"Wi-Fi Refugees" Shelter in West Virginia Mountains

The 13,000 sq mile U.S. Radio Quiet Zone is an area in West Virginia where all wireless transmissions are banned because of the large number of radio telescopes located there. (This official page shows a map of the Zone; an old Wired article is fascinating reading.) These high-tech telescopes have attracted unlikely neighbors, people who claim to have Wi-Fi allergies. In recent years, scores of people have moved to the area to escape the "damage" that electromagnetic fields can cause them. From the article: "Diane Schou is unable to hold back the tears as she describes how she once lived in a shielded cage to protect her from the electromagnetic radiation caused by waves from wireless communication. 'It's a horrible thing to have to be a prisoner,' she says. 'You become a technological leper because you can't be around people. It's not that you would be contagious to them — it's what they're carrying that is harmful to you.'"

Comments

Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[elrous0]

As if the hillbillies out in some of those valleys weren't batshit enough already, now they're inviting in a bunch of tinfoil-hatter paranoid schizos to stay. Expect a significant jump in alien abduction and anal probing reports (above even the current extremely high levels).

And before everyone gets all offended, I'm not saying EVERYONE is WVa is a hillbilly. But don't even THINK about pretending that *none* of them are. There are some fucking crazy dudes out in those hills, just ask the locals. Oh, not so much the doesn't-wear-shoes-and-makes/drinks-moonshine variety these days--more the has-a-shitload-of-guns-is-trigger-happy-and-makes/uses-crystal-meth types. Equally as violent/well-armed as their isolationist predecessors, but now they're tweaked up on meth and hallucinating too. Mixing those guys with a bunch of tinfoil-hatters who think radio waves are making them sick just cannot lead to happy-happy-joy-joy results. Though it is nice to cordon them off.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[c6gunner]

There are some fucking crazy dudes out in those hills, just ask the locals.

It's not nice to talk about the scientists at the radio telescope observatory that way. I would have thought a site dedicated to geek culture would be a bit more understanding ...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[elrous0]

Good point. I forgot the other variety of crazy already there.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[razorh]

It's not nice to talk about the scientists at the radio telescope observatory that way.

Especially when they supply good shine!

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[ColdWetDog]

Too bad that the 'wireless quiet zone' only refers to a very narrow band of EM radiation.

Hopefully they've also banned TVs, VCRs, microwave ovens, cars, police and fire transmitters and church PA systems.

(Actually would be a nice place if they could do that).

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[adamdoyle]

It would be interesting to have these people participate in a blind test in the same way that audiologists do hearing tests. Give them a button to push when they "feel" the pain associated with the electromagnetic field while you turn on the and off the field during random intervals. Unless they're actually feeling something, they shouldn't be able to correctly push the button at the right time.

I'd be interested in hearing their response to that. (although I suppose there are some people with whom you simply can't have rational arguments)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't West Virginia part of the Bible Belt? Them evil scientists with their "FACTS" and "LOGIC"... they're the anti-christ!

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Tsingi]

Expect a significant jump in alien abduction and anal probing reports

This is no joking matter. Have you ever had your ass probed by an alien? I suspect not, or you would temper your remarks.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[poetmatt]

Nice depends on the concept, considering that you would have zero emergency response when it matters as a result.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Gunkerty Jeb]

Slashdot is hardly the place for criticisms of tin-foil hat wearers. Talk about a pot calling the kettle black.
p.s. West Virginia's slogan is 'Wild and Wonderful' if anyone is curious, and it is as fine a state as any.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[ColdWetDog]

Actually, FTFA, they HAVE banned most of those things directly around the Radio Telescope. Still and all, the poor afflicted darlings have probably never heard of the inverse square law. Or inverses. Or squares.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[ColdWetDog]

They've done exactly that and the results are exactly what you would expect.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[KendyForTheState]

Some of them use their soft, squishy tentacles or other appendages, which is not so bad. But the insectoid aliens with their exoskeletons and hard scratchy carapaces are the ones you have to look out for!

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[MoonBuggy]

Too bad that the 'wireless quiet zone' only refers to a very narrow band of EM radiation.

If it's enough to quell their psychosomatic symptoms while keeping them out of the way of the rest of us, I'd say it's a win.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[elrous0]

Obviously an astronomer with mod points doesn't have a sense of humor. Hard to believe there's a humorless astronomer out there, but there you go.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[ColdWetDog]

This is no joking matter. Have you ever had your ass probed by an alien? I suspect not, or you would temper your remarks.

Well, I once had my butt chewed off by a supervisor who was pretty damned odd by any measure. Does that count?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[elrous0]

Have you ever had your ass probed by an alien?

By an alien? No.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[hrieke]

Actually, having grown up there in West by god Virginia, I can tell you that the Greenbank radio observatory area is very lovely and populated with very smart people doing very good work.

The Hillbillies that you are talking about are more from Bluefield.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[tlhIngan]

Hopefully they've also banned TVs, VCRs, microwave ovens, cars, police and fire transmitters and church PA systems.

According to that Wired article, *all* electronics are basically banned - power cables have to be shielded, no WiFi at all, etc. Now, police/fire/etc radios, as public safety do trump the EM quiet-zone, but even then a lot of work goes into making sure the antennas don't interfere with the telescopes. Apparently something like a WiFi card can generate a strong enough signal that blows the amplifiers of the telescopes.

Of course, what I'd like is a blind test of these people - even the old grandma stating "it was the TV making me sick - the remote controlled my pain" is not an example (psychosomatic response). Add in some fancy blinking lights that have nothing to do with the test would help as well.

(And yes, if they blame WiFi for it, why don't they blame their microwave oven? That thing produces more leakage and they're often closer to it when it's on...).

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[MoonBuggy]

I was thinking the same thing; although TFA does allude to a (apparently disputed) positive result from a double blind study, it doesn't provide a link to a published article, or even a name to look up.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[IamTheRealMike]

TFA says some scientists have done such an experiment and it appeared to indicate the subject actually could detect radio waves. There was no link to more info unfortunately.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Quiet_Desperation]

Those ovipositors are definitely not ribbed for your pleasure, that's for sure. Evolution is a bitch.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not saying EVERYONE is WVa is a hillbilly.

A reporter went way up into the hills of West Virginia to write an article
about the area. He met an old man in a small town and asked him about any
memorable events in his life.

The old man said, "Well, one time my favorite sheep got lost, so me and my
neighbors got some moonshine and went looking for it. We looked and looked
and finally found the sheep. Then, we drank the moonshine and, one by one,
started screwing the sheep. It was a lot of fun!"

The reporter figured he can't write an article about that, so he asked the
old man to tell him another story.

The old man said, "Well, one time my neighbor's wife got lost, so me and
all the village men got some moonshine and went out looking for her. We
looked and looked and finally we found her. Then, we drank the moonshine
and, one by one, screwed the neighbor's wife. Now, THAT was a lot of fun!"

The reporter, feeling frustrated, told the old man that he couldn't write
articles about those stories and asked him if he had any sad or dramatic
memories that he could talk about.

The old man paused a little and with a sad expression on his face said,
"Well, one time I was lost ..."

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[MightyMartian]

Or the fucking sun, apparently. I trust they're all living several miles below ground.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[ByOhTek]

Umm... Most scientist would agree with, and self-apply those adjectives... We are fucking crazy dudes, and if were weren't, life would be so much less enjoyable!

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[TheRaven64]

There was a story on Slashdot a couple of years ago about a mobile company that put up a mast in a village, and started getting complaints from people saying that the transmitter was giving them headaches and so on. They issued quite an amusing press release, saying that they were sorry and they hoped that the symptoms wouldn't get much worse next month when they turned the transmitter on...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[phatphoton]

I'll back that up, having lived about an hour away from Greenbank for more than half my life. For everyone else's information, there are very smart people there, there are also very smart hillbillies, and there are also very unintelligent people of all standards.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[fyngyrz]

lol

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[ae1294]

something like a WiFi card can generate a strong enough signal that blows the amplifiers of the telescopes.

Time for a trip to W. Virginia with my AWUS036H! Damn dirty scientist with their magnets. HOW DO THEY FUCKING WORK!

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

jesco white doesnt like slimey sloppy eggs, nor outsiders callin his kin batshit.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[tomcode]

I worked there one summer, and what surprised me, is that only diesel cars are allowed on site, because spark plugs cause interference.

They keep a fleet of old diesels, originally bought in the 1950s. It gives the whole place a serious retro vibe. That and the fact that every morning I could set my mickey mouse watch to one of several atomic clocks made it a pretty cool place to work.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[TheWanderingHermit]

So, I take it, you live in or have lived in that area so you know these people?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[moonbender]

Well, it has the name of the lead researcher and the journal. I'm pretty sure this is the study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21793784?dopt=Abstract

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[geekprime]

SHHHH!

What the wifi-allergic don't know, literally wont hurt them! Leave them believe they are happy and safe and they will be.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Nick Ives]

You'd expect a few studies to come out with that result due to chance. Thankfully most research shows no link, so overall I think we can be sure that electrosmog isn't the cause for the reported symptoms.

One of my sisters claims to be sensitive to microwave radiation. She refuses to be in our parents kitchen when their combination microwave / grill / convection (fan) oven is turned on, as she can "feel the radiation". She claims she can feel it even when it's on the convection setting; really she's just responding to the sound of the fan and the motor that turns the table, as it sounds exactly the same on the microwave and convection settings.

Of course, there could be some malaise associated with fan ovens. That raises the question as to why she has no symptoms around the much larger fan oven our parents also have in their kitchen.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[dgatwood]

It would be interesting to have these people participate in a blind test in the same way that audiologists do hearing tests. Give them a button to push when they "feel" the pain associated with the electromagnetic field while you turn on the and off the field during random intervals. Unless they're actually feeling something, they shouldn't be able to correctly push the button at the right time.

It sounds like most of these folks don't claim to be sensitive to Wi-Fi, but rather are afraid of it injuring them (cancer, etc.), in which case your test won't do anything.

Also, even if they claimed that they physically felt it, a nerve can continue to misbehave for hours after some types of injury, so in the worst case scenario, they would reliably press the button as soon as the field came on, but would then say that it never went off... and this would still be a legitimate indication of detection.

I can even propose a theoretical reason why someone would feel a Wi-Fi signal. A half wave Wi-Fi antenna is 6.25 cm, or about 2.5 inches. It is entirely possible for the brain or some other part of the body to have a roughly straight conductive region that is that long—the walls of a particularly straight blood vessel, for example, or a series of overly (even dendritically) myelinated neurons lined up perfectly in a row—in which case you'd basically have a (poor) Wi-Fi antenna in your brain, coupled directly to your nervous system.

You'd have an even bigger problem if you had any sort of metal implant that was just the right length, up to and including stupid things like the metal arm on a pair of eyeglasses, a wire on a retainer or pair of braces, etc.

Either explanation would, of course, be inherently testable with an MRI test, and more to the point, any claim of Wi-Fi sensitivity should be testable with an fMRI test.... My gut says that the entire notion of Wi-Fi sensitivity is almost certainly crap, but I feel like more research is needed to prove that it is crap before that gut feeling becomes a strongly held belief rather than simply a hypothesis.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[WrongSizeGlass]

Give them a button to push when they "feel" the pain associated with the electromagnetic field while you turn on the and off the field during random intervals.

I think that's what the Staple's "Easy Button" was originally designed for.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[hedwards]

Yes, and if you read the article you'd take note of the fact that they're talking about things which are fairly close to them, not miles out. They're just moving there because it's the only place where there is an enforced ban on such electronic devices.

Whether or not there's any basis for the claims, it's complete bullshit to suggest that the effect wouldn't be strongest when sitting next to a transmitter. There isn't any particular support for the notion at this time, but there isn't any particular evidence that people aren't sensitive.

For years, I couldn't go into the electronics section of retailers because the TVs were screeching so loud that I couldn't think straight. Same goes for some of the devices that stores would use to detect those tags, the amount of power used in those cases is substantially higher, but it's really not productive to suggest that because a claim is strange that it must be false. There's a lot of weird things that ultimately turned out to be true, or at least partially true.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[UnknowingFool]

Unless these people live in caves, they are exposed to naturally occurring EM all the time on the planet surface. Remember how solar flares can disrupt electronics on the Earth?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[thesh0ck]

I bet she is going to be pissed when she finds out there is in fact radio transmissions there... quite a bit of them in fact. The ones that are banned are the ones from outsiders. They transmit thier own radio signals that are accounted for in the science, as are the goverenment radio signals. There is in fact more electro-magnetic radiation in that area than in a city. Its a true lack of understanding of anything in reality that makes these people do these things. After all... light is also electromagnetic radiation, and there is radio waves coming from the sun and stars but she doesnt mention anything about having problems in the sun or looking at the stars. Crackpot ignorant people.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[cellocgw]

Whether or not there's any basis for the claims, it's complete bullshit to suggest that the effect wouldn't be strongest when sitting next to a transmitter. There isn't any particular support for the notion at this time, but there isn't any particular evidence that people aren't sensitive.
You're a little weak on the concept of scientific methods and the null hypothesis, aren't you? Not to mention that I bet a few minutes w/ Google might find you some studies which failed to find any such sensitivity.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Cajun Hell]

Wait a minute, did you say a button? Please tell me that button isn't connected to a wire. And please make sure the button and the casing it's moving against, don't contain any ferrous metals. Because if you don't do this right, it will only prove that creationism is a scientific theory.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't tell them about the natural radioactivity from the rocks, though :-)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[meerling]

Assuming of course they don't get the idea that the radio telescopes are sucking in radio waves.
Considering I've talked to people literally afraid their computers would catch an airborne computer virus from their fax machine, I'm not going to put it past them...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[inviolet]

For years, I couldn't go into the electronics section of retailers because the TVs were screeching so loud that I couldn't think straight. Same goes for some of the devices that stores would use to detect those tags, the amount of power used in those cases is substantially higher, but it's really not productive to suggest that because a claim is strange that it must be false.

In the case of televisions, we know that many humans can hear the 16-18KHz scan frequency they emit. And you're not hearing the electron beam itself; you are hearing tiny, electromagnetically-induced vibrations in the oscillator circuitry.

Probably a similar explanation for the RFID scanners. An oscillating circuit can induce physical vibrations at some harmonic of its base frequency, if some component of the device just happens to be resonant at that harmonic.

My point is, your experiences are easier explained as auditory coincidences than as RF sensitivity.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[meerling]

As to the blind tests, there have been several, they all were all shown to be psychosomatic. (Not affected by EM radiations.)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[RadioElectric]

How would you test the Wi-Fi sensitivity that you describe with fMRI?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[vlm]

Apparently something like a WiFi card can generate a strong enough signal that blows the amplifiers of the telescopes.

LOL check out the inverse square law and get back to me... If that were the case, aircraft over new york state would utterly vaporize them.

Now I have heard stories of ham radio guys with cutting edge 1296 preamps and high gain mobile antennas blowing their preamps by driving down the street next to the airport full of hundred watt peak class 1090 MHz active transponders. But that requires the antennas to be only a few feet apart, high gain antenna pointed at each other, and a factor of a thousand higher power.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[vlm]

I can even propose a theoretical reason why someone would feel a Wi-Fi signal. A half wave Wi-Fi antenna is 6.25 cm, or about 2.5 inches. It is entirely possible for the brain or some other part of the body to have a roughly straight conductive region that is that long—the walls of a particularly straight blood vessel, for example, or a series of overly (even dendritically) myelinated neurons lined up perfectly in a row—in which case you'd basically have a (poor) Wi-Fi antenna in your brain, coupled directly to your nervous system.

You'd have an even bigger problem if you had any sort of metal implant that was just the right length, up to and including stupid things like the metal arm on a pair of eyeglasses, a wire on a retainer or pair of braces, etc.

Unfortunately that antenna is embedded inside a highly conductive saline dielectric, that being your body. Model it in NEC for a good laugh. Also note the "RF skin effect" is very appropriately named in this case. You'll thermally/ohmically burn your skin long before you get individual neurons excited.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Grishnakh]

Spoken like someone who knows nothing of the south. Lemme guess, you come from California, right?

No, WV is NOT part of the Bible Belt. It's not even part of the South. In fact, it split away from regular Virginia during the Civil War because that part of the state agreed with the Unionists, while the other part of the state became the capital of the Confederacy.

The "Bible Belt" is really the Deep South, which is MS, AL, GA, etc. The people of WV probably have a lot more in common with the people of western PA and eastern KY than anyone in the Deep South.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[mcgrew]

These people are certainly ill, and their maladies might be physical or mental, but no doubt they're not well. They could be hypochondriacs, or they could have real maladies that the doctors aren't diagnosing properly (think of that one nerve disease they have treatments for now that they used to say was all in the patients' heads).

I doubt EMF has anything but coincidence to do with it; there's no known physical link.

But even if they are mentally ill, where's your compassion? Do you sneer at cancer patients and heart attack victims? Do you laugh and sneer at your mom when she gets the flu? Mental illness us usually debilitating and often fatal. They can't help being mentally ill any more than Stephen Hawking can help being sick. Do you sneer at him for his disability?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to carry that statement further. "I'm not saying that all those LA people are crazy freaks, but some of them are.. " or "I'm not saying that all of those people from the Pacific NW are freaking environmentalists but some of them are.." Kind of a silly statement if you ask me. Before anyone jumps on me, I'm actually originally from the NW and love that place. But I don't understand the point of the "disclaimer".

