anechoic chamber, paper dresses, automotive speed limits, cholera belts

We had a whole-floor ice cream party in lab a few days ago, and the discussion turned to the Orfield anechoic chamber in Minnesota (we got a new electric clock, and it clicks loudly every minute... okay). So i looked the chamber up; it's a negative decibel level, so you hear even your organs functioning. It's used to test noise emitted by various things, to see how they can be made quieter. There is an e-tour featured on this very informative page.

So the Olympics happened. i wound up getting to watch some of the various ice dancing and skating, and snowboarding, luging, and tracked down skeleton. Regarding ice dancing, the some highly amusing coverage came via comedy writer for Vanity Fair magazine, and collectively can be found here. Looking further into the event known as skeleton  (due to the 'boney appearance of the sled'), check out this GoPro video (brief cursing in the middle; apparently the rider shredded a shoe accidentally).

Someone linked this huffpost article of a 4 year old girl who makes her own dress-up dresses out of paper. This is really neat, and something to keep in mind for future babysitting.

In defense of the dietary habits of certain friends-who-should-not-be-encouraged-in-them, apparently this dude ate a lot of pizza in the last 25 years.

The topic of automotive speed limits came up in discussion the other day; a labmate is from Montana, which only recently posted a speed limit, with the former indicator being 'reasonable and prudent speed'. i mentioned a particular highway in Texas upped the speed limit to 85 mph (woo!). It's a tollway between San Antonio and Austin, and slightly (even more) dangerous because it's not super high traffic, so sometimes animals wander across and cause massive accidents (it's difficult to slow down from 85 mph). Also, speeding cameras. Interestingly, from the wikipedia article, " 80 miles per hour (129 km/h) is slower than the 130 km/h (81 mph) recommended speed on the Autobahn and the actual 130 km/h (81 mph) speed limit for freeway-class roads in thirteen European countries and the Australian Northern Territory." It also surprised me to see that Utah's speed limit is a standard 80 mph.

Finally, i was reading a NYTimes article about a book about British women who were sent by the East India company to India and serve as " what came to be known as the fishing fleet, which supplied a steady cargo of potential brides to generations of expats ". Somewhere within the article, a piece of clothing called a 'cholera belt' is mentioned. i figured it to be a sort of belt which was soaked in something to repel mosquitos or misasma or foul spirits, but went ahead and looked it up. Turns out, a cholera belt is simply a piece of flannel designed to keep one's abdomen warm, "the theory being that a chilled abdomen would lead to cholera, dysentery, diarrhea, and other gastrointestinal ailments. Doctors realized fairly early on that cholera had little to do with cold and damp and was in fact caused by fecal bacteria in drinking water. But military inertia being what it was, use of the belt persisted until after World War II" , cited here (and go ahead and read that; it has another interesting anecdote). Further research pulled up this fascinating academic article from 1957, and a report of how cholera influenced the life/writing of Rudyard Kipling.