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Lifting The Lid On Computer Filth
IainMH writes "There's a story over at BBC News about how work stations contain nearly 400 times as many microbes than lavatories. Gross. 'A desk is capable of supporting 10 million bacteria and the average office contains 20,961 germs per square inch, according to research. ... By contrast, the average toilet seat contains 49 germs per square inch, the survey showed.'"
Old news? Workstations 'Dirtier Than Toilets' /. article Mon May 13, '02 02:43 PM.
;-)
Same story at CNN
At least... if you're working at your workstation its 'your' bacterias and not some others ass/shit/piss?
20" box fan, 20" square hypoallergenic furnace air filter, duct tape.
It works for my allergies, at least. Lasts a couple months. You should see the filter when it's done...very nasty dark shade of gray. I did notice less dust overall.
...
I go two words for you...
Ionic Breeze
Yes they're expensive. Yes they work.
You get a "deal" if you buy two of them so find a bacteriophobe geek friend to split the order.
Go here for some fun tips.
If there's electricity in the water when you clean it, then you forgot to unplug it, and your computer is too close to water anyway.
so filthy I that I don't want to touch them without a radiation suit and tongs..
Really though, the FIRST thing that any computer I service gets is CLEANED.
The keyboard is the most disgusting thing of all, people eating, drinking, picking their noses, scratching their privates, you name it. The keyboard is a petri dish.
I mix 50/50 antiseptic mouthwash and 91% rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle and mist the keyboard, then scrub it with a nylon scrub brush. I have an air compressor with an aardvark nozzle that I blow the keyboard out with. The keyboard looks 100% new (unless it turned yellow from a SMOKER) and it 100 times cleaner that it came in as.
I open the PC and blow all the crap out, including the drives and fans. If the owner is a SMOKER, then the job is extra nasty and takes more aggressive cleaning. Cleanest computers come from elderly, upper class people, filthiest computers come from poor people who usually have lower hygiene standards and more likely to SMOKE than the upper class folks.
Also, computers on the floor in a carpeted room get clogged up with carpet dust no matter how clean the habits are of the owner, carpet disintegrates as it wears out and the fibers that break off (as dust) get sucked into the running PC fans..
Who found, among other things:
The area where you rest your hand on your desk has - on average - 10 million bacteria.
So guess where the source is, boys and girls. Wipe your desk then, cut off your hands?
It has been estimated that only 1/10 of the cells within and upon the human body really "belong" to us. We are host. Enviroment. The "World as we know it," to a good many teeny-tiny little critters.
If you really want to get paranoid about something, get paranoid about money, which passes from hand, to hand, to hand. Your own desk doesn't really rank that high on the risk list, seeing as how its population is largely an extension of your own.
Unless you're selling disinfectant products.
Of which honey is one of the best, although it's a bit tough on keyboards and the general office enviroment.
On a boo-boo a little honey, dusted with corn starch to deal with the sticky issue, works wonders, but neither Johnson & Johnson nor Clorox would make much money promoting that.
For disinfecting your desk (or hands) in a safe manner nothing really beats vodka or other high proof, food grade alcohol, but the moralists and politicians have made that an over pricey proposition.
KFG
We were talking about this just a couple of days ago, because they have been teaching it to the kids in school. You should always Sneeze into your elbow, doctors have been doing this for years.
Here's what I use to keep my computers clean:
1) Shop Vac -- $20 from WalMart for a 1x1 (1HP x 1Gallon) container.
2) Isopropyl alcohol -- 50c or so for a pint
3) Baby Wipes -- about $4.00 for a box - unscented
4) Glass cleaner -- $1 at the Dollar Store
5) Scouring Powder -- 50c at WalMart
The ShopVac is perfect for the dust bunnies and stuff inside the system unit. Be careful around fans as the suction can spin them much faster than the typical case fans are rated for. Some of these vacs are reversible to blow air.
