This topic recurs with a frequency of about 6-12 months. Just like the Kentucky Fried Rat, and various other urban legends that people Swear is True, we need to regard with proper skepticism the flood of anecdotes regarding Death By Touching a CRT.
As Stuart says, there is a mix of art and science wrt electrocution, but that does not relieve us of an obligation to consider science. There is no documentary data in the peer-reviewed literature to support the notion that you risk death from a compact mac's crt discharge. None. The risk that you face is essentially the same as that of dying from someone startling you. So the risk of death is nonzero, but that's not a reason for panic. It's a matter of relative risk. Most don't fear death from receiving surprising news, and that's the same level of risk that we are talking about here. There are excellent physics-based reasons for this absence of empirical evidence. I've tried summarizing some of them in: http://www.applefritter.com/thefritter/13/drwebster.html Sorry, Stuart, but the article invokes a mix of high-school and college-level physics (and I see nothing wrong with physics properly applied, at any level). This is necessary to understand why phrases like "20,000 volts through the heart" are worse than meaningless. The bottom line is: Irrational fear of the CRT leads people to advocate routine discharge of the CRT, even when no work is to be done on the HV circuitry. Not only does this fear discourage people from fixing their macs, following the standard advice ironically exposes many more people to the very risk that we mean to avoid. Let's be rational, folks. -- Prof. Thomas H. Lee Center for Integrated Systems, CIS-205 420 Via Palou Mall Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-4070 http://www-smirc.stanford.edu 650-725-3709 ph, -3383 fax -- Compact Macs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/>. Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Compact Macs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/compact.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive:<http://www.mail-archive.com/compact.macs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
