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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.
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...
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?
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?
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.
Reminds me of http://german-bash.org/101161.
Short and translated version: the Telekom had built a cell phone mast in a village, and a lot of villagers started to complain about sleep problems and whatnot because of it. The comment of the Telekom was, "how bad must it get, when we actually turn it on" :p
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