Slashdot Mirror
English DJ Claims Wi-Fi Allergy
path0$ writes "British Ex-DJ Steve Miller claims that his Wi-Fi allergy is making his life one big misery
, forcing him to live in an iron-clad home far from any neighbors. According to the article, more and more people are suffering from an allergy like his. The only positive side to this is that at least Miller didn't think of suing anybody yet, like these people did,
who claim to suffer from the same condition and were mentioned in a Slashdot article in 2008."
Put him into a room. Randomly switch on and off a WiFi-net and ask him to tell if it is on or off. If he manages to get more than 50 % right there might be something to it. He would also be the first person to manage this in years and years of testing.
Yes, they've tested it many times. No correlation found. The way they tested it was easy. They wheeled a scary looking device covered in antennas, and the people reacted in pain whenever the green light came on. The only trouble is, it was a big inert piece of metal. The only electronics in it were, well, the LED to show it was "on". Meanwhile, under the dropped ceiling there was an actual massive wifi antenna that would randomly blanket the room in "evil radiation", and they were completely unaware. In other words, they only react to wifi at all if they "know" it's there, even when it isn't.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
Absolutely. Yet if he does use a microwave oven, and you were to point this out to him, he would quickly declare that the WiFi transmissions must have some additional quality that makes them "bad" as compared to microwave oven radiation.
You must always keep in mind that you are dealing with people suffering from a psychological disorder. Logical arguments means nothing to them; they'll simply ignore what you're saying, or rationalize their behavior in one way or another. I've heard that some drugs for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder can be helpful in extreme cases, but these people are completely convinced that their ailments have physical causes, and will reject any suggestion that "it's all in your head".
As a kid, I could actually hear some EM quite distinctly. It was only the stronger pulse-like stuff, like arcing transformer a hundred meters away, or lightning strikes within about 2km. I can still hear lightning strikes that are fairly close as a faint crack in my head, a second or so before the thunder, but this ability seem to be diminishing as I age.
Of course, there is no frickin way anybody can feel 100mW of 2.4GHz radiation from any distance, and not feel 1kW (although shielded, but leaking a lot more than 100mW) microwave oven.
FWIW take a look at this study (http://www.aehf.com/articles/em_sensitive.html) which shows after weeding out people who are affected by fake situations, that this is a real health issue. An M.D. is involved in the paper. After weeding out people who got faked out by placebos and "active challenges", they got 100% positive, 0% negative. (I just briefly flipped through the paper so read it more carefully please.)
Agreed. There was a case on my university that I found very interesting.
We have access points (AP) distributed all around the campus, meaning we get wireless connectivity pretty much everywhere. One particular AP was located inside a small room used by janitors, adjacent to an interior garden. Being inside a room, it was safe from the weather and would still provide coverage for the area.
However, one day, one of the janitors complained she was getting headaches, and claimed that the AP was the culprit. The network managers, skeptical of it, decided to test her theory and switched off it's radio interface, not telling her anything about it. Although the AP stopped emitting radio waves, the status LED and Ethernet LED still blinked constantly. For the common person, not familiar with network devices, that is enough to assume the access point is working as usual.
Unsurprisingly, the headaches didn't go away and the whining continued. Despite the technical expertise and scientific knowledge of the network staff, the school directors decided to ignore all of the advisory they provided and sided with the janitor, ordering for the AP to be moved out of the janitor's room.
Now, the funny thing is that they moved the access point around two meters from the original position, so that it was on the other side of the wall, enclosed on an opaque, weather resistant box. Radio interface was brought up and then, mysteriously, the headaches went away...