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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."
His crop is already being irradiated...BY THE SUN. Idiots. Sheesh.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
Scientists and corporations around the world would buy his crop at many times market value, in order to both prove and disprove that the mutations were a result of the tower. What a disappointment it will be for him when the tower is built and his crop turns out just fine.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
He should stick to farming and leave the radio vs radiation science up to the smart people.
Someone go point him to the definitions of "Microwave Radiation" and "Ionizing Radiation"
"I think over a period of time it will change the DNA of the garlic because it shakes up the molecules."
I wonder why he's concerned about the garlic DNA, but not his own? In other news, I objected to a wind farm cos I was worried about the flying saucers crashing into it...
Scientific ignorance from the organic produce industry? Really? That's just so shocking.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
I totally agree with the farmer! From my research, it even has dangerous effects
on humans!
Here are some of the symptoms that it causes:
1. Carpal tunnel
2. Distaste for light
3. A tendency to shout out: "First Post"
4. Loss/Gain of gold pieces
5. Disturbing images of cats
6. Lots of accidents that subsequently end up online.
7. Bad writing.
Can anyone think of other symptoms?
Please regard this man as a non-representative sample.
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oh they dont need to know how and why. when my aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer she decided to look into radical natural diet and exercise changes to try and avoid chemo and a mastectomy. growth halted in the tumors for well over a year, she lost weight, felt better than ever before.
good for her. she also got rid of her microwave oven. while she wont come right out and say it to most of the family, she believe the radiation can mutate food in the microwave and cause her body harm. wow.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
Found it. Thought some people might be interested
Organic Food
It's not possible. Only ionizing radiation can alter DNA.
Microwaves are not ionizing radiation. Not even remotely close, they're on the complete opposite side of the visible portion of the spectrum in fact.
From visible, you go to IR and then to RF (including microwaves)
To get to the wavelengths capable of altering DNA, you need to go the other way, through violet to UV (DNA damage), X-rays (more DNA damage!) and gamma (lots of DNA damage).
There's only one way I can describe this guy - fucking ignorant dumbass. The most likely thing to do DNA damage to his crops is the very sunlight his crops depend on to grow.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
If you're looking for something that will mutate cells, then try the UV rays from the Sun. Perhaps he should grow mushrooms if he is so paranoid about exposing vegetables to radiation?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Somewhere in Gilroy a Garlic farmer is dialing Sprint to beg for a tower so he can make monster garlic.
There are times when I wonder what the world might have been like if we hadn't pushed high speed microwave-based internet access in Nova Scotia. It's not like there weren't other solutions -- satellite, possibly. Cabling if they could have found someone to foot the bill. But there was a rush to make it happen, as usual with big business looking for their next tax haven. Who would have thought the entire world would pay for that bit of greed? Who would have thought we'd never dare look at the sun again.
The end can't be too far away. There aren't many of us left, down here in the caves. All the moss has been eaten. The water may last awhile longer, but without food....No one who's left the caves to search for food, no matter how desperate or self-assured, has ever come back. Perhaps our greatest fear, moreso than even starvation, is that the Garlics will be able to trace one of those people back to our hideout. We've taken precautions, of course, by choosing a tunnel system with a downdraft. At least that way, we can smell them coming.
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But if they put a wi-fi tower next to him, the vampires are going to congregate there to check their MySpace pages and the next thing you know they'll develop an immunity to garlic. This dangerous cycle must be stopped!
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
This isn't an American problem exclusively. Related to this is the scare about "zomg genetically modified organisms!", which is much worse in Europe.
I helped gather data for a study, incidentally, comparing GM and ordinary cotton. The GM cotton had a gene expressing the BT toxin in it, a protein that fucks up caterpillars who eat it rather royally but is harmless to pretty much everything else. The farmers were told to not do anything special with their fields, to use pesticides as normal, etc. (This meant more use of pesticide on the non-GM cotton, obviously.)
Then I wander through the fields and sample the insect population by species. The conventional cotton was something of a wasteland -- here's a lonely little spider, looking for dinner; there are a few ants; here are a shitload of aphids, which are resistant to insecticide.
The GM cotton had a whole pile of bugs, all running around happily eating each other.
GM crops can be *better* for the environment. After all, the BT gene is just a way of putting a pesticide only harmful to a narrow range of insects *into* the crop, so only pests that actually eat it will die. This is a whole lot more targeted than crop-dusting the field with something that'll kill anything that moves with more than four legs. Monsanto's abuse of the patent system is another matter altogether, of course.
The scientific and engineering community doesn't mean the same thing by this word that you mean -- namely, that shit that makes your ass glow green, or whatever.
I propose that people not be allowed to rant and rave about this stuff until they:
--Learn the basics of the electromagnetic spectrum and the sources and engineering uses of radiation at each point along it.
--Learn the basics of nuclear radiation, and understand its effects and where it comes from
--Leave a Geiger counter near a nuclear power station and take one on a plane across the country at 40,000 feet, and compare the counts
I teach physics labs to premeds at the university. They come in and I'm munching peanuts off of a pretty bright orange tray, and offer them some; some of them accept.
A little later I'm showing them how to use a Geiger counter, and show them radiation from a few sources we have in the room -- lookie, radioactive rocks! Lookie there, a bit of caesium! Oh, wait ... where'd these radioactive peanuts come from?
The students freaked out. (For those who don't know, the bright orange glaze on old Fiestaware was made from uranium oxide. It's safe, unless maybe you eat the plate, in which case you have a .01% risk of cancer and a 10% risk of a perforated bowel.)
Getting rid of the microwave, while not stopping the cancerous growth, may very well have served as a placebo for helping with her overall health. Sometimes results are more important than the method, and if she thinks this is helping her, more power to her.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
No one is exempt from stupidity and certainly not ignorance. No man can know all things let he be a God among men.
I've met the brightest that Harvard graduated and they thought you could get the swine flu from eating pork.
I work with a Yale man that couldn't replace his air filter in his car.
I've worked with two former NASA engineers and a Ballistic Warhead designer from UDLP that couldn't install an electrical outlet in thier home.
Ignorance is relative people. How many of you know when to harvest garlic? When you put down your fertilizer? How many days do you let alfalfa dry between cutting and baling? Know how to shoe a horse? How about stitch a wound? At what rate should you run the reverse rehometer to prevent scaling on a polymer test?
There is a difference between stupidity and ignorance. You can mock stupidity till you are blue in the face; just make damn sure you know the difference between the two or all you will accomplish is proving how big of a jackass you are.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-