A recent BBC Panorama documentary has suggested that wifi Internet might be a major health hazard. Scary quotes about chromosome damage and radiation exposure have appeared all over the Internet. Unfortunately, the documentary’s conclusions are junk science. Let’s start off by noting the inverse square law, a piece of basic physics which applies to electromagnetic radiation exposure. Basically, the strength of a signal varies in proportion to the distance squared.
My previous PDA was a Palm V. 16MHz 68000, 160×160 B&W screen that could do greyscale in special modes that most software didn’t use. I didn’t particularly want to replace it, but there were a few issues I was having. First off, the fact that it was serial based rather than USB meant it was a pain to connect to any modern computer; getting it hooked up to the Mac involved a USB to serial adaptor, special drivers, and a lot of futzing with Palm Desktop, and the end result was painfully slow.
After several days of enthusiastic rain, the weather finally let up this afternoon. We had gone to the Spider House Café, and I’d done a good chunk of work, so when the sun came out we decided to go and see the new Zilker Park Waterfall. It seems that the Colorado river is rather beefier than usual, and is flowing over the dam in a great brown stinky torrent. Since we were downtown and hungry, we decided to go to Z’ Tejas.