HashOut: 2007/07/06

Exercise your ears


We all know that loud noise can damage your hearing - but it seems not enough noise can also impair it. Consequently, people in cities have better hearing than those in quiet villages.

Researchers at the Universtity of Giessen in Germany spent over a decade testing the hearing of some 10,000 people. As expected, people exposed to very loud noises as part of their jobs, such as construction workers, had poor hearing. But those living in quiet rural areas had hearing not much better. And people, including airline pilots or orchestral musicians, who encoutner constant noise at work, could hear very well. Firefighters, whose lives can depened on sounds, had exceptional hearing.

The team concluded that continual exposure actually "trains" the ear to tolerate it; it is sudden, extreme noise that does the damage. Which would explain why Asian villagers, whose quiet lives are punctuated by occasional firework celebrations, have the worst hearing of all.
» Continue reading

Read more on ,

NoFollow No More

UPDATE: Since Google does not allow author link in Blogger comments anymore, HashOut does not support nofollow free author links anymore.

NoFollow No More - You Comment I Do FollowI felt that the people commenting on this blog were not really getting their due. The NoFollow attribute which comes by default with the Blogger templates just stifles the incentive to comment. I've thus decided to remove NoFollow from the comments section. And since my comments are moderated, I have no worries about spam as I can decide what goes live.

Hope that will entice you to comment more and actively participate in the discussions.

For those of you who are interested in removing the NoFollow attribute from the anchor tags in the comments section of your blog but do not know how, here is a simple guide to remove NoFollow from Blogger layouts (only for the new Blogger Layout templates). » Continue reading

Read more on , , ,