Building a Better Tin Foil Hat
An anonymous reader writes "Now you can wear a Tin Foil Hat and not be subject to ridicule or discomfort." From the article: "This hat -- made from cotten fiber, silver and copper -- will help reduce your brain's exposure to EMF. LessEMF also sells shirts and cell phone covers to accomplish the same thing."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinfoil_hat
The effectiveness of the tin-foil hat as an electromagnetic shield for stopping radio waves is greatly reduced by the fact that it is not a complete enclosure. Placing an AM radio under a metal bucket without a conductive layer underneath demonstrates the relative ineffectiveness of such a setup. Indeed, because the effect of an ungrounded Faraday cage is to partially reflect the incident radiation, a radio wave that is incident on the inner surface of the hat (i.e., coming from underneath the hat-wearer) would be reflected and partially 'focused' towards the user's brain. While tin-foil hats may have originated in some understanding of the Faraday cage effect, the use of such a hat to attenuate radio waves belongs properly to the realm of pseudoscience.