I did a quick google search & found this: http://www.nvbt.nl/hot-metalen4.html which does indeed show an increased level of mercury in the brains of cadavers with amalgam fillings.
Thank you.
Just a couple of comments. First, the levels found in the brains of the "subject" cadavers has a mean of 15.21 ng Hg/g wet brain. That is a very small amount. Very, very small. There definitely is a correlation to number of amalgam tooth surfaces. The mean for subjet cadavers is about twice the mean for controls (6.7 for controls, 15.21 for subjects). But 2 times a teeny number is still a teeny number. To contrast, look at the rabbit studies they mention. Quote:
Fukuda (11) was able to elicit a "fine" tremor in the fore and hind limbs of two of six rabbits exposed intermittently to mercury vapor; the brain concentrations ranged from 0.8 to 3.7 ug Hg/g wet weight.
In this case the units are ug/g, 3 orders of magnitude larger than the units in the cadaver study. So these numbers are actually 800 to 3700 ng/g , much, much greater than the amounts found in the cadaver brains (the highest outlier was 110 ng/ g).
I'm not knocking the article. The researchers didn't make any hyperbolic claims. But there isn't anything there that would lead me to believe fillings leach enough to result in toxic levels of Hg in brain tissue. The paper's summary says it well:
Data from this project demonstrate a positive correlation between the number of occlusal surfaces of dental amalgam and mercury levels in the brain (p [less than].0025 in white matter). This is indirect evidence suggesting that mercury from dental amalgam fillings may contribute to the body burden of mercury in the brain. The toxic levels of mercury in human tissues have not been sufficiently investigated and the amount of mercury in human brain tissue from dental amalgam may or may not be clinically significant. Nevertheless, dental amalgam exposure should be considered in monitoring sources of mercury accumulation in human brain tissue.
However, one thing has been demonstrated repeatedly: in cadavers, when amalgam fillings are extracted and tested, only a fraction of the original mercury content remains, variable directly with the age of the filling.
Can you provide a reference on this? More than one would be nice since you say it's been demonstrated repeatedly.
Mercury poisioning is not an imaginary malady, by any stretch of the imagination; ask any dentist about the precautions required for handling mercury as the amalgam is prepared... the precautions are extensive. Yet they will happily insert this substance immediately into your mouth.
Two things:
1 - Since dentists work with Hg over and over and over, they need to take precautions others don't. It's like X-Ray technicians - they hide away from the X-Ray device while happily bombarding you with high energy photons. That's because they're around it every day.
2 - Nobody denies that elemental Hg is dangerous. Precautions do need to be taken, especially before the Hg is amalgamated.
This is the position paper of the National Council Against Health Care Fraud on the topic of Hg amalgam fillings.
Why are you posting on slashdot rather than doing something to help humanity? Why play a video game when you can do something else that will actually help humanity? Why go to a movie when you can be doing something to help humanity? Why waste your time having fun, making love, playing games, exercising, writing poetry, painting, arguing - anything at all that's not helping the human race?
This isn't a zero-sum game. People get into seti@home because it's intriguing - there is zero chance that if you could wish seti@home into the cornfield, those 5 million people would sign up for folding@home.
Not only that, but I don't feel like there's an ethical lapse in donating spare cycles to a longshot like seti@home. I can do plenty of socially useful things while my work computer is churning away on seti data.
BTW, I tried to do folding@home (I have a biochem background and find that really intriguing), but have had nothing but problems with the Mac client. There's another folding project, whose name I can't remember, that was also impractical on my Mac. I'll keep going back. But my point is that nobody can make everything they do socially significant - so I have a problem with your implied (false) dichotomy of "Do something else/Completely wasting your time."
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell
This is just like what happens every time there's an article about chess - a handful of numbnuts chime in with "chess sucks! Let's talk about GO! It's superior to chess in every way!"
Why do people find it necessary to shit all over anything they don't like? Maybe submitting a story about the physics of hockey would be more constructive.
All I could get was an itty-bitty screen with illegibly small text appearing in between soft focus shots of geeks' faces. WTF? Is that supposed to pique my interest?
