Thursday, March 8, 2012

More on That, I Suppose!

In my fourth post, I blawgged about how I'm frightened by EMP devices. (You really don't need to click on that link. I literally just told you the whole thing.) It's really the entire notion of electromagnetic pulses that scares me, but EMP devices in particular. There's a big solar storm going on today, which is releasing a lot of electromagnetic radiation, but from this distance the radiation can't fry anything on a small scale, just hitting major infrastructure. Meaning, the power may go out, but it won't fry your VHS tapes. On a smaller scale, however, like say the scale of a device intended for the sole purpose of frying our VHS tapes, our VHS tapes are going to get fried pretty well, demolishing all our precious stop-motion LEGO Jurassic Park sequels. Along with, you know, important banking documents and stuff. While with a solar storm the power could go out at any time, with some terrorist weapons it could actually irretrievably zap all our digital information.

In order to avoid this, I suggest printing stuff out. Or use a computer that uses vacuum tubes instead of silicon transistors. Whichever's easier for you.

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