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What's that noise?

by tye  (Monk)
on May 20, 2003 at 06:32 UTC ( [id://259376]=poll: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

Vote on this poll

What noise?
[bar] 45/15%
Just a tree against the window
[bar] 8/3%
Them sneaking up
[bar] 50/16%
Sinus problems
[bar] 17/6%
The building settling
[bar] 15/5%
Pests in the walls
[bar] 9/3%
That breakfast burrito
[bar] 30/10%
A failing cooling fan
[bar] 47/15%
Nothing, as far as you know
[bar] 25/8%
Voices, very angry voices
[bar] 59/19%
305 total votes
Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: What's that noise?
by Enlil (Parson) on May 20, 2003 at 07:03 UTC
    ..oh well time for more medication ... i was going to put more, but they told me to stop..

    already said to much..

    i'm gonna pay for this when i get home...

    -enlil

Re: What's that noise?
by greenFox (Vicar) on May 20, 2003 at 08:47 UTC
    I looked in vain for the raven option :)

    --
    Life is a tale told by an idiot -- full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Shhh!
by htoug (Deacon) on May 20, 2003 at 07:30 UTC
    Not so loud - *they* might hear you...
    Paranoid? Who me? No, but why are you following me?
Re: What's that noise?
by vek (Prior) on May 20, 2003 at 13:08 UTC
    How about neighbours deciding to take out their trash at 2:00am. This happened just last night in fact. I sat up in bed and uttered the classic middle-of-the-night phrase of 'what the f*** was that?'.

    Thanks neighbours, yep 2:00am is the perfect time to drop glass bottles into the dumpster - no really it is, I mean it's not like anyone was trying to sleep or anything :-)

    -- vek --
      Send your neighbors on a trip to /dev/null. :)
      Maybe their watches are broken?

      My watch is broken, so whenever i wake up in the middle of the night, wondering what the time is, i just hammer a few times on the wall.

      There's always someone in the next room saying "Who the f**k is hammering on the wall at 2 o'clock in the morning?"

      Now, vek, I know that it could be you. Thanx :) It is always frustrating not knowing what the time is.

      bollen

Re: What's that noise?
by zemote (Scribe) on May 20, 2003 at 06:42 UTC
    Interesting question? It's actually raining here tonight,
    so the noise is the rain outside and me typing on my
    IBM Model M "clickety" keyboard. So if a tree falls in
    the forest does it make noise? Now that is a long
    philisophical question we could debate hours over.

    zemote

      Speaking purely scientifically, YES.

      Regardless of the presence of any one (or thing), sound waves are produced (see below for logic); the ripping of plant cells, cracking of the timber, the rush of wind and russeling of leaves as the tree falls, the impact.

      Sound is defined as waves within a specific frequency (I refer you to here for the denotative meaning). So as long as a frequency wave (or waves) within the appropriate human range are produced, a *sound* is made. Just my 2 cents.

      ======================
      Sean Shrum
      http://www.shrum.net

        Actually, speaking purely scientificationalisticly, the answer is *very very probably*.

        On a 'macro' level, there is a chance (albeit extremely small and *very* contrived) that the tree might be completely silent - if for instance, a *very small* tree had been sawn completely through earlier in the day, the ground had been prepared with sound-absorbing material and the leaves stripped off...to say nothing about the whole forest being covered with a big dome and the air being pumped out... :)

        On a quantum level, again there is a 1-in-a-VeryLargeNumberIndeed chance of complete phase cancellation - every single sound made by the individual movements of a molecule could be negated by its neighbour moving in the opposite direction.

        This is the point of the old saw...in order to answer a question like "does it make a sound" (and the associated 'is it in the appropriate human range - again, the tree could fall *very very quickly*, so only the local bats could hear it :) ) the thing has to be measured somehow - and the only question that can answered with 100% accuracy is *did* it make a sound, not *will* (or does) it.

        What I want to know though, is if the tree falls on the box, does the cat die? :) Ooh - I wonder if I can get an Arts Council Grant to find out? {g}

        Cheers,
        Ben.

      If a man says something in the forest and there's no woman to hear him...is he still wrong?

      Please, if this node offends you, re-read it. Think for a bit. I am almost certainly not trying to offend you. Rememer - Please never take anything I do or say seriously.

      No. Because in order for sound to be registered, there must be a listener. Thus if no one is there to hear it, it does not make a sound. Philosophically speaking of course. :-)
Re: What's that noise?
by mce (Curate) on May 20, 2003 at 08:34 UTC
    My wife always complains about noise when I dig up my old Iron Maiden cd's :-)


    ---------------------------
    Dr. Mark Ceulemans
    Senior Consultant
    BMC, Belgium

Re: What's that noise?
by theorbtwo (Prior) on May 20, 2003 at 17:20 UTC

    Cow-orkers.


    Warning: Unless otherwise stated, code is untested. Do not use without understanding. Code is posted in the hopes it is useful, but without warranty. All copyrights are relinquished into the public domain unless otherwise stated. I am not an angel. I am capable of error, and err on a fairly regular basis. If I made a mistake, please let me know (such as by replying to this node).

Re: What's that noise?
by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on May 20, 2003 at 15:18 UTC
Or the following?
by snafu (Chaplain) on May 20, 2003 at 09:03 UTC
    A few more...

    * Clock ticking/donging/ringing
    * Hdd whirring/thrashing (this should have been in the list)
    * Which noise (perhaps under 'what noise')?
    * tapping of keys/mouse clicking
    * The TV (Late night with Conan/Leno)
    * Wife/Husband snoring
    * kids crying
    * phone ringing

    _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
    - Jim
    Insert clever comment here...

