I am languishing in my sickbed, riddled with plague and reading about all this Tumblr stuff.

Maybe not plague. A cold.

I know that the ringing in my ears is louder when I’m sick, but it’s coupled with the sound of the water moving through the radiators and hot water pipes – a similar sound to the one I hear in my ears – which makes it all worse somehow. No amount of earplug-wearing will help when it’s a noise already in my head.

Coincidentally, I’m also reading about how places like restaurants are really loud. I’m constantly thinking about how loud places are and how it seems like everywhere has gotten louder but can’t really decided whether they really have become louder or I just notice more now that I try to avoid loud noises. Probably both.

Restaurants are so loud because architects don’t design them to be quiet. Much of this shift in design boils down to changing conceptions of what makes a space seem upscale or luxurious, as well as evolving trends in food service. Right now, high-end surfaces connote luxury, such as the slate and wood of restaurants including The Osprey in Brooklyn or Atomix in Manhattan.

This trend is not limited to New York. According to Architectural Digest, mid-century modern and minimalism are both here to stay. That means sparse, modern decor; high, exposed ceilings; and almost no soft goods, such as curtains, upholstery, or carpets. These design features are a feast for the eyes, but a nightmare for the ears. No soft goods and tall ceilings mean nothing is absorbing sound energy, and a room full of hard surfaces serves as a big sonic mirror, reflecting sound around the room.The result is a loud space that renders speech unintelligible. Now that it’s so commonplace, the din of a loud restaurant is unavoidable. That’s bad for your health—and worse for the staff who works there. But it also degrades the thing that eating out is meant to culture: a shared social experience that rejuvenates, rather than harms, its participants.

Link to the original site

A lot of the technology I have is pretty old. I don’t know that I’ll ever go in for anything that gets unlocked with a fingerprint or my face (partly because these things can change).

And then you get stuff like this: Researchers create ‘master key’ fingerprints that can fool biometric databases

Researchers from New York University have created a set of master fingerprint keys that can be used to spoof biometric identification systems.

While the database of fingerprints used by the researchers had a chance of falsely matching with a random fingerprint one out of 1000 times, the master prints they generated had the power to falsely match one out of five times.

Which, like, great.

Link to the original site

A lot of the technology I have is pretty old. I don’t know that I’ll ever go in for anything that gets unlocked with a fingerprint or my face (partly because these things can change).

And then you get stuff like this: Researchers create ‘master key’ fingerprints that can fool biometric databases

Researchers from New York University have created a set of master fingerprint keys that can be used to spoof biometric identification systems.

While the database of fingerprints used by the researchers had a chance of falsely matching with a random fingerprint one out of 1000 times, the master prints they generated had the power to falsely match one out of five times.

Which, like, great.

Link to the original site