Having said that, I agree that this depicts hyper-nerddom at its worst, but I can see why someone would have an interest in the Klingon language, just from a liguistic POV. Creating this language was pretty clever, and I think artificial languages are interesting. Then again, I don't think I'd take the time to become fluent and hang around with others who did the same. A bit much, methinks.
Stargate the series brings them to a bunch of worlds where everyone speaks English.
I can relate. Still, my philosophy about scifi shows is this: If it's good overall, I can give the show 1 mulligan. By mulligan, I mean I can give them 1 absurdity or gaping plot hole for which I will willingly suspend my disbelief. Giving SG-1 the "everyone speaks English" mulligan, I have found it to be one of my favorite shows ever.
Besides, much of the crew was meeting for the first time in Encounter at Farpoint, so it would be tough to do anything with all the familiar characters together that was set earlier than that.
The name isn't so much clever as... let me think... feeble? Maybe insipid? Fatuous? How about nebbish?
It's too much like all the inane corporate "invent-a-word" names, like Verizon, Accenture, Cingular, Enovation, Qwest, ExpedX...
I miss the simple, descriptive (although a bit bland, I grant) names like International Business Machines, or Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M, if you didn't know). Marketing goo makes my skin crawl. If Linwhatever starts talking about leveraging the untapped potential of Linux to empower the user to unleash his blah blah blah, I will vomit. And that is a promise.
I'm glad the guy's being sued, but for 9,000 emails? That's nothing. I mean, I understand that they have to zero in on something, but I find it odd that out of millions upon millions of bizzarely spelled pitches for useless quack herbal boner bullshit, these 9,000 emails are singled out as a high crime.
Isn't there some way to broaden the scope a little? Seems like the only message here is not to send spam to Hotmail accounts.
The thing is, if you haven't had a problem with your backlight, you probably haven't posted to this thread. How many people with iBooks haven't had this problem?
You're right that we don't have a way of quantifying the problem - But there have been a LOT of people with the same problem, and the technical flaws have been identified. It's not like this is some kind of mass hysteria: When my logic board died for the second time, with exactly the same symptoms being reported by other users, I wasn't making it up. So while we don't know quantitatively what the problem is, we do know qualitatively. I appreciate your skepticism - I'm like that, too. But even though I can't quantify "a lot" of users, if you look at the Apple discussion boards, you see a lot of posts from people with various problems, and those don't get hundreds of "me, too" posts like the logic board problem does. Just looking at the number of people with this problem compared to how many have other problems should tell you something's amiss.
What is annoying to me is that every time this gets discussed, we get someone saying that it hasn't happened to them, so the complaints can be dismissed as whining. That's pure BS, especially since nobody's saying the failure is destined to happen to everyone. I'm hoping my third logic board won't fail, and I don't think it's inevitable that it will, but if this one just up and dies one fine day, like its predecessors did, I'm asking for a replacement. Logic boards shouldn't just stop working every few months, especially on a machine as babied as mine is. That's a design flaw.
I'd say it's a vocal minority (and a whiney one at that). I know many people who have iBooks (including 2 myself), and I've never seen or heard of this problem except on Slashdot and the Mac web.
Having your computer repeatedly die suddenly tends to make one cranky, and with good reason. When I sent mine back for its second logic board replacement, the Airborne Express guy looked at the label and said, "iBook?" "Yup." "Is it a dead screen? I've been seeing a lot of these packages lately." I was amazed this guy knew about it.
If the delivery guy notices this, it's probably more than a handful of noisy malcontents. It's easy to dismiss others' problems when you don't have the same problems yourself.
BTW, I do not sympathize with people who let their warrantly lapse and then demand free service. If you knew you got a 1 year warranty, you knew they were only obligated to 1 year of warranty service. But I don't blame them for being unhappy.
Why oh why they have to stick brushed metal look everywhere? It was sort of tolerable in QuickTime Player and iTunes, since those aren't too "serious" applications, but... Finder???? I didn't know my files and directories were supposed to be eXXtrEME steel-molded things!
I don't understand why so many people have such intense hatred for the brushed metal theme. I don't think it's great, but I don't see why it should cause so many apoplectic fits, either. Can someone explain why this is? I understand not liking it - tastes vary, of course. But why the intensity?
