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kleinbl00  ·  4386 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Quiet Ones

Jesus fucking christ.

1) Entropy always increases. That's the second law of thermodynamics.

2) Noise is an expression of entropy in mechanical systems.

3) The world has been getting noisier since the invention of the horse. It will continue to do so.

I did acoustics for a living for five years. I'm a professional expert on "quiet." And lemme tell ya - some heel bitching about someone else typing too loudly on a MUTHERFUCKING TRAIN is somebody spoiling for a fight.

The reason libraries are louder is because they serve primarily immigrant populations with children and children are loud. I suspect our author hasn't been to a library in a while; the books are no longer front and center, the community outreach is. The reason restaurants are louder is that silence is excruciatingly expensive and masking is not. If you play a song you hear the song, not the traffic. The reason people talk more and talk louder in public is that we now carry our own little bubbles of environment with us, and those bubbles often include people on the other end of a cell phone. Assholes that think you're typing too loudly on an Amtrak car aren't looking for a communal environment of silence, they're looking for a solitary environment of silence. Buy some fucking QC2s and shut the fuck up.

Communal silence is readily and freely available in church. In reading rooms. In meditation centers. That available on an Amtrak car runs about 55 dBA fast, or roughly as loud as the front seat of a Cadillac. Typing too loud for you?

Fucking move over a seat. Sparking a confrontation because someone is typing too loud is just a dick move... and anyone who celebrates dick moves is adding to the entropy that increases the noise that makes shit like this happen.