Re: What's that noise?
by mrpilot (Curate) on May 20, 2003 at 15:41 UTC
    You must remember the truth...there is no noise. :-)
Re: What's that noise?
by talexb (Chancellor) on May 20, 2003 at 18:39 UTC
      Voices, very angry voices

    Oh, wait. That's me lecturing my fifteen year-old stepson.

    Yes, Matt, on a macro level we do live in a democracy, but within this household, you're living in a benevolent (I hope) dictatorship. You can form your own government when you move out. :)

    --t. alex
    Life is short: get busy!
Re: What's that noise?
by P0w3rK!d (Pilgrim) on May 20, 2003 at 15:25 UTC
    It's the mice in the wall again!

    The background noise is the voices in my head...as I am one with the Monestary.

Re: What's that noise?
by feloniousMonk (Pilgrim) on May 20, 2003 at 17:05 UTC
    I know it's them sneaking up. But I'm not paranoid, not me. Paranoia means you only *think* you're being watched. And followed.

    -felonious (stop watching me)--
Re: What's that noise?
by tune (Curate) on May 20, 2003 at 20:17 UTC
    Yeah the coworkers':
    • cellphones ringing
    • stupid chatter
    • dialing speakers turned on
    • listening crap music on their laptop speakers
    • f^rting, burping, eating
    • you name it!

    --
    tune

      It's the cell phones that kill me. I mean, I'm a cell junkie. It has largely replaced my landline. I always have my phone with me, I even take it with me to the bathroom (it has videogames). Being as my phone is never more than 5 feet away from me, I can keep it on vibrate mode and never miss a call.

      Some of my co-workers, however, leave their phones at their desks. They still don't want to miss their calls, so they compensate by turning the ringers up to full volume and have the phone ring 10 times or more before going to voice mail, so they'll have time to return to their cubes to answer them. For the rest of us, this means we have to listen to their phone ringing at top volume (one of these shmucks uses the theme from "Beverly Hills Cop" as a ring tone). Not surprisingly, this behavior is specific to (you guessed it) sales and marketing, who are higher on the totem pole than us lowly engineers, so there's little I can do.

      Still, I have recurring fantasies about walking into cubes and smashing cell phones. There's also a more complex fantasy about serruptitiously replacing the ringtone with an synthesized voice saying "I'm an inconsiderate jerk! It's all about me!". A man can dream, can't he?

      -Logan
      "What do I want? I'm an American. I want more."

        I am one of those people :) Hey, when I go outside for a smoke I don't want to take my cell phone with me, because it's an old model and weighs like 20 pounds.

        I call my cell phone "the phone for the deaf," because I can hear it from almost anywhere in the building. Of course, when it rings it scares the hell out of me every other time.

      listening crap music on their laptop speakers f^rting, burping, eating

      You can't spell CRAP without RAP

      ~~
      naChoZ
Re: What's that noise?
by WhiteBird (Hermit) on May 21, 2003 at 01:07 UTC
    What's that noise?
    Funny you should ask that. 99 times out of a hundred, my answer to that question is "What noise?" I'm so good at sinking inside my own sphere of thought that I can block out just about any outside disturbance. The noise might be angry people yelling, but even if they were yelling at me there's a good chance I'm not going to hear them. And I absolutlely never hear the mice in the walls, the branches on the windows or the failing cooling fan. I don't have to hear the people sneaking up. I can feel them behind me.
Re: What's that noise?
by Chady (Priest) on May 21, 2003 at 08:29 UTC

    The building IS settling; they're constructing a building next to ours, and they're drilling at the bottom of our building. I think they're trying to take us down.


    He who asks will be a fool for five minutes, but he who doesn't ask will remain a fool for life.

    Chady | http://chady.net/
Re: What's that noise?
by artist (Parson) on May 20, 2003 at 17:08 UTC
    For most of us, it is the keyboard noise.. most of the time.

    artist

Fans, Failing or not
by Rex(Wrecks) (Curate) on May 20, 2003 at 18:06 UTC
    AHHHRRGGHH!! I can hear them...they are everywhere!!

    With as many machines as I have about, both at home and at work, fan noise is definatly NOISE!

    I have invested fairly heavily into good, quiet as possible but still do the job fans and I can still hear them. Oh, and try replacing all the fans on your switches one day....not fun :)

    "Nothing is sure but death and taxes" I say combine the two and its death to all taxes!
Re: What's that noise?
by mr_mischief (Monsignor) on May 22, 2003 at 23:32 UTC
    I felt compelled to vote for sinus problems. As a few of you may know, I've had horrible sinus issues this week. It turned out to be the flu or soemthing similar, which caused body aches and a fever along with those. Thank God for better living through chemistry.

    Christopher E. Stith
    use coffee;
Re: What's that noise?
by adamk (Chaplain) on May 23, 2003 at 00:16 UTC
    "Sinus" is the only tinitus type answer allowed?

    I've got three forms of the damn thing, popping from sinus from time to time, clicking from going on a plane with a flu and hurting my ears on the decent, and two or three ( really annoying ) high pitched pure tones from load concerts...

    So... that noise is mostly in my head.

Re: What's that noise?
by Acolyte (Hermit) on May 20, 2003 at 15:10 UTC

    How about "the sound of a man beating the crap out of his wife and child"? That's what I woke up to this morning. Thin apartment walls are both a blessing and a curse. Thank God for fast response time by the local authorities. They don't get paid enough for the job they do.

    Acolyte
    Studying at the feet of the masters
Re: What's that noise?
by dmitri (Priest) on May 21, 2003 at 03:37 UTC
    I was so upset with this poll that I didn't even vote. The obvious option is absent -- the noise is the computers (15 or so) in my office.

    Sheesh.

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