FWIW, I think the striped Aqua background is a little busy and prefer something more "solid." Brushed metal is an OK way to do that, I guess.
In the shop? Please, for the love of god, tell me you didn't drop it off at CompUSA?
I didn't drop it off at CompUSA. I dropped it off at a local Seattle certified Apple repair center with whom I've happily done business for some 15 years. They have experience doing low-level repairs in-house and send machines to Apple if needed.
To hold Apple accountable for their behavior just plain isn't fair. Place blame as it is appropriate - Apple for the failure, CompUSA for slow-ass repair service...
If you're going to just leap headlong into an unwarranted and wrong conclusion, why did you ask the question earlier?
They sent it to Apple a week and a half ago. There is no word from Apple. I didn't think I'd need to spell this out. I guess it's just easier to assume someone's an idiot and jump all over them than just ask. BTW, I never do business with CompUSA.
I think some of these people are missing something important.
I'm afraid you're treading on thin ice with your reasonable position. This is slashdot, where judgment of others is swift and extreme.
That said, I completely agree with you. It seems like the issue here has been twisted from legitimate problems with iBook logic boards to some strawman about how if you don't buy Applecare, you don't have a right to complain.
I bought Applecare. No problem with that. But there is clearly a congenital defect in these machines, and we have damn good reason to complain about it. There's no excuse for computers that just keel over and drop dead for no apparent reason, over and over again. I don't think we're alone in that we rely on our computers.
Also, to compare this to the iPod lawsuit is ridiculous. The only thing they have in common is Apple.
The situation is similar for the iBooks. Having a major hardware component die is absolutely no fun. However this sort of failure is something that would be covered and has been covered under the hardware warranty. If people with failed logic boards did have AppleCare they'd be up and running again in under a week. Instead they want to rant and rave and make money selling t-shirts.
Mine's been in the shop for 2 weeks now with no estimate for a fix. This is the second logic board replacement in a 10 month old machine. I do have Applecare, BTW.
I think this kind of thing is usually bogus, but this iBook flaw is for real. They just die - and I take *very* good care of the hardware. Losing my computer for weeks at a time on multiple occasions is more than a minor inconvenience. (I'm using a hoary old Linux PC right now.)
If you write code professionally that BBEdit excels at editing (HTML, Perl, etc.) then it is likely to be worth it. If not, you probably aren't going to be compelled to purchae a text editor, when there are decent (though inferior) free ones.
Thanks for the helpful (and enlightening) answer. I've used BBEdit Lite a lot in the past (I'm an old school Mac guy who fell into the Windows abyss due to job concerns and have recently returned to the fold), and I didn't see why BBEdit would be an improvement over the free stuff.
It's funny how passionate people get about their editor of choice. Your rational reply was kind of surprising.:)
And I find it hard to see why people like the New York Yankees. Shrug
Yeesh - I'm ASKING WHY. See, my not understanding motivated me to ask. One person, thankfully, answered me helpfully. You've decided it's more fun to be snotty. Shrug.
I can't understand why anyone would pay $179 for BBEdit.
Because they don't realize you can download BBEdit Lite, then buy the BBEdit for the upgrade price of $119?
There is no longer any BBEdit Lite. That path made a lot more sense to me. But Bare Bones eliminated it.
I understand why someone who's been using it a long time and relies on it heavily would be willing to spend the money. I just find it hard to see why someone would switch from something else. But hey, if it's that good, and it's worth it to you, great.
Slashdot Mirror
You people are so inflexible. These things e v o l v e.
I, for one, welcome our new twin prime masters.
MS could call it the pShit.
Can we all now agree that the Kill Bill jokes are played? They weren't very funny in the first place.
I did a quick google search & found this:h does indeed show an increased level of mercury in the brains of cadavers with amalgam fillings.
.0025 in white matter). This is indirect evidence suggesting that mercury from dental amalgam fillings may contribute to the body burden of mercury in the brain. The toxic levels of mercury in human tissues have not been sufficiently investigated and the amount of mercury in human brain tissue from dental amalgam may or may not be clinically significant. Nevertheless, dental amalgam exposure should be considered in monitoring sources of mercury accumulation in human brain tissue.
http://www.nvbt.nl/hot-metalen4.html
whic
Thank you.
