Green Sexy

Now Hear This...Or Don't.

USA Today's health blog reports a European Union committee on emerging health risks finding that 1 in 10 MP3 player users could go deaf!  Well, that is if you listen to it for an hour a day for five years.  That would then include basically anyone who owns a personal MP3 player! 

As one who works in a junior/senior high school, I can tell you right now that we'd better start teaching sign language with the way that these kids blast the music in their ear buds.  I swear, you can hear the music from their iPods halfway down the hall.  It's as if they have to "ego-cast" to their peers what kind of music they're listening to.  Now, that's not much different from when I was in high school and kids cranked the music up to full volume on their walkmans, but at the very least those earphones sat on the outside of the ears, not directly inside the ear!  Maybe this explains why some idiots feel the need to install kickers in their cars and drive around in an earthquake-inducing machine---it's not that they're trying to subject the rest of the world to their bass-driven music, rather it's that they've already gone completely deaf from listening to their iPods and have to resort to "feeling" their music.

The sad thing is, once you've damaged your hearing to the point at which you've killed the hair cells in your ear that amplify and interpret sound waves for your brain, you'll never be able to gain it back without the assistance of a hearing aid of some kind.  According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), "the safe limit for noise exposure (is) 85 dB for 8 hours a day. Each time the noise level increases by 3 dB, safe exposure time is cut in half."  The maximum volume for an iPod is 100-110 decibels, which, according to the Mayo Clinic, is equivalent to a chainsaw or jack hammer at 100 decibels or an amulance siren at 110 decibels!   Going by the figures for the maximum job-noise exposure allowed by law, an iPod user can only listen to their iPod at 100 decibels for 2 hours before suffering permenant hearing damage, or for only 30 minutes at 110 decibels.  How many of you have a teenager who practically lives with their iPod's earbuds planted in their ears?   Maybe it's time for MP3 users to "Turn on, tune in, drop out"---that is "turn on" to what's actually going on around them, "tune in" to the sounds of real life, and "drop out" of listening to their MP3 players 24/7! 

Korean Pianist Turns On the Juice!

On Tuesday, February 19th, Korean pianist Soyeon Lee wore a dress made of 6,000 recycled juice pouches during the second half of her recital at Zankel Hall, New York City.  She wore this dress because she wanted to promote the possibilities of recycling.  The dress was designed by Nina Valenti and was pieced together from juice pouches collected by hundreds of American schoolchildren.   Soyeon Lee also contacted and worked with two companies that helped make her dress a reality.  The first company she contacted was TerraCycle, Inc.,which is a company that turns garbage into consumer products.  The other company she contacted was Honest Tea, Inc., which makes organic bottled teas and uses recyclable pouches.  With TerraCycle's vision and Honest Tea's grape juice pouches, the concept became a reality! 

Check out this dress!!!

Here's the photo shoot:

Windup/Solar Powered Radio!

I wake up early for my schoolteacher job, and as tedious as it is to wake up at six in the morning, I look forward to listening to the morning show on my local a.m. station WHAM1180.  The first thing I do (after I'm  finished hitting the snooze on three different alarms for half an hour) is get up, head to the bathroom,  and crank up my Freeplay Radio.  54 cranks later, my blood is pumping (because of the residual exercise) and my ears are filled with traffic reports, entertainment news, author interviews, and news recaps as I shower. 

How exactly does the Freeplay Radio work?  Well, my model (which is much older than the one pictured here) requires 54 cranks, which yields 30 minutes of music or talk radio.  If you put it in the sun, the solar panel on top of the radio sucks up the light and utilizes solar power as its power source.  Cool, eh?    I just love this radio and the fact that it uses alternate energy sources.  I love being a battery (not in the Matrix sense)! 

So, next time you're listening to some cool tunes and someone asks you to "crank it up", oblige them and crank up your Freeplay Radio!  What a Green-Sexy product!