Garlic Farmer Wards Off High-Speed Internet

DocVM writes "A Nova Scotia farmer is opposing the construction of a microwave tower for fear it will eventually mutate his organic garlic crop. Lenny Levine, who has been planting and harvesting garlic by hand on his Annapolis Valley land since the 1970s, is afraid his organic crop could be irradiated if EastLink builds a microwave tower for wireless high-speed internet access a few hundred meters from his farm."

Comments

Speaking of idiots...

[Moraelin]

His crop is already being irradiated...BY THE SUN. Idiots. Sheesh.

You know, I wish people using that argument (or variants thereof) actually knew what they're talking about. No offense.

The Earth's atmosphere and ionosphere are only really transparent to a very narrow band of frequencies. As you go up in the UV range or lower into IR, actually less and less of it gets to ground level.

And let's put it this way: If enough microwave radiation from the Sun got to the Earth to be comparable to a cell phone tower, you couldn't actually use a cell phone. Because the white noise from the sun would not only give the tower a crap signal-to-noise ratio, but would be hundreds of decibels stronger than the milliwatts emitted by the phone itself or received by it in some places.

So no, it's not. Not in the same frequencies and/or not as much.

Yes, the "OMG, the crops will mutate" scare is incredibly stupid anyway. But countering it with the equally bogus "OMG, the sun already does the same", doesn't really debunk it.

Re:Idiots

[Charles Dodgeson]

The article is full of the sort of howlers [...]. Where do we start? "Shakes up the molecules" - clearly the phrasing of a person well versed in the concept of ionizing radiation! I'll use wi-fi all day and you can sit next to some cobalt 58 and we'll see what person's molecules get "shaken up" more.

We are talking about microwave radiation. Microwave radiation cooks food by "shaking" the molecules (of water). Of course that isn't going to cause genetic mutation. Yes the guy is an idiot, but if you're going to get into name calling, try to get your own facts right.