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to you. You are called "a bigot."

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Insightfill]

There was a story on Slashdot a couple of years ago

Probably this story from last January.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[RsG]

Heard the same story, only it was a ham radio. It's likely apocryphal in any case, though it would not surprise me to learn there's an actual event obscured by the retelling.

Regardless, the GP has the right idea. I've heard of blind tests of "EM sensitivity" done in the past, with results that unambiguously showed a purely psychosomatic condition - that is to say, the subjects felt sick when they believed they were being exposed, regardless of their actual exposure, and felt fine when they believed they were "safe". But to the patient, this is always going to be met with denial. "Can you believe that doctor thought it was all in my head! Where the hell did he learn medicine? I don't like being called crazy, I'm going to go to my homeopath for advice from now on!"

Partly this is the fault of our culture labelling all mental health issues under the broad brush of "s/he's crazy". Nobody wants to admit that there could be anything wrong with their head, ergo all psychosomatic illnesses are attributed to external causes, sensible or otherwise. The prevalence of quacks and snake oil salesmen ready to cash in on the latest hysterical bandwagon only makes the problem worse.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

They can even do those tests without their knowledge:

http://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-in-iburst-tower-battle.html

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah, I always show a new recruit what happens when you point a microwave signal strength meter at the sun. The funniest thing is that they are all engineers and they are all surprised. What the hell do these young whipper snappers learn in University, I sometimes wonder.

So, if young engineers are that clueless, imagine how clueless would a regular dude with a pub skool edumacation be...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[elrous0]

I have plenty of compassion for the mentally ill. I just don't want to hang out with them, much less live in a town full of them.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[elrous0]

Just to carry that statement further. "I'm not saying that all those LA people are crazy freaks, but some of them are.. " or "I'm not saying that all of those people from the Pacific NW are freaking environmentalists but some of them are.."

What's silly about those statements? Are you saying there aren't any freaks in L.A.. or environmentalists in the northwest? Stereotypes aren't just made up whole-cloth, you know. There is usually at least a kernel of truth to them.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[elrous0]

Oh Juan, how I miss him.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

But see where you're a tool is this area is not in the batshit crazy part of the state. How do I know? Because I fucking grew up in the batshit crazy part of the state.

Also meth isn't as big of a problem in WV as it is in many rural areas. Pain medications are the current drug of choice for your typical druggie hillbilly.

Take some time to educate yourself about an area before you go spewing a bunch of ignorant shit.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[MightyMartian]

I actually had one of these dingbats come into my office one time. I had a pretty bad headcold and this weird woman poked her head in the door and saw the network set up and started telling me how I was sick because of the radiation, but that she had a friend who made a bracelet that could keep the evil RF waves from hurting me. Fortunately someone came along and escorted the wingbat away.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[the_other_chewey]

Apparently something like a WiFi card can generate a strong enough signal that blows the amplifiers of the telescopes.

LOL check out the inverse square law and get back to me... If that were the case, aircraft over new york state would utterly vaporize them.

Well, not "blow" in the sense of destroying the amplifier, but in the sense of
completely drowning the signals they are looking for.

Radio astronomy looks for signals in the Picowatt range, so the some-100-mW
Wifi signals will still be an order of magnitude stronger more than 100km away
(not considering topography etc).

Airplane radios are a big annoyance too, but fortunately don't emit much in the
astronomically interesting GHz range - Wifi does.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Nadaka]

Umm... Most scientist would agree with, and self-apply those adjectives... We are fucking crazy dudes, and if were weren't, life would be so much less enjoyable!

I was fucking crazy chicks, and it was very enjoyable except for the bite marks, but to each each their own.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's so racist

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yes. You are a complete asshole.
Great that the mods put a "5, insightful" on this.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[adamdoyle]

haha fine... it's a hydraulic button that squirts a fluid onto a material that will be later analyzed in a lab to determine the time it was pressed based on evaporation rates...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Having come from an Appalachian region not far from the WV border, I approve of this message. I didn't even MEET such people until I was thirty, a testament to just how out there and keep-to-themselves they can be. But when you do meet them up-close-and-personal, "frightened" is definitely the mindset you develop, very very quickly. Some of these folks would really be more at home with h.neanderthalis than h.sapiens.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

You know whats between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh? Alabama.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[c6gunner]

No, WV is NOT part of the Bible Belt ... probably have a lot more in common with the people of western PA and eastern KY than anyone in the Deep South.

You mean KY as in home-of-the-creationist-museum-KY? :) If that's not part of the bible belt, the US is in bigger trouble than I thought ...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[adamdoyle]

or even simpler: the whole experiment is done inside a Faraday cage (which they seem to trust) and the button is entirely mechanical inside of the cage and doesn't have any electronics until outside of the cage.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Came here to say I have Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, and that what I have is a real disease, and those EMF people are all crazy and don't lump us with them.

Leaving... unsure. Thanks for the info, I think I may be wrong.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Hatta]

Have you spent any time in eastern KY or western PA? It's pretty fucking rural and jesusy.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[arbulus]

I had the same problem with electronics sections of stores. CRT TVs and monitors were PAINFUL to be around. But it wasn't a matter of RF sensitivity, it is an auditory sensitivity. And it's not just electronics. I can hear incredibly high frequency sounds that nearly everyone I know cannot hear.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Beacon11]

I think you just verified his point: "there isn't any particular evidence that people aren't sensitive." Studies which fail to find any such sensitivity doesn't mean such sensitivity doesn't exist, just that the studies can't find it.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Beacon11]

Great explanation. I'd mod you up, but I never have any points when I need them.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[endymon]

PLACEBO EFFECT, in a negative way. People will complain about anything and everything given a chance.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[millennial]

TFA says some scientists have done such an experiment and it appeared to indicate the subject actually could detect radio waves.

A couple problems: first, a study with a single test subject is not at all scientific (what were the controls?); second, how many people did they go through with negative results before they hit on one with "positive" results?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[dr2chase]

Could be audio, and frequency-specific. Big fan might avoid the annoying frequencies.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

You could've said something insensitive like "No, I'm just allergic to stupid". ;)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Darinbob]

The screeching is sound. Some people are very sensitive to the sounds of electronics, high pitched hums and whatnot. Some people can't hear it at all. It's not RF though.

There has been a study that has shown an effect of RF on humans (it the article) but it was high power RF at a certain frequency, not the sort you'd get from a mobile phone or the next door neighbor using wifi. What we don't have are double blind experiments showing consumer device level RF can cause these problems (wifi, phone, smart meter). Instead we have the non-science of anecdotes.

What I suspect may be happening is that people who are sensitive to the sound are making an association. The sound can cause headaches (I get them) and if the sound is to the level where you are affected but can't consciously hear it you can learn to associate it with the electronic device itself. For instance you learn to hate the radio or TV or wireless phone, etc. Some people may spread that association to other devices as well.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Shadow99_1]

No no... the Eath has it's own magnetic field, so that doesn't work either... Maybe we should send them to pluto? As far as we know pluto has no 'harmful' EM field...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Mr. Slippery]

After all... light is also electromagnetic radiation, and there is radio waves coming from the sun and stars but she doesnt mention anything about having problems in the sun or looking at the stars. Crackpot ignorant people.

I'm highly skeptical that there's anything more than a nocebo effect here. But the arguments in your dismissal is not sound. Light is not radio waves; and radio signals from the sun and stars are far weaker that those emitted by phones and wifi gear. (Which is the whole reason for the "quiet zone".

Again, I don't mean to say that this syndrome has a physiological basis, just that "this person doesn't claim to be sensitive to visible light or to the stellar radio background!" does not logically imply that they do not have some sensitivity to some sort of radio signals.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[dgatwood]

Unfortunately that antenna is embedded inside a highly conductive saline dielectric, that being your body.

Or a pocket of that saline between two blobs of tissue could be just the right length to act as an antenna. Whatever.

You'll thermally/ohmically burn your skin long before you get individual neurons excited.

That's simply not true. Before I had a skull MRI, I would have said that there was no real chance of any sort of biological response to EMI. Then I had the skull MRI. During certain parts of the roughly half hour scan, I experienced a tingling sensation in various random parts of my body as it scanned various parts of my brain. It was the strangest experience I'd ever encountered.

So you should not be so quick to dismiss the notion that someone can feel electromagnetic energy. It is well documented that this occurs at high enough levels of energy (that are still orders of magnitude less energy than would be necessary to burn your skin). The only question is whether the much, much, much lower levels of things like consumer Wi-Fi gear could ever produce enough of a current to cause some hyper-sensitized neuron to fire or otherwise misbehave. My suspicion is that the answer is "no", but I am certainly not willing to place bets on that based solely on the limited research that has occurred in this area. There's just way too much we don't know.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Was it a good looking alien?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[dgatwood]

You run the fMRI looking at a part of the brain that you think might be excited. Then, you add that electromagnetic field and you see if that part of the brain starts using more oxygen.

This is assuming, of course, that the person is sensitive only to a particular frequency range and not to EMI in general, in which case the fMRI would produce so much that it would completely negate the test. However, such a person would be walking around in pain all day from all the cell towers, the TV stations, etc., so I'm assuming we're limiting this to ISM band sensitivity claims.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Expect a significant jump in alien abduction and anal probing reports (above even the current extremely high levels).

Actually I would think that the overall average would drop now, since these folks can probably detect the EM radiation that an alien vessel generates from miles away...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Mr. Slippery]

For years, I couldn't go into the electronics section of retailers because the TVs were screeching so loud that I couldn't think straight.

That's the flyback transformer. It makes a high-pitched whine in many TVs. I used to hear it when I was a kid -- I don't know if TVs have gotten quieter or I lost that range of hearing over the years, probably a bit of both. Nothing really to do with electromagnetic effects on the body.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Alien abductions? Anal probes? That happens daily, just ask the TSA. They're the ones responsible for it all.

Lets not forget that there isn't a square centimeter of the United States that isn't getting hammered with Satellite radio signals for television and radio programming.

So much for emf free living. Add in radiation from the Sun, and bam, more radition than any 1000 cell phone towers combined.
The dirt they're standing on contains radon and thorium,. so they are being bombarded by low level rad counts all the time anyway.
Ignorant fucks.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Defenestrar]

You'd expect a few studies to come out with that result due to chance. ...

Perhaps - one in twenty is the worst case scenario for an incorrect conclusion though.

A properly done study will tell you what the chance is that they've come to the wrong conclusion. The typically minimum accepted chance of an incorrect conclusion is 5% among most scientific literature - some fields are far more stringent. If you can't meet that margin you try physical ways of improving your resolution (power to detect: use a larger population, reduce the measurement noise, etc...) and if you still can't show that the group on the left is different than the one on the right you start to play with the math (transform the data and run your stats on that (i.e. log)). Finally, if the first two don't work you can still try to analyze for variance based on ranks & etc... Your conclusions can't be as strong, but you can still say that your conclusion is more than just a gut reaction to your data.

The statistical methods should be mentioned in the paper, or the editor wasn't doing his or her job. Sometimes a result is too obvious to be worth going through the stats (like when the error bars are smaller than the data points and each data point is at least a dozen standard deviations from the next), but even then the author should at least mentioned how he calculated the error bars (they're not always the Excel function "StDev," you've got standard deviation for the population vs group, standard error (which is my preference), generic standard deviations, etc...). I'll skip the entire discussion between Type I and Type II error.

So the point is, yes you should know whether the results of that study were due to random chance - or at least the degree to which random chance could have given that result.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[sarkeizen]

You can read the study here:

Oddly it's the only one not featured on the

It's a little interesting but it is only one subject and I'm a little skeptical about the descriptions used by the subject for the symptoms.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[sarkeizen]

That bit should have read "on the researchers web site".

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Chris6502]

I'm one of the resident aliens in Green Bank and I confine my probing to the chickens on the grill at our volunteer fire departments annual cookout.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[sarkeizen]

It's actually a case study which, you're right is low grade evidence. You establish your control by having sham sessions.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[mcgrew]

Well, I wouldn't want to live in a leper colony, either. But then, it seemed you were a bit harsh on the crazies -- they can't help being crazy. And like I said, if you hurt and somebody's convinced you that EMF is bad, thinking the EMF is the cause is ignorance, not insanity. Most folks don't know anything at all about physics or biology.

I'd be willing to bet there are more nuts in New York than WVA. They're just a different kind of insane.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[turkeyfeathers]

They can't help being mentally ill any more than Stephen Hawking can help being sick. Do you sneer at him for his disability?

Big difference: Stephen Hawking can't take pills to make himself better, they can. If they decide not to, they deserve to be sneered at.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[anyGould]

For years, I couldn't go into the electronics section of retailers because the TVs were screeching so loud that I couldn't think straight. Same goes for some of the devices that stores would use to detect those tags, the amount of power used in those cases is substantially higher, but it's really not productive to suggest that because a claim is strange that it must be false. There's a lot of weird things that ultimately turned out to be true, or at least partially true.

Well, I was one of those kids who could hear an active CRT monitor from outside the classroom (used to freak out teachers by telling them a computer was left on, then unerringly walking directly to the one monitor out of fifty that was left on). But I'm sure that if I had complained about headaches and such that a doctor or scientist could show that yes, I can detect them.

Last I checked, these folks haven't managed to accurately detect whether they're near an EM source without being able to see it. I wish I had the link, but I loved the story where a public hearing ended after the complainants (who had just finished bemoaning their suffering at this very moment) were informed that the offending transmitter had been inactive for the past several weeks - they just didn't tell anyone to test if you were allergic to EM or just large metal towers.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[HungryHobo]

Studies which fail to find any evidence of unicorns don't mean that unicorns don't exist, just that the studies can't find them.

when it's so trivial to test: place subject in a shielded room with a wifi router or 10 hidden from view.

tell subject to press a button when they believe they are feeling the effects of their wifi sensitivity.

double blind it by turning it on and off with a random number generator and when you're done compare when it was actually on with when they believed it was on and do the stats.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[tverbeek]

You do realize that that is the part of the country (rural PA) that Obama was talking about with his "cling to their guns and religion" comment?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Beacon11]

Haha, I don't disagree with you-- I think it's ridiculous. I just wanted to point out that that was his *point*.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Grishnakh]

You mean KY as in home-of-the-creationist-museum-KY?

Yup. That's not the only place with that kind of mentality prevalent; wasn't there some kind of Creationist museum or somesuch in Kansas too?

If that's not part of the bible belt

No, it's not.

the US is in bigger trouble than I thought ...

Yes, it is.

All you have to do is look at the statistics for church affiliation over the last 50 years or so. Back in the 50s, most Americans identified themselves as mainline Protestant Christians: Methodists, Baptists, Episcopals, Presbyterians, etc. Out of those, only the Baptists had a real fundamentalist streak. Independent, fundamentalist churches were a very small part of the landscape. That's completely changed over the last few decades. Now, if you ignore the Catholics (many of whom are Hispanic, a population subset that has rapidly increased in size in the last few decades), and just look at the Protestants, the fundamentalists actually outnumber the "mainline" Protestants, and their numbers are rapidly growing while the mainline Protestant numbers are shrinking, and many of their members are elderly. All those "mega-churches" you hear about? Those are fundamentalists, where the preachers tell you which political candidates you should be voting for, that homosexuals should be put in concentration camps, openly advocate military action to convert Muslims to (their brand of) Christianity, etc. Megachurches are a very new phenomenon, but they're rapidly growing. I went to one here in Phoenix, and they actually had a Starbuck's coffee bar in the lobby and cup holders on every chair. It's scary how aligned with corporatism the fundamentalist mindset is. Meanwhile, we see the mainline Protestants, such as the Episcopals and Presbyterians, going the opposite way, by having openly-gay pastors and such, but again, their numbers are shrinking and their members aging, while the younger subset of the population embraces fundamentalism.

America just isn't the place I grew up in just a few decades ago (I was a child of the 80s).

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Grishnakh]

So is Kansas, Arizona, and lots of other parts of the USA that are not part of the "Bible Belt". What about California? They have giant fundamentalist megachurches there in the LA area. Fundamentalism is taking over the USA, but that doesn't mean you can redefine the term "Bible Belt" to mean whole country.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[DocHoncho]

Light is not radio waves;

Are you sure?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Grishnakh]

So what? That doesn't make it part of the Bible Belt any more than some decaying infrastructure in Louisiana makes it part of the Rust Belt.

People like rural Pennsylvanians are just about everywhere in the USA.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Haeleth]

Partly this is the fault of our culture labelling all mental health issues under the broad brush of "s/he's crazy".

This. A thousand times this. This is totally correct.

Just look at language. Love it or hate it, political correctness is a fairly good way to track society's attitudes. And we can see that many people, nice people who would never dream of calling someone "nigger" or "fag" or "bitch" or "lame" or "fatty", have no problem with using words like "crazy" in polite company.

It's inconceivable that a politician who described his/her opponent as "insane" or "deluded" would face criticism from anyone apart from the most radical bloggers. Compare that to what happens if a politician uses a word that even sounds like a racial or sexual slur!

I'm not making any big judgement here. I call things "crazy" all the time myself. My point is simply this: the language we use proves that society as a whole does not think of mental illness as a thing that affects "people like us". It affects other people. Those crazy people who are insane and therefore not like us and our friends. Crackheads and people who were abused as kids and so on. People we can comfortably assume aren't present in the room when we're talking.

Is it any wonder that people will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid considering the possibility that they themselves might have mental health problems?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[tmarsh86]

No, it's not.

