We’ve been toweling ourselves dry after showering for centuries. I’d like to see a revolutionary change in drying tech. Towels are analogue, I want to dry digitally.
Hearing aids help to a point. Many folks with age related hearing loss buy HAs and expect to hear like they did at eighteen. When they are disappointed, the HAs are thrown in the sock drawer, to live forever.
Turn the closed captioning on yout TV. It really, really helps.
~VOW
I agree. Fortunately I was at a University teaching clinic so my testing and hearing aid preparation was state of the art. I knew what was possible going in and so I wasn’t disappointed.
I also think captioning is great-I still use it, even when I have hearing aids in. Now captioning fills in that 20% that hearing aids don’t assist with. I bet I depended on CC for 10 years until my hearing decompensated past the point of no return and I needed hearing aids to keep being able to do my job. Now I wish I had tried hearing aids 5 years sooner, I struggled for years when I didn’t need to. It wasn’t pride or vanity, I just didn’t know what hearing technology could do in the modern era. For crying out loud (that was a wee bit of hearing loss word play😉), my bluetoothed hearing aids are paired to my iPhone, I customize the settings and volume through that app, my notification text and phone call tones are piped directly into my ears, as is all the content of phone conversations and Zoom, even Google maps step by step directions. But yes, I do still use captions a lot and they are a great first step that can carry you for years, if not forever.
After a Covid-19 vaccine, the top priority should be a vaccine against malevolent stoopidity.
I used to envision that we would someday have RS-232 ports implanted in our heads, by which we could directly upload and download all manner of information to/from our brains. Today, of course, we would envision a mini-USB port.
That thought kinda skeeves me out now. I envision such a thing becoming very dystopian now.
TV sound. If a single category of TV programming, easily identifiable and predictable, has for decades been unintelligible to an audience segment, and 99% of TV content remains perfectly clear, it is odd that the industry doesn’t give a fuck, and shrugs and tells a deprived market sector to buy 4-figure support hardware. Apparently, sounding cool to the millential big-screen market is more lucrative than the at-home after-market.
You would think it would be cheap and easy to re-mix the track for non-theatrical versions.
I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear when I said I still used captioning on movies and television. I only use what captioning is available without additional cost. I could barely afford my hearing aids when I was able to work. I’m terrified what will happen when they need replacing in a few years, now that I’m involuntarily ‘retired’. I will have to do without, further isolating me from people, including family.
Yeah, age-related hearing problems. I’m starting to dislike the sound of brass instruments, especially trumpets. I wonder what’s next.
Closed captioning without charge has been available in the US for over 20 years. It took a while before everyone got on board, and then it took a while for the broadcasters and program managers got all the squirrels bound and gagged.
A few still get through.
On program descriptions, you’ll often see “CC.” You can be pretty sure the program will be captioned. There are times, though…
I throw stuff at the TV. I yell a lot.
Right now, DirecTV has a “glitch” where parts of the captioning is gone. When it gets to the point where I’m missing 50%, we reboot the box.
When watching movies from disc, sometimes you have to toggle through a plethora of screens to find the captioning. And when you put another disc in, it starts all over.
Make no mistake, though. I am so very very grateful for captioning!
~VOW
@Vow Pretty sure we’re in agreement here. I know my sweet sons had to tie themselves into knots to download a movie or show for me so that we could watch it together and I had captions-partly so I didn’t have to keep asking them to turn the volume up or keep saying…”hunh, what did they say?”. Seems like that got a lot easier to find in the past few years.
And on way too many discs or platforms you do have to hunt and hunt for CC. Sometimes I’m a bad person and wish hard-of-hearingness on the folks making those programming decisions…
Dear Vow - I’m your lifetime grapefruit scientist (er, kinda) and I’m interrupting your regularly scheduled thread to tell a story.
I spent a postgrad year at college in a lab. A couple of the guys in the lab (proper postgrads, mind) were working on something super-new called Human Liver Cytochrome P-450 Oxidase. They spent for ever doing 2-dimensional paper chromatography* on it. The shit hot technology of the time. Yes, I’m that old.
The enzyme @Senegoid referred to wasn’t Human Liver Cytochrome P-450 Oxidase (or CYP450 as we call it these days). Not exactly.
Nor was it CYP450 3
Nor CYP450 3A
But rather CYP450 3A4
Turns out there’s a lot of different stuff in Human Liver Cytochrome P-450 Oxidase. Looking at spots on paper was rather like pissing in the wind. But hey, baby steps.
Weirdly, by the time I got to the end of a mostly aimlessly meandering career, I had somehow got back to where I started, dealing on a fairly regular basis with, you know, the grapefruit-problem-enzyme. In truth it’s much more than just grapefruit that can cause problems, hence the interest, particularly in the multiply medicated**.
I will now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
j
(*) - you know where you put a spot of something on paper and sit in a liquid [eluent], and that washes through it and separates it out into little spots? In 2D you put the spot in the corner of a square of paper, so you get a little line of spots along one side of the square; and then you turn the paper through 90 degrees, so those spots are at the bottom, and repeat the process (with a different eluent) to try and separate out all those spots.
(**) - a lot of medications interact with CYP450 3A4, hence the interest. This specific enzyme is at the root of many drug interactions. It may well be that the -
-that you have to put up with is addressing this.
Also, can one of the Lamb Scientists out there please breed a specific lamb that people in remission from UC can safely eat?
Thank you in advance for your efforts.
j
I went on a trip in the Wayback Machine!
I remember doing paper chromatography in Biology at The Big U. I think it was tomato paste, you had to be FAST to mark the paper at the location of the individual pigment lines! As soon as the solvent evaporated completely, the lines DISAPPEARED!
Unknowns! Solvent! Mettler balance! Aaarrrggghhhh! I’m having a day-mare!
~VOW