Mobiles are dangerous!!!
"but your mobile phone won't unless it hits you really hard (most likely to happen, ironically, during a car accident)."
Or an argument with Naomi Campbell...
Tuesday's classification of mobiles as potentially carcinogenic produced some great headlines, despite being based on no additional research or statistical findings and putting phones into the same danger category as coffee. "Cellphone radiation can cause cancer" read one headline, while "Cellphone, cancer link confirmed" was …
Nice to know that coffee has been given a modern twist. I recall, thanks to the wit & wisdom of Victor Borge (probably the greatest voice over artist for brewers ever) that J.S. Bach wrote the Coffee Cantata's (1730'ish) as a way of upsetting the establishment. Mainly due to the fact that coffee was then 'known' to cause impotence - and as a father of around 20 children JS suspected this not to be the case...
This year, it causes cancer. If you want to be safe, wait till next year, when it'll prevent it again!
Seriously, depending on the Hype-Of-The-Week (tm), everything is either good or deadly for you, it just depends on which group is hyping what this week.
And remember;
"Life, though short
is sufficiently long
for most of us to get
what there is of it wrong" - Piet Hien
I still stand by what I said earlier, you do things in moderation and don't spend 19 hours a day with it clamped to the side of your noggin, you'll probably not see any adverse effects.
Sounds more like a scare-scam designed to keep a bevvy of boffins employed on long running and very expensive jollies all over the globe, to find out if the human race is nuking its brains into oblivion!
Untill we know for sure we should bedoing all we can to protect ourselves. I suggest a study of every single person on the planet who will use a mobile phone be studied from birth to death. All the rest of the planet can be used as a control group.
I look forward to reading about these definitive results in about 70 years till.
I found myself in an undergraduate chemistry lab up to my elbow in a jar of Benzene. I mentioned to the guy to me that it was carcinogenic. "Naah," he said "you have to swim in it to get cancer" and after 25 years I'm beginning to suspect he was right.
Somehow, I can't really bring myself to be scared of phones (or coffee).
I don't know if we can blame the lack of numerical literacy or the lack of credibility that "clever basterds" have, ever since Magnus Pike and Patrick Moore broke into song on The Morecambe and Wise Show. However the gap between what's possible (hint: almost anything) and what's probable (hint: very little) seems to have got lost in the mix, somewhere.
It's that lack of being able to quantify the risk in the statement that leads to a lot of the ludicrous decisions that get made these days. Yes, it's possible to get cancer from a cellphone. But is that more likely than dying from an infectious disease caught from an unsanitary handset? Unless the risks put into a meaningful context: HOW MANY people have died from cel[phone-induced cancers in the past 25 years? Am I likely to be one more? there is nothing but a little more free-floating anxiety which is probably more harmful to us, as a society, than all the one-in-a-trillian chances that make up daily life.
Personally I plan to ignore this scare story and carry on using my phone, inside it's tinfoil wrapper - though dialling numbers while wearing hazmat gloves is becoming a bit of an inconvenience.
...being alive is bad for your health. The air is toxic, your water supply is tainted with chemicals, your food is bad...
Seriously, there are studies showing just about anything can be dangerous in high enough quantities, even water (which can kill). I've given up on the scaremongering unless there's some serious, proven risks. I think it was the study many years back showing clingfilm caused cancer that really set me off doubting the real level of risks...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cumbria-13640925
Now you show me an example of a phone causing cancer.
There might well be fuckwits who phone/text while driving but that is covered by legislation and is nothing whatsoever to do with phones allegedly causing cancer. There are many ILLEGAL acts that somebody could commit that could possibly result in my death but we are not talking about the illegal use of mobile phones. There are far more likely situations involving a mobile phone that will save your life.
How about:
1. Help! There is somebody in my house.
2. Help! I'm in the park and getting severe chest pains
3. Help! I've fallen down a crevasse.
4. Help! My boat has sunk.
etc
I can remember news stories from the last year covering all of the above.
So then the risk of a cell phone causing cancer is right up there with the risk of one setting a gas station (petrol station to you Brits) on fire. That is, non-existant.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go drink a gallon of coffee while yacking on my phone and filling my gas tank.