Kentucky, the entire state, actually is part of the bible belt, whether you like it or not or believe it or not. Also included: some of West Virginia, some of Kansas, some of IIlinois and some of Florida and most of Texas.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Hatta]

Maybe the term "Bible Belt" is an anachronism now.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Shit, dude. Bluefield is civilized compared to a bit further north. Venture up into McDowell, Mingo, and Logan Counties for some real fun.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Hognoxious]

Bible cummerbund? Bible corset?

Shit, I hope it's not a boob tube or a basque.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Hognoxious]

Let me get this straight: They're worried about all the uranions coming out of bluetooth routers and etherhub nets so they go and literally sit next to a radio telescope that can see all the way to alpha centauri?

What a bunch of retreads.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[bored]

Starbuck's coffee bar in the lobby and cup holders on every chair.

The amazing thing is that they cannot see their own hypocrisy even when its right in front of them. Next time your in church, next to the church bookstore/starbucks/etc, ask someone if they can remember the only time Jesus was angry/violent in the bible. Yah, that's right, the money changers and vendors selling goods for passover in the temple. I wonder what Jesus thinks about the "christian" stores that seem to be in every church now.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Grishnakh]

What, they actually have stores in churches now? And I thought the Starbuck's thing was bad.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[PPH]

If that's not part of the bible belt,

Actually, its the part that hangs over the bible belt.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Grishnakh]

Wikipedia does seem to agree with you. But it doesn't show many other places where fundamentalism is growing fast, such as Colorado where Ted Haggard's megachurch is located. Pretty soon, I think that map is going to have to be redrawn, showing most of the country, and they'll probably need to just retire the name "Bible Belt" altogether as it really doesn't make sense to use it if almost the whole nation is like that.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Omfg, I really laughed at the Bluefield comment after working with someone from there in DC years ago. His photo can be found in the dictionary next to stereotype.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[confused one]

You're older. That and LCD, LED and plasma TV's don't have flyback transformers.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[couchslug]

Lived in the South for decades, visited WV.

The words "poor white trash" have specific meaning, and PWT look and act the same in both places.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Grishnakh]

While Wikipedia disproves my prior assertion about WV not being part of the Bible Belt, PWT looks and acts much the same in just about every place: Alabama, Mississippi, WV, Iowa, North Dakota, Colorado, rural parts of California, Alaska, really any rural part of the country.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[flosofl]

Dude, light is the "visible" spectrum of electromagnetic radiation.

As for 2.4 and 5GHz frequencies, I've yet to see a study that doesn't dismiss "electromagnetic sensitivity" as nocebo. I can't for the life of me begin to guess what physical mechanism present in the body would explain an allergic response to a spread (albeit relatively tiny compared to the entire spectrum) of electromagnetic frequencies as opposed a specific frequency. Why is it WiFi in general and doesn't seem to differentiate between 2.4 and 5 GHz? What about the spectrum between that or above or below?

I say it's hypochondria, exacerbated by a need for attention and/or martyr complex.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me get this straight: They're worried about all the uranions coming out of bluetooth routers and etherhub nets so they go and literally sit next to a radio telescope that can see all the way to alpha centauri?

What a bunch of retreads.

They are crazy, but not "retreads." They know that the radio telescope doesn't emit any nasty waves. Which means they have a far better grasp of the situation than you do, obviously.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[leighklotz]

Before I had a skull MRI, I would have said that there was no real chance of any sort of biological response to EMI. Then I had the skull MRI. During certain parts of the roughly half hour scan, I experienced a tingling sensation in various random parts of my body as it scanned various parts of my brain.

This this product sheet for an MRI amplifier says:

Our broadband family of RF power amplifiers spans the range from 8 MHz to 300 MHz, allowing for a wide range of imaging options. These amplifiers provide the outstanding performance essential for high-quality MR imaging at power levels up to 8 kW.

So, up to 8 kilowatts at a frequency range that is known to produce heating in human subjects.

Now, compare that to 0.1 watt in a laptop Wifi, and that's about 5 orders of magnitude bigger.
And not pointed directly at your head in a focused beam.
And not accompanied by 8.5 Tesla magnets.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

The article is not in print yet. You can get the abstract online here:
http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/00207454.2011.608139

payment required for the full article.

TL;DR: subject had no conscious knowledge/recognition of the field, but showed 100 s latency physiological reaction to a 60hz field with strength 300 V/m.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[poofmeisterp]

Obviously an astronomer with mod points doesn't have a sense of humor. Hard to believe there's a humorless astronomer out there, but there you go.

I don't understand what you're saying. Beetelgeuse is frying tonight, dude!!!! You should check it out. Oh, and did you hear about that supernova a few days ago. Awesome. /snark

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[CAIMLAS]

Wow, that really does sound dangerous. I suppose the WVa murder rate is higher than in most other places in the country, mainly the clean(er) city centers, then?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[tftp]

I have heard stories of ham radio guys with cutting edge 1296 preamps and high gain mobile antennas blowing their preamps by driving down the street next to the airport full of hundred watt peak class 1090 MHz active transponders.

The 10 GHz LNA that I bought recently from DB6NT can't take more than 1 mW at its input. They specifically stress this point; a bad relay can blow the FET.

A common ham dish antenna for 10 GHz can have gain of about 30 dB. If two such dishes are pointed at each other and one transmits only 200 mW, the minimum safe distance between those dishes is:

FSPL (dB) = 20 log10 (d_in_km) + 20 log10 (f_in_MHz) + 32.44 -Gtx - Grx

Since we want to lose 23 dB (200 mW to 1 mW) the 'd' will be only 33.7 meters. Any closer and the amp burns up. This is actually well known in practice when hams show up with their microwave rigs and try them out in a parking lot. They are very careful to not point dishes to anything they don't want to cook :-) Many 10 GHz rigs run more than 200 mW; 3W is typical, but some do up to 10W (it just costs more.)

Radar operators also know to not point their radars at nearly objects. Some radars on civilian airplanes can't be ran on the ground - both due to radiation danger and due to the overload of the front end (burnination is optional but likely.)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Cajun Hell]

I think your fluid may have dissolved iron in it. And let's not forget Van de Waals forces.

If your experiment's results don't match my feelings, the problem will be with your experiment and it'll finally put the nail in the coffin for your ridiculous global warming model.

Wait, did I say global warming model? I mean evolution theory. Whatever. You sciencies are all the same, with your hubris of wanting to understand how things work instead of just accepting that they do, and your tedious "repeatable results" as though people have the time to do experiments over and over instead of just taking my word for it, and your unnatural elevation of evidence when any common fool can deduct what the real truth is just by using their imagination. BLEH! Faithless wretch!

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Dachannien]

Even worse, a big portion of the reason for the radio quiet zone is the Echelon facility at Sugar Creek. I hope she invested heavily in tin foil headwear.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Mainly because the WV hillbillies are dumber than your average hillbilly. And considering the average hillbilly is in the lower 1% of intelligence, that gives you an idea how fucked WV is.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

What about those illegal Canadian's? Damn maple-back, border jumpers coming over here, stealing our jobs, and probing anus'!

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[sznupi]

Heard the same story, only it was a ham radio. It's likely apocryphal in any case

Not so much apocryphal, just an old trick when installing new visible radio equipment.

The whole issue is more than just our culture. It's the result of how our brains evolved over the last half a billion years or so, a very deeply ingrained over-sensitive alertness, avoidance of anything associated with "bad" stimuli, promotion of false positive responses, and such; we are not very rational creatures.

The world to which our brains adapted was also much simpler. You hear some noise, then you see a predator attacking. And the individuals becoming more alert (stressed) the next time when some noise happens, left a bit more offspring... even though in vast majority of cases there was no predator.

"Electrosensitives" are tormented by almost constant exposure to a very strong stressor of theirs, as far as their experiences are concerned (starting perhaps with one little association their brains made between a random bad mood and, say, being close to a WiFi AP or overhead power lines; worse, such random bad mood, if regular, might actually have a goo but neglected reason, even something so simple as a bad diet and lack of exercise ...unfortunately, eating a lot of junk food, or not straining oneself physically, feels good to our brains at those very moments, but there's no more regulation via natural scarcity of food or a need to be active to survive)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Hognoxious]

Yup, my dad used to be a TV repairman, and I could hear it. Generally it was a bad sign - a good quality, well adjusted TV shouldn't do it. LCD & plasma ones don't have a scanning beam and hence don't suffer from it, AFAIK. And can you even buy CRT ones these days?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[darrylo]

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation? (No, I kid you not, and, no, don't try this at home.)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[darenw]

As a cousin of one of those afflicted darlings, I can tell you she does indeed know about squares and inverses, and is overall rather high in IQ and college educated. Her dad (now deceased) was an electronics instructor, and two uncles were engineers.

I don't know anything about the other afflicted darlings, however.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Meski]

A placebo transmitter? Pity you can't receive the output from them on placebo receivers, or you could save a lot of power.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Kaenneth]

What bothers me most about it is, you 'have' a cold, cancer, the plauge, etc... but you 'are' crazy, depressed, mentally ill, etc...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[bronney]

nonsense! everyone knows it's the damn dihydrogen monoxide!!

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Hognoxious]

Mixing those guys with a bunch of tinfoil-hatters who think radio waves are making them sick just cannot lead to happy-happy-joy-joy results.

I'd pay good money to watch that.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Hognoxious]

Yup, and so is the person who wrote the article that you obviously didn't read.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Carewolf]

The Bible epidemic

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

+1

As a (moderate) atheist, what baffles me the most is not what Christians believe, but how little many Christians know about the history and the holy book of their own religion.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

The Reader's Digest Pot Belly?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

Using the "null hypothesis" that way, we must also conclude that scientists who believe in the Higgs particle are crackpots, since numerous studies and billions of dollars have been spent on proving its existence, without success. After all, the null hypothesis for a particle's existence is that it doesn't exist.

Skeptics are often fond of pointing out that the absence of evidence is not evidence for the absence; the null hypothesis is the exact opposite of this.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

Cell phones can catch viruses wirelessly. If you don't know the specifics of how different machines communicate with each other, and have heard of cellphone viruses, it's entirely reasonable to believe fax machines can infect your computer. It happens to be wrong, since fax machines are normally not equipped with wireless transmitters and use incompatible OSes and/or processors, but you need to have specific knowledge about technology to rule it out.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

People also need to understand that "psychosomatic" doesn't mean it's all in your head. It means psychological circumstances cause somatic (bodily) symptoms. For example, stress can cause unconscious tension in your muscles, which creates muscle pain and decreased blood flow, which are both bodily symptoms.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

Um... radio telescopes receive radio waves, they don't emit them. If they emitted any significant amount of elctromagnetic noise, they'd disturd adjacent telescopes.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

Obviously an astronomer with mod points doesn't have a sense of humor. Hard to believe there's a humorless astronomer out there, but there you go.

I see what you did there.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

It should also be noted that this only accounts for random errors, not errors in the experimental method, errors in how the data is interpreted, errors from external noise, etc.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

What, you think the pills cure mental illness? They only alleviate the symptoms, sometimes more, sometimes not at all. For some people, the side effects are worse than the original illness. Add to that that doctors are bad at adapting the dosage to the individual patient (for example, it's possible to test how much medication the patient retains in their blood, but this is usually not done).

As long as someone's illness doesn't cause them to commit serious crimes or do physical harm, you have no right to tell them what medication to take.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

Absolutely. For example, a group of people from that area exhibiting the stereotype might once have been visible a lot in mass media.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[mcgrew]

As long as someone's illness doesn't cause them to commit serious crimes or do physical harm, you have no right to tell them what medication to take.

Aspirin and Naproxin don't cure arthritis, either, but I take them. I agree with your statement, but most mentally ill people (at least in America) aren't refraining from taking the drugs by choice, they don't get the drugs because they either have no insurance or their insurance doesn't cover mental illness.

Sick people who want treatment should be able to get it. And the stigma against mental illness is itself insane.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[imakemusic]

Bible Hijab.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[xrayted_za]

There is an actual case here in South Africa : http://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-in-iburst-tower-battle.html Residents were complaining of the usual suspects, rash, headaches, etc. iBurst agreed to turn of the tower (having actually turned it off 6 weeks earlier) and the residents symptoms improved suddenly while they had not improved over the previous 6 weeks.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[metacell]

Yes, that's not any better. I live in a country with universal health care, which means the system is obliged to do something with all patients. For people with mental problems, that "something" usually means sending them home with some pills, because it's the cheapest option.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Khazunga]

From the wikipedia article:

The light we see with our eyes is really a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Just so you know...

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Khazunga]

Not to support the loonies here, but your test could fail even if the effects are valid. Simple example, happens with me and some people I know: I am able to hear the very high-pitch sound emitted by old CRTs. I can clearly distinguish some of them being switched on or off immediately (I'm looking at you Sony Black Trinitron), some I can't hear ever, but some are on the threshold of conscious hearing: i.e. I get a sense of relief once the TV is shut-off, but wouldn't have picked up it being switched on.

I would fail a blind test testing for the ability to hear CRT TVs, and I know for sure that I can hear them.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[tehcyder]

I can even propose a theoretical reason why someone would feel a Wi-Fi signal. A half wave Wi-Fi antenna is 6.25 cm, or about 2.5 inches. It is entirely possible for the brain or some other part of the body to have a roughly straight conductive region that is that long—the walls of a particularly straight blood vessel, for example, or a series of overly (even dendritically) myelinated neurons lined up perfectly in a row—in which case you'd basically have a (poor) Wi-Fi antenna in your brain, coupled directly to your nervous system.

But in that case wouldn't you have two steady amber lighs glowing on the side of your head when you were receiving a good connection?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[tehcyder]

If these people are really mentally ill, they should be given help and treatment, not allowed simply to luxuriate in their own delusions.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Bob the Super Hamste]

In my city (Apple Valley, MN) they were trying to put up some municipal WiFi towers last year. I went to some of the public meetings so that I could see if it would be economical for me to switch, the speeds, and other technical stuff. The nut jobs came out of the wood work. People claiming that this was going to give everyone cancer, mess up their electronics, destroy the aesthetics of the city (never understood this one with all of the big box retailers, gravel pits, urban sprawl, and concrete pipe factory), and then there were the people who were "EM sensitive".

My wife got concerned since she kept hearing from all of these stories about how bad this was, she gets overly concerned with everything. The nearest tower to our house was about going to be just under half a mile away and I think the power rating on them was something like 100 watts. These were omnidirectional antennas, so the way I tried to explain it to my wife was that the power she would receive from these would be substantially less than that of a car with both its high beams on at the same distance (basically unidirectional) and that seemed to quite her down. As soon as some of the towers were erected some people complained about headaches and other problems even though they weren't turned on. I had mentioned at one of these meetings that you should be more concerned about your neighbors microwave oven than these thing but that will never calm those who believe they are EM sensitive.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[SkimTony]

Sounds like a good opportunity for some unannounced double-blind testing. For example:

Test 1: Blanket the region in RF, similar levels and spectrum to an average suburb. You have enough radio telescopes in the area that no one will notice the extra emitter equipment being brought in, as long as its done sensibly. Measure the local activity by having nonchalant conversations with the alleged sufferers of RF sensitivity allergies (ideally you'd start building a rapport a few months ahead of time, so nothing seems amiss - plus I'm sure they have at least a few fun parties). You could even front as scientists studying their "illness" and interview them about their symptoms, etc., for an even better/more specific example. Bonus points for "But it's never bothered me up here in these hills" comments recorded on the day/week of the RF storm.

Test 2: Well after the first test, "leak" news of a test like the first, but don't broadcast any extra RF. Measure community reaction as in test 1. See what differences arise. If you have someone who's legitimately sensitive to RF, he or she will notice things, and likely say something (especially if you're asking around). If everyone is subject to the "nocebo" effect (term seen elsewhere in this thread - I kinda like it) you'll have predictable results.

Step 3: Publish! (like Profit!, but for academics)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[SkimTony]

Had a power outage for about 20 hours (storm related) a few weeks ago. It was amazing. So quiet, so dark. I almost didn't want to go to sleep (and admittedly, I almost couldn't!).

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[SkimTony]

Well, you 'are' sick, or you 'are' depressed. Why are you sick? You 'have' the flu, or you 'have' schizophrenia. The language is there, to be used as you like. One of the differences tends to be that most mental illnesses aren't considered contagious and have less-well-understood mechanisms. Phrases like "she's schizophrenic" and "he's cancerous" don't have the same connotation, because cancerous means something else.

Also, mental illnesses tend to have more of an impact on personality (i.e., who you are) than physical ones, and tend to last much longer (the flu lasts a week, something like bipolar disorder lasts essentially forever). Certain mental health issues are also a lot less stigmatized than they have ever been, mostly as a result of pharmaceutical companies and popular psychology.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Also don't let them know that they can actually hear the spark plugs if they tune to an AM signal that isn't used in your area, or even if you have it tuned to a station with a weak signal. If you have really worn spark plugs you can sometimes hear them on AM stations with a strong signal.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Zebedeu]

I heard this is standard procedure even for radio amateurs who build large antennas on their roofs.
Build the antenna and wait a month or so before turning it on. When people complain (and apparently, someone always does), show them the disconnected cable, and they'll go away.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[mcgrew]

Agreed.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[oldestgeek]

Yes, and if you read the article you'd take note of the fact that they're talking about things which are fairly close to them, not miles out. They're just moving there because it's the only place where there is an enforced ban on such electronic devices.

