Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!rochester!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!kenr
From: kenr@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Ken Rich)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac
Subject: Re: Ott Computer Safety Light
Summary: I like mine.
Keywords: Magntic Fields, Blood, Eye Strain, Radiation
Message-ID: <2979@ur-cc.UUCP>
Date: 9 Sep 89 06:17:06 GMT
References: <15388@dartvax.Dartmouth.EDU>
Reply-To: kenr@uhura.cc.rochester.edu (Ken Rich)
Organization: University of Rochester
Lines: 81

Hi-

( a long rambling story to counter a long rambling story )

Everybody here at the University of Rochester who knows me and my
Ott Computer Safety Light thinks I'm crazy-loony-fullabulloney.
Actually what I have is the 'Enegy Light' if I remember right.
Anyway the story is:
I was doing a lot of running multiple VMS
sessions using a vt220 and a Mac with macIP and every night I'd
go home feeling like absolute fried sh*t and my eyes were growing
floaters and felt worse than the rest of me and i was getting alarmed.  
For some reason I thought the tubes and the fluorescent lighting
were responsible, plus having moved into 8 hours a day of looking
at fuzzy marks on tubes, instead of just 2 to 4.
I realized at some point that
on days i only used the vt220 i only felt like 1/2 fried m*nure
and started to wonder.  Then I ran into some Ott literature, though
I'd read about it before.  He was very concerned about the effects
of oscillating magnetic fields on red-blooded sorts ( note that
athlete's foot contains neither of the great multiporphyrins or
whatever they are, known locally as hemoglobin and chlorophyll )
and i started to think maybe he has something there.  Then my
office mate started using two terminals every day while monitoring
some mvs-ish item and I started feeling like fried sh*t runover
by a Mack Truck every night.  I'd go home and do absolutely nothing:
No Energy, burning eyes, constricted brain.  
I started feeling like i could count how many CRTs were on in a given
room just by how lousy i felt.  One day I had my stuff
off and was discussing a project with a coworker and started feeling
like at least 4 or 5 of the 6 tubes in the room were on.  I was
too involved in interesting stuff to be too bothered that only 2
were on.  When the discussion ended and the botherment came 
on strong, I realized that during the meeting i'd oonched back until
my head was a good 12 inches from the screen of a running ibm 3178c.
I knew in my gut then that it was more than eyestrain.
So I got a light.  At first i didn't feel like it helped me
much because it didn't do much for eyestrain directly.  Also the
walletstrain bothered me some.  But...during the 2 weeks following
getting the light I finished renovating our front entryway which
i had barely started working on over the previous 3 months.  I came
home and did stuff.  My wife commented that i was suddenly much
easier to live with.  So my only evidence against it being just
placebo effect is that the results I got were not the results I
was expecting.  But they were great results anyway.  As for the
eye strain, since to receive the greatest benefit from an Ott
light the UV tube should shine unobstructedly into the pupil,
I arranged the terminal so i could work without wearing my glasses
at least part of the time.  Mine are glass and are opaque to UV
as are most plastic ones as well.  That and using an old pair of
my wife's old weak glasses have cured most of the eyestrain
problems...I'm nearsighted, though.
I'll agree Ott's language is not too scientific sounding to
those of us close to the hard sciences and academia, etc.
But is that a reason to flame the poor guy? 
Even now i can't run the Mac and the vt both all day.
I had wondered why I seem to be so much more sensitive to this
stuff than everyone else around here.  A couple people have
mentioned they always feel cruddy at the end of the day
something like I described, but only one person tried the
light.  He said it helped but they didn't think it was
worth the money.  Then one day giving blood, i found out that
the droplet of blood in the blue liquid test was a test for
iron content, and they commented that mine was very high
in iron, what did I do, eat nails?  I do eat carefully, having
been anemic when i was a kid.  Ott theorizes that the iron
in hemoglobin gets magnetized by terminals's oscillating
magnetic fields.  So the lesson is: stay anemic, guys and gals,
and the terminals won't bother you so much.  Maybe.  Pretty sad.

I wont go into low vs. high energy UV, skin cancer, cataracts,
thinning ozone.  My eye doctor is very impressed with the
health of my corneas.  i AM interested in trying one of those
Xray filters too.

Feel free to come snort some rays...@ UCC, Towne House 134,
University of Rochester, Rochester, NY

Ken Rich		kenr@uhura.cc.rochester.edu
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