It's so true. I can do routine work with noise, but not the kind that requires insight.
The sad thing is that noise is yet another example of the phenomenon of "the tragedy of the commons." Which means things tend to get noisier and noisier. In fact, what has surprised me most about living in Palo Alto is how noisy it is. You'd think living in the suburbs would at least be quiet. It is on weekends. But the problem with this suburb is that people are too rich: they all have their gardens maintained by gardening services, who use among other things gas-powered leaf blowers and hedge trimmers.
The leaf blowers in particular are unbelievably loud. You can hear a gas-powered leaf blower 3 blocks away. Which means during the day you can almost always hear one. (The city of Palo Alto has outlawed gas powered leaf blowers, but the gardening services all pretend not to know.)
At this point, I'd gladly take the leaf blower. Car stereo sub-woofers and straight pipe Harleys: Two things that, in my opinion, should be outright outlawed. Live on a street where they are frequent, and your life will be difficult. Live next to someone who tinkers on them incessantly, and your life will be hell.
Work is another problem. I wore out my health trying to cope with the "standard environment". (Which, of course, was spun as "collaboration". [Cough - "cost savings" - cough.]) No more. For my own sake, as well as to no longer support people who promote such environments.
I live in Milwaukee. Harley's 110th is here this week(end). I made a point to stock up on sleep over the weekend :)
Seriously, that "Loud pipes save lives" thing is such bullshit. Hearing a bike coming from a mile away is not the same thing as seeing where they are. And then at 2am the bars close and everyone goes outside to see whose bike is the loudest...
I like bikes, probably going to buy one someday, but modding your bike specifically to see how loud you can make it is unbelievably obnoxious.
</rant>
Work is another problem. I wore out my health trying to cope with the "standard environment". (Which, of course, was spun as "collaboration". [Cough - "cost savings" - cough.]) No more. For my own sake, as well as to no longer support people who promote such environments.
How's that going for you? I came to the same conclusion a few months ago, especially the "wore out my health" part. I quit my job in SV, moved back to rural NY and have been focusing on getting healthy again, both mentally and physically. I haven't found a full time telecommuting job yet and, in all honestly, I'm dreading it. I have difficulty believing that, even while telecommuting, any company is going to be truly different from the "standard environment."
I was actually fairly well able to deal with the personalities and political stuff. I've always been fairly easy to get along with and able to establish good working relationships with a wide variety of people. (Even the jerks, although I've become increasingly less tolerant of such behaviour.)
It was the physical environment that did me in. I was responsible for fairly essential financial analysis of about a billion dollars in revenue, at one point, including managing the transition of/to some fairly radical and poorly planned systems conversions. Yet they couldn't find anything better for me than a cube where my kitty-/katy-corner neighbor spent a couple of hours a day on speakerphone, and the senior manager next to me spent a different hour of the afternoon chatting on the phone with his son -- a fabric wall is not effective when two people are sitting circa five feet apart.
I didn't even care what they were doing -- or, in the case of the family chats, also not doing. I just didn't want to fight the noise for my concentration.
In another position, they finally agreed to move me to an office. Which, despite better rooms being available (and turned down by my manager), they made a windowless box (fine -- well, ok, I can cope) located next to a conference room, with no sound insulation in between (not fine).
The irony in that was that about half of the team I was on at that point was located either at other offices or virtual. That aspect worked our really just fine. One of the fellows I grew to have a lot of respect for, over the course of a couple of years, I never met in person. Yet we could pick up the phone and call -- or just email or IM or whatever -- and immediately address and plan a course of action, or take action when immediately needed, with no problem. He was a seasoned developer who knew how to get stuff done.
So... Personalities and experiences differ. But, I wouldn't worry too much about the virtual part. From my perspective, it would be likely to make me more effective in doing the actual work. And I would welcome the separation from all the environmental crap. Perhaps also the ability of people to just stop by my cube or office and draw me into their political BS or social BS. There's good social. And there's wasting an hour debating the best Jim Carrey movie. I can do without the latter.
Actually, I'm dealing with a little environmental noise now, at the moment. So, I hope I remained coherent in this response.
TL;DR: Do the work, and unplug from the crap. Keep the network active, for if/when the crap nonetheless starts to exceed the work. Use virtual as a crap buffer/filter.
--
P.S. The guy I mentioned coming to respect? Well, I got to know more than a bit about his golf fetish. There is -- or can be -- quality socializing in a virtual environment. What's nice, though, is not to be forced to tune out your neighbors' two hour discussion of their weekends.