Just a couple of comments. First, the levels found in the brains of the "subject" cadavers has a mean of 15.21 ng Hg/g wet brain. That is a very small amount. Very, very small. There definitely is a correlation to number of amalgam tooth surfaces. The mean for subjet cadavers is about twice the mean for controls (6.7 for controls, 15.21 for subjects). But 2 times a teeny number is still a teeny number. To contrast, look at the rabbit studies they mention. Quote:
Fukuda (11) was able to elicit a "fine" tremor in the fore and hind limbs of two of six rabbits exposed intermittently to mercury vapor; the brain concentrations ranged from 0.8 to 3.7 ug Hg/g wet weight.
In this case the units are ug/g, 3 orders of magnitude larger than the units in the cadaver study. So these numbers are actually 800 to 3700 ng/g , much, much greater than the amounts found in the cadaver brains (the highest outlier was 110 ng/ g).
I'm not knocking the article. The researchers didn't make any hyperbolic claims. But there isn't anything there that would lead me to believe fillings leach enough to result in toxic levels of Hg in brain tissue. The paper's summary says it well:
Data from this project demonstrate a positive correlation between the number of occlusal surfaces of dental amalgam and mercury levels in the brain (p [less than]
However, one thing has been demonstrated repeatedly: in cadavers, when amalgam fillings are extracted and tested, only a fraction of the original mercury content remains, variable directly with the age of the filling.
Can you provide a reference on this? More than one would be nice since you say it's been demonstrated repeatedly.
Mercury poisioning is not an imaginary malady, by any stretch of the imagination; ask any dentist about the precautions required for handling mercury as the amalgam is prepared... the precautions are extensive. Yet they will happily insert this substance immediately into your mouth.
Two things:
1 - Since dentists work with Hg over and over and over, they need to take precautions others don't. It's like X-Ray technicians - they hide away from the X-Ray device while happily bombarding you with high energy photons. That's because they're around it every day.
2 - Nobody denies that elemental Hg is dangerous. Precautions do need to be taken, especially before the Hg is amalgamated.
This is the position paper of the National Council Against Health Care Fraud on the topic of Hg amalgam fillings.
Why are you posting on slashdot rather than doing something to help humanity? Why play a video game when you can do something else that will actually help humanity? Why go to a movie when you can be doing something to help humanity? Why waste your time having fun, making love, playing games, exercising, writing poetry, painting, arguing - anything at all that's not helping the human race?
This isn't a zero-sum game. People get into seti@home because it's intriguing - there is zero chance that if you could wish seti@home into the cornfield, those 5 million people would sign up for folding@home.
Not only that, but I don't feel like there's an ethical lapse in donating spare cycles to a longshot like seti@home. I can do plenty of socially useful things while my work computer is churning away on seti data.
BTW, I tried to do folding@home (I have a biochem background and find that really intriguing), but have had nothing but problems with the Mac client. There's another folding project, whose name I can't remember, that was also impractical on my Mac. I'll keep going back. But my point is that nobody can make everything they do socially significant - so I have a problem with your implied (false) dichotomy of "Do something else/Completely wasting your time."
"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell
This is just like what happens every time there's an article about chess - a handful of numbnuts chime in with "chess sucks! Let's talk about GO! It's superior to chess in every way!"
Why do people find it necessary to shit all over anything they don't like? Maybe submitting a story about the physics of hockey would be more constructive.
All I could get was an itty-bitty screen with illegibly small text appearing in between soft focus shots of geeks' faces. WTF? Is that supposed to pique my interest?
Having said that, I agree that this depicts hyper-nerddom at its worst, but I can see why someone would have an interest in the Klingon language, just from a liguistic POV. Creating this language was pretty clever, and I think artificial languages are interesting. Then again, I don't think I'd take the time to become fluent and hang around with others who did the same. A bit much, methinks.
Stargate the series brings them to a bunch of worlds where everyone speaks English.
I can relate. Still, my philosophy about scifi shows is this: If it's good overall, I can give the show 1 mulligan. By mulligan, I mean I can give them 1 absurdity or gaping plot hole for which I will willingly suspend my disbelief. Giving SG-1 the "everyone speaks English" mulligan, I have found it to be one of my favorite shows ever.
