You rock, Anonymous!

this is what I miss when I forget that I have a comments function on here:

Anonymous said...
Hmmm...I think you might only experience the full 120 dB if you are, what, on top of the speeding ambulance with your head inside the siren. And I would not recommend doing this for reasons not directly related to hearing loss. Sound intensity dissipates with the inverse square of distance, so sitting in a restaurant tens of meters away means the siren would easily drop to a level that would be drowned out by the whining from some of the commenters here. Go to http://www.numericalexample.com/content/view/18/33 to figure out how loud the sound would be in the hypothetical case in which you were not on top of the speeding ambulance with your head inside the siren. You can even change the dissipation coefficient if you want--what fun! If you were just 30 meters away (assuming the original 120 dB were measured at, say, 1 meter), the sound would dissipate to 90 dB, meaning you would have 2 hours 31 minutes--not 9 seconds--before you experienced the claimed hearing loss. Oh, and I *know* someone didn't call 14th Street Girl "chumpy." This from someone who spells weenie "wienie."