I live near both those things and can put up with the intermittent noise. Leafblowers are an invention of Satan and must be destroyed, preferably along with their owners and operators. They are the epitome of laziness.
I had neighbors who insisted upon playing their car (or truck) stereos whenever outside, which was fairly perpetually. There is nothing that blocks or masks the sound of those sub-woofers.
It was an unincorporated location, and the county sheriff couldn't be bothered.
It also turned out that the little local street was a shortcut. "Intermittent" turned out to be a... weak description of the traffic situation.
I nonetheless grew at least somewhat accustomed to the passing noise. The non-stop, however...
Oh, and those same neighbors didn't have Harleys, but they did seem to be of the opinion that every vehicle had to have glass packs or something similar. And that they had to be "tuned up", with sometimes an hour or more of engine revving, seemingly weekly.
By comparison, I can hear a leaf blower. But as a fairly constant drone, and one that does not, at low frequency, pass right through the house, I find it comparatively easy to take.
Leaf blowers used by homeowners or the people paid to take care of their gardens are one of the most "typically American" and absurd and annoying things. You almost never hear/see these things around Europe, except some similar contraptions use to take care of very large city parks, for which they probably make sense, and even then they are used at reasonable hours.
I mean, using a powered leaf blower to help clean up some fallen leaves off your front yard, sparing you 15 min of your life? Wtf...
When you're paid to clean leaves off multiple front yards? 15 * yards * days used per year = a whole lot of time. It's really not surprising that they pick what works quickest.
Not at all. I've watched them for years all over California and in a few other States. I used to film them and show friends, back when making movies with a pocket-size device was novel.
They tend to loiter and run the machinery excessively whether it's needed or not. I'm not sure why. A display of 'work theater' to impress their clients? Or maybe it's to keep the driving/onsite ratio reasonable? Like, they have enough clients to make a living and don't feel like doing the extra travel/setup/teardown to add more, but don't want to just go home for the rest of the day when people are supposed to be working, so... run the leaf blower? I rarely see them in a hurry. It's almost like a form of meditation for them.
Exactly this. I've confronted gardeners doing this and the homeowners who employ them. I even had the police come out on a noise complaint. Nobody seemed to care and most think it's fair game to make noise as long as it's during "business hours."
So the root of the problem is that people are paying other peoples to clean their yards... guess it's the same "hidden cost / side-effect of externalizing things".
That's why I try to stick to the "keep as many things in-house as possible", both for my household and family and for my business :)
EDIT+: I think the so called "american way of doing things" is so successful business-wise exactly because of the "externalize as much as you can" philosophy, but it kind of fails big when the hidden costs of externalization are non-financial and manifest themselves as "lower quality of life" or "worse health" and at the same time get offloaded to other people than the ones doing the externalizing (like to the neighbors of the people that pay companies that use powered leafblowers to clean up their yards).
No, it's not always the lawn services. I remember a dozen or more years ago driving down Wayne Avenue in Silver Spring, a neighborhood of small bungalows with lawns to suit, and seeing a man, evidently the owner, running his leaf blower.
I don't particularly mind raking leaves. Our yard is probably a 90 minute job two or three times in late fall. But I also mow the lawn, with a power mower, so I'm making some noise too.
It makes sense in a large park but not for personal use? Sounds like you're ok with scaling the noise to the size of the job? It's really not a marginal 15 minutes if you're dealing with any number or large trees. Then there's the removal to deal with. I use a walk-behind mulcher. The machine is running for the same amount of time a blower would (or less), but at the end the leaves are mulched in a bag that I can dump along the edge of the lawn to compost. The material disappears in less than a year. I don't like that I'm making noise for several hours every fall, but it would actually take four times as long to rake and bag it (I'm serious about that number).
I have deferred for years pulling the trigger on a blower to clean the interminable tree cruft off the driveway, though. In light of this thread, I will have to think even harder before going that route. I do appreciate quiet.
So do you have some incredible raking skills, or do trees not lose many leaves where you're from? Here cleaning leaves under a big tree in the fall, with or without a leaf blower, takes a solid hour. 2 if you've been lazy and not done it for a week.
google for leaf sweeper. I find mine to be much quicker than either a leaf blower or a rake, and much easier to use than a rake. For those too lazy to google its a human powered street sweeper that dumps whatever it sweeps up into a perhaps 9 cubic foot cloth bucket, then you dump the bin when it gets full. For $150 you can buy one that will fall apart in a year, or for $200 you can buy one that apparently will last a lifetime (so far). As an exercise it's pretty weak, rates as a bit less than walking up a hill, but probably more than hiking level with a backpack. If you're strong and talented enough you can push it one handed while talking on the phone or whatever. Its basically silent, a laptop like "whirr" from the sweeping brushes. On a good one you can adjust the brush height such that it sweeps bare air accomplishing nothing, or digs into the dirt with extreme effort, or ideally somewhere in between. With a bad one you adjust it by varying the height you hold the handle, which must be incredibly unergonomic.
