The sound of silence — CNET reviews noise canceling headphones. Cost, including shipping and taxes, of the Bose QuietComfort 2 headphones to Prince Edward Island: $503.

Update: someone upstairs just bought a pair of the QuietComforts for $267 on eBay.

The City of Vancouver has a program called SoundSmart that provides comprehensive urban noise information, including:

In our daily lives we are rarely exposed to sound levels near either end of our huge (0 to 130 dBA) audible range. Typically we encounter noise levels between about 20 and 30 dBA (a faint whisper or night-time background noise in a quiet suburban bedroom) and 100 dBA (unmuffled motorcycle or jackhammer operating nearby). Typical noise levels experienced include:

• 40 to 50 dBA in a general office situation.
• 60 dBA when talking normally to someone 1 to 2 m away.
• 65 to 75 dBA when riding in a car at highway speeds.
• 85 to 95 dBA while cutting the grass with power mower.

Roughly speaking, each 10 dBA increase in sound level corresponds to a “doubling of subjective loudness” so that, for example, jackhammer noise at 110 dBA would typically be judged to be 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 16 times as loud as the inside of a car at 70 dBA.

In other words, I’m 64 times more likely to go crazy from noise today than I was on Sunday.

Excerpt from the Big Dig Construction Noise Control rules in Boston:

Work shall be performed in a manner to prevent nuisance conditions such as noise which exhibits a specific audible frequency or tone (e.g., backup alarms, unmaintained equipment, brake squeal) or impact noise (e.g., jackhammers, hoe rams). The Engineer will make any final interpretation concerning whether or not nuisance noise conditions exist. The Engineer has the authority to stop the Work until nuisance noise conditions are resolved, without additional time or compensation for the Contractor.

FAQ from the Noise Abatement Society in the U.K., an organization:

…instrumental in making noise a statutory nuisance in 1960. Its aims are to eliminate excessive noise in all its forms by campaigning to raise awareness, by lobbying parliament and through education to enhance the environment for all. It is an active and effective problem solving organisation with strong contacts in Government.

The jackhammers are back in the Queen Parkade this morning. They’ve been joined, from the sounds of it, by concrete saws. Email to Les Parsons at CADC that I sent yesterday, seeking steps to mitigate the problem, has so far gone unanswered.

Back last year I stumbled across the book Cork Boat, the tale of a crazy American who built a boat out of wine corks and sailed it down the Douro River in Portugal.

It only serves to reason that when I stumbled across an offer of a “renovated fisherman’s cottage” in Porto (where the Douro enters the ocean) on craigslist.com, we carved out part of our spring trip to take us to Portugal for two weeks.

So from May 13 to 26, before flying up to Copenhagen, we’ll be living just north of Porto in Leca da Palmeira.

When I later found out that airport code for Porto’s airport is OPO, my faith in our decision was only reinforced.

Perhaps you were thinking, after reading of my jackhammer plight, “I wonder what that actually sounds like.”

Attached hereto for your listening pleasure are 40 seconds of sound recorded with the internal microphone on my iMac after the jackhammers started up after lunch today. Suggestion for stress test: blast this through your headphones in an endless loop, and try to complete a complex technical task.

My office window here at [[84 Fitzroy Street]] in [[Charlottetown]] faces right out onto the Queen Parkade, a multi-level parking garage. If you leave out the “large concrete monolith that blocks out the sun” part of the deal, they’ve been a good neighbour.

Until today.

Today CADC, the crown corporation that runs the parkade, started work on a renovating the first two levels of the Queen Parkade, work that is expected to continue until the end of May.

“Work” in this case means “jackhammers that sound and feel like they are operating inside my head.” In other words, my office space has been rendered uninhabitable.

The jackhammer operators are on a lunch break right now and peace has momentarily returned to the kingdom. If the sound and fury keeps up as it did this morning, however, I’m going to have to move out of the office.

Results of the Provincial By-election in District #2 are available at results.electionspei.ca. You’ll also find links to raw data files and an RSS feeds of the poll-by-poll results there.

Somehow in the week that I was away, [[Oliver]] became a completely accomplished user of Firefox. While he’s not installing his own extensions yet, he can start it up, find PBSkids, and independently browse around for hours. This is all due, I think, to his reaching a sweet spot of hand-eye coordination (so as to run the mouse effectively), a sudden surge in digital curiousity, and a desire to be in the driver’s seat.

As I type this, it’s Sunday afternoon and Oliver is sitting over in [[Johnny]]’s office with my [[laptop]]. I haven’t heard a peep out of him in 30 minutes, although I hear Barney singing and Teletubbies gurgling from time to time.

What’s most amazing about this is that only a couple of weeks ago Oliver simply couldn’t do this: three weeks ago I left him alone in front of [[Catherine]]’s iMac for 5 minutes and I came back only to find that he had mistakenly ended up at the website of the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Of course there’s always a chance that his choice was deliberate and that I mistakenly redirected him to Barney when he was in the midst of an evaluation of the DRM situation in Latvia.