Running Hot
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What is the main topic of this episode?
Pushkin. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.
Who is Ben-Nadav Hafri?
Hello, hello, everyone. This is the first of what are going to be a couple of episodes in this mini-season from my colleague, Ben-Nadav Hafri. Ben is the guy, when you're hiking through the wilderness, who says, let's go this way. And there's no trail. And you think, oh, I'm going to get eaten by bears. And then, no, you find some lost civilization and large piles of glittering gold. Ben started telling me this story and I stopped him halfway through and I said, oh Ben, this is a spandrel. And what's a spandrel? One of my all-time favorite concepts invented by Stephen Jay Gould. The spandrel is the thing that doesn't have a function, but which hangs around like a random hitchhiker because it happens to be riding along with things that do have a function. Like your earlobes.
What is a spandrel and how does it relate to sirens?
I mean, what are they there for? Doesn't it seem like they were all just along for the ride with the part of our ear that actually does useful things? Or your chin. What's up with the chin? We look at a spandrel and we assume there has to be a reason for it. And there isn't. They're just spandrels. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. This is Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. In this episode, my colleague Ben-Nadav Hafri investigates a spandrel you don't even realize you've been living with, something that none of us would ever think to question. Because it's such a bedrock part of our world, we all just assume it has to be there. And it doesn't. I'm talking, of course, about Sirens.
Sirens.
Walk me through. Oh, no.
You really do.
Walk me through what we're looking at here. I'm talking with my wife, Julia Conrad, who happens to share an apartment with me on quite a noisy street in Brooklyn.
This is a log that you created, although I am represented in it. I think it looks like we only did it for one day of how many times we heard the siren and where we heard it. Wow, what a day.
Julia and I live opposite this grocery store that's all local, small batch, whatnot. So instead of getting just one delivery a day, they get, like, 15. Sometimes from trucks bearing, I assume, one sprig of artisanal basil. Next door, there's a noisy playground, and crucially, a fire station. A really active fire station. What happens is the grocery store trucks block traffic, which means the fire trucks can't get out. And so, sirens. All the time. This, for me, as a writer, podcaster, and light sleeper, is a problem. So I decided to do some research. I made a spreadsheet. We counted from 9 a.m. till 10 at night, and we heard a siren 24 times. 24 times! And this is reliable data. Julia is a data scientist.
She works for the New York City government, and she has held my spreadsheet to the highest of standards.
First, I have to say, I never understand your way of doing Google Sheets because the color coding seems to just be aesthetic. It's not actually representing anything in the data.
I don't need this. I can get enough of this in my job. I don't need it from you. I will confess that the spreadsheet consisting of mauve, baby blue, puke green, a cheery yellow, and several pleasingly varied shades of red isn't even complete because it does not count the times we heard the siren in the middle of the night when there is no one on the road. Maybe you didn't realize this, but emergency vehicles will sometimes run their lights and sirens even if there's seemingly no one around. Sirens can run anywhere from 110 decibels to over 130. That is ear-damagingly loud. The classic fire siren sound, like what you hear in your head if you imagine a fire truck right now, is called the Federal Q2B, and it's a whopping 123 decibels at 100 feet away. There's an actual corporation that makes the siren, Federal Signal. Fans post videos about the siren online. Here's what it sounds like. Maybe turn your volume down.
As we say, it's not a fire truck unless it's got a Q siren.
According to a helpful chart from Yale University, 123 decibels is just two decibels lower than the point at which, quote, pain begins. This would all be fine, except I kind of need my ears for my job. And this is why I began the log. The log has fields for all relevant data. Date, time, branch of emergency service, location in the house from which we have heard the siren.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic of this episode?
0:06–0:17
2
Who is Ben-Nadav Hafri?
0:17–1:04
3
What is a spandrel and how does it relate to sirens?
1:04–6:25
4
Why are sirens so loud?
6:25–8:48
5
What does Dr. Arlene Bronzaft say about noise?
8:48–15:08
6
What new emergency response strategies are being implemented?
15:08–26:18
7
How did the public react to changes in ambulance response?
26:18–45:49