About 18 months ago, I blogged about my concerns about the radiation coming from my laptop, and what effect it might have.

While it's not my most read post, it is far and away my most active, with 24 comments.  Seems like there are a lot of people out there concerned about this... and if their comments are any indication, having scarier experiences that I have had with my Mac.

I wonder how long til it emerges that laptop manufacterers knew all along what they were subjecting their customers to...?  

Oh noes! You may remember a while back, I wrote a post about the perils of bad computing posture. Many of you probably read it, shuddered, and carried on merrily with your poor postural habits... yes? (Trust me, I am not nearly as much of a model for proper ergonomics as I wish I was. I count myself among those of you who did not rush out to change your entire set-up.)

Well, today, via my friend the Instapundit (who has kindly linked to me on a number of occasions), I came across this quite distressing article.

Read 'em and weep:

• Back specialists say as many as four in five patients have chronic nerve damage caused by working on portable PCs.
• One expert said he had seen dozens of Xrays showing signs of degeneration in the joints of regular laptop users.
• He is also quoted as saying: "I also see many people in their twenties and thirties with a dowager's hump - a rounding at the base of the neck - after only a few years of looking down at a small screen while sitting slumped on a chair for long periods."

Watch out, my friends. You only get one body in this lifetime.

So what can you do?

I am blessed, in general, with pretty good health. These long stretches of healthiness permit me to enjoy my beliefs about natural healing, the badness of much of the modern pharmaceutical world, the importance of listening to the body's wisdom rather than suppressing the symptoms, etc. I also happen to with with three housemates who share similar good health, and similar ideas about medicine.

Well, today I am sick. Sick, sick, sick. I Ibuprofen'ed myself enough yesterday to get through our visioning session for Web of Change, but around about 5pm I hit the wall – hard. I got home, whimpering much of the way on public transit, and crashed into bed. Thankfully I live with lovely people, and so I was brought tea, soup, juice, and a hot water bottle in bed. However, I was alone through the horrible sleepless night – the tossing, turning, messed-up dreams, can't get comfortable in any position for more than a minute, night.

After what felt like hours of this horrible discomfort, I got up for some water, thinking it *must* be almost morning. But no... it was only 1:20am! In my distress, I began cursing my healthy hippy household. What was wrong with all of us? Why were there no DRUGS in the house!? Dammit, what good were immune system boosters going to do me right then!?! I wanted DRUGS, the kind that would numb me into blissful sleepy oblivion until morning. Out, out, damn symptoms.

Yeah, it's funny how all my holier than thou-ness dissolves so easily when faced with pain I'd rather escape from. Hmmm. The other interesting part was that once I just committed to letting all the discomfort be there, and really immersing myself in it, the night became much more bearable.

Even so, I've got some drowsy-making Tylenol Cold lined up for tonight. ;)

As an update to my recent post, I wanted to report that I did go out and get an external keyboard and a mouse to add to my working set-up. (It was hard deciding which to go with – way too many choices in this world.)

Now I know that some people (hi Bill!) think I'm ridiculous to worry about radiation from my laptop CPU, but all I know is what I feel, and I can assure you that the physical experience of working for hours on an external keyboard is *very* different from the experience of working directly on my laptop. My laptop gets pretty warm after a couple of hours of use, but with the keyboard it's all cool all the time. No more hot buzzy feeling either – which is a relief, because the buzzy feeling was starting to make my wrists ache.

As for the purchases I made...

I'm happy with the keyboard, though for my purposes I'd much prefer that they scrapped the whole number pad at the right hand side. I'll never use it, and shaving off that extra 10cm would make the whole thing much more portable.

I don't love the mouse I got - a Macally iLaser. It performed terribly yesterday at Workspace on the unfinished wood table surface. It also doesn't have the ability to scroll side to side, which I value. I think I'm going to take it back and get something different... probably a Logitech with a Tiltwheel in it.

Therein ends today's discussion of workplace health and geekery. ;)

Read this if you care about your health and the planet you live on (remembering of course that they are inseparable). But be prepared to be scared.

Gawd, some days I think that getting cancer is pretty much inevitable. How depressing. :( Today I feel like walking around shaking people, screaming "WAKE UP!"

I'm especially stoked to learn that my new(ish) mattress is probably still off-gassing flame retardants that I'm absorbing into my blood. Sweet. :(

(Thanks to Christopher Haase for the link.)

Oh dear. Yet another thing to be wary of when it comes to laptop addiction.

For all that i love the portability that my 12 inch laptop affords me, I'm coming to accept that working at it full-time is *not* good for me. The postural problems that result from hunching forward over a laptop, and constantly looking down at a screen that's below eye level, are bad enough. But I've also started noticing something more insidious. 

I been noticing that when I work at my laptop for a while, my wrists and hands get hot from the heat coming off of it. The keyboard is directly over the CPU, after all. Worse than the heat, though, is the feeling of "vibration" that I've been feeling. It doesn't just feel like my hands are getting warm – it feels like they're being pumped full of some kind of energy. As I've become more attuned to it, it's become more and more uncomfortable to me.

Last week, I had an appointment with a craniosacral therapist named Mark Levine, in Richmond Hill. While we were chatting after my (great) session, the topic of working at a laptop came up. He pulled up a little device he has that measures electromagnetic radiation. When he holds it over things, it registers the radiation coming off of them. As he held it over his MacBook keyboard, the little indicator shot off the chart. As he held it over his external keyboard, it barely registered anything at all. 

He showed me that you really don't have to get too far back from the CPU for the EMFs to drop significantly – but when you type at a laptop, you really are working direclty in an intense field of radiation. Which explains what I've been feeling... and makes me rather nervous.

I've been meaning to invest in an iCurve and an external keyboard for a while now. No more excuses... I'm going to do it asap. It'll be much better for my back, and will hopefully also elimiate this creepy hot buzzy feeling in my hands that I've got as I type this!