Whether or not there's any basis for the claims, it's complete bullshit to suggest that the effect wouldn't be strongest when sitting next to a transmitter. There isn't any particular support for the notion at this time, but there isn't any particular evidence that people aren't sensitive.

For years, I couldn't go into the electronics section of retailers because the TVs were screeching so loud that I couldn't think straight. Same goes for some of the devices that stores would use to detect those tags, the amount of power used in those cases is substantially higher, but it's really not productive to suggest that because a claim is strange that it must be false. There's a lot of weird things that ultimately turned out to be true, or at least partially true.

Yes, and if you read the article you'd take note of the fact that they're talking about things which are fairly close to them, not miles out. They're just moving there because it's the only place where there is an enforced ban on such electronic devices.

Whether or not there's any basis for the claims, it's complete bullshit to suggest that the effect wouldn't be strongest when sitting next to a transmitter. There isn't any particular support for the notion at this time, but there isn't any particular evidence that people aren't sensitive.

For years, I couldn't go into the electronics section of retailers because the TVs were screeching so loud that I couldn't think straight. Same goes for some of the devices that stores would use to detect those tags, the amount of power used in those cases is substantially higher, but it's really not productive to suggest that because a claim is strange that it must be false. There's a lot of weird things that ultimately turned out to be true, or at least partially true.

it;s the old bullsh*t "you can't prove it isn't harmful" wheeze!"! You can't prove that your not a raving looney about to blow up the local Best Buy!

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[oldestgeek]

Have you considered that you might?

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[rgviza]

I have this issue. Some Tube TVs drive me absolutely insane. To me the whine of those oscillators is as painful as a dental drill in some cases.

I couldn't stand to be in the same room as some TVs. I can hear them all to some degree but some were extremely loud.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[PSandusky]

You'd expect a few studies to come out with that result due to chance.

Sure, and particularly on the chance that the experimenter didn't know anything about effect sizes. A study will be considerably better received if the experiment is designed to include enough subjects (and therefore data points) to substantiate the claims in its conclusion. "Chance" resulting from a too low n doesn't cut it.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget the FBI under the guise of CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services) has a big presence in Clarksburg.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[black soap]

If it is natural, it must be good for you.

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to support the loonies here, but your test could fail even if the effects are valid. Simple example, happens with me and some people I know: I am able to hear the very high-pitch sound emitted by old CRTs. I can clearly distinguish some of them being switched on or off immediately (I'm looking at you Sony Black Trinitron), some I can't hear ever, but some are on the threshold of conscious hearing: i.e. I get a sense of relief once the TV is shut-off, but wouldn't have picked up it being switched on.

I would fail a blind test testing for the ability to hear CRT TVs, and I know for sure that I can hear them.

What makes you think you would fail a blind test? By your own description you'd easily pass a blinded test involving the Sony Black Trinitron, so long as the method of preventing you from seeing whether it's turned on doesn't block sound in the relevant frequency range. As for the TVs whose volume is a bit lower, blind testing has long been a very useful tool for determining the just-noticeable threshold of hearing.

(On the other hand, you might learn that you can't actually reliably detect when such a TV is shut off. But the problem is that you think such a result would be evidence that double blind testing doesn't work. Your experience of a sense of relief when most CRT TVs are switched off, even when it's one you admit you can't detect being switched on, might actually be confirmation bias stemming from experiences with those TVs which you definitely can hear. Human perception is funny that way -- it's deeply influenced by cognitive biases, and one of the fundamental lessons of science is that this is so even when you're aware of the need to be unbiased and are actively trying to avoid it. The only reliable method is to take away all sources of bias, which is why double blind testing was invented in the first place: neither the researcher nor the test subject can know what's actually happening until after the data has been collected.)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[c6gunner]

If there were a god, you would have gotten modded +5,000 funny :)

Re:Just what WVa needs, a new variety of crazy

[badkarmadayaccount]

I'm not a bad person - I'm usually told I have too much compassion for the mentally ill (guess where that came from). But I have no compassion for the ignorant. I guess a lot of /.ers feel that way.

Literal meaning to "The circus is back in town"...

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk about having the circus back in town. These people are hypochondriacs of the nth degree!

At least they are in a concentrated space, so it will be easy to round them up...

aaaachooooooo!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Those microwatts of power sure can make a man sneeze.

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

Now when the aliens drop by to see where that signal came from, they'll be greeted by jabbering hypochondriacs with faraday cages on their heads.

there's hypochondria

[circletimessquare]

then there's these people

It's contagious, all right

[Just Some Guy]

Sorry, Diane, but you are contagious. Just as you learned of this invented disease from someone else, you've undoubtedly passed it along to another hypochondriac. Just because it's not transmitted by biological vectors doesn't mean that it can't spread from person to person.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

Case in point, when I was a kid nobody was allergic to peanuts. Now it's two in every three people and I can't eat peanuts on the plane in case tiny particles get into the air cycler (I'm not saying there are NO people with this allergy, as it is a demonstrable allergy, but it's almost certainly one or two orders of magnitude less than people claim).

Re:It's contagious, all right

[madhatter256]

No use telling her... she won't be able to read this comment...

Re:It's contagious, all right

[elrous0]

I'm sorry, I didn't get to the end of you post because I have ADHD. I also have mild spectrum autism, bipolar disorder, and a variety of hip new allergies. But, no worries, the good people at Pfizer have me on a variety of drugs to make me all better (and also conformist and quiet, the way Mommy and the school like).

Re:It's contagious, all right

[kehren77]

Case in point, when I was a kid nobody was allergic to peanuts. Now it's two in every three people and I can't eat peanuts on the plane in case tiny particles get into the air cycler (I'm not saying there are NO people with this allergy, as it is a demonstrable allergy, but it's almost certainly one or two orders of magnitude less than people claim).

And why are we sheltering these people? It's a genetic defect, let natural selection take it's course. We shouldn't be allowing them to breed and create more people allergic to peanuts.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[phorm]

I used to work in schools. There was one kid who supposedly had one of those look-at-a-peanut-and-die severity of allergies.
The school was made peanut free. One "bully" who was apparently ticked off about no longer being able to eat PB&J at lunch decided to take it out on allergy-kid... but mashing a bunch of peanut in his face.

Was there instant peanut-induced choking and death? Not at all. Allergy-kid simply had to clean the peanut off his face... no reaction.

There are people with severe allergies, but a lot of the peanut scare is a farce.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Amouth]

agreed - the school where my wife teaches - there is a single child with a severe peanut allergy, they sent a notice to all students requesting that they not bring anything to school containing peanuts or peanut by products.

this was a tone down because the child's parents wanted the school to ban it out right.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[trout007]

You are pretty close. I have environmental allergies (dust, pollen, ect). So I get allergy shots which builds up my tolerance. It works great. The same thing with peanuts. My kid had allergies and we had him tested for everything and he was allergic to peanuts. When he ate peanut butter he would get red in the face and complain about an itchy throat. They don't do shots for food. So we started building his tolerance by giving him smaller doses that he could handle an slowly built up. It is working just like the shots.

So what you said is correct. If parents keep shielding their kids from things they are allergic to they will never build up immunity to them.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[PPH]

you've undoubtedly passed it along to another hypochondriac.

But with a national whack-job preserve like this, its not likely the contagion will be passed on. I mean, what's this person going to do? Blog about it?

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn straight - any signs of genetic anomolies in previous generations should also be taken into account. Perhaps we could have tests - those who score above a certain grade and are able to get at least a 10th place finish in an Olympic sport are allowed to breed - this would allow us to create a superior master race.

I hope to hell I was whooshed but if not your a bloody idiot.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[the_raptor]

Actually you are wrong, the case of actual, give a kid a peanut and they die due to anaphylaxis, nut allergy has increased massively in recent times (and there are several theories as to why, from industrial pollutants to kids having hypersensitive immune systems due to lack of germs). People who are "peanut intolerant" etc are normally whackos, but nut allergy is increasing and can be shown in double blind conditions. Unlike "electromagnetic sensitivity".

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

OMG PROOF that stupidity is contagious!!!

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Citizen of Earth]

Memetic virulence.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

And why are we sheltering these people? It's a genetic defect, let natural selection take it's course. We shouldn't be allowing them to breed and create more people allergic to peanuts.

As a civilisation, I think we're way past natural selection. Your kind of advocating for selection after the fact is of course barbaric, but we're entering an age where we will be able to perform selection before a person is born. I'm betting that in two hundred years there won't be any allergies to peanuts in the developed world.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Quiet_Desperation]

People just mistake an intolerance for a food for an allergy (the latter involves an immune system reaction while the former does not).

That being said, food allergy cases (recorded cases serious enough to require a trip to the hospital) *have* risen in the past 20 years. The cause of this is up for debate.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[kheldan]

All kidding aside, what I think is really going on with this, is it's part of a trend I've been seeing more and more over the last, say, 20 years. People are more and more rejecting technology and technological progress altogether. Not sure why. I suspect that our poor caveman brains are just finally getting overloaded by the non-stop onslaught of sensory input. Think about it: We watch too much TV; the commercials are noticeably louder than the actual program, and the program very often has pop-up ads on it. Instead of a telephone being just a telephone, it's a multi-media, internet-connected mobile computing platform, and 99 times out of 100 when someone'e phone rings, it doesn't sound like a phone ringing, it's some obnoxious sound or jingle or song. If you browse the internet, everything is run on Flash, and many have sound that you can't turn off. You walk and drive around in public, your senses are assaulted by electronic billboards often featuring full-motion video, but always transmitting light, not just reflecting ambient light or directed light; it makes a difference, especially at night, it's not anywhere as easy to ignore. Kids don't go out and play as much, they sit inside and play video games featuring lots of noise and fast motion. Speaking of TV again: TVs themselves are huge now, and who doesn't have at least 5.1 surround sound? Myself, I live what I consider a technological lifestyle (I'm an electronics engineering technician who gets to pretend I'm an actual engineer, own multiple computing devices, etc) but I'm not immune to that which I speak of, I find myself wanting to isolate myself from the non-stop onslaught to my senses. So, yes, I'm saying that these people who claim to have an "allergy" to wireless signals are psychosomatic, but at the same time I'm saying that what they're experiencing is completely real to them, whether it's their own brains rejecting the constant overload all around them, or actually being affected by electromagnetic waves. The fact of the matter is that the air has been full of man-made electromagnetic radiation of one wavelength or another for 100 years and nobody up until now has had problems like these, so I can't believe that it's radio waves themselves -- but it still may well be the technology creating them that's the problem.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[phatphoton]

My quantum spins are all out of whack, my cardio-tributaries are inflamed and my brain hurts when the light flickers. Thankfully I found a great OTC drug, Orthoflombonestaprilaminax (sounds legit). Side effects may include the jitters, stomach involution, weightlessness, anal retention, the hiccups, cerebral flatulence, blinking too much, and an inner ear disorder you've probably never heard of, it makes the world feel 90 degrees on its side.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[vbraga]

but we're entering an age where we will be able to perform selection before a person is born.

You know the hipsters will want organic kids, don't you?

Re:It's contagious, all right

[OzPeter]

You are pretty close. I have environmental allergies (dust, pollen, ect). So I get allergy shots which builds up my tolerance. It works great.

I had a colleague who suggested that for pollen allergies that you locate local honey producers as that honey would work in the same manner as allergy shots. I don't know how true it is, but he swore by it

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Belial6]

Maybe so, but I took my son in to find out what kind of pollen caused him to get a runny nose and puffy eyes. They did the battery of tests, and came back telling us that he has sever peanut allergies. That we should keep him away from all peanuts and and peanut products. They also told us that we NEED to buy an Epipen, and keep it with us at all times because just touching peanuts could kill him. We were also told that the Epipen needs to be replaced monthly.

My son eats peanuts all the time. He eats peanut butter straight. There is clearly no peanut allergy. Not even a mild reaction.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

your sarcasm implies that you consider your own response laughable, but it makes complete logical sense if you're trying to improve the species.

if you're putting together a basketball team, you don't pick 5 random guys off the street, you pick the 5 best players you have available to you. that's completely logical. the problem is that breeding doesn't involve logic, it involves fucking, and fucking is ruled by emotion, not logic.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[trewornan]

No we're definitely not past natural selection nor will we ever be. Currently natural selection is selecting people who live on welfare and do nothing but shag all day.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[inviolet]

All kidding aside, what I think is really going on with this, is it's part of a trend I've been seeing more and more over the last, say, 20 years. People are more and more rejecting technology and technological progress altogether. Not sure why.

I'm a part of that movement. Ubiquitous technology makes me feel vulnerable, because everything is so complex and interdependent now. When the power grid fails, we city-dwellers will quickly be in serious trouble.

I suspect that our poor caveman brains are just finally getting overloaded by the non-stop onslaught of sensory input.

That barrage is probably the reason why every generation of humans is measurably smarter than the previous. Seriously, they have to constantly re-norm the IQ tests because the next generation coming up has lived submerged at the bottom of an ocean of information.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[meerling]

My 6 year old daughter tests as having an extreme allergy to peanuts. As per doctors orders she hasn't been exposed to peanuts and always has an injector for emergencies (which is a real pain at school since they have a no-drugs policy that won't even let them have emergency medicines).

As informed by multiple doctors, including allergy specialists, detecting as having an allergy doesn't necessarily mean you are actually allergic, or necessarily will have a really bad reaction. Unfortunately, peanuts are one of those things that if you test positive, you most likely are, and that your reaction will be as bad as you test. My daughter tests at the maximum result so there is no way in hell I'm going to risk her dying from a reaction. We aren't talking a rash or itchy throat, we are talking asphyxiation and death. Would you risk it? Even if it was only 20% probable? Neither will I.

The school she goes to is NOT a peanut free zone, but it does encourage non-peanut alternatives. You know what? I don't have a problem with that, so long as they don't expose my daughter to it. Also, I've been told that they try to explain to students what allergies are, and to not share food with other students because it might hurt them. (There are several students with peanut allergies, among others there.)

Unfortunately my daughter is also allergic to other things, including a severe grass allergy. But those are almost never lethal. In her case her eyes go red, nose runs, and she's pretty miserable, but give her a dose of zyrtec and she's running around the playground giggling in 20 minutes. She also tests strongly positive on a cat allergy, and she's never had a reaction to those. She loves everything fluffy, but prefers dogs over cats.

Don't assume the parents are responsible for an over reaction of a local institution, and don't ever expect them to accept a risk to their childs life for your menu convenience.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

It really depends on your allergy. That works for some people but other people might have problems.

For example, I'm "allergic" to milk. If I go a month without milk then I can drink 2 or 3 glasses in a day with no ill effect. But if I keep drinking it every day, even in small doses, I will get more and more sensitive/sick.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Buelldozer]

"Maybe so, but I took my son in to find out what kind of pollen caused him to get a runny nose and puffy eyes."

"My son eats peanuts all the time. He eats peanut butter straight. There is clearly no peanut allergy. Not even a mild reaction."

Uhhhhh, Sir?

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

Knowledge is not intelligence.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[arielCo]

It usually has to be ingested:

While the most obvious and dangerous route for an allergic individual is unintentional ingestion, some reactions are possible through external exposure. However some of these are controversial, exaggerated, or have been discredited through empirical testing. Common beliefs are that anaphylaxis can be triggered by touching peanuts or products, smelling the odor of peanuts, and simple proximity to peanut products. Many of these beliefs have resulted in controversial bans on all peanut products from entire facilities such as schools and medical facilities.

Wait, there's more:

Some reactions have been noted to be psychogenic in nature, the result of conditioning and belief rather than a true chemical reaction. Blinded, placebo-controlled studies by Sicherer et al. were unable to produce any reactions using the odor of peanut butter or its mere proximity. That said, some activities such as cooking or large-scale shelling or crushing of peanuts (such as in a farming or factory production environment) can cause particles to become airborne, and can have respiratory effects to allergic individuals who are nearby. Similarly, residue on surfaces has been known to cause minor skin rashes, though not anaphylaxis.

So yes, his claim of death on sight/touch of a peanut may have been exaggerated, but it's quite likely that he couldn't eat one without choking.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[arielCo]

They don't do shots for food.

Really? I was somewhat allergic to chocolate (I'd get urticaria all over) and tomatoes, and they desensitized me with weekly shots. Still, thanks for confirming^Wreinforcing my suspicion that it could be done with gradual exposure to the allergen.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[wagnerrp]

All kidding aside, what I think is really going on with this, is it's part of a trend I've been seeing more and more over the last, say, 20 years. People are more and more rejecting technology and technological progress altogether. Not sure why.

I'm a part of that movement. Ubiquitous technology makes me feel vulnerable, because everything is so complex and interdependent now. When the power grid fails, we city-dwellers will quickly be in serious trouble.

Then you should be doing the exact opposite. Embrace it. Improve it. Make each part independently robust so you don't end up with cascading failures. Make the system more decentralized, so in the event of catastrophe, individual self-sufficient islands can break off and operate on their own, until connectivity is re-established. When something isn't quite good enough yet, abandoning it entirely is the worst possible option.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[jovius]

Maybe she hears about it on the local radio station.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[SEE]

it's part of a trend I've been seeing more and more over the last, say, 20 years. People are more and more rejecting technology and technological progress altogether.

Highlighted the inaccurate bits in your statement.