Isopropyl alcohol is great for cleaning mice. I tend to just throw away the keyboards since they're so cheap and so tedious to clean. If you do need to clean them I recommend actually removing the keys and dumping them into some soapy water. Rinse. Then set them to dry on a towel. A hair dryer can help dry up residual moisture. Alcohol is also good for some types of sticky residue from stickers and tape.
Baby wipes are convenient in a lot of places. I use them for the system unit and general wipedown. They work just as well as the Computer Wipes but are about 1/10 the cost. They are damp so don't use them inside the case.
Glass cleaner is good for body grime. Make sure it has ammonia (most do). Be careful when using it near Scouring Powder that contains chlorine bleach.
Scouring powder is a last resort for marker stains on plastic housings. It will scratch a little, but can help get out tougher permanent marker.
Other useful things include a toothbrush, eraser pencil, air can, Qtips, and cotton buds.
So, your cells still constitute the majority of your body's biomass.
I've read about the same thing regarding overprotective/sanitary parents.
The kids who go to day care (and are exposed to every germ and virus within a 30 mile radius, every day) DO get mild illnesses more often while they're little... but as they grow up their immune systems are super-fortified against just about everything, and they are much healthier overall then the kids whose parents disinfected everything and kept them away from any other kid with a sniffle.
Obviously this does NOT mean you should encourage your kid to eat dirt and so on, because a really concentrated source of bacteria (e.g. dog turd) could make them seriously ill, and it's a good habit to wash their hands before meals. It's just an interesting case of more of a good thing (cleanliness) NOT being better.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
The first sentence:
"The vast majority of bactera on Earth are harmless."
Vonal Declosion
Wonderful.
I've stopped really caring to hear, every 1.5-2 years, about the shocking and revolutionary study that -gasp!- places that get daily use sans daily cleaning are actually dirtier than places that are - given their function - cleaned nightly.
However, there is a quote and its bretheren that never cease to amaze me:
The study found that where office workers who were told to clean their desks with disinfecting wipes, bacterial levels were reduced by 99%.
Hmm ... let's take a look at this ...
1. Disinfecting wipes can take out bacteria. Woohoo. We know this.
2. People are being encouraged to live in a germ-free world - and we'll suffer because of it.
I believe we're headed straight for another Black Plague, given our disposition towards feeling the need to scrub and kill every last germ off our surfaces. This is silly, and is in fact making us weaker as a whole, as we now have zero exposure to elements that, 50 years ago, we came into daily or near-daily contact with.
A few-point plan to save us from ourselves:
a. If you go to the bathroom, wash your damn hands after you're finished. And this does not just mean rinsing them under cool water - this means the full soap and warm-hot water treatement.
b. We're not Howard Hughes. Let a few germs go; they'll likely do us all a lot more good than bad. Yeah, they're all over your skin, clothes, and so on ... but to want to rid yourself of 'em is tantamount to saying that we ought to rip out our eyelashes - because there're symbiotic crawlies living in there, and that gives me the willies.
c. The only people that antibacterial soap ought to be dispensed to are nurses and the like. Antibacterial products are the result of an over-indulgent Western imagination rising up with our xenophobia with a desire to remain King or Queen of our Domain.
Anyway ... that's what I think. ;) Please wash your hands after going to the bathroom ... other people have to touch that door too, you know!
It goes futher than symbiotic bacterial cells with their own genetic futures. Mitochondria may have originated as separate organisms that evolved to exist symbiotically inside a larger cell... mitochondrial DNA is separate from nuclear DNA. Mitochondria cannot be produced by cells de novo.
It would be foolish to say that only the parts of a cell which are created by genomic DNA are human. Our animal cells cannot function without mitochondria.
The bacteria are not the stonework or metalwork of our bodies' cities, though. A closer metaphor would be that a country is a body made up of humans as cells, and that the animals which support each person are the bacteria that outnumber the cells. America is a country made up of people, not cows.... but it survives by consuming dozens of cows per person every year. Rats eat our garbage.... that is, intestinal bacteria eat our digestive waste. Etc.
A body without bacteria is no more desirable than a country without non-human animals. It's beyond silly.