And the American symbols symbolize what they signify, too. A stylized wheelchair to indicate physical mobility. An ear with a line through it to indicate deafness. Less poetic, maybe, but the point is to communicate.
The reason they don't (and won't) have an NRR rating is that they're only useful for constant noise, and not for impulse sounds. There's no question that Airpods are not industrial PPE, for instance.
But I also ride with foamies most of the time (laser lites) and airpods occasionally, and I'd guess that the bike and wind are maybe 10-15% louder with airpods. The foamies win out for actually staying in my ears when I put my helmet on, but if I can get it on then the airpods stay in place fine.
Surprisingly, when I was looking for a rough equivalent to NRR for Airpods, I discovered that Apple does advertise their ANC as hearing protection[1], which I'll assume the FDA has now permitted, because Apple didn't used to make that claim because the FDA wouldn't permit it. They don't offer an NRR and they do warn against impulse sounds, but that KB article suggests a 20dB drop, which is nothing compared to foamies but is in the same range as musicians' earplugs or hardhat earmuffs, and probably better than Loops.
They don't block out loud things or ambulances approaching you. They block out constant loud background noise. This is why they're good for airplanes, lawn mowers, motorcycles and being out in public, and not good for shooting or as industrial hearing protection.
As I mentioned in another comment, on an airplane, my airpods in ANC mode make it easier for me to hear announcements.
+1, but add a motorcycle to that list too. Not Miami, but a large city, and now a smaller city.
All the assertions I'm seeing in this thread are bizarre to me. One can easily hear a siren over noise cancellation and over wind noise, and it's even easier to hear if you have noise cancellation for that wind noise.
As a related example, when I'm on an airplane and I have noise-cancelling headphones on, the pilot announcements are easier to hear than without them.
But "slop" has meant low-quality stuff for a very long time. See also "swill", both analogies to pig feed.
The earliest OED2 citation of "slop" for the sense "figurative. Nonsense, rubbish; insolence" is 1952. Slop was slop long before "AI slop" was coined, and AI slop is slop from an AI.
I read an article not long ago which I cannot find for the life of me now, but the thing in it that stuck with me was the idea that people (in the context, career software developers) were not either AI-pilled or anti-AI, but rather that people are both excited and afraid at the same time.
It's not uncommon to have small amounts of data come out of experiments. These are appropriate tests for the size of the data. These tests failed to disprove the null hypothesis.
I was also curious. It looks like it's probably Kristy Noem[1], and the citations are to The Week and the NYT:
> Noem has since become one of the most prominent examples of so-called "Mar-a-Lago face", a cosmetic surgery trend among conservative women,[370][371] also known as "Republican makeup".[372]
Is [370] pushing it for a biography of a living person? Yeah, probably, especially with the "one of the most prominent" and "so-called" in there. But since "Mar-a-Lago face" has its own, cited Wikipedia entry... maybe not? It's not like Wikipedians made up the term, they're citing that _others_ use that term for her.
I'm not sure how I'd phrase it to say that she is a prominent example of the plastic surgery common to the Republican inner circle, and reference the "Mar-a-Lago Face" article, without attributing the phrase to her plastic surgery.
If the Vision Pro was balanced on top of the head, it would definitely be easier to sustain for a longer period of time, but the weight is attached to the front. That means you're holding it up with your neck muscles instead of straight down your spine.
This reminded me of the Diataxis documentation model.[1] A lot of what's out there now is the "application" side of the model, leaving the "acquisition" side
unfulfilled.