Here's another related one that always bothers me: When you say something's loudness in decibels, you also need to specify a measurement distance.

The author of this article even accidentally makes this omission:

> It’s 94 dB, roughly the loudness of a gas-powered lawnmower

And that distance is very important; the actual sound pressure measured is proportional to distance^2. So for a lawnmower measuring 94dB, let's say we assume that we're measuring at 1m. At 2m away, the sound is actually 91dB.

And don't get me started about the fact that a halving in power is 3dB, that's just wacky. I wish we used base 2.