plantteacher

I just posted about a hum that I hear. There is a science project to track the people who hear the hum, which I was looking to contribute to. Then I noticed the survey is inside the private walled gardens of Google. The researcher’s email address is gmail, the survey form is in Google Docs, and they exclusively use Twitter as well. There is apparently no free-world way to contribute data.

I wonder how much science is encumbered by technofeudal fiefdoms and if there are efforts to make scientific research more open. In principle, science is peer reviewed. So whoever would be the peer reviewers for the research would ideally spotlight this problem.

I was glad to hear from BBC crowd science (the linked show) that I’m not alone in hearing a hum. People around the world hear a low frequency (50 Hz) hum.

What I hear often when waking up in the morning is a high pitch buzz, comparable to the sound of your ears ringing the day after a concert. My theories:

• it’s microwave radiation, perhaps from wi-fi
• the eardrum itself is making noise due to a physiological condition, despite not being around loud noise (BBC mentions this as well)

I recall hearing about a woman who could hear wi-fi, to the surprise of scientists who would emit supersonic sounds and the woman would raise her hand to indicate when she hears a sound. IIRC, she moved to live in a small region where wi-fi is banned to prevent interference with an array of radio telescopes.

Here’s another link to past stories:

• https://www.tinnitusjournal.com/articles/manifestations-of-a-lowfrequency-sound-of-unknown-origin-perceived-worldwide-also-known-as-the-hum-or-the-taos-hum.html
• https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/mar/16/can-you-hear-the-mysterious-global-hum-apparently-many-of-you-do

I am not quite sure I would call the hum low pitched. What I hear is very similar to the ringing ears experience after a concert. Isn’t that a high pitch?

I have to say I’m bothered that the research for this requires participants to use Google. I will not submit records to the project because of that.

A chemist told me rust does not spread. The top of my refrigerator gives me some doubt. It’s covered in these spots. The center of every spot is a small break in the paint, but the rust all around those spots is on top of the paint.

I put an aluminum wok lid in the dishwasher and it came out with black marks on it. I’ve also seen other aluminum cookware come out with some kind of white powder specs on it.

So apparently aluminum is dishwasher unsafe. But obviously it’s not the water that’s the problem. It must be the detergent. So the question is, what can a lazy motherfucker like myself do? Why don’t I see aluminum-safe dishwasher detergents on the shelf?

Possibly related: Bailey’s creme liquor turns black underneath an aluminum cap. Is that a chemical reaction or spoilage, or something else?

I acquired a ~16 year old laptop. The mat black plastic top (back of the LCD) is sticky. At first I thought the previous owner had stickers on the back that were removed. But that seems like a bad theory now. I rubbed it with a cloth and denatured alcohol and it only got slightly less sticky, but black residue came off on my hands and the cloth. This is apparently not adhesive.. it’s the plastic itself.

What’s my best move? I don’t suppose I can do anything to re-polymerize it. I don’t care about cosmetics.. I just don’t want it to be sticky and marking anything that touches it. One temptation is to put plastic film on it, like cling wrap. But that could just make a bigger mess.

Running this gives the geometry but not the density:

$ identify -verbose myfile.pgm | grep -iE 'geometry|pixel|dens|size|dimen|inch|unit'

There is also a “Pixels per second” attribute which means nothing to me. No density and not even a canvas/page dimension (which would make it possible to compute the density). The “Units” attribute on my source images are “undefined”.

Suggestions?