In the long run the solution to hatred of maintenance of deciduous trees is a chainsaw and an evergreen sapling, but I digress. There are people trapped in prisons, err, I mean overactive homeowners associations, who have to do exactly what the warden says exactly when the warden tells them to do it, but they were dumb enough to pay a huge quantity of money to give up their freedom, so serves them right.
This is one of those insane comments that I only ever see on hacker news.
Who gives a shit how they pick up leaves in Europe? Picking up leaves isn't some artful process..it's drudgery which consumes some amount of my (finite) life, and which technology has provided a quicker solution.
I hate front lawns. With a passion. But, guess what, I had to fall in line and make mine "pretty", put in some sod and match the rest of the neighborhood. For now I have the greenest and neatest front lawn on the block.
Why? We have a culture where you lose value if you adopt arid climate landscape when people expect grass and flowers and that's what everything around you looks like. We had a nice arid climate front yard with rocks and plants that required zero water and maintenance. We refinanced and the bank actually objected to the look of the house. They said it looked unkept. Unbelievable. The arid landscaping cost me thousands. It just didn't match the rest of the homes on our street. So the friggin sod had to come in.
I find it beyond moronic that we are actually throwing water at the ground to grow grass. Then we come back a couple of times a month and use gasoline to cut, trim and blow it clean. The only thing worst is owning a swimming pool.
I refuse to be a weekend lawn-mower monkey. I've never had any interest in that and never will. I'd rather be doing a million other things than pushing a mower on a pointless patch of grass. Yup, that means we now have a gardener with the dreaded gas powered leaf-blower, mower and trimmer. I am not proud of this at all.
So, here's the plan: I planted fruit trees right smack in the middle of the lawn areas. Once they grow beyond a certain size they'll kill-off most of the grass. That's when I go back to practical landscaping. And, of course, I'll be producing some fruit as well which is neat.
If I absolutely have to I am going with plastic grass in the front and will learn to love it.
The back of the house is now 100% concrete, soon to be covered with solar panels for both shade and off-grid power. Great for entertaining and hanging out. Our local parks have plenty of grass if we feel the need.
My gardener is a few months away from being out of a job. I wish more people would wake up and realize what they are doing.
I think this is a big reason we've seen a renewed interest in cities since the 1980s. All of the upkeep on a home is ridiculous. Also commuting, sitting in traffic every day, dealing with the hassles and expenses of owning a car. Simplifying all of this is incredibly liberating.
A lot of people actually like it - they like to have a well kept lawn, and if they want to use their time or money to do that, why not? But I don't like that you're expected, if not directly asked to, to keep it as society wants it to be. However, I can understand that the bank is concerned about the value of the house if they're financing it.
Personally I'm looking for a house well outside the city and any far from busy roads. Lots of land and I can have the wild nature I love and grew up with. I can't think of anything that'll calm me down and unwind like a walk in the nature does.
To add to your answer. Yes, lawns waste water. They also require fuel burning machinery to maintain, causing pollution. And then there are the chemicals (fertilizers, weed killers, insect control, etc.). Go back one more layer and you have the sod farms which use water, fuel, chemicals, etc. And I am sure the chain continues for another layer or two.
All of what you add is entirely optional. It is possible to keep a "nice lawn" around your house, without use of fuel and chemicals. Water however is mandatory if it's not raining enough.
Water is not mandatory at all. Grass with a healthy, deep root system will survive extended droughts just fine. It just turns brown and people don't like that.
I get a nice mix in Indiana. In the spring the lawn is green and thick. I have to mow it once a week. In the summer the lack of water slows and eventually stops the growth. After early July, I mow only one more time the rest of the year. Copious shade overhead keeps it from getting too terribly brown. In this situation the grass is less work than anything else I can think of other than letting trees and bushes go wild across every square foot. I like the open space. It takes about 2 gallons of gas a year for a double lot in the city.
Everything under discussion is equally optional. You need water to have green grass just like you need to mow the lawn to have short grass. Neither of those things are required by the grass, they are purely optional things society expects of us.