Besides, much of the crew was meeting for the first time in Encounter at Farpoint, so it would be tough to do anything with all the familiar characters together that was set earlier than that.
No problem. Working title:
Star Trek: RETCON.
The name isn't so much clever as... let me think... feeble? Maybe insipid? Fatuous? How about nebbish?
It's too much like all the inane corporate "invent-a-word" names, like Verizon, Accenture, Cingular, Enovation, Qwest, ExpedX...
I miss the simple, descriptive (although a bit bland, I grant) names like International Business Machines, or Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing (3M, if you didn't know). Marketing goo makes my skin crawl. If Linwhatever starts talking about leveraging the untapped potential of Linux to empower the user to unleash his blah blah blah, I will vomit. And that is a promise.
Your reply was very good, and helpful, and I thank you for it.
However, you say:
There are way too many third-party applications that leverage the registry to eliminate it.
I the name of humanity, please, I beg you, don't use "leverage" as a verb. It's such a hideous piece of empty marketingspeak it causes birth defects.
Please. Think of the children.
With Respect,
Doug Leverage
I'm glad the guy's being sued, but for 9,000 emails? That's nothing. I mean, I understand that they have to zero in on something, but I find it odd that out of millions upon millions of bizzarely spelled pitches for useless quack herbal boner bullshit, these 9,000 emails are singled out as a high crime.
Isn't there some way to broaden the scope a little? Seems like the only message here is not to send spam to Hotmail accounts.
The thing is, if you haven't had a problem with your backlight, you probably haven't posted to this thread. How many people with iBooks haven't had this problem?
You're right that we don't have a way of quantifying the problem - But there have been a LOT of people with the same problem, and the technical flaws have been identified. It's not like this is some kind of mass hysteria: When my logic board died for the second time, with exactly the same symptoms being reported by other users, I wasn't making it up. So while we don't know quantitatively what the problem is, we do know qualitatively. I appreciate your skepticism - I'm like that, too. But even though I can't quantify "a lot" of users, if you look at the Apple discussion boards, you see a lot of posts from people with various problems, and those don't get hundreds of "me, too" posts like the logic board problem does. Just looking at the number of people with this problem compared to how many have other problems should tell you something's amiss.
What is annoying to me is that every time this gets discussed, we get someone saying that it hasn't happened to them, so the complaints can be dismissed as whining. That's pure BS, especially since nobody's saying the failure is destined to happen to everyone. I'm hoping my third logic board won't fail, and I don't think it's inevitable that it will, but if this one just up and dies one fine day, like its predecessors did, I'm asking for a replacement. Logic boards shouldn't just stop working every few months, especially on a machine as babied as mine is. That's a design flaw.
I'd say it's a vocal minority (and a whiney one at that). I know many people who have iBooks (including 2 myself), and I've never seen or heard of this problem except on Slashdot and the Mac web.
Having your computer repeatedly die suddenly tends to make one cranky, and with good reason. When I sent mine back for its second logic board replacement, the Airborne Express guy looked at the label and said, "iBook?" "Yup." "Is it a dead screen? I've been seeing a lot of these packages lately." I was amazed this guy knew about it.
If the delivery guy notices this, it's probably more than a handful of noisy malcontents. It's easy to dismiss others' problems when you don't have the same problems yourself.
BTW, I do not sympathize with people who let their warrantly lapse and then demand free service. If you knew you got a 1 year warranty, you knew they were only obligated to 1 year of warranty service. But I don't blame them for being unhappy.
Why oh why they have to stick brushed metal look everywhere? It was sort of tolerable in QuickTime Player and iTunes, since those aren't too "serious" applications, but... Finder???? I didn't know my files and directories were supposed to be eXXtrEME steel-molded things!
I don't understand why so many people have such intense hatred for the brushed metal theme. I don't think it's great, but I don't see why it should cause so many apoplectic fits, either. Can someone explain why this is? I understand not liking it - tastes vary, of course. But why the intensity?
FWIW, I think the striped Aqua background is a little busy and prefer something more "solid." Brushed metal is an OK way to do that, I guess.
In the shop? Please, for the love of god, tell me you didn't drop it off at CompUSA?
