I'm essence any type of foreign dust contaminant is bad for your lungs and health. Our lungs are equipped with mucos generating cells that protect us through carrying out the mucous once it traps the substance. The reflex that does this for you is reduced over time through the body conditioning itself against the invasion and goes away, but you still cough from the irritation once the mucous production diminishes. Thats when things go south.
Fact is our bodies cope with so much junk every day that isn't considered a health hazard. Cooking tomatoe sauce in an aluminum or cast iron pot can be just as bad for you as handling lead based solder with your bare hands (lead is water soluable and goes into your bloodstream through your skin). We use aluminum every day for food containment and cooking but its a known nephro- and neuro-toxin in other countries. Here in the US, the government does little to educate people and keep big corporations from freely selling you something if it grosly benefits big business. This whole game is about money, not about public health. If it was, fast food wouldn't be as big and we wouldn't be eating genetically modified corn, soy and wheat. Dairy and meat is not what it used to be from a nutritional point of view. The government won't tell you its not as good for you because this way of doing things generates alot of money for big business, who in return support and elect government officials and law makers. The cycle just continues.
Knowing what your dealing with is the most important thing along with how to protect yourself from long term health risks. Problem is alot of things that are bad for you have no decent alternative replacements ie. asbestos is a very good substance for fire suppression anf insulation where other materials just don't cut it. IMO, as long as its handled well, labeled and disposed of properly, its a minimal risk in contained form. I've used lead based solder for decades and there is no decent alternative to it IMO. If there was, I'd be all over it.
Fact is our bodies cope with so much junk every day that isn't considered a health hazard. Cooking tomatoe sauce in an aluminum or cast iron pot can be just as bad for you as handling lead based solder with your bare hands (lead is water soluable and goes into your bloodstream through your skin). We use aluminum every day for food containment and cooking but its a known nephro- and neuro-toxin in other countries. Here in the US, the government does little to educate people and keep big corporations from freely selling you something if it grosly benefits big business. This whole game is about money, not about public health. If it was, fast food wouldn't be as big and we wouldn't be eating genetically modified corn, soy and wheat. Dairy and meat is not what it used to be from a nutritional point of view. The government won't tell you its not as good for you because this way of doing things generates alot of money for big business, who in return support and elect government officials and law makers. The cycle just continues.
Knowing what your dealing with is the most important thing along with how to protect yourself from long term health risks. Problem is alot of things that are bad for you have no decent alternative replacements ie. asbestos is a very good substance for fire suppression anf insulation where other materials just don't cut it. IMO, as long as its handled well, labeled and disposed of properly, its a minimal risk in contained form. I've used lead based solder for decades and there is no decent alternative to it IMO. If there was, I'd be all over it.
"Fact check: Exposure to aluminum through food does not cause neural issues or cancer"
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...ugh-food-wont-cause-health-issues/3239457001/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...ugh-food-wont-cause-health-issues/3239457001/
One thing I do not judge things by is those "fact checker" sites.
Because there is no way to really determine the validity of them.
Like "hearsay" - it doesn't hold up in a courtroom.
These "facts" are citing Government sources which are scientifically vetted...
People used to think a womans uterus would fly our of their body if they went 55 MPH on a train too... People used to think that the LHC would create a quantum singularity and destroy the planet... None of them were scientists.
I prefer to believe scientists over say, some lady who "read it on Facebook" or "Saw a Youtube video about"... 😀
I also take everything with a grain of salt - you can make a "study" show the exact results you're after if you know how to manipulate the data.
People used to think a womans uterus would fly our of their body if they went 55 MPH on a train too... People used to think that the LHC would create a quantum singularity and destroy the planet... None of them were scientists.
I prefer to believe scientists over say, some lady who "read it on Facebook" or "Saw a Youtube video about"... 😀
I also take everything with a grain of salt - you can make a "study" show the exact results you're after if you know how to manipulate the data.
In kodabmx's case, it's easy to fact check the "Fact Check". Google is one of yer few friends. Lots of data and science to corroborate.
Political commentary and related collateral removed. Please read and abide by the forum rules.
These days, even some scientists have questionable credentials..... and that's a fact!
Rumors spread, that's also a fact.
And since humans are inherently susceptible to such things as hype and hearsay, it's a matter of having the necessary intelligence and common sense that makes the difference.
I agree but I also would say common sense isn't so common anymore.
"Don't put your hand in the vise and close it"
Of course, that's just my opinion... I could be mistaken.
"Don't put your hand in the vise and close it"
Of course, that's just my opinion... I could be mistaken.
However...this day...you might want to... "fact check" the 'Fact Check', since "rumours spread" as you are clearly aware. Last thing we want is for the the wrong ones to be spreading, no? Too much hype and hearsay may lead to your conclusions.