Growing up I wanted a smooth, green lawn for playing sports. Then I grew up and realized what that entails. Now my lawn is as weedy, hard, and bumpy as anything out there!
haha as someone who has to cut quite a bit of grass each weekend in the summer, I totally sympathize with wanting to kill all the grass and plant some fake stuff!
I have a little farm-house at the end of a dead end street.
No traffic, nearest neighbor 100 meters and he's doesn't own a leafblower. Clear view of the fields in three directions for the next 5 miles or so, 20,000 sq ft lot.
It's been up for sale for 2 years, if you're interested ;)
If anyone is looking for houses in quiet locations I can recommend mountain bothies in Scotland - these are open houses (they are completely free to use) in some amazing locations:
If I had the money, I would buy this.
A friend of a friend just offered to give me a house. They have several in depopulated areas that are basically worthless for sale and decaying if no one lives there. Some areas are so deserted, there could be hacker villages.
I wonder if this is my midlife crisis…
One of the ideas I had to do with it is convert it into a start-up kick-off resort, alternatively a hacker space. But it's far away from where I live now (200+Km). Selling it is quite painful, I put tons of work into that place, here are all the pictures of the renovations:
Im in Mountain View and I can tell you that at least half of the problem is shoddy construction. East Coast houses are made to keep out weather and West Coast houses are made not to hurt when they fall on you.
And this issue is going to make someone a billionaire in the future. Urbanization is well under way and people are only getting noisier and more crowded.
Also, another area for huge improvements is in the legal system. Basically you're screwed if you have noise issues due to anything "normal" - e.g. music, talking, babies...etc.
West Coast houses are made not to hurt when they fall on you
True, they're junk. In most places it would be smarter ot make them out of brick, and the chances that they'll fall on the occupant are very low indeed. Some of the oldest (pre 1906) houses in SF are made of brick, ditto in Oakland.
As it turns out, brick buildings are much more prone to complete collapse than wood houses during earthquakes, owing to the greater flexibility of wood.
Or are you making the argument that that conventional professional wisdom is incorrect?
Unreinforced brick will indeed fall down in even modest earthquakes. In new construction it is possible to sink rebar into the wall, at which point it is at least the equal of concrete (and certainly more attractive); however a lot of people don't want to bother with perceived time and expense and so we go back to concrete and stick framing.
Much construction in California is penny wise and pound foolish. It is routine to omit insulation from the walls in new construction, never mind that it will pay for itself in savings on heating and cooling bills. Wooden houses can be destroyed in an earthquake if the quake shakes them off their foundations; fixing this is simple and easy during construction but, again, wasn't done for a long time. I believe the only reason it is done now is code requirements—it would not overly surprise me to learn that the builders can't be bothered even in new construction.
It's not really the flexibility. Masonry is strong in compression, but heavy, and relatively weak in tensions. It tends to crumble under its own weight.
But yes - brick is good in a hurricane, but a death trap in a quake..
In Europe pretty much any old house is made out of brick. They've been through many earthquakes, built hundreds of years ago and still standing; and this is without reinforcement.
"In Europe pretty much any old house is made out of brick."
Depends on what is the most easily available building material - here in Scotland pretty much all old buildings are made of stone (everything from small houses up).
NB Speaking of making things from stone - the 5000 year old village of Skara Brae even has remaining furniture made of stone:
Probably wouldn't want to live in one during a strong 6+ earthquake, but they are pretty handy during a hurricane. If you can manage to make the roof stay put.
The reason the pre-1906 buildings are made of brick isn't that brick is superior for surviving earthquakes, but that much construction of the time was brick, and that which wasn't was wood. And most of the destruction of the 1906 quake came from the fire which followed it.
So the only structures which could survive were brick and masonry.
Most of those brick structures have been very significantly reinforced over the years. And if you've ever been next to a brick wall as it's bulging in and out as S waves pass by, you'll likely reconsider your argument.
Steel cage buildings are far preferable to either, from a survivability standpoint.
I lived in a California Craftsman house for a few years, and plaster-on-lath construction on the inner walls was great. The higher density & mass of the material masked sound better than drywall, but also provided additional thermal mass so very little AC was required for most of the season. Just circulate outside air at night to cool the house, and close up the windows in the morning to stay cool for the day.
Modern tech exists for good acoustics, it's simply a matter of cost - houses near areas that need noise-abatement routinely get fitted with it, but developers are cheap and will skip it if at all possible.
If your landlord shows you your apartment at 2pm while everyone is at work (or only shows a model unit) and you move in and can hear every footstep your neighbor takes and your neighbors coughing in bed at night, there should be easier ways than currently exist to solve that problem.
