Nobody could adequately explain to those of us in the CS dept why we had to take 3 semesters of Chemistry. Bits of it hung on and from other sources such as space exploration articles I recall this much:
Fires and lungs both operate on partial pressure of oxygen. As long as nothing else in the air is toxic, your body cares that it gets X oxygen molecules per cubic centimeter of air in your lungs, not Y parts per million. Those deep sea submariners are breathing mostly helium with a small fraction of oxygen in it. If you just compressed surface air there would be so much oxygen that your hair would explode when you ran your hand through it. Assuming the electronics didn't burst into flames first. And if you didn't set yourself on fire, that much nitrogen would kill you pretty quick.
So the question is, does helium displace air or mix in with it? I believe the answer is 'some of both'. If that's the case (and I think we can infer that from "the alarms didn't go off") then a good amount of helium might reduce the oxygen partial pressure less than going to 3000 feet above sea level. So what's the Venn diagram of COPD sufferers, in a hospital wing near the MRI machine, that aren't currently on supplemental oxygen?
Even outdoors, large amounts of CO2 tend to sink to the ground and suffocate people in low-lying areas. Look up Lake Nyos for a particularly grizzly example of that.
I meant that it's disturbing that the amount of He needed to disable the iPhone is low enough that the standard sensors around He (which measure 02 levels) don't regard it as a major leak for He to be at that level.
Presumably, the sensors exist to protect humans, not electronics.
Yes, I'm allowed to be disturbed by that; why wouldn't you be?
The devices are tested for usual STP. Nothing else, unless specified. They are done so not for human comfort, but for tested conditions. No more.
If you want extreme conditions, pay through the nose.
In addition, unlike carbon monoxide, helium doesn't bind to, well, anything and certainly not hemoglobin, so it doesn't present a momentary exposure hazard either.
> Yeah, but at the same time, it wasn't enough to set off the alarms for low oxygen content, which is at least a little disturbing, right?
First, alarms for low oxygen content are set for people and no other reason. There can be alarms for high oxygen content, but they are extremely rare and would likely not be present in very many places in a hospital.
Second, why in the world would low oxygen be a danger to an iPhone?
You can't make a complete non-sequitur of a logic leap and then expect everybody to be on board your train of thought.
Furthermore, comments were rolling in assuring me of the nonthreat to humans after I clarified.
And yes, I get it, the sensor exists to detect for threats to life, not threats to iphones. But that's the point: this is a threat we're not set up to watch for at all -- hence why it took so much investigation to root-cause it!
Are you still going to make it your hill-to-die-on that it's "not disturbing"?
Come to think of it, did that "lack of faith" scene in Star Wars (1977) also seem confusing to you?
You totally misunderstood my comment.
I mentioned popping a party balloon because it could also disable your phone. And UV light because it can also destroy certain electronics. But sensors that can pick up little bits of UV are normally not set to warn about it, and that's perfectly reasonable and not "disturbing".
We can use a different word if you want. You think it's a [significant] problem and I don't think it's a problem. Is that better?
I'm not here to die on the hill of word choice. I disagree with your underlying opinion.
What made it unnoticed for so long was that it required the much larger MRI He release to trigger. What (I claim) makes it disturbing is that an expensive incident can happen (bricking a hospital's iphones for weeks) at levels that no one currently calibrates sensors to check for, because no one expects that level to have a negative effect of such magnitude.
Regardless of your preferred terminology, it seems odd to take an attitude of "oh, it only deleted everyone's second-brain for week, in a way that was hard to root-cause, no one died, no big deal" and therefore balk at the use of "disturbing".
I mean, do you consider undetectable, inexpensive phone-bricking techniques to be generally "non-disturbing", or just this one?
Some of the tests were just plastic bags with tiny amounts of helium in them. Unless you're asserting some exceptionally strange gas physics here, you can break an iphone with some balloons.
> Regardless of your preferred terminology, it seems odd to take an attitude of "oh, it only deleted everyone's second-brain for week, in a way that was hard to root-cause, no one died, no big deal" and therefore balk at the use of "disturbing".
> I mean, do you consider undetectable, inexpensive phone-bricking techniques to be generally "non-disturbing", or just this one?
Hang on. You were calling the calibration of the air quality sensors disturbing. That's what I objected to. I wasn't making any claims about the iphone bug itself.
"So, i noticed some of the workers' iwatch's weren't registering the users' heart-rates. At first, I thought it was because they had all died from suffocation from the massive gas leak. But, then I discovered something interesting... it was actually the helium molecules worming their way into the internal clock chip! Amazing day."