Ever since technological and related social change has been visible in a lifetime, there's been a significant section of the populace rejecting it. Complaints in the last 20 years are very similar to complaints in the 1960s, which were very similar to complaints in the 1920s, which were very similar to ones made in the 1880s, which were very similar to ones made in the 1840s.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

You know the hipsters will want organic kids, don't you?

And they won't allow you to fry them in transfats either. Damn Hippies insisting on baked, not fried.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[savi]

Be careful. Some allergies, like food allergies or poison ivy, get WORSE with each exposure. Some people just have itchy throat from nuts until one day they stop breathing after eating some.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[matfud]

My mother 70 ish now shows allergic reactions to pretty much every test known to man. The only things she is actually allergic to are bee stings and penicillin. And she has ended up in hospital because of bee stings and was already in hospital (different reason) when she had a massive reaction to penicillin (not other antibiotics though) She has to wear a medic aid bracelet warning about penicillin now.

So I don't have much confidence in those tests. If they show positive then your body is overreacting. but not necessarily in a way that is detrimental.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[ThatMegathronDude]

He verified the doctor's findings empirically, or the kid ate peanut butter before the allergy tests? What, are you some kind of unimaginative idiot?

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Jbcarpen]

My 6 year old daughter tests as having an extreme allergy to peanuts. As per doctors orders she hasn't been exposed to peanuts and always has an injector for emergencies (which is a real pain at school since they have a no-drugs policy that won't even let them have emergency medicines).

Zero tolerance policies have officially gone too far.

She loves everything fluffy, but prefers dogs over cats.

Good girl, cats are evil.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

She could if we had a service that delivers web pages through snail mail, kinda like the recently discussed surfing thorough SMS. Regular mails as wrappers to http requests, and then someone prints the resulting pages and mails them back! Sure, the latency would be dreadful, but the bandwith? Divine!

Re:It's contagious, all right

[compro01]

Intolerant != allergic.

Intolerance means you a problem of some sort digesting a food (e.g. lactose intolerance, where you lack the enzyme (lactase) necessary to digest lactose)

An allergy means your immune system goes berserk in the presence of it.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[turkeyfeathers]

Currently natural selection is selecting people who live on welfare and do nothing but shag all day.

Blatantly false statement... they take time from shagging to go to the store and stock up on Pop Tarts and Doritos for the kids to eat.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Sanat]

"it involves fucking, and fucking is ruled by emotion, not logic."

I can tell you never have been involved with a Pleiadian woman.

Being involved with the female space beings is like making love with a playboy bunny... perfectly formed and eager to please and yet it is not really fulfilling for you lack the free will to choose whether you want to participate or not. It is mandatory and you WILL do it.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

Just as you learned of this invented disease from someone else, you've undoubtedly passed it along to another hypochondriac.

And why are you so sure the disease is imaginary? Because you can't sense these things yourself? It could be real for them, you don't know.

Take the annoy-o-tron (briefly makes a noise ever so often). You know it's there and it annoys you, but you can't find it. If somebody walks into your office and you tell them you are hearing random noises from nowhere they'll think you're crazy unless it goes off when they're there. But in the case of hypersensitivity they can't 'be there when it goes off' since they can't perceive it. If they are like you they would just think you crazy.

People get a shitton of input that they aren't usually even aware of, but some people are. And we just found out that human cryptochrome genes when put into a fly restores their ability to sense magnetic fields. So it could be possible for people to actually see magnetic fields or detect radiation that almost nobody else can. In any case to say they are crazy and inventing it because of your personal beliefs is just as crazy.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Yamioni]

You forgot Aspergers. Doesn't everyone have self-diagnosed Aspergers these days?

Re:It's contagious, all right

[anyGould]

In other news, recently discovered cave man drawings have been translated as:

Og No Like Wheel. Too Crushy Toes. New Shapes Hard.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[uncqual]

recorded cases serious enough to require a trip to the hospital

I don't know the source of this nor do I have any reason to doubt it.

However, perhaps the definition of "require" has changed due to social and media attention to food allergies and what's being recorded is "trips" not "required trips" (the latter of which would seem medically hard to determine reliably without stringent national standards which remain the same over the decades)?

If a child has a mild allergy to a particular food, my sense is that it's more likely today than 20 years ago that a parent, teacher, child care provider etc. will take the kid to the ER/call 911 instead of waiting to see if the condition resolves on its own. If that's the case and many of these mild cases "self resolve", they wouldn't show up in stats from 20 years ago but might now.

If the child begins to instinctively reject the offending food (humans, and perhaps other animals, actually seem to be pretty good at that -- perhaps to an excess, but then that probably is good for the species survival except where there is very little variety of food available), then the problem may not recur often. If, in fact, continued exposure at low levels actually sometimes causes an allergy to go away, a child from 20 years ago might actually be able to eat that food w/o a reaction after a few mild reactions and never have been "reported" as allergic due to one, potentially unnecessary, trip to the ER under the "new" rules of engagement.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

perhaps she uses IPoAC....

Re:It's contagious, all right

[thoromyr]

I wish I had a citation, but I don't -- can't remember the source. The contention is that there is no scientific basis for allergy testing, nor for the treatments. Having had allergy testing myself, and knowing several other people who have had testing, and comparing notes as far as I can tell there is a strongly random component in the allergy test for response. Anecdotal? Yep. But I'm still looking for clinical trials following scientific method (much less following it well) that support the claims of allergists.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[drinkypoo]

It is mandatory and you WILL do it.

Death... by Snu-Snu.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Razed By TV]

I'm a little skeptical about this. I'm not saying you haven't experienced this, and that this isn't how your allergy and your son's allergy function. What I will say, is that this sounds entirely counter-intuitive to what I've heard and read about anaphylaxis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphylaxis#Pathophysiology

Anaphylaxis is a severe, whole-body allergic reaction. After an initial exposure "sensitizing dose" to a substance like bee sting toxin, the person's immune system becomes sensitized to that allergen. On a subsequent exposure "shocking dose", an allergic reaction occurs. This reaction is sudden, severe, and involves the whole body.

So, while I've heard of the idea of taking small doses of an allergen to acclimate yourself to it, I don't think this gives clear recognition to the fact that many people have allergies that are impossible to combat in such a manner. These people have to carry epinephrine in case they are unexpectedly faced with a life-threatening allergic reaction. If there is an alternate treatment for them, I haven't heard of it. This is also the first time I've heard the that people can be weaned onto allergens as as children to prevent them from manifesting more severe allergies later. (I'm not saying it's not true, but it is a first.)

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Anonymous Coward]

Peanuts are legumes, so while nut allergy increases might be correlated to peanut allergy increases the two are not equivalent.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[kheldan]

Do you go to the gym? Do any serious strength training? If you increase the resistance too quickly, you can overload yourself in a bad way and get injured. Similarly if you push your brain too hard too quickly, it will just give up and not even try anymore. That's what I think I'm seeing. Too much change too quickly. Many people can't keep up with it, and they reject it.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Belial6]

The runny nose and puffy eyes had no correlation to the times he ate peanut butter. They did have a correlation to times of year, amount of wind, and county we were in.

Correlation may not imply causation, but lack of correlation DOES imply a lack of causation.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Macgrrl]

I had a customer years ago who suffered severe hay fever and travelled for extened period internationally for work. He said the first thing he did when he moved to a new place was find the local aipary to source honey. He took a teaspoon daily to manage the symtpoms.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Macgrrl]

Personally I am severely intollerant of shellfish and strawberries. It typically exhibits as sweating, nausea, vomiting and migraine, onset is within about 15 minutes of ingesting the item. I have displayed symptoms on occasions when I wasn't aware the product was present (not listed on the ingredients, verified later with the manufacturer).

While it may not be lethal or an 'allergy', it's still pretty unpleasant and I go out of my way to avoid the possibility of an incident.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Kjella]

Probably because she has no baseline to compare against, I mean it's not like a constant weak allergic reaction is directly harmful but more like your body is stressed all the time. You just do what's possible and stay away from things you're strongly allergic to, you have to eat something and you have to balance it against other issues like getting all your vitamins and other dietary needs.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[trout007]

Yeah I know all about it. I've had some bad reactions to the shots as well. Since we are so allergic we have several Epi-Pens for just such an event.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[trout007]

I live in Florida and we have lots of local honey. I usually prefer the citrus honey which I eat regularly. I'll check my symptoms when they are in bloom.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[tompaulco]

More anecdotal evidence. I had a roommate who was allergic to cats. I had two cats. For a month or two he was coughing, sneezing and hacking, but after that, he was completely fine.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[compro01]

That sounds more like an unusual form of anaphalxisis than intolerance.

The "oh no I can't breathe" reaction is not the only way it manifests (though that happens in about 70% of cases.) . Migraines and gastrointestinal distress are other potential results, among others.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[tehcyder]

That barrage is probably the reason why every generation of humans is measurably smarter than the previous. Seriously, they have to constantly re-norm the IQ tests because the next generation coming up has lived submerged at the bottom of an ocean of information.

Intelligence is not a measure of how much information you have absorbed. And IQ tests are best used for measuring how good at IQ tests you are.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[phorm]

First: It's good to see that you've taught your child the dangers of peanuts as opposed to the common stance of trying to ban them school-wide. Congrats

Second: I have lots of personal experience with grass/animal allergies. For the pet allergies, the best way to get over those is to get a pet (and not bury your face in it anytime in the near future). I got over allergies to cats and bird that way over time.

Overall, it sounds to me like they need to improve the testing for life-threatening allergies. I'd hate to be banned from something for life only to find that I was never severely allergic in the first place. I do have some life-threatening allergies myself, but knowing how to deal with them is a big part of the battle (and again, congrats on the education vs ban choice).

Re:It's contagious, all right

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Personally I just like to unplug from the world. Last year my boss was shocked that he would be unable to get a hold of me in case I was needed while hunting and didn't believe me that I would be unable to get a cell signal, have electrical power, or have an internet connection. I had to check in with him one day while on vacation and that was a half hour drive into the nearest town to where I could get a cell signal and ended up having to drive back to the cities so I could deal with emergencies at work (they really weren't my former boss was just a dink). Maybe I should have my boss have to find me if they want me to come back to work while on vacation as it would probably take an areal survey, a trained tracker, and a pack of dogs. When asked where I was going I told him the north woods of Minnesota, somewhere between Zipple Bay and Grand Portage and possibly as far south as McGregor as this was the best description of where we would be. The places we stay and hunt are out in the woods as we tent camp during deer season and the vehicles are left on the nearest road. We go back to the vehicles to eat each day so we don't have to pack in all that gear and food, but camp much closer to where we are going to hunt. It is amazing how refreshed I come back, low stress, more energy

Re:It's contagious, all right

[mewshi_nya]

When the doctor says, "this is a severe allergy," you should say, "rerun the rests"... just saying, since those tests aren't *that* bad >.>

Re:It's contagious, all right

[black soap]

All kidding aside, what I think is really going on with this, is it's part of a trend I've been seeing more and more over the last, say, 20 years. People are more and more rejecting technology and technological progress altogether. .

Or maybe the luddites simply stand out more than they used to. They seem even weirder now than they would have a generation ago. Also, there is more now for them to reject.

Re:It's contagious, all right

[That Guy From Mrktng]

The marketing is strong in this one

Wow

[Gedvondur]

It's like a crazy-enclave. I think the easiest way to make these people realize that they are suffering from mental illness or delusional thoughts is to explain to them how many waves and what type pass through them every day, even in a radio-free enclave.

I just don't get this kind of irrational behavior. I think it has to be an illness similar to germaphobia.

Re:Wow

[peragrin]

I liked the lady who thought she needed to live in a faraday cage made of wood and chicken wire. I bet you could get cell recption in there, and it only blocked a couple of frequencies at most.

Or lady the lady who got sick sitting in front of her TV. She was old enough that i would bet the elctron gun was damaged and outputting higher than normal.

She should get an LCD tv and see if she feels the same.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people are in fact able to see really low refresh rates, and can get kinda carsick.

I had a coworker who complained about flourescent bulbs.

But, yeah, an LCD would almost certainly fix that.

Re:Wow

[Amouth]

i have an old CRT TV - and i get sick sitting in-front of it, that is if i'm watching any current media.. turn it off or watch a good old movie and the sickness goes away.

Re:Wow

[MightyMartian]

I get sick sitting in front of any TV, largely because I apparently have an allergy to pretty much everything that's shown on it.

Re:Wow

[slim]

There are lots of faulty fluorescent bulbs out there (mostly strip lights) that flicker like mad. They trigger migraines in lots of people. No craziness there.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I guess, but some people are just more sensitive. He'd react to what seemed like ordinary bulbs in the building, and not just the strips, also the compacts flourescents.
If I stared at it for a while I thought I saw a faint flicker, but for him it was a problem.
Dirty power?

Anyway, monitors and TVs with low refresh rates, that I've definitely seen people notice. I think some people just have slightly higher thresholds for perceiving frames as movement. Maybe, like, oh, 70 fps instead of 50fps for example.

Re:Wow

[Amouth]

so we have the same condition.. i say we use it as a soap box to get current content creators banned from airing material that makes people sick..

Re:Wow

[wagnerrp]

Most LCDs use CFLs for backlighting, and a cheap ballast can produce a flicker. Wait until it's dark, turn your monitor brightness up, and bring up a blank white page. Move your hand quickly across the screen. My two Samsung monitors produce a noticeable strobe effect. My older Sony doesn't, presumably due to a better power supply that buffers out the 60Hz powerline signal.

Re:Wow

[Darinbob]

It's like a crazy-enclave.

So it's a little bit of California on the east coast?

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm allergic to neutrinos unfortunately.

Re:Wow

[Gedvondur]

A fair assessment.

Re:Wow

[anyGould]

I liked the lady who thought she needed to live in a faraday cage made of wood and chicken wire. I bet you could get cell recption in there, and it only blocked a couple of frequencies at most.

While I would be interested to see what measurable effect the cage has, I doubt it would change her opinion (even if you could prove that The Goggles Do Nothing.)

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, are a murdering bastard.

Can you not imagine what someone this mentally ill will suffer if you tell them how much EM radiation they're exposed to, every day, no matter what you do? They will just die, sir. Die. Horribly, I'm sure.

Knowledge is power. Power is dangerous. It corrupts. And it will corrupt their fleshy selves into a grave. They're that ill. If you were more kind hearted, you'd fill them with narcotics and tell them that its a new, special EM-blocking compound. They'll be so high that they can't help but believe it.

In fact.. if thats the policy we're taking, I might just fall ill with the same disease. At least when stuff gets really stressful.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I guess, but some people are just more sensitive. He'd react to what seemed like ordinary bulbs in the building, and not just the strips, also the compacts flourescents.
If I stared at it for a while I thought I saw a faint flicker, but for him it was a problem.
Dirty power?

No, crap Chinese quality or worse USA quality.

Re:Wow

[Macgrrl]

There was a laser engraving place set up in the middle of our local mall about 2 christmasses ago. The first weekend it was there, everytime we got within 20 meters of it while it was operating, my husband would start feeling twitchy and pass out. We'd move him away from it, he'd recover, we'd try to walk in that direction again, rinse repeat.

It was something like the 3rd time it happened that we figured out what was happening. We started walking around the outside to get between the two areas and the problem went away. He also gets triggered by the alarms that go off in some stores when people take tagged goods through the barriers. but is fine around general electronics and computer or networking gear.

From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity :

The majority of provocation trials to date have found that self-described sufferers of electromagnetic hypersensitivity are unable to distinguish between exposure to real and fake electromagnetic fields,[2][3] and it is not recognized as a medical condition by the medical or scientific communities.[4]

[2] Rubin, James; J Das Munshi J, Simon Wessely (March–April 2005). "Electromagnetic hypersensitivity: a systematic review of provocation studies". Psychosomatic Medicine 67 (2): 224–32. doi:10.1097/01.psy.0000155664.13300.64. PMID 15784787.
[3] Röösli M (June 2008). "Radiofrequency electromagnetic field exposure and non-specific symptoms of ill health: a systematic review". Environ. Res. 107 (2): 277–87. doi:10.1016/j.envres.2008.02.003. PMID 18359015.
[4] http://www.cdc.gov/search.do?q=%22Electromagnetic+hypersensitivity%22+&btnG.x=20&btnG.y=5&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&oe=UTF-8&ie=UTF-8&ud=1&site=default_collection

Re:From Wikipedia...

[ElectricTurtle]

Honestly it just makes me want to find somebody with this mental problem and fuck with them.

"Ok, I have just turned on this megawatt radio tranmitter, how are you feeling?"

"Arglbargl!"

"Ha ha, I lied, I don't have a megawatt transmitter."

Seems like it would be hilarious. And nutjobs like that deserve it if they're not getting mental health treatment.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[gfxguy]

Majority can't tell = a minority CAN. I rather doubt most of these people, but I don't doubt it's possible.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[gilbert644]

Majority of trials not people.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Just Some Guy]

I rather doubt most of these people, but I don't doubt it's possible.

I do, as it'd mean throwing out all of modern physics and starting over with a brand new theory where their claims wouldn't be impossible.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[gfxguy]

It makes little difference in either context... a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish; the flaw is that it's "self-described" hypersensitive people. What they need to do is filter out the ones who can't, and keep retesting the ones who can. All you need is ONE person that can do it a majority of the time.

I'm not suggesting these people in W.V. are for real... but I am suggesting that the hypothesis that a body whose nervous system runs on electrical impulses can be effected by electromagnetic fields seems like a good one. Now, whether being in a wifi enabled area is enough... I doubt it, but I can't claim it's not possible.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

And what part of their person will be detecting these waves?

