Whistlestop

It's important to read the newspaper, especially the sports page, because you can learn things. Things like the discovery that people with excessive exposure to referee's whistles had an increased tendency toward tinnitus and hearing loss. In particular, those people tend to be the referees themselves, but apparently players of sports with frequent whistles are also at risk.  The sport with the most whistles? Apparently, volleyball. Whoda thunk? If I remember from the Olympics, the thing that seemed to have the most whistles was water polo, where I'm not sure if there's more whistle or non-whistle time.

The other thing that popped out from the article is that the whistles are rated for their decibel level, with the top one tweeting in at 106 decibels. This is a little more than a snowmobile, a tad less than a power saw, and about the same as a being 3 feet from a power mower, a subway train pulling into a station, or a boiler factory. I'd never thought about boiler factories and the I don't know what kind of noises are there, but now I at least know they're loud.