Comments on: Kinder, Gentler Thermobarics

By: Charles

Charles — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 18:28:43 +0000

Remember the decibel scale is a log scale as well.

By: David Hambling

David Hambling — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 09:45:08 +0000

The makers view on possible health effects:
“The measured acoustic output of 178 decibel and light intensity of 2.2 million candlas at one foot, do not appear to be high enough for permanent injury, while both remain high enough for effective diversion. According to literature, 5 eardrum rupture begins to occur at 185 dB. In order to establish medical thresholds for both permanent hearing and visual damage, extensive human testing would be necessary.”

By: bespoke

bespoke — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:27:40 +0000

fronten, if you are using Firefox, there’s a nice extension that will show a little icon depicting the type of the link when you mouse over the link: TargetAlert.

By: bespoke

bespoke — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:25:44 +0000

After search minutes of googling, the concensus generally seems to be that 170dB, even for a millisecond, would cause irreversible hearing loss.
In fact, some websites say that even with hearing protection, anything above 140dB should be avoided. If I recall correctly, most hearing protection devices only “block” about 30 to 40dB.
I wouldn’t want to be in a “free speech zone” when the 10kg version is used for “non-lethal ‘shock & awe’” — hearing protectors or not.

By: fronten

fronten — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 18:20:05 +0000

writers, please flag your media links with an appropriate file type tag like (PDF) or such..

By: Eric Hundman

Eric Hundman — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 14:01:50 +0000

I seem to remember the following rough decibel scale from my middle school days:
100 dB: hearing damage
150 dB: internal organ damage
Any doctors care to elaborate on whether I’m roughly correct and, if so, how long the sound/noise has to be sustained to do any significant damage?