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

More likely a minority are lucky guessers.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[plover]

Majority can't tell = a minority CAN.

This is not a logical conclusion. It doesn't necessarily indicate there are any people who can detect RF. It might simply mean the minority of studies are faulty. They might have been poorly conducted, they might have been filled with statistical outliers (a statistical number of studies will have results that appear to be statistically significant but are not), or they might have been fraudulent studies being promoted by people with political or other agendas.

I rather doubt most of these people, but I don't doubt it's possible.

Certainly the studies haven't proven it's impossible. But nothing has proven it is.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[samkass]

Maybe we could inoculate them by injecting them with small amounts of electrons once a week.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Statistics do not work that way.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[gfxguy]

Crap. Name one aspect of modern physics you have to throw out because some humans may be more sensitive to electromagnetic fields... Name one thing that is dependent on EM fields not affecting human beings in any way whatsoever.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the most idiotic post yet. Majority CAN'T does not mean minority CAN. It means there was a few of the participants beyond the statistical norm so they can't say all. That doesn't mean they can feel them, it just means they guessed right enough they can't definitively say they can't.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Jmc23]

because modern physics doesn't say energy systems can affct other energy systems? Because science hasn't shown chips that can use the surrounding emf as part of their system more effectively than if not. Because modern science hasn't posited that human brains work in similar fashion?

Apparently the problem with your BELIEF is that you know nothing about science.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[gfxguy]

I never suggested otherwise (or at least didn't mean to). The linked article suggests it's possible even while trying to state it isn't... there's nothing conclusive about it. I think EMF can effect mood. I don't know that wifi is enough to do it.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not "a majority can't tell", it's "a majority of studies show people can't tell".

You'll always have people who show a "treatment effect" due to random chance, for the same reason if you give 1000 people a penny and tell them to flip it, some of them will get a lot of heads in a row.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[hedwards]

I disagree with that. I was always able to tell when poorly made CRTs were on or off by the interference I was getting. The better ones would use better components that would better shield the radiation from being emitted, but I was always able to tell without any other signs.

The problem is that with something like this you're talking about only a very small number of people having problems with it and most people describing it are probably hypochondriacs. In my case it's a fairly well established symptom of tinnitus.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2657824/

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if they instantly fall down and start to shake because of an internal division by zero, when I tell them about that giant electromagnetic field called the SUN! ;)

Or do they live underground?

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

MAJORITY of TRIALS have shown that people can't.

If you do enough trials, some will show an effect purely by chance.

If I test whether someone can affect the flipping of a coin by telekinesis, 5% of individuals will show an effect to p.05 purely by chance. This is one reason why trials/studies come up with conflicting results. Unfortunately, too, the trial showing a contrarian result ("EMF makes people ill!") is more publishable than the 10th study in a row showing no effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_power
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

"I rather doubt most of these people, but I don't doubt it's possible."

Logically, then, you can realize that it is possible a lot of these people share the same DNA codings... and could possibly ALL be affected. I meant that not as a joke. These folks don't move around much. ;)

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

The majority / minority wasn't talking about the patients, but about the trials. The majority of trials has found that no patients were able to tell the difference. That therefore a minority of patients can tell the difference obviously doesn't follow.
It turns out that the few trials that did find some effects fell into three categories. 1) The same research group failed to replicate their trial later on. 2) The effects appear to be random statistical artefacts. 3) Effects are mutually exclusive with the other trials.
From this it follows that in all likelihood the fact that some trials found an effect says nothing about the patients, and indicates flaws in the trials themselves.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Tinnitus is not a well established symptom of EMFs. That specific article that you cite simply shows that people who self-report "EM Hypersensitivity" are also likely to self-report suffering from tinnitus. I think what you are describing is just the sound that CRTs (particularly cheap or failing CRTs) will make from the flyback transformer. I know that I can hear that as well, and it sounds very similar to tinnitus (which I also experience) but the one from CRTs is just an actual sound that you pick up from the environment.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was small I always knew when the TV was on a few rooms away even when it was muted. I could hear the high pitched squeal. Perhaps your "being able to tell" was something similar.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[brit74]

> "It makes little difference in either context... a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish"
A minority of trials may have been setup badly (for example, not double blind). Also a minority of trials might've had positive results by chance. If people are completely unable to detect electromagnetic radition, then by pure random chance, you'd expect 50% of all trials to come up with results that are at least slightly positive, and 1 out of 20 trials will come up with statistically significant results.

Imagine it this way: you try to guess how many times you can guess whether a coin will come up head or tails. If you have no psychic abilities, then you'd average about 5 out of 10. There will be some random variation around that number, however, so sometimes you'll come up with 8 right guesses out of 10. This doesn't mean you're actually psychic, even though that trial (of ten coin flips) came up with positive results. (This is why you can't say "a minority of coin-flipping trials have found that people can predict coin flips".)

> What they need to do is filter out the ones who can't, and keep retesting the ones who can. All you need is ONE person that can do it a majority of the time.
That's a fair statement, but it seems at odds with your earlier statement that "a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish", which is false since you haven't established that a minority of people can distinguish. Positive trials are positive due to some combination of bad methodology, random chance, and real WIFI detecting ability.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Most CRTs emit high-pitched sounds at the edge of human hearing. I'm never in doubt as to whether a CRT is on or not because of the noise. I wish I couldn't hear it, it's really annoying. Perhaps you can just barely hear these sounds and describe that sensation as interference? I don't think the better CRTs use any kind of radiation shielding, but some of them do make less noise.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Jthon]

That's not radiation, that's because cheap CRTs tubes oscillate at 60 hertz and if you're not deaf in the upper frequencies you can hear them whine. Basically it's noise from the flyback transformer in the CRT. Many children can hear them but people often lose those frequencies as they get older.

I can still hear when a cheap CRT is on but I don't claim to be allergic to wifi.

See http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/comp/crt/failWhine-c.html for some more info.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably heard an audio beat note between the TV sweep rate and the tinnitus.

A beat frequency is the difference between two closely tuned audio tones. Musicians listen to the beat notes to tune their string instruments.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Wikipedia article states that a majority of the *trials* found that result. In the trials that did not find that result, they could have had too much error to be conclusive, or they could have been non-scientific or non-rigorous trials.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Jumperalex]

I work with one. She has lined her daughter's bedroom in copper. The only thing that stops me is she works for me and I work for the government and would get in trouble if I did (unprofesssional bla bla bla hostile work environment bla bla bla). But oh boy I wish I could. If nothing else, maybe I can tell her I turned one on in my office that only goes as far as my door so she can stopwalking in unannounced and unwelcome to bore me with stories about her levitation classes, astrology lectures, essential oil mixtures, and her "healer" boyfriend.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the same or different than what could be described as a 'high pitched squeal' around cheap CRTs (especially old TVs)? I can hear this rooms away from the TV even if there is no audio or video. Is it the same thing?

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

CRT's whine. You could hear it.

I can too. It doesn't mean I'm sensitive to anything other than the sound. It's rather low-frequency, compared to the majority of the EM spectrum, and I don't expect any of it to cause me real harm in everyday situations.

I could hear those old-school "silent" burglar alarms, too. They sit at the 20-22kHz range and annoy the crap out of anyone with good hearing. They, too, are safe to be around without getting your brain nuked by harmful brain-nuking waves.

I'd also wager that many of these hypochondriacs use a microwave oven without even thinking about it.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[plover]

And I said it wrong, too. Obviously people can detect RF. Point a microwave transmitter at their head, dump in a couple of kilowatts of energy, and their head asplode. That's a fairly extreme form of detection. What we don't understand yet is the human detectable threshold. Is it watts/m^3? Milliwatts? Microwatts? At what wavelengths? What's the maximum sensitivity of the most sensitive individual?

There's also the problem of other noise, be it audio or visual. RF equipment often involves coils and transformers, which are capable of emitting very high audio frequencies. Many people found the 15kHz flyback transformer in their TV sets to be unbearable. I don't care for the sound emitted by incandescent lightbulbs that have electronic dimmers. It's possible that random coils of metal could be energized by RF oscillate. And the 60Hz flicker of various lighting technologies can be very stressful. I can understand why people could have headaches or other problems due to electronics or other technologies, and those could easily be tied to RF.

But what's probably not human detectable are the nanowatt levels of RF these paranoid hypochondriacs are claiming to cause problems. Unless they have a finely tuned metal antenna connected to their nervous systems, they simply weren't born with the physiology needed to detect them.

Unfortunately, most of these people are irrational beyond logic. Things cannot be proven to them, they cannot be explained to them. They simply don't have the intellectual capacity. Or they don't have the emotional maturity to admit they were wrong.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[wagnerrp]

That's why such studies are supposed to have a statistical basis, to allow near certainty of the results.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[wagnerrp]

We could do it with a form of gun! We could even use a form of electric steering of the gun through magnets! Now how do you suggest we get people to subject themselves to this electron gun for several hours a day?

Re:From Wikipedia...

[cvtan]

Horizontal refresh rate for NTSC is 15734Hz and many people can hear that frequency. http://www.paradiso-design.net/videostandards_en.html

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Thowllly]

Tinnitus from CRTs? Couldn't that have been caused by the high frequency (15.625/15.734kHz) whine produced by many CRT TVs? In fact, that CRT whine does sound a lot like tinnitus by itself...

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

always able to tell when poorly made CRTs were on or off by the interference I was getting [...] well established symptom of tinnitus.

Are you sure you didn't just hear the CRT whining? I remember hearing our living room television's tube whine all the time when I was a teenager, and it was definitely auditory, not EMF-based. I also have slight tinnitus from playing in a rock band, but it only bothers me in very quiet spaces such as a recording booth. I personally have experienced no correlation between tinnitus and EMF signals.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[wagnerrp]

It was actually easier to do with it muted because the noise wasn't drowning out the basely audible whine. You didn't really hear it, you just "knew" the TV was on. My personal favorite was the connection warble from one of the old cell generations. When the connection between phone and tower were initially established, they had a couple low frequency, high power pulses, that could be heard in any electronic noisemaker. Like the TVs, it was just barely in the audible range, and you didn't really hear it, you just "knew" someone's phone was about to ring.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[zmooc]

And now that we're finally getting rid of those CRTs, we're buried under switching power supplies in phone chargers and the like. They're even more annoying because they're not next to a noisy computer but typically next to my bed... Argl.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Darinbob]

That's where the bad science starts. You look at the one trial that does show an effect and combine it with anecdotes and some people will believe that's proof.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Darinbob]

It's not just CRTs. A lot of electronic components can emit an ultrasonic whine.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[canajin56]

It makes little difference in either context... a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish; the flaw is that it's "self-described" hypersensitive people. What they need to do is filter out the ones who can't, and keep retesting the ones who can. All you need is ONE person that can do it a majority of the time.

Statistics do not work that way! Good night!

What typically happens, whether you are testing electromagnetic sensitivity or ESP, is you ask them yes/no questions a bunch of times. In this case you wheel out a router-like device with big antennae and you ask them to guess whether or not the extension cord powering it from the other room is plugged in, based on their discomfort. You make sure the guy wheeling it in doesn't know if it's plugged in, either, so it's double blind. And you repeat it a lot of times. Then you look at their yes/no answers. Your yes/no question should be distributed around 50%, if they actually can't tell. And so your test isn't "are they electromagnetically sensitive?" but "what are the odds that we'd see a distribution like this by random chance?" And so if 19 tests say "We're 95% confident that this can be explained as random chance" and one test says "We're less than 95% confident that this can be explained by random chance alone" then you HAVE NOT FOUND A HYPERSENSITIVE PERSON. So no, just because a majority of tests have found no connection does NOT imply that a minority have.

Anywho, fine, retest people who show promise. Just be damn careful when you start pruning your pool of test subjects POST HOC. Why? Well, let's play a game. Let's get us 100,000 test subjects and flip a coin ten times. Wow, about 70 of them have 100% accuracy. Those people could by psychic! Let's test them again. WOWZERS, almost all of them have accuracy over 60% after round two. The odds of 60 out of 70 people all having accuracy over 60% are practically zero, that's got to be a statistically significant finding, right? Only, why do so many have accuracy over 60%. Oh, oops, it's because you can't keep their original 10/10 score when you do round two, otherwise of course all of the ones remaining will still be 50% or higher. Stupid mistake, but it's been made before ;) Viewed from the other side, you don't have 60/70, you have 60/100,000 and you just didn't finish testing most of the 100,000 people.

My favorite electromagnetic sensitivity test involved wheeling out a big device covered with antennae, and they would wheel it around. The subjects were told to rate their discomfort at various power levels (researcher adjusts big knob) and at various distances from the transmitter. Only it was an empty box. Meanwhile, the entire time they were waiting they were being blasted with high powered transmitters in the false ceiling. Absolutely no discomfort until the fake device was "turned on". Hypersensitivity is an absolute joke.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

60Hz is a buzz, not a whine. The flyback transformer can make an audible high frequency. Something about the scanline timing or something.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am suggesting that the hypothesis that a body whose nervous system runs on electrical impulses can be effected by electromagnetic fields seems like a good one.

Crap. Name one aspect of modern physics you have to throw out because some humans may be more sensitive to electromagnetic fields... Name one thing that is dependent on EM fields not affecting human beings in any way whatsoever.

Look, it's not our job to teach you EM theory. No one is saying EM fields can't effect the human body, including nerves. The effect is well known and well understood. The problem is that wifi and other fields are many orders of magnitude too small to have an effect. Seriously. There is no scientific theory consistent with modern physics that allows people to feel these fields. YOU come up with a theory and I'll tell you why it conflicts with modern physics. I can't prove a negative.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[lgw]

Of course EM field affect humans in some way. Ionizing radiation is a bitch, and I hear the AEGIS radars will make you explode into steam if you stand in front of tham.

But low-intensity non-ionizing radiation can only make you warm. Salt water does a good job of absorbing EM, so any non-ionizing EM that's not strong enough to burn the skin can't posibly have any complicated internal effects on the interior of the human body.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

I get this all the time too. I can usually tell you when there is something electronic turned on in the next room. For the most part it doesn't really bother me and also works as a cheep party trick seeing that no one else in my age bracket can detect those frequencies anymore, but there are a few devices that emit a sound that hits the sweet spot of annoyance and I need to leave the area. I can sort of see if that happened on a more regular basis, and I didn't know it was a sound emitting from electronics that was causing it, that I might say that I was allergic to electronics. The way I look at it is if there is a kid throwing a tantrum I just leave the area, I don't go on a crusade telling the world that kids throwing tantrums are harming me and everyone shouldn't have kids to prevent my pain. If it annoys me, I leave. If electronics annoy you to a level that you can't function in a community, there is plenty of open sparsely populated land. Go buy a cabin in the back-country, or buy a house on the prairies. Not far enough for you? Then how about trying to give live in an Inuit village, or become an aid worker/missionary in some tribal village.

Don't buy a house next to an airport and complain it's too noisy and should move. Move yourself to an area away from the source of your problem.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Zinho]

You probably heard an audio beat note between the TV sweep rate and the tinnitus.

A beat frequency is the difference between two closely tuned audio tones. Musicians listen to the beat notes to tune their string instruments.

I don't think that's the case here. Beat frequencies are the result of two actual sound waves interfering with each other; in tinnitus I don't think anyone is suggesting that the perceived sound is actually being produced (otherwise it could be measured with an in-ear microphone). Having both fired too many guns in my life and spent time studying music I have tinnitus and can recognize beat patterns; when I'm exposed to real audio frequencies close to my tinnitus frequency I've never heard beat frequencies.

I have to agree with the other posters in this thread that the GP's experience was simply hearing the flyback transformers whine.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Majority can't tell = a minority CAN.

If you give a test to 100 people and they're all just guessing, you would expect a minority will still get an "unusually" high score due to chance. And a minority will get an unusually low score, and most will get middling scores (think "bell curve"). This does not mean that the ones who got high scores are special in any way.

Go read up on statistics. Start here: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Probability_distribution

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Lemmeoutada Collecti]

I hate to tell you this, but I am provably able to detect electromagnetic radiation using reliable, reproducible methods.

My first method is to open my eyes. Since light is a form of EM, the rod and cone cells in them are quite adequate as receptors.

As an adjunct to that, I have tactile response to high voltage, low amperage electrical fields, e.g. a Tesla Coil's emissions. This is, of course, because my entire nervous system is electrical in operation, and those high energy fields can produce current in a conductor under the right circumstances.

I am also able, through chemical means, to perceive strong infrared fields through the epidermal layers of my integument. The translation of infrared to localized heat is chemically translated into an electrical signal in the aforementioned nervous system.

In addition to my senses, many species of avian are able to sense magnetic fields.

The point here is that while some trials have been conducted, establishing the absence of a sense in x population does not mean that all populations lack the sense. Otherwise, a double blind, fully randomized study of penguins would very inaccurately conclude that all birds, and even some flying mammals, are flightless.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[CreatorOfSmallTruths]

I can hear CRTs when they are 3 rooms away, with the sound off. it's not a myth. as for wi fi, I am not sensitive to it but I wouldn't categorically say no one else is.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[CharlyFoxtrot]

It makes little difference in either context... a minority of trials have found people CAN distinguish; the flaw is that it's "self-described" hypersensitive people. What they need to do is filter out the ones who can't, and keep retesting the ones who can. All you need is ONE person that can do it a majority of the time.