GSM phones are limited to 2 watts peak output at 850/900 and 1 watt for higher frequencies. Then considering the 8 slice TDMA channel the average power is no more than 1/8th the peak, 1/16th if the phone is operating on a half channel.
This is already pretty low RF power exposure but it gets even lower as the power output is automatically lowered by protocol so as not to interfere with other cells and to preserve the customer's battery.
On the other hand consumer cordless phones may transmit at up to 1 watt on a 50% duty cycle. Guess there are not enough deep pockets in that market for lawyers to be interested.
On a recent trip to Dublin I saw an antenna on the back of the ship marked with its output power - 100W apparently.
Thank god for the inverse square law so we were allowed on deck!
(Reminds me of a nurse who used to turn on the extraction system after taking x-rays to "let the x-rays out"...sigh)
That kontemptable letter is konstandly kreating havok for skhool kids. It sertainly doesn't do me any favors. It's a konsonant that sounds like a "K" or an "S"; we kan spell words without it already; just look at Krispy Kreme! Sertainly a better khoise of spelling. Sure, there kould be some resistanse, but a little kaos now will kreate a mukh happier future. We may need to make exseptions to the rule, of kourse - words like "khildren" are a bit unweildy - but we should keep that usage konsise and to the point.
My spellkhekk seem to hate it, though...
Since almost every person on the planet now has a cell phone - I'd expect that if cell phones caused brain cancer, we'd see some noticeable uptick in the number of cases of brain cancer. So instead of trying to interview people with brain cancer and asking them how many hours per day they spent with the phone against their head 10 years ago - why not just plot a graph of reported cases of brain cancer each year - starting a decade or two before cell phones existed. Make adjustments for overall increase in population and better diagnostic tools today ... and bingo. If you have a rising graph, whose slope correlates well with increased cell phone usage - then you have a smoking gun.
I'd think there would be more deaths from texting while driving (a larger concern) or cancer of the fingers in young people.
Shouldn't there be a verifiable mortality rate threshold, that must be reached, before the government is allowed to step in (maybe a slightly lower rate for special interest groups).
We allow tobacco and tobacco use and both of those are far beyond cell phone use in deaths per year.
The Foundation series.... last great hurrah for the dying Empire, where scientists studied the studies of other scientists for new or confirming conclusions without ever doing the experiments/walking the actual ground.
Food for thought: Any time somebody mentions 'awareness' of something or other. hold on to your wallet or purse. Just saying...
Mkay back to my personal project: Decided to go through all the demotivational posters from oldest to newest. Currently page 503 of 579 and speed limited due to satellite connection.
It amuses me.
The state of the art in cellphone tech when I got wed in October '87 was a handset and a semi-portable radio which included a lead-acid accumulator i.e. boat battery inside. I know this because I saw one in use and marvelled that anyone could think they'd ever catch on.Clamped to the ear it was not. The biggest risk to health from using it would have been a back injury sustained while lifting the thing.
In 1995 most cell phones were still analogue and had a battery life measured in minutes - usually on the order of 15-30 of same. I had one of these. One excessively long call could render you incommunicado for hours as the NiCad battery recharged.
These yuppies you speak of probably spent the latter half of the nineties with phones clamped to their heads at most.
Two shovelsfull of hyperbole do not a single measured argument make.
The real deadly threat hidden in the cellphone is the one in which the user walks into traffic while texting and gets squished by a low-loader transporting a crane, driven by someone too busy texting to watch the road.
One should avoid coffee as the reception is lousy and it can severely scald the ear canal.
From the '80s "voice only" (early cells; much more powerful transmitters than today's models), to the '90s "texting" (simple sms; more powerful transmitters than today's models), thru' the 00s "gestures" (so-called "smart") with brain, thumb, and thumb & forefinger cancer, respectively ... and then show me causality.
Until you can do this, kindly shut the fuck up. Idiots.
The mind absolutely boggles ...
