The Stuff We Leave Behind

The European Space Agency has just published some pictures of the space debris surrounding Earth. Ancient civilizations have often been identified by the garbage heaps they leave behind. I guess it’s no different in space.

Creating a Zombie Horde? No Worry, They’re Not Moving.

Kids watch a lot of TV. According to the FCC most children will have watched 3 years of it by the time they are 6 years old. Since sleep takes up about one third of our lives this means that 75% of a child’s waking life is spent in a stupor, as Wolfram Hahn’s creepy photos document.

The report continues with more disturbing statistics. Americans have the TV on for 8 to 11 hours a day. 66% of American children have a TV in their bedroom.

In all fairness, the FCC report says these children spent the time in front of the television, so I guess they could have been sleeping at the same time. How this might invade dreaming is too scary to even think about.

Scary Tales + Politicians = Rushed Legislation

Lead is bad. Everyone knows that. We should keep it out of our water and our air. Until recently lead was used in solder, which means that every electrical or electronic device contained lead. Enter the European Union and their RoHS Directive. In July of 2006 lead solder was banned from the EU. Manufacturers have been forced to find replacements, usually an all tin solder instead of the lead/tin solder formerly used.

Many engineers have raise concerns. Tin solder has a number of drawbacks – it is brittle; it has a tendency to cause shorts; it requires more heat; it doesn’t “get along” well with other types of solder on the same board. This last issue can cause problems with repairs and with electronics that are composed of parts from multiple manufacturers.

Although the RoHS only applies to the European Union, it affects us all. Manufacturers cannot supports different processes for different countries. Assembly lines have been switched over to the new soldering techniques whether they are making radios or communications satellites or medical equipment or airliners.

It’s too early to tell if this will cause problems, although anecdotal evidence suggest that it has. Studies on Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) have been hampered by manufacturers who are unwilling to let their failure rates be documented. Meanwhile, the manufacturers are blaming hot-headed environmentalists for possible failures and environmentalists claim that greedy industry welcomed the change because failures sell more product.

Cringley’s column has more to say

Be Careful Out There

Domain Name Service [DNS] servers are the roadmaps of the Internet. They direct your browser to the correct website. Computers use numbers [called an IP address] to identify themselves, but humans have a hard time remembering numbers. Enter the DNS server. When you type www.google.com the DNS server looks it up in a table and returns the number 208.67.217.230, which is the IP address of Google. When you first connected to the Internet your Internet Service Provider [ISP] told your computer how to find its DNS server.

DNS poisoning is an increasing problem on the Internet. If your machine is compromised then it will point to a rogue DNS server. This server will return incorrect numbers and you will be sent to the wrong website. These websites can be mockups of legitimate sites that are phishing for personal data, malicious sites that try to install software on your machine, or sites that are full of advertisements.

If you notice that you are being sent to the wrong websites or a familiar site doesn’t look quite right, contact your ISP or local computer geek and ask them to verify that your computer is using the right DNS server.

Great Lakes Report Suppressed

Six years in the making, a study on hazardous materials around the Great Lakes has been buried by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Despite extensive review by the EPA, International Joint Commission, state agencies from New York and Minnesota, independent academics and the ATSDR itself, the director of ATDSR has claimed the study “well below expectations.”

The study contains warning that more than nine million people may face elevated risk from dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury or other pollutants. It found low birth weights, elevated rates of infant mortality and premature births, and elevated death rates from breast cancer, colon cancer, and lung cancer.

According to Dr. Peter Orris, one of the reviewers of the report, it “…is perhaps the most extensively critiqued report, internally and externally, that I have heard of.” Christopher De Rosa [former] director of Toxicology and Environmental Medicine complained in a letter to the CDC director and the director of ATSDR that not publishing the study had “the appearance of censorship of science and distribution of factual information regarding the health status of vulnerable communities.” Mr. De Rosa has since been relieved of his job.

For a more complete story see The Center For Public Integrity