Decibels are not linear
Covid happened five years ago. Can you imagine? It’s been five, long, crazy, and even more shaky years. It’s a weird part of life to not remember given it affected nearly every human on this planet at the same time. I can’t believe I forgot so quickly a time where I thought there was as decent chance I could die any given week. This is especially ironic given that I used to listen to and play in bands that had “death” in the title and genre, yet then never once thought about actually dying.
Remember when those lives become a nail-bitting series of clicks to see maps of growing red dots swallow where we live and a graph of generally ever-rising infection, fear and death. I’m talking about the COVID-19 infection graphs we all liked to look at because we’re collectively all sadists.
I never used nor really knew what a logarithmic scale was until this fun period of our lives. It measures growth so it’s good for a particular thing. One thing it also does is take the same situation and make it look way less bad than it is, because you see a flattened curve where there isn’t one. You’re supposed to understand it, but in reality your eye sees a thing, your mind understands another and you go away thinking whatever the hell it is you wanted to anyhow.
So what else is in our lives all the time that we also don’t understand how to understand properly? Sound. Decibels aren’t in fact linear. They’re measured proportionately. And yet nobody really told any of us. A measurement everyone thinks they know because duh and they have actually no idea about.
