Another Reason to be Annoyed by Cell Phones

lotussuper7 writes: "This story at newscientist (free, no registration, unlike the NY Times) has some insight into the amount of RF you may be getting from all those cell phones people around you are using. Might be time to buy a cell phone jammer."

Comments

you are rationalizing

[j09824]

Well, of course, a cell phone is no microwave. But your head isn't a potato either (actually, judging by your comments, maybe your head is, but mine isn't). It doesn't take a lot of heat to cause serious damage in some tissues, and RF can potentially cause lots of other problems at much lower intensities. Nobody knows what the long term effects of constant exposure to RF are. But we do know that there are clear, short-term, biologically measurable responses at normal cell phone strengths already.

Also, the 2.45GHz frequency is deliberately not the optimal frequency for absorption and heating of water, it's a tradeoff between heating and penetration (you don't just want to cook the surface of the food). I believe the optimal frequency is somewhere around 900MHz. Whatever it is, anything in the range from maybe 500MHz to maybe 3GHz is bad news: at some frequencies, it heats strongly but doesn't penetrate very deeply (risk of cararacts), at others, it heats less well but penetrates deeper (risk to your brain and organs).

The point of that article, too, is that many places where people use cell phones are cavities.

People used to think that radioactivity and X-rays were really nifty and harmless, but things turned out differently. Maybe we should learn from that and be more careful this time around.

Re:ECM

[tps12]

The other day my friend called me on my mobile phone, from his mobile phone, because he'd just had an accident on his bike. I was able to call another friend (on their mobile phone) to arrange a car to go and get him.

...to take him to the hospital and save his life? Just because it involved an accident doesn't make it an emergency. Sounds more like you (all) managed to save him an hour or two of inconvenience, but call it what it is.

Re:So the solution is...

[Jouster]

Need motivation to stand up? Try echo rm -rf / | at 7:30am

Why not rm -rf /.? At the very least, it would reduce the amount of weevil and wombat pr0n in the world.

Jouster

Re:Idiotic

[ArsonPerBuilding]

Wow, I didn't know my cellphone communicated with the transmission tower with photons that don't need line of sight.

Where the fsck did you get the idea of photons running rampamt with rf waves?