Fact check is no more valid/invalid than any other opinion on this or any other forum. That's why opinions are just opinions. I don't go online for medical problems, I go to the MD professionals.
My former employer used to give blood tests for beryllium sensitivity. In the early 2000s, I showed positive for Be sensitivity. They gave me another blood test completed by U. Penn medical lab which was inconclusive. Follow up was to travel to National Jewish Hospital in Denver, CO. That was four full days of testing, not all of it was pleasant, especially when they took a lung tissue sample from each lung by sticking a tube down each nostril. Conclusion was that I was not Be sensitive and I retired in 2015.
That's why I look for medical advice from a professional and not on internet forums about DIY audio.
My former employer used to give blood tests for beryllium sensitivity. In the early 2000s, I showed positive for Be sensitivity. They gave me another blood test completed by U. Penn medical lab which was inconclusive. Follow up was to travel to National Jewish Hospital in Denver, CO. That was four full days of testing, not all of it was pleasant, especially when they took a lung tissue sample from each lung by sticking a tube down each nostril. Conclusion was that I was not Be sensitive and I retired in 2015.
That's why I look for medical advice from a professional and not on internet forums about DIY audio.
Studies happen! What do you want to prove, or disprove? Now let me pick your test subjects, your measurement methods, and criteria.
Seriously, 12 years ago a group of well respected engineers did a several month long study and followed it up with a whitepaper that "proved" that a certain piece of multi band radio hardware could NOT be built in a certain cubic volume with the technology of the time. Proving something is doable is hard, as the only real path to prove it convincingly, is to do it. Proving that something can NOT be done is a foolish move, period, because someone can really wreck your credibility when they do it. Several members of upper management in the research group where I worked called BS and the storm broke out. There were two sides of the discussion with meetings, arguments and lots of blamestorming going on, and eventually the gravitation field surrounding the issue dragged me into the middle of it.
I went to my boss and requested a parts guy, another engineer, and two months. For what? He asked. I replied that I'm really going to ruin someone's day in a couple of months, and it will shift the balance of power in this group back where it belongs. Two months later I had a pair of two way radios demonstrating that "could not be done" technology. That "proof of concept" demo I did evolved into the Motorola APX 8000 public safety radio.
https://www.motorolasolutions.com/e...oject-25-radios/portable-radios/apx-8000.html
I started working in the Motorola plant on the assembly line at age 20 and worked my way up to "Principal Staff Research Engineer" over my 41 year career. During that period, I spent time in virtually every group, place, and position in that facility. I knew almost everybody that had been there more than a year or two. I also spent 10 years in the cal lab so I knew every piece of test equipment in the place, and all of the vendors that came to call selling us everything from test equipment to resistors.
One person does not need to know everything. They just need to know what question to ask, and who to ask. We had two distinct groups at the plant, engineering, and manufacturing. They were in different buildings and rarely communicated with each other. There was often a cultural and even a language barrier between the two groups. Few people dared to cross that boundary. The cal lab technically reported to manufacturing because some of our products required NIST traceability. The cal lab also serviced and tracked all of the test equipment in the entire plant including engineering, which required me to have access to the whole place. I had no problem walking out to the factory, sitting down in a test bench, and working on a radio, because I had been there, and I had kept up with the current products while in the cal lab in order to develop better test methods.
Sometimes to me an obvious simple question triggered a month or two long study to fetch an answer that should have been on the top of someone's spreadsheet. The Motorola plant where I worked always made low volume high dollar products like police radios and commercial two way radio products. Product cost was not a primary concern in the design and engineering phase. That changed when a taxi cab dispatch radio morphed into the Nextel / iDEN walkie talkie cell phone in the mid 90's. Within a couple of years our lazy little factory was looking at a million unit a year run rate with an ever shrinking profit margin.
In my effort to cost reduce the phone I dared to ask, "how much does it cost to place a SMD part on a PC board?" when I could replace 12 parts with 3 that cost a little more overall, but sped up the line, and "How much does our distribution center spend to ship an empty box?" $20 per unit is OK on a $2000+ police walkie talkie, not on a $150 phone.
Amazing. Your hobby is/was your job. Pretty rare in this world. I’m writing this during a short break from hauling 52 sheets of drywall down into a customer’s basement by myself at 65. Mind you it keeps me fit. However you look pretty fit in your avatar. 🙂
The paper clip met the wall outlet at about age 4. From that moment on I knew my life would involve electricity. Somewhere around age 6 or 7 my parents gave me an electric guitar without an amplifier for Christmas. The music store guy convinced my mom that an unamplified electric would be quieter than an acoustic guitar (true). Shortly thereafter my father got a stereo console and ditched the old mono Magnavox. It took me about 5 minutes to cut a guitar cord in half and tape the wires to the wires in the tone arm of the Maggie and a young kid had DIYed his first guitar amp. Now 60+ years later, I'm still making them. I also built and raced fast cars, played guitar in a couple bands, and sailed all over the south Florida coast line, the keys and Bimini in boats from 14 to 47 feet, but never made any money at those hobbies, just spent lots!