Hmm, about the only mechanism I can think of for cellphones to affect people other than the small amount of fumes generated by hot plastic outgassing, is psychosomatic.
Think about it, up until the people started complaining about Wifi giving them headaches the "effect" was non existent, now there is a whole group of them lobbying for it to be taken out of schools etc.
My opinion is that the placebo effect can therefore cause cancer, based on current evidence.
Prove me wrong!!!!
In fact the placebo effect has measurable physiological effect as this has been proven recently in a study, announced on the radio.
AC, because he is working on a "Cellphone CancerBuster (tm) $39.95"
Cause autism. It's trues look it up. If vaccines are not cause and increase of autism then it's cell phones. Something has to be the cause off all these increased rates of autism . Never mind the fact that in 1996 they change it from autism to autism spectrum disorder which wide the definition from some thing very specific to range of of symptoms. The fact that I've had 12 units of college course work (failed it all) makes me even more qualified to give my half ass crock of shit personal opinion as fact. More so then these super genius celebs that we should all be listening to.
Ok, mobile phone fearmongers, Physics 101, once more from the top:
There's this form of energy known as the electromagnetic spectrum. It includes all forms of radiating energy. From lowest frequency to highest, those forms of energy are known as radio, microwave, infra-red, visible light, ultraviolet, X-rays, gamma rays, and cosmic rays.
Now the higher the frequency, the greater the energy. The greater the energy, the greater the chance it's going to give you cancer and/or otherwise muck up your cellular structure. Pretty much anything of higher frequency than visible light is going to increase cancer risk. Ultraviolet has a fair chance of giving you cancer, X-rays have a good chance of giving you cancer, and gamma rays will almost certainly cause cancer. Visible light has next to no chance of giving you cancer, and frequencies lower than visible light have no chance of giving you cancer.
Mobile phones operate on microwave frequencies. These frequencies are less than infra-red and much less than visible light. People exposed to visible light alone do not have any higher incidence of cancer than those who might live their lives in darkness. Sunlight can cause cancer, but that's because it contains ultraviolet light in its spectrum. Exposure to ordinary light bulbs and LEDs does not cause cancer.
So, if exposure to a light bulb or LED, which emits higher frequency and higher energy radiation than a mobile phone, does not cause cancer, then you can safely say that exposure to a mobile phone, being lower frequency and lower energy than visible light, does not cause cancer. QED.
So please, scaremongers, if you're going to moan about phones causing cancer, then you'd better get started on the more dangerous visible light from the LEDs on our appliances, because that is more likely to cause cancer than mobile phone microwaves are. Otherwise, stop with the mobile phones and go back to moaning about tanning beds, which really do increase the cancer risk, because they do emit ultraviolet.
Guy next to me mentioned that the side of his head felt warm after he had been using his mobile for a while, and he seemed to find this ominous.
I pointed out to him that this would likely also be true if you held a bar of soap to the side of your head.
I think we're all preaching to the converted here; I have noticed a singular lack of an explosion in brain cancer cases in the last twenty years.
since it's obvious that a sufficiently bright visible light source can kill as well. I'm talking about the frequency, which is directly related to the energy, of any radiative source. Microwave radiation is of a lower frequency to that of visible light, therefore has less energy per photon. So a light source of one watt has more energy per photon than a microwave source of one watt (so would emit less photons per watt of course). Mobile phones are a few watts typically, so they give off the equivalent of a fairly decent torch. Holding a Maglite next to your head isn't likely to cause cancer. So neither is a mobile phone.
As to resonance, that also can affect you regardless of frequency. For example, a strobe flashing at around 9 Hz will make most people feel uncomfortable and disoriented after a few seconds, and is the frequency most likely to trigger seizures in photic-sensitive epileptics. So electromagnetics resonance probably can kill, yes. But that too is not what I'm talking about.
What I mean is that one photon of gamma radiation is much more likely to do damage than one photon of visible light. It has much more energy because of its higher frequency. Similarly, one photon of microwave has less energy (and ionising power) than a visible photon. The diminished energy translates directly to a reduction of chance to cause damage. That is not factually incorrect, it's simple logic.