Rodger,
I looked (hurriedly) for something on the potential problem of radiation
damage to digital media or equipment.
I found only a bit, which is included here. It seems to say that there's no
danger from airport-strength x-rays, but there might be a danger from
magnetic fields from the motors that drive the belt in the x-ray scanner or
from the equipment used to produce the x-rays. However, it seems very
unlikely and I did not come across any actual cases or accounts of an actual
loss of data having taken place.
Several warnings about taking the equipment or media through the metal
detector, though. And, an interesting account of damage by car seat
heating..:-)
Preben
-----------------------------------------------------------
sorry - lost source for this one:
Keep your floppy away from devices that produce magnetic fields -- like your
monitor, speakers and, yes, refrigerator magnets. Floppy disks are not in
any danger when X-rayed by airport security. X-rays are not magnetic. (They
are electromagnetic energy but then again so are visible light rays.) But do
watch out for the metal detectors; most employ a weak magnetic field to find
metal.
<robinson@apollo.com>
Fri, 24 Mar 89 13:11:46 EST
One fine *cold* day in February I transported a floppy from location
A to location B. I thought nothing about placing the floppy in the
passenger chair. It was positioned vertically against the chair back,
wedged gently behind an empty child seat. The trip took about 30 minutes.
Then I tried to read the floppy and could not: the machine couldn't even
find track 0. I tried about a half-dozen or so machines before I gave up.
It was an old floppy so I guessed that it just couldn't hold the bits
anymore, so I got a few new ones and was going to try again when the real
cause of the problem dawned on me: I own a 1985 SAAB with the *heated*
front seats. I guessed that since the heating element was electrical it
might be puting out enough of a magnetic field to scramble the data. So I
experimented: I made about 5 copies of the floppy and placed some of them
on the floor and one of them on the seat as before, drove for about 30
minutes (again on a cold day) and then tried to read them. The floppy
placed like the first one was unreadable. Those on the floor were fine.
I'd sure like to get a instrument and measure the magnetic field near that
chair when the heater is working. I'd like to know why the magnetic stripe
on the credit cards in my wallet still work...
Douglas B. Robinson
www.peimag.com/pdf/pei00/pei1000/Pg40-flashmemory.pdf
----- Original Message -----
From: <rpkphoto@earthlink.net>
Art, Preben, Ezio, et al -
I like amicable arguments like these; they make me think and I get a
sense of the actual people behind them.
One issue, however, that none of you has addressed is the increasingly
invasive security involved in traveling, particularly since last Sept
11, both nationally and internationally. A friend of mine recently
traveled to and from Indonesia, and had he not raised a stink EVERY time
he encountered an Xray machine, his film would have gone through 21 of
them (as it was it went through only two).
So a big question for me vis a vis this debate would be, are digital
files, like film, adversely effected by these ubiquitous Xray machines?
Rodger
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