From Out of the Ether...

There Are Bugs, And Then There Are BUGS! -- Commenting on our recent insight into the shotgun wedding between silicon chips and snail neurons reader Jeff Birkel offers us a somewhat chilling thought as to one possible result of the thinning line between things that are living, and things that are not:

"This reminded me of a show on PBS that I saw a few years ago about "the Flu" viruses that periodically invade the US. Researchers at the CDC are able to track the movement of viruses like the Hong Kong flu, tracing them back to their point of origin. Apparently in some parts of the world, farms are laid out in such a way that the chicken coop is right next to the pigpen, and the pigpen is right next to the farmer's house. These people live almost literally with their animals, and this close proximity of chickens and pigs and humans provides an environment in which a virus can make the leap across species. The virus then devastates human populations because human immune systems have never seen it before.

Imagine if a snail virus managed to jump to the neighboring silicon. Far-fetched perhaps, but I can also remember reading about the similarity between carbon and silicon atoms, and the possibilities for silicon-based life forms. A nightmare scenario would have some neural computing researcher creating a virus that learned to literally infect a silicon based device, and then run unchecked through the defenseless silicon chip "population".

Probably not. But hey, as computing devices become more like life forms, why wouldn't they start to have medical problems?"

Yes, this does read like science fiction, right now. But such things are worth thinking about so that we do consider such "improbables," as we seriously "change the rules."

And, I can just see it now -- HMOs for PDAs?

And Speaking Of Bugs -- It turns out that real bugs, specifically the fungi that we recently learned can destroy CDs, are quite happy to go after just about any computer storage media if the conditions are right. Reader Clark Mahan describes what he experienced first-hand while working at a school for the children of missionaries, deep in the heart of the jungle in southern Venezuela:

"The weather there varied form hot to very hot (95F to 110F), and the humidity varied from damp to wet (95% RH and up). We had to store CD's, videotapes, and floppy disks in a "hot box" (any cabinet with a light bulb on) all of the time to discourage fungus growth, which would render the recording unusable!

Sometimes we could polish damaged CD's with fiberglass cleaner, or run the video tapes thru a tape cleaner and restore them to use, but the floppies were always ruined.

There was even an instance where glass panels were stored stacked one against the other, and some fungus grew between them, etching the glass to a frosted appearance!

Talk to your favorite missionary...this is not unusual!"

Very serious little beasties. And just because most of us don't live in the jungle, we really can't rest easy -- image how hot and humid it can get in non-climate controlled storage buildings, such as self-serve sheds and older warehouses. In many places, summer humidity can be distressingly high -- perhaps high enough to invite the fungi to have a data feast, on our data! We have been warned...

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