In the future I think every apartment will come with a noise disclosure of some sort, detailing expected noise levels throughout the day. And I think people will probably be made to sign noise agreements to join buildings..etc.
Interesting JSTOR sidenote - before we made Coffitivity, this research was behind a Paywall, and we convinced them to remove it. It was weird timing when it happened, it was kind of emotional to speak to JSTOR at the time, but it's cool we can just link to it now.
I think this is not inherently true for all humans though. Not all noise prevents me from doing "insightful" tasks. Passing cars, birds, heavy winds or unintelligible conversation don't seem to bother me.
Conversations I can actually understand or singing - I've had a colleague who sung at his job - does seem to kill any reasonable thinking process in my case.
In fact, I think absolute silence is detrimental to the thought process - I find it very hard to concentrate on hard problems without some degree of environmental noise.
I agree, nature is not silent either. Total silence is eerie. Open plan offices on the other hand are a total killer of though process, as the constant chatter around distracts you beyond hope of any focused work ever.
The author Nicholson Baker has written about writing with earplugs:
"I’ve always been helped by sensory deprivation. I used to wear earplugs a lot. Sometimes I would write with my eyes closed. But writing in the early morning is different because you haven’t been able to see anything for hours. I would get up and feel my way around. The only help was the moonlight, if it was a moonlit night. You think differently if you can’t see."
The New Yorker ran a good article about the leaf blower issue in Orinda a couple years back. I can't stand leaf blowers either, but the article does a decent job of (among other things) pointing out that blowers are a necessary competitive technology for the gardening services.
http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2010-10-25#folio=050
There are actually some pretty good gas leaf blowers that are muffled. Husqvarna makes one.
This is why I hate bans on particular items and want the language of the law to name what they are actually trying to prevent (high dBA device used in neighborhood).
"Leaf blower motors are inordinately large emitters of CO, NOx, HC, and PM according to a study conducted for the ARB (5). Two-stroke engine fuel is a gasoline-oil mixture, thus especially toxic. Particles from combustion are virtually all smaller than PM2.5. According to the Lung Association, a leaf blower causes as much smog as 17 cars."
Yeah, it's things like that that make me wish we could just outright ban all two-stroke engines. See also those gas scooters that occasionally go by - it's incredible how much stink they produce (and conversely, how incredibly clean-burning cars are now). At least there aren't too many of them.
You might hope that we would become habituated to reoccurring noises in our environment, but the opposite has been shown empirically. [1]
The study showed that while regular office workers become habituated to office chatter after 20 minutes of exposure, their habituation resets to baseline after only 5 minutes of quiet (measured via memory tasks). The irregularity of the noise is what kills us.
The only effective solution I've found against ambient ear-shocks is to overpower them via headphones and regular white noise.
Tonight I woke up at 4 because it was totally quiet in the city. It's strange that we feel discomfort when things are quiet.
It shouldn't be that way and it's one of the big problems to be solved. Electric transportation can help. And maybe electric leaf blowers are the next thing Tesla should promote.
I'm sitting here (Detroit suburbs) trying to read this article while the lawn service is outside cutting, trimming, and blowing. Recently I've been looking at houses closer to the city, but considering northern Canada at this point.
Better sound insulation can help reduce the noise level from external sources inside a home, but 1) does nothing for outdoor areas of your home (a patio or porch for example), and 2) becomes completely ineffectual if you open a window.
Indeed. For example, dual-paned windows are fantastic, but since air conditioning is relatively rare in dwellings in the Bay Area, you effectively can't use them for sound insulation for several months of the year.
When I truly want to concentrate and need silence, I wear noise-canceling ear plugs. The same type you use to protect from a chainsaw-sounding snoring roommate.
Sometimes that feeling of having something stuffed into your ears, or if they are headphones that feeling of something heavy on your head is more distracting than the noise itself.
The sad thing is that noise is yet another example of the phenomenon of "the tragedy of the commons." Which means things tend to get noisier and noisier. In fact, what has surprised me most about living in Palo Alto is how noisy it is. You'd think living in the suburbs would at least be quiet. It is on weekends. But the problem with this suburb is that people are too rich: they all have their gardens maintained by gardening services, who use among other things gas-powered leaf blowers and hedge trimmers.
The leaf blowers in particular are unbelievably loud. You can hear a gas-powered leaf blower 3 blocks away. Which means during the day you can almost always hear one. (The city of Palo Alto has outlawed gas powered leaf blowers, but the gardening services all pretend not to know.)