That picture is at least 15 years old. Motorola put a fitness center in the plant in 1999 and made it free to employees. My younger buddies convinced me (the then 47 year old fart) to join. I hit my peak physically from age 50 to about 53 where I weighed over 200 pounds with a very low body fat. It's been all downhill since then, but I was still a muscular 180 pounds when Covid came, and I ditched my gym every weekday morning routine. Two and a half years later I decided to go back to the gym but it has closed down. I'm now down to 160 pounds, so maybe I need a new avatar. Maybe this one with a newer DIY guitar amp?
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I wish you lived around the corner from me. Fun times being retired and having the same hobbies. I remember your story about getting zapped on a (Fridgid Pink?) album that had aluminum foil on the cover. I took apart about everything in the house until I didn't reassemble the alarm clock correctly and my dad was almost late to work. He bought me a book called "How Things Work." My brother somehow has that book even today, but he's not very computer literate because computers weren't as ubiquitous until we were in our 30s.
Since electronics weren't as easy to figure out as mechanical devices, I wanted to learn electronics and joined the military. They taught us how to fix avionics and told us we might be out in the middle of nowhere and had to learn to fix the gear. Unfortunately, after a couple years out of avionics/electronics school, it got to the point where we got a call for a certain problem and I knew what board and what component caused the problem. When I got out of the military and went home, I studied mechanical engineering and got a job at a national laboratory after getting my BSME. Spent close to 40 years working there and retired in 2015.
The avatar looks good. You look serious or maybe it's the guitar chord?
Since electronics weren't as easy to figure out as mechanical devices, I wanted to learn electronics and joined the military. They taught us how to fix avionics and told us we might be out in the middle of nowhere and had to learn to fix the gear. Unfortunately, after a couple years out of avionics/electronics school, it got to the point where we got a call for a certain problem and I knew what board and what component caused the problem. When I got out of the military and went home, I studied mechanical engineering and got a job at a national laboratory after getting my BSME. Spent close to 40 years working there and retired in 2015.
The avatar looks good. You look serious or maybe it's the guitar chord?
Very fit 160, that's fer sure. My life has not been anywhere near as interesting as either of yours'.
I remember it very well. The album was Steppenwolf, The Second the one with Magic Carpet Ride on it. I had souped up a pair of old Stromberg Carlson PA amps for home stereo and guitar amp duty. The high school electronics class had several hundred metal envelope RCA 6L6 tubes courtesy of Homestead AFB, so four were in each amp. The amp was never intended to be used with the metal tubes which have pin 1 connected to the metal shell, so pin 1 was used as a tie point for a screen dropping resistor. Our classroom had grounded metal benches which often made for some fireworks when working with a hot chassis radio or TV set. I had the album cover in hand while leaning against the bench and somehow the cover touched one of the tubes in the live amp. A loud profanity and the record cover were both launched at the same time, and everyone involved got a good laugh, especially the teacher.
I had to think about this for a minute, then it became obvious. The photo is labeled "New Guitar" as it was one of two under $50 guitars I got on Ebay a few years back. There is no chord, just a single note probably part of a simple pentatonic riff that I can play blindfolded, so why the concern? I looked through my raw photos to find that this was the best one of about 15 consecutive pictures starting at #1000346. Panasonic's Lumix cameras number each photo consecutively starting at 1000000. This was not only a new guitar, but it was also the 353rd picture taken on a new camera that now has taken over 300,000 pictures. Most of the other 15 pictures are out of focus, so I'm probably trying to see the little LCD screen with one of those monster LED garage lights shining in my face and do something meaningful with the guitar before the self timer takes the picture. I noe know better ways to do this.
The original photo before compressing it to fit forum size requirements dates to 2018, before Covid, so I was likely 175 or so in that picture.
Someone may ask how does someone take 300,000 pictures in less than 4 years? I forgot to mention another hobby that began in my early 20's, photography. I had my own color darkroom in the film days and managed to win a few "mentions" in some magazine and newspaper photo contests. In those days it's cost money every time you push the shutter button, so you planned every shot. Today it's too easy to put the camera on "auto" and take a bunch. Most of the pictures taken on the Lumix were done in "time lapse" mode. The camera can be set to take one picture every second with preset counter limits, or until the battery dies. The pictures of glowing tubes often seen here involve letting the camera take one picture a second while I turn knobs or otherwise provoke the amp under test. I had not yet learned "time lapse" mode when I took the "new guitar" picture as my older Sony did not have this feature. Today I would just let the camera run wild, act stupid with the guitar in front of it, then pick the best of say a hundred shots.....Or I could put the camera in 4K video mode, make a short movie, then grab the frame of choice from it.