Live from Austin!

The "cell phone electromagnetic fields are giving you cancer" people have a new target: now it’s hybrid cars that are going to kill you. The NYT gasps:

While Americans live with E.M.F.’s all around — produced by everything from cellphones to electric blankets — there is no broad agreement over what level of exposure constitutes a health hazard, and there is no federal standard that sets allowable exposure levels.

Yeah, that may be because nobody’s ever managed to reliably, scientifically demonstrate a negative health effect from everyday electromagnetic fields applied to human beings.

Testing with a TriField meter led Brian Collins of Encinitas, Calif., to sell his 2001 Honda Insight just six months after he bought it — at a loss of $7,000. He said the driver was receiving “dangerously high” E.M.F. levels of up to 135 milligauss at the hip and up to 100 milligauss at the upper torso.

Who is this Brian Collins? Given the way the NYT quotes his verdict that 135 milligauss is "dangerously high", I hope he’s a scientist. Wouldn’t want to think the NYT was scaremongering, eh?

Let’s go back to 1995 and see what the NYT had to say about electric fields then:

The world’s largest group of physicists, the American Physical Society, has taken a stance on a contentious public health issue by saying it can find no evidence that the electromagnetic fields that radiate from power lines cause cancer. [...]

By comparison, at a distance of one foot, home appliances radiate fields from about 1 to 280 milligauss, the highest figure being for an electric can opener. [...] The earth’s magnetic field, which humans are constantly exposed to, is about 500 milligauss.

Oh well. I guess that means Brian Collins is just a random crackpot with an EMF meter then.

So, if you’re worried about the electric field given off by a hybrid car, make sure you do all your laundry by hand, leave the planet as soon as possible, and for god’s sake don’t use an electric can opener.

Me, I use the phone in the car. I’m crazy that way. Yet my blood pressure has dropped over the last few years. You know what raises it, though? Stupid scaremongering.

Digital TV means crystal clear reception from an $8 wire loop antenna. It means beautiful sharp images a meter across with no visible scan lines.

It also means occasionally having to reboot your television.

It’s just the way things are. I have to reboot my cellphone every day or so, or a memory leak eventually causes it to crash. I have to reboot the printer once a month or so. Our answering machine has needed rebooting a few times, too, and the other day I rebooted the car. I haven’t had to reboot my watch, but it does have to sit and calculate for a while when I change physical time zone. I’m sure in a few more years, I’ll be rebooting the toaster whenever it starts burning toast.

Like a Mac, our TV is entirely software controlled, even powering itself on and off when ordered to by the software. There’s no physical on/off switch, just a button that requests that the software turn the set on or off.

Unfortunately, there’s a bug. Every now and again, the software will think there’s no incoming signal, and ask the hardware to turn off the screen to save power. After a second or two it’ll realize it made a mistake, and ask the screen to power up again. It happens very intermittently, I’d guess once every dozen hours or so, but that doesn’t stop it from being annoying. At one point there was a TV episode on the TiVo that would reliably make it happen at a certain point.

So, I wrote to Sharp asking if this was a known glitch with Aquos TVs. They called me back, and had me put the TV into a special hidden maintenance mode. It turned out my TV needed a software update, something to do with a power glitch in Aquos models that support CableCard. I was refered to a local Sharp service engineer, who brought over a couple of flash cards and apparently did the update. So far, so good.

Something about this disturbs me, though. More and more outwardly simple objects that we interact with are controlled by complex software, and we’re apprently still no closer to solving the problem of delivering reliable software. I didn’t feel too bad when the car needed a firmware upgrade, because a car is a really complicated system—especially a hybrid car that needs to control 2 engines at once and trade off energy between them. But TV is conceptually so simple, and it used to involve no software at all. Digital is nice, and all, but because of the need to decode MPEG-2 we’ve quietly lost simplicity of design. And that’s before you even consider the fact that ATSC is a horrible, horrible piece of design-by-committee with 18 different formats.