I didn't drop it off at CompUSA. I dropped it off at a local Seattle certified Apple repair center with whom I've happily done business for some 15 years. They have experience doing low-level repairs in-house and send machines to Apple if needed.
To hold Apple accountable for their behavior just plain isn't fair. Place blame as it is appropriate - Apple for the failure, CompUSA for slow-ass repair service...
If you're going to just leap headlong into an unwarranted and wrong conclusion, why did you ask the question earlier?
They sent it to Apple a week and a half ago. There is no word from Apple. I didn't think I'd need to spell this out. I guess it's just easier to assume someone's an idiot and jump all over them than just ask. BTW, I never do business with CompUSA.
I'm hoping I might get some good news today...
I think some of these people are missing something important.
I'm afraid you're treading on thin ice with your reasonable position. This is slashdot, where judgment of others is swift and extreme.
That said, I completely agree with you. It seems like the issue here has been twisted from legitimate problems with iBook logic boards to some strawman about how if you don't buy Applecare, you don't have a right to complain.
I bought Applecare. No problem with that. But there is clearly a congenital defect in these machines, and we have damn good reason to complain about it. There's no excuse for computers that just keel over and drop dead for no apparent reason, over and over again. I don't think we're alone in that we rely on our computers.
Also, to compare this to the iPod lawsuit is ridiculous. The only thing they have in common is Apple.
The situation is similar for the iBooks. Having a major hardware component die is absolutely no fun. However this sort of failure is something that would be covered and has been covered under the hardware warranty. If people with failed logic boards did have AppleCare they'd be up and running again in under a week. Instead they want to rant and rave and make money selling t-shirts.
Mine's been in the shop for 2 weeks now with no estimate for a fix. This is the second logic board replacement in a 10 month old machine. I do have Applecare, BTW.
I think this kind of thing is usually bogus, but this iBook flaw is for real. They just die - and I take *very* good care of the hardware. Losing my computer for weeks at a time on multiple occasions is more than a minor inconvenience. (I'm using a hoary old Linux PC right now.)
I haven't sold any t-shirts, either.
reason for people to become HAM radio
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
HAM IS NOT AN ACRONYM! It's just "ham." Why do people insist on calling Amateur Radio HAM radio, and Macintosh computers MACs? Tighten it up, people!
I'm sorry. I tried to contain my peeve, but I kept seeing it over and over and I snapped. (/me sobs into a pillow)
He used many words from Old English that are no longer used
No, not Old English. Old English isn't recognizable to modern English speakers. Here's a bible verse in old, middle, and modern english:
Old English:
And tha laedde se deofol hyne. and aetywde him ealle ricu eorthan ymbehwyrftes. on anre byrhmhwile
Middle English:
& e deuel ledde hym in to an heiy hil, & shewede to hym alle e rewmes of e roundnesse of ere in moment of a tyme
Modern English
The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.
The orthography doesn't show up correctly here; The thorns and eths don't appear. Sorry about that.
If you write code professionally that BBEdit excels at editing (HTML, Perl, etc.) then it is likely to be worth it. If not, you probably aren't going to be compelled to purchae a text editor, when there are decent (though inferior) free ones.
:)
Thanks for the helpful (and enlightening) answer. I've used BBEdit Lite a lot in the past (I'm an old school Mac guy who fell into the Windows abyss due to job concerns and have recently returned to the fold), and I didn't see why BBEdit would be an improvement over the free stuff.
It's funny how passionate people get about their editor of choice. Your rational reply was kind of surprising.
And I find it hard to see why people like the New York Yankees. Shrug
Yeesh - I'm ASKING WHY. See, my not understanding motivated me to ask. One person, thankfully, answered me helpfully. You've decided it's more fun to be snotty. Shrug.
[I agree about the Yankees, though.]
I can't understand why anyone would pay $179 for BBEdit.
Because they don't realize you can download BBEdit Lite, then buy the BBEdit for the upgrade price of $119?
There is no longer any BBEdit Lite. That path made a lot more sense to me. But Bare Bones eliminated it.
I understand why someone who's been using it a long time and relies on it heavily would be willing to spend the money. I just find it hard to see why someone would switch from something else. But hey, if it's that good, and it's worth it to you, great.