Nicholas Thompson wrote: > I am getting confused again: Can somebody confirm or deny the following:? > > (1) We have two worries here, high voltage transients and cell phone use. > > (2) They have nothing to do with each other, right? > As I understand it, the transients hypothesis is that high frequency voltage spikes may induce currents in cells and that these can be above the normal potentials used for cell signaling. Here the frequency range is relatively low, up to 12 KHz or so. Normally the currents that can be induced in tissue by magnetic and electric fields are several orders of magnitude below what is there naturally, though. (In the NovoCure brain tumor therapy they had to come up with a distributed stimulation technique to avoid burning the scalp to deliver the needed voltages to influence [cancer] mitosis.)
Cell phone concerns can be divided into thermal changes (they heat up nearby tissue), and non-thermal effects which are claimed to exist but the research is sketchy and mysterious. > (3) In the study on high voltage transients, the excess cancers were > melanomas, right? Could this have had anything todo with the fact that the > study was done in California? What was taken as the base rate for > melanoma? I feel the Reverend Bayes is about to enter the argument. > There are some slides on that here: http://lqms.net/Milham.aspx (They say no, slide 13.) That doesn't preclude other confounding factors, however. e.g. common histories or habits of those teachers, or some other non-obvious correlate of those spikes. Say flickering lights or annoying hum, that led them to a behavior that was associated with a carcinogen...they had a headache, so when they got home they sat in the sun and smoked cigarettes.. > would worry about laptop use > before I would worry about cell phone use. Not only do laptops put out of > wifi signal, they cook your crotch to the temperature of rare roast beef, > if you hold them in your lap. A WiFi signal power is way below a cell phone. There is also complex EMR from the microprocessor that's can be as a high of a frequency as WiFi. But the heat isn't because you are being microwaved, it's just that microprocessors are very hot. (If you take a heatsink of a running computer's microprocessor and put your finger on the CPU, it _will_ hurt!) If you want to do something to reduce your exposure to microwaves, don't put a cell phone (or cordless phone or walkie talkie) next to your head. WiFi from your laptop is less than 1/10th of the power, and signal power falls of as 1/distance^2. Putting the laptop on the desk instead of your lap will decrease signal strength to the level that groups like Bioinitiative advocate (0.1 microwatts / cm^2). Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