From the wikipedia page :

"Seven studies were found which did report an association, while 24 could not find any association with electromagnetic fields. However, of the seven positive studies, two could not be replicated even by the original authors, three had serious methodological shortcomings, and the final two presented contradictory results."

So the evidence overwhelmingly points to the fact this is nonsense. The "all it takes is one counterexample" attitude is counter productive, it is so unlikely you can exclude the possibility. This is the same grasping at straws the "parapsychology" people do, waiting for their one golden child who'll sweep away decades of precedents.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[mr100percent]

But how? There's essentially no way for anyone to do this with their existing nervous systems. Any disease must have a physiological explanation for it, and this one doesn't have any.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's possible, I can always tell when using my cell phone if the wifi is on or off based on how my joints feel. They feel slightly achy after 20 or so minutes of exposure to wifi, been using wifi since it came out and never really had a problem with it till I got a smart phone, for me it seems that i have to have my hand on the antenna for awhile to feel anything. I suspect some of these people are indeed crazy, but a small percentage probably are just very sensitive to certain but not all em frequencies. PS never really believed that whole em thing till I was able to repeat the effects over and over. Scientific studies tend to be flawed in that they don't account for the wide genetic differences in human beings.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Reading is fundamental, idiot. The parent was NOT discussing a majority/minority of people, but was talking about majority/minority of STUDIES. The MAJORITY of studies say these kooks are talking out their butts.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

You fail statistics. It does not mean that a minority can; it means that real statistics was used for the research. That, or you get statistics but are bat-shit insane like the rest of the people who think that they are alergic to wifi

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

The majority comes from the trials, not from the people. If WIFI could do any physical thing to these people then visible sunlight and cosmic background radiation would be doing the exact same thing. It just comes down to the fact that the waves are too tight and there is no human physical apparatus to interact with them.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got some electromagnetic waves you'll be allergic to. Let me hit you with a taser and see if those waves don't cause some allergies.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

I really doubt it is possible.
Sure, most (actually all) people can detect electromagnetic radiation of some frequencies. However there are no proof (yet) that anyone can detect low power radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation with any repeatability, let alone, be harmed by it. There is no good proposed mechanism for such a detection, either.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Majority can't tell = a minority CAN.

No, that's not right at all. "Majority can't tell" does not necessarily imply that the minority can tell. It is more likely that the statement was formulated that way because not every single sufferer has been tested and therefore exhaustive statements about every single individual can't and shouldn't be made, even if all signs point to the phenomenon being fake.

In short, "Majority can't tell" simply means that not everyone was tested.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

Majority can't tell = a minority CAN.

No, it really doesn't. The quoted article said a majority of studies found that no one who self-reports hypersnsitivity can tell the difference between a high power radio antenna and a cardboard box with a red light on it. A majority of studies. Not patients. The statement says nothing about individuals and doesn't even say whether the minority of related studies found anyone able to tell the difference or if they just failed to find any conclusive data at all.

Heaping ignorance on top of inadequate data does not reveal new information.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Anonymous Coward]

A majority of TRIALS, not a majority of self-diagnosed sufferers. Reading comprehension FTW.

I DO doubt that something so inherently implausible with no credible physical mechanism is possible, until somebody demonstrates that it does actually exist at a statistically significant level. Bear in mind here that if a study turned up even a few individuals who could consistently detect EM radiation, and proceeded to investigate how they do it, the researchers in question would be in Nobel Prize territory.

Re:From Wikipedia...

[Sean Hederman]

Majority can't tell = a minority CAN

Really? You think that automatically follows?

How exactly? Do they have some strange sense that science hasn't yet discovered and for which no plausible mechanism has been proposed?

Re:From Wikipedia...

[tehcyder]

A minority of trials may have been setup badly (for example, not double blind). Also a minority of trials might've had positive results by chance. If people are completely unable to detect electromagnetic radition, then by pure random chance, you'd expect 50% of all trials to come up with results that are at least slightly positive, and 1 out of 20 trials will come up with statistically significant results.

Thank you. I'm getting quite worried by the number of people posting to slashdot who seem to have asolutely no idea of the basics of the scientific method, or how to conduct proper experiments .

Re:From Wikipedia...

[spinkham]

Yes. What the general public doesn't seem to realize is that 95% confidence is the standard, and that means we expect at least 5% of scientific studies to be false positives.

(As a side rant, I really think statistics should be the capstone course in math in HS, not Calculus, as it's much more useful to the general populace.)

Re:From Wikipedia...

[badkarmadayaccount]

CRT is old hat, for general purpose use. Get LED fixtures.

Is it my imagination...

[jbarr]

I'm 45, and while the likes of the Internet and mass-media obviously provide significantly more information than we ever had in the past, I just don't remember so many people having food allergies, aversions, ADD, "sensitivities", or other maladies that are so abundant today. Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?

Re:Is it my imagination...

[0racle]

You could use that there internet and find out.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't die of their allergies as babies or small children anymore. People have always had food sensitivities, they just eventually turn into "I don't like this food." Also, we put so much crap into processed foods now; previously, when it was just the ingredients you put in, a soy allergy would never have been a problem.

Nobody cared if your kid had ADD before. The kid would just misbehave, or would leave school early to work on the farm, or whatever. It's only now that we keep them in school and sedentary until they're adults that it really matters.

In short, it's the "less ignorant" option, not the "weaker constitutions".

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Daniel_Staal]

There's some of both. Partly it's better diagnosis and information about these different sensitivities: People are more likely to find out exactly what they are sensitive to, and be able to communicate it better to others. We are also making an effort to make public areas more open to people with these sensitivities, so someone who 20 years ago would just not eat out, now can go and find something on the menu tailored to them in many restaurants.

But there's also the fact that people who grow up in near-sterile environments tend to have hair-trigger immune systems, and therefore are more likely to develop allergies in the first place. When your parents were raising you, they probably didn't sterilize every surface you touched with antibacterial cleaners. They kept it clean, but it wasn't hospital-clean. Many people your age have raised kids in environments that are hospital-clean, or nearly so. A foreign substance is an unusual event for their bodies, and it tends to react with a full-scale alarm. Even when that substance is just a new food, or some pollen.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[brusk]

Don't forget that there used to be other illnesses such as female hysteria and neurasthenia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Historical_and_obsolete_mental_and_behavioural_disorders) that are no longer diagnosed. Conversely, behavior that was once within a normal spectrum might now be considered pathological (e.g., ADHD). So some change in apparent rates of disease have to do with shifting medical practices. That doesn't mean, for example, that some allergies have become more common.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[gfxguy]

I think you're just hearing more about it because of ubiquitous access to information, and when we talk about peanut allergies, for example, the really bad cases 20 or 30 years ago may not ever have even made it to school age.

As for some of the other problems, I do think a lot of it bunk, but I also think that humans have stopped becoming a stronger species and are, in fact, getting weaker. Survival of the fittest doesn't apply to us any more.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[ColdWetDog]

I'm 45, and while the likes of the Internet and mass-media obviously provide significantly more information than we ever had in the past, I just don't remember so many people having food allergies, aversions, ADD, "sensitivities", or other maladies that are so abundant today. Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?

Read up on the old medical literature (on the Internet of course). 'Hysteria', 'the vapours' and a host of other obviously psychosomatic maladies have been around for quite a long time. The current fad of blaming said problems on the environment (the 'sensitivities') is fairly recent. Previously the scapegoat was God, the Devil, Witches or similar malign influence. It's not surprising since we know that some of the many chemicals / radiations we're exposed to ARE really dangerous (pleased to step away from that tub of acetone if you don't mind). Just keep going along those lines and anything can be dangerous.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[berashith]

There are reasons for a few of these heightened sensitivities outside of people just wanting attention.

There is a theory that the amount of cleaners that we use prevent us for being exposed to mild toxins, and our immune systems really want to have something to do, so an allergy occurs to things that we should not be sensitive to. Not sure I buy it 100%, but it holds more water than just blaming more information to the hypochondriacs.

The soy allergies that have occurred go right to Monsanto. They have a protein that results in their GM seeds that they say cooks out. The Japanese asked for proof of this, and the answer turned out to be that the temperatures needed to remove this were not ever reached,and this is something that people can be allergic to. Japan denied the GM soybeans for this. I want to find people that are allergic to soy and take them on a field trip, as this would be fun to prove.

If this first theory is right, then our immune systems may need to dial back to being dependent on the external cleaners for protection, and then your point on weaker constitutions will be spot on. I dont know how many generations it will take for the FSM to create this change.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Imrik]

I'd say it's actually a bit of both. Before when people had minor allergies that weren't recognized they would eventually overcome them through exposure. Now we recognize those allergies and avoid them, resulting in stronger reactions when they are eventually encountered.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Attila Dimedici]

I think the increased incidence of these sorts of things has a three fold cause. The first is that a significant number of the people who suffer from genuine problems (such as severe allergies) would have died from them or something else at a very young age in the past. The second is that the threshold for diagnosis of certain disorders have been lowered (diabetes and autism are two examples). This does not account for all of the increase in the incidence of those disorders, but it accounts for a significant portion of it. The third cause is that improved communication allows people to become aware that symptoms they are experiencing are related to real problems and to become aware of crackpots claiming to suffer from some imaginary malady.
In the ordinary course of things, the vast majority of crackpots have their ideas rejected by those around them and they either abandon them or learn to keep relatively quiet about them. There have always been a few that because of random chance happen to be in an area where people take their ideas seriously. In the past, these few tended to remain isolated. With the advent of modern communication, these crackpots have been able to more readily find those people who are a receptive audience for thier ideas, allowing a greater distribution of those crackpot ideas.
Of course, at the same time, many good ideas that in the past were suppressed by those who controlled communication are also able to spread more easily. Overall, it has become harder to control which ideas gain acceptance which makes it harder to manipulate and control the populace.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[jalefkowit]

It's neither. The reason is because the environments we live in have become less dangerous. There's only so many hours in the day to worry about things, so the more dangerous things take priority. As we've removed more and more dangers through scientific and social progress, it has freed up room in our busy schedules to worry about less significant things.

Think of it as a Maslow-style hierarchy of risks. You only start worrying about things higher on the hierarchy when you no longer have to worry about the things beneath it. At the bottom are things like "being eaten by bears." Then above that is "plague." Then above that is "being crushed by industrial machinery." And then above that is "peanut allergy."

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Toonol]

Wait, wait, wait...

Are you saying Female Hysteria doesn't exist? I get the impression it's more common than the common cold.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is the opposite. You can't build up a tolerance to a food allergy. Unfortunately, the more you are exposed to the allergen, the worse the reaction becomes.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[operagost]

It's only recently that we've come to grips with the fact that nearly all women are hysterical.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[FredFredrickson]

Well, you're on target, but in the wrong scale- You're right, survival of the fittest has slowed considerably, thanks to modern medicine, genes that wouldn't usually be considered viable are able to survive long enough to breed (propagate).

But Weaker ? Maybe in the long run as a species, now that we're able to increase survival rate, that signifies that our evolution has taken to a more social level. As a society- we're much stronger.

Either way, evolution of certain traits can take thousands/millions of years. I don't think the amount of time we've had modern medicine has done much to evolution yet.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 45, and while the likes of the Internet and mass-media obviously provide significantly more information than we ever had in the past, I just don't remember so many people having food allergies, aversions, ADD, "sensitivities", or other maladies that are so abundant today. Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?

I think it's a change in language. I've heard plenty of people say, "I'm allergic to mosquitos." meaning, they get a bump when a mosquito bites them. When I was a kid, we just called that a mosquito bite.

I also dated a woman who had serious food allergies. The tiniest bit of fish or tree nuts, and she would swell like a balloon. Getting exposed to her allergen is a trip to the emergency room at best. She carries an EpiPen, because that prevents a one-way trip to the morgue.

So now, whenever somebody says, "I'm allergic to X." I always ask, "Do you carry an EpiPen?"

Re:Is it my imagination...

[FredFredrickson]

People love witch hunting. The marketing trend profits off that greatly, in fact. How often are big-box food distributors blamed for being "all artificial" which is synonymous with "bad for you?" I just saw a cheese-it commercial touting how they use REAL cheese, instead of artificial cheese. Does anybody know how we make cheese? It's already a damn process for christ's sake!

There are things that are bad for us (transfats), and then there are ghosts (this wasn't grown organically, it contains boogeymen chemicals!)... same goes with the sensitivities. It's all part of our anti-rational history!

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's because people are crazy, and now, not only can they find out about imaginary conditions, but we can find out that they exist. All thanks to the magic of the internet.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

More like the general public is likely over medicated. A 7 year old kid that has "ADD" is more just likely in need of the right stimulus (more sports, hunting and fishing trips etc) rather than the pills doctors give em or the 6 or 7 hours of mindless tv that most kids watch these days every day.

I think lots of allergys are caused by the bubble that alot of parents have their kids living in. Think about it. My parents sure as shit didn't lysol down every surface in the house and i know for a fact that i had plenty of cuts and scraps from questionable sources that probably could have used better medical treatment that what my mom could offer according to main stream media etc.

A little dirt in your body doesn't hurt. Infact i am a big subscriber to the idea that you can improve your immune response by slowly introducing your body to infections etc, rather than living in a bubble and hoping that the doctors come up with a drug that solves all your problems.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Jason Levine]

Part of it is increased detection. Decades ago, someone with a peanut allergy might not have known about it. They might have eaten some food that had incidentally touched peanuts and had a fatal reaction. The people around them wouldn't have known just what killed Mr. Peanut Allergy. They might chalk it up to some disease, "bad humors" or God being angry at him for his sins. Today, we can do skin tests and find out that a person is allergic to peanuts. They can then avoid peanuts and live a happy life. Or we can detect that someone has ADD and isn't just hyperactive for no good reason.

Another part is more publicity. Decades ago, if you had bad allergies or were different in any measurable way you might be institutionalized to get the "proper care." Society just wasn't good at helping these people so they were pushed to the side and forgotten about.

Increased detection and publicity makes it seem like a sudden surge occurred.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[yourlord]

Go find a cemetery that is 100+ years old and look at the number of graves of infants and children under 15, then compare that to a modern cemetery.. Conditions, diseases, and injuries that would have meant death 150 years ago are treatable today. This yields an ever higher percentage of the population which are "defective" and would never have survived outside the influence of technology (I admit I probably fall into this group). This group now, more and more, makes it to puberty and then passes those defects on.

But, back on topic, these people are just bat-shit crazy hypochondriacs.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because in the past we told them to quit their bitchin' simple as that.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Just Some Guy]

I haven't reached your august age but I've seen a lot of the same. I knew exactly one kid at school with a food allergy, and she couldn't eat large amounts of chocolate. That was the extent of the allergies my school had to content with.

That said, two of my kids have been diagnosed with ADD (not ADHD). They simply could not concentrate on school stuff. For example, I'd watch my son try to do homework at the kitchen table, and he'd be fine for a little while until a neighborhood dog barked. Maybe the numbers on a clock would change and he'd turn to look at it. He'd work on a few more problems, then start playing the drums with his pencil. He's a good, well-behaved, smart, funny kid but couldn't focus on school stuff unless I physically sat next to him and yelled every time he got distracted. That certainly didn't help his enjoyment of learning.

One day, he was nearly in tears and asked for our help because he'd tried everything and wanted to do better at school but couldn't do it on his own. A prescription for a non-stimulant medication later and his entire workflow changed. He's still the same kid, but is able to knock out his homework in a few minutes before going out to play.

And know what? He's me. I wasn't any better at sitting still and working than he is. I could usually get all my work done before leaving school but I never was good at finishing homework. I wish they'd known more about ADD when I was a kid; I think things would've turned out a lot differently for me. I'm glad I can help my kids work through these problems until they're a little older and we can all work on good coping strategies together. (In my case, I discovered "Getting Things Done" which was a life-changer, but the kids are a little young to start in on it full-scale).

Re:Is it my imagination...

[jeffmeden]

A weak constitution is a nurture thing, not a nature thing. Also, the effect of everyone having a "problem" is thanks to the sharp decline (or lack of maintenance) of critical thinking skills necessary to tell the difference between a web site that says you have something (usually alongside serious comments about how doctors are not to be trusted), and actually trusting a doctor who is skilled in medical diagnostics. As if their 4+ years spent doing nothing but study genuine illnesses somehow disqualifies them from giving a reliable answer, but "skynrdfan88" can gain trusted followers with his/her spew of nonsense about every little "disease" their precious little snowflakes have come down with.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[hedwards]

Epidemiological studies are easier to come by in this day and age. That and the massive changes in culture and environment. Taking those two together I'd say that a lot of it has to do with better understanding of what's going on.

That being said, it doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't real increases in prevalence, but at this stage, I'd probably hold off on saying that until the various diagnostic testing and epidemiological surveying techniques have stabilized a bit. It's really hard when a diagnosis like autism is rapidly increasing to suggest that there was a real change in prevalence, most of the time it's just a change in criteria or increased attention.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[gfxguy]

Stronger as a society is perhaps true; I don't deny our knowledge and brain power might be increasing, but the physical fitness of human beings doesn't seem to be. If our lifespans are increasing, it'd due to modern medicine and knowledge of how to better take care of ourselves.

I think things like allergy problems can propagate a lot faster than you seem to believe... a couple of generations can certainly produce people who are more prone to allergies. We're not talking about another appendage or psychic ability. Just like inbreeding can cause problems... not necessarily at first generation, but more and more likely with each subsequent generation. It doesn't take thousands of years for problems to manifest.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

I personally think the more likely culprit is the rise of artificial sweeteners/fats/preservatives, hormones/antibiotics/pesticides/etc introduced into the food chain to prevent disease/prolong food shelf life, and departures from the more simple and traditional diets of humans over the last 40,000 years. Also with the population explosion of the last 100 years or so, random mutations, decrease in childhood death rate, curing and prolonging the lives of people who would have historically just died out from disease, well, frankly we're just asking for it.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 45, and while the likes of the Internet and mass-media obviously provide significantly more information than we ever had in the past, I just don't remember so many people having food allergies, aversions, ADD, "sensitivities", or other maladies that are so abundant today. Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?

Partly it's better diagnosis of real conditions.
Partly it's people becoming aware of extremely rare conditions and suddenly deciding they have them.

Whatever did hypochondriacs do before Wikipedia and WebMD?

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of problems can be explained by insufficient exposure to pathogens (and, well, dirt in general) growing up.

ADHD and other neurological disorders are another matter. There is some evidence (this is my field btw) that exposure to certain classes of pesticides can increase ADHD frequency, though, it's preliminary and may not pan out. But I think a lot of it is just due to lack of exercise. Kids don't run around and play as much as they used to.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the increased incidence of these sorts of things has a three fold cause. The first is that a significant number of the people who suffer from genuine problems (such as severe allergies) would have died from them or something else at a very young age in the past. The second is that the threshold for diagnosis of certain disorders have been lowered (diabetes and autism are two examples). This does not account for all of the increase in the incidence of those disorders, but it accounts for a significant portion of it. The third cause is that improved communication allows people to become aware that symptoms they are experiencing are related to real problems and to become aware of crackpots claiming to suffer from some imaginary malady.

In the ordinary course of things, the vast majority of crackpots have their ideas rejected by those around them and they either abandon them or learn to keep relatively quiet about them. There have always been a few that because of random chance happen to be in an area where people take their ideas seriously. In the past, these few tended to remain isolated. With the advent of modern communication, these crackpots have been able to more readily find those people who are a receptive audience for thier ideas, allowing a greater distribution of those crackpot ideas.

Of course, at the same time, many good ideas that in the past were suppressed by those who controlled communication are also able to spread more easily. Overall, it has become harder to control which ideas gain acceptance which makes it harder to manipulate and control the populace.

There have been some postulations that the super clean condition people are bringing kids up in these days, are causing our immune systems to freak out and cause these allergies. You don't see new mothers without some sort of disinfecting wipe, gel, soap etc...

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

Its a combination of both. We are more aware of a lot of different disorders and people are much more likely to get diagnosed today vs 75 years ago. Look at Autism, we've broadened the definition over the years to include more and more people, so that alone will cause the % of the population with Autism to increase, even if the ratio of people with that disorder has stayed the same.

Its also been found that as the environment gets cleaner, and more kids are raised in rather sterile environments, the immune system doesn't get a proper workout in youth, leading to higher levels of various illnesses later in life. Especially allergies.

Add to that that people are having their children when they are a much older age. It wasn't that long ago that people were getting married at 15 or 16 and popping out a whole family by their early 20's. Now many don't have their first child until 30 or older. There is a bit of research out there suggesting that things like Autism and ADHD can be linked to older women being much more likely to give birth to a child with these problems vs young women.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I have more access to a wider variety of food stuffs than my great grandparents. So there is a variety of allergens that we wouldn't have been exposed to previously. Add to that my family hasn't lived here for 200 years, we aren't even immune to the local stuff anymore.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[CastrTroy]

Who are these people that have time to keep a house hospital clean with kids around? I have 3 kids, so maybe my experience is a little different, but even when we just had 1 kid, keeping everything hospital clean would have been a full time job.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Martin Blank]

You absolutely can build up a tolerance to a food allergy. There have been several studies in the last few years suggesting that small amounts of allergens can be used to build up a tolerance. Here are two examples:

Milk
Peanuts

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am 35 and suffer from Asthma. It was caused by allergy (usually is). My spouse is from another state, but suffers from allergy too. Neither my parents nor anyone in the family ever heard of such a thing before. I was recently shocked to find out that a significant part of population suffers from it. According to this it is a 25% population. Check out the mortality rate chart. Note that it accounts statistics only until 1995, but steady growth is evident.

Why our generation, you ask? My theory is that an air-polluting factory near my house had something to do with this. There is a number of things that we have while our parents did not.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Mister Whirly]

Yeah, but back then you would have been labeled "hyperactive" and given a bunch of amphetamines as the cure.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[wagnerrp]

Who cares if it's good for me. I would rather have cheese-its made from real tasty moldy cheddar in whatever industrial process you want and then covered in salt, than some tasteless homogenized oil-based crap.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[JoeMerchant]

Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?

I don't think our physical constitutions are weaker, but the environment is more challenging in some places than it was 30 years ago, and less in others, like steel mill towns for example.

I think the primary effect is one of broader knowledge. 30 years ago, if you had some 1 in 100,000 disease, doctors would scratch their heads and tell you to take two aspirin and call them in the morning. If it wasn't better, they'd likely shrug, refer you to their favorite associate specialist, and he'd diagnose you with whatever he could treat and see if that helped. Now, you can join a support group with thousands of people suffering from the same condition and compare notes - patterns that went unrecognized are discovered and valid courses of treatment are established - my personal recent favorite is wheat-gluten intolerance, which went from complete crack-pottery association about 7 years ago to mostly accepted as fact today (in some cases, at least.)

There will always be psycho-somatic conditions (and, for what it's worth, the placebo effect is real in its own right), hopefully with enough knowledge sharing, most of the people who think they are suffering from an imagined condition can be helped to identify what's really going on and get more effective relief.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you doubt the legitimacy of female hysteria you've never met my ex.. fucking crazy. The only way to end her temper tantrums was to wait for the police to arrive or cajole her into sex. Not even kidding

Re:Is it my imagination...

[izomiac]

Allergies are massively overstated. People commonly mistake known side effects of medications for allergies (e.g. my insomnia medicine makes me drowsy). If a kid happens to catch gastroenteritis, then obviously they're allergic to whatever they just ate. If a baby develops colic (16% of all babies, with more not meeting the strict criteria), then obviously it has a milk allergy. And if someone becomes lactose intolerant while they're sick (lactose digestion is the first thing to go), then clearly that's a permanent condition.

And egg allergies! You wouldn't believe the number of people who refuse vaccinations under that excuse. Realistically, if you can eat a cupcake without going into anaphylactic shock then you aren't allergic to the vaccine. A number of hospitals have made the flu vaccine mandatory for workers. In one they stipulated you either got the shot or wore a N95 mask for the entire flu season, while providing testing and desensitization for those claiming egg allergies. Oddly enough, of the ~10% that were allergic to eggs before, none had a serious reaction when tested.

All that said, allergies today probably are more common. We spend less time outdoors, eat more exotic foods, and have created all manner of strange chemicals. Those that would have perished in childhood a century ago can now live long lives. And now we can explain why people get "that head cold every spring that lasts for 3 or 4 months". (BTW, I didn't make up any of those quotes, and have heard each multiple times.)

Re:Is it my imagination...

[wideBlueSkies]

I'm looking forward to having a cigarette later - to cure what ails me. My doctor said the tobacco is medicinal.... He smokes too.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[compro01]

Respiratory problems are not the only type of anaphylaxis. It's very common (70% of cases), but it often presents in other ways, such as a rash or hives, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, fainting, cardiac arrhythmia, etc.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[NikeHerc]

A little dirt in your body doesn't hurt. Infact i am a big subscriber to the idea that you can improve your immune response by slowly introducing your body to infections etc, ...

My wife is in the medical establishment; she will use anti-bacterials on anything that doesn't move out of her way first.

OTOH, I tend to side with the above poster. I tell her that her immune system will be a lot stronger if she eats a handful of dirt out of the back yard every week. (Excluding, of course, where the dog unloads. No sense in going too far in the other direction.)

Re:Is it my imagination...

[boyfaceddog]

Umm, no. Twenty years ago my wife began having these bizarre pains whenever she ate. She was tested for different non-allergy problems and nothing turned up. Then some doctor told her she might have an allergy to a food. This was acceptable since her mom had an allergy to shell fish (iodine sensitivity).
Two years later she was STILL having problems despite testing for wheat, all sorts of fruit, meat, and even alcohol. She was really suffering by this time and she couldn't figure out what was causing it. Finally a friend of hers suggested that she might be allergic to corn. She stopped eating corn (no small feat in the US) and she felt better. She still suffered. Then she found an article on line about cross-sensitivity to different foods and that corn allergy sufferers usually suffer from soy allergies, too. Twelve years of no corn and no soy and she is much happier.

You see, the doctors really didn't know about the corn allergies. It wasn't something they ran into a lot (it's like some ungodly small percentage of the population) but there were enough people on the internet, even back in the late nineties, to educate my wife about it. Did she wind up trying a lot of wrong diagnosis? Sure, but there were a lot of those from the doctors. Did she reach the correct conclusion by luck? Not really since she gave each diagnosis a fair trial (science).

So, you see, we aren't really weaker. We have a greater breadth of information to sift for truth, and while you might hear of massed-idiots with cuckoo beliefs you never hear of the ones and twos self-diagnosing correctly using the 'net. And yet there is the giant background roar of people who now know what they are allergic to because they have more information.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Yamioni]

Thank $deity that we have Sarah Silverman to provide a much needed couterpoint.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd give general decay of the food we eat, and the water we drink some credit. Fractionalized foods make us the fattest nation in the world, yet we suffer from chronic diseases that used to show up MUCH later in life 30-40 years ago, but are now showing up in teenagers. And water is constantly under attack from the 'I want mine now, and screw the next generation' folk who want the EPA to go away. (Fracking?) So, no, it's not your imagination. Unless you work for Monsanto.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Yamioni]

Hell, just do like I do and skip the Cheese-Its altogether and go straight for the cheese. The price difference is marginal in bulk quantities. Current new favorites of mine are Havarti and Muenster. Give 'em a try if you haven't already.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[couchslug]

These attention whores now have the internet. Before, they were easier to ignore and being ignored is what they deserve.

When paranoid bullshit made the rounds on mimeographed newsletters it was slower to spread.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[swb]

We have friends from Chicago who are African American. They laugh at Peanut Allergies and the like and say "Poor people don't have food allergies, they eat anything."

This struck me as insightful.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[adri]

Course, those with the allergies are dead at an early age; blamed on "poor health and nutrition".

Can't win, can't not play.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sharp decline? I've never seen anything indicating that is used to be better. Though of course the world is always going down the drains, ever since the greeks at least.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Hognoxious]

And on top of that, kids used to play outside. Outside isn't sterile at all, it's full of bugs, pollen and who knows what.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Hognoxious]

Survival of the fittest doesn't apply to us any more.

It does, but the definition of fitness has changed.

But Darwin wasn't referring to how many push-ups you can do anyway.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Hognoxious]

Whatever did hypochondriacs do before Wikipedia and WebMD?

They either bothered the heck out of the local doctor, or found someone else - often a fellow sufferer - to moan incessantly to.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

He said he's 45 not 200.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or... maybe the increase in those issues is caused by our increasingly effed-up food system and horrible crap we eat.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[tehcyder]

I'm 45, and while the likes of the Internet and mass-media obviously provide significantly more information than we ever had in the past, I just don't remember so many people having food allergies, aversions, ADD, "sensitivities", or other maladies that are so abundant today. Is it because we are less ignorant and more informed of what were otherwise "hidden" issues, or have we physically evolved into people weaker constitutions?

In the past, if you were a neurotic, whiny, self-obsessed hypochondriac, you were shit out of luck unless you were a fairly well off young/middle-aged woman, in which case people would happily pander to your neuroses, as it was socially acceptable to have vapours/hysteria or whatever the current name was. Men and older people or children would just be laughed at or told to go out and have a brisk walk.

Nowadays, anyone can self-certify themselves as having some stupid made up "condition" and there's probably dozens of blogs and facebook groups to provide delusional feedback.

A fellow parent at school had a kid the same age as one of my daughters, and he was basically a disruptive little shit. But due to his over-protective parents he was instead referred to various special classes, then special schools for dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADD, ADHD, being on the autistic spectrum, and all the rest. There was really nothing wrong wih him at all (interestinly enough, he didn't have all these various problems concurrently, but rather serially), he was just a lazy troublemaking self-absorbed shit, whose parents had to have something to blame other than his own innate shit-hood.

Nowadays I have a very cynical attitude to people with conveniently debilitating problems which somehow don't sotp them doing anythingt they really want to do.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[tehcyder]

Who are these people that have time to keep a house hospital clean with kids around? I have 3 kids, so maybe my experience is a little different, but even when we just had 1 kid, keeping everything hospital clean would have been a full time job.

A lot of the time you're talking about only children, who already get over-protected and over-indulged if parents aren't careful, and so are much more likely to be allowed to be fussy about new foods and to insist on their parents keeping everything spotless for them (as there are no annoying siblings to meess things up).

Re:Is it my imagination...

[tehcyder]

Or we can detect that someone has ADD and isn't just hyperactive for no good reason.

Translation: we can label someone who is hyperactive as having "ADD" and use it to explain away his appalling exam results to his pushy middle class parents.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[tehcyder]

All kids are like this about homework, there's nnothing special about your son. My three kids were/are the same (the oldest is now grown up enough to know she has no choce except to ge on with it) including tears, temper tantrums, snapoping pencils just so they could re-sharpen them, staring out of the window at clouds and all the rest (t

They have trouble concentrating on stuff they don't want to do, not some medical condition called ADD - they'll sit through music, films or TV programmes they like with 100% concentration.

Learning is not just about enjoyment, I'm afraid. One of the things kids have to realise is that there are things you have to do that are not immediately fun.

Also, I get nervous at the idea of non-medical people prescribing anything stronger than calpol for their kids.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Just Some Guy]

All kids are like this about homework

No, they're not. Two of my kids are; one isn't. We don't know about the youngest yet because they don't give much homework in preschool. This wasn't the normal "I'd rather be doing something else" behavior.

Learning is not just about enjoyment, I'm afraid.

It's not "just" about enjoyment, but it's a whole hell of a lot about enjoyment. My parents taught me how fun and cool it is to learn new things and that shaped a large part of my life and career. Sometimes learning isn't fun, but if you teach your kids that it simply is not enjoyable and something to be dreaded then you've failed as a parent.

Also, I get nervous at the idea of non-medical people prescribing anything stronger than calpol for their kids.

From your spelling and word choices, I infer you're in the UK or a UK-influenced country. In America, prescriptions are issued solely by licensed medical personnel. Anything you walk into a pharmacy to buy on your own is referred to as "over the counter". That I mentioned a prescription implies that we saw a physician. In this case, it was a pediatric neurologist who knows a lot more about ADD in general (and my children in particular) than you ever will.

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Bob the Super Hamste]

I have met people like this and they are appalled when they come over to my house and I let my oldest (recently turned 3) go and play outside in the dirt patch that use to be the garden (didn't have time this year to plan with a newborn), or that I let him also "help" me fix vehicles. Frequently these are also the helmet crowd who insist that nothing bad ever happen to their child and that they be protected from even the slightest thing that may cause some discomfort. My three year old did a face plant off the swings at the park this year when he was learning to swing on the real swings. He got the wind knocked out of him for the first time and a mouth full of sand. He panicked from having the wind knocked out of him so I picked him up and told him he was ok and he got over it and then wanted to get back on the swings. I got some of the dirtiest looks from some of the other parents since he is probably a bit small to be on the real swings but he wants to do what the big kids are doing and hates the bucket swings. He also likes to chase the stupid Canadian geese in the park and knows what to do when one comes at him

Re:Is it my imagination...

[Jason Levine]

More like we can figure out that someone who has trouble paying attention isn't just "a bad student who just isn't trying hard enough" but actually has a medical problem that can be treated (either with therapy or drugs or both depending on the circumstance). This person can then do better in class and actually live a more productive and happier life.

Seriously though

[Anonymous Coward]

If they find relief from being sensitive to radio waves then good for them.

It's nice that they can live there freely without comment or ridicule, oh wait.

Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[Anonymous Coward]

but, how come nobody ever points out that when we started pumping out radio waves we had no idea what they might do to the body. I can't imagine that they DON'T have some effect on us. If magnets set on one side of the brain or the other cause us to lie or tell the truth? (is that really a real study? cause THAT one I have a hard time with lol)

I'm pretty sure we have no idea what wifi, cellphones, etc. are doing to us. It's like how mercury was first treated... we all just think it's fine and laugh at anyone who says otherwise because we don't experience the problem or haven't seen it with our own eyes. But, we really have no idea.

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[fahrbot-bot]

If magnets set on one side of the brain or the other cause us to lie or tell the truth?

Sure, but the magnetic field strength for TMS is about the same as for an MRI, held about 5 inches from the brain. Do you regularly stand 5 inches from an AM/FM broadcast antenna? There's no "maybe", these guys are crazy.

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[Lurker2288]

Right. We have no idea. Because NO ONE in the history of commercial radio has ever studied this issue. You are LITERALLY the first person to ever consider the possibility that EMF could affect living things. Stooge.

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[ColdWetDog]

I'm pretty sure we have no idea what wifi, cellphones, etc. are doing