I plead guilty to being wildly off the topic of hi-fi, but I thought that some of you would find this topic on acoustics and the human body interesting.
http://www.popsci.com/bown/2009/innovator/pied-piper-mucusThe only thing more bizarre than the fact that this works, is that if you live in the US of A, the country formerly-known-as-the-land-of-the-free (with apologies to Prince), you have to get a doctor's prescription to buy it. Everywhere else in the world, you can just buy the thing.
Another weird topic concerning acoustics is infra-sound, hearing, health, and wind turbines.
http://oto2.wustl.edu/cochlea/windmill.htmlThe Romans had water pipes made of lead, latin for lead is plumbum - where we get the word plumber. Water + lead = bad idea. Being close to a wind turbine might also be a very bad idea. Please note that the common "A weighting" rolloff curve is usually built into most cheap sound level meters, making them useless for measuring infra-sound, but assuring that sound measurements of wind turbines measure as safe no matter how loud the infrasound output. Reminds me of the monthly tests of lightning rods at a WW2 ammo dump. Every month they had to measure the ground conductivity of the lightning rod system at the dozen or so ammo bunkers. Problem: the middle of Nebraska tends to be very dry in the summer. Solution: a dozen buckets of water, pour a bucket of water where the grounding cable entered the soil 30 minutes before you measure it. Problem solved.
"See? It measures just fine." <- Famous last words.
You can't sense infrasound, just like you can't sense alpha, beta, or gamma radiation.
Ken
