There's a useful device which is a muffin fan in a shroud, with a charcoal filter on the back. Put this next to your soldering station and it sucks up the fumes.
Lead-free solder is the way to go now. I know, it's a pain because of the higher melting point, but it's the future. Also, you can get the kind with a little silver in it to bring the melting point down. Unless you're running a large production shop, the slightly higher cost won't matter. The student electronics labs at Stanford now have a No Pb sign - no leaded solder allowed.
Honest answer: to get to orbit, you've got to go really fast (like Mach 25) and there's a lot of air between you and outer space. Air resistance goes up as the cube of velocity, so you want to minimize frontal area. Balloons or propellers can't get you up to the necessary speed; you've got to use rocket engines. For aerodynamic stability reasons, those need to go at the other end of the vehicle; they also require lots and lots of fuel, and the aerodynamically best place to put that fuel is in a long cylinder behind the nose and atop the engines. The nose of a rocket is shaped the way it is because of a trade-off between aerodynamic drag at slow speeds through thick air near the ground and very high speeds through thin air higher up. The reason some rockets have a thicker section near the tip is because it turns out to be aerodynamically permissible to make the forward section fat, yielding more space for a physically larger payload while keeping the design of the engines and fuel tank section unchanged. Rockets with lots of weight up front are dynamically stable, too.
Question: Is this compatible with OS X 10.9.x or earlier? Or is it only for the latest pieces of shit that are 10.10/10.11?
edit thanks for the correction netheril96!
I'm curious about the state of compatibility because I've drawn a line in the sand -- and refuse to upgrade from 10.9 (since many things seem to be getting only worse and less stable in MAC OS land :).
Please don't breathe solder fumes.
That picture of everyone hunched over their PCB boards while soldering makes me cringe.
Use some form of protection via a fume extractor or face mask and when possible solder in a well-ventilated area.
I've met people who've completely destroyed their lungs and ended up with nasty lung cancer after years of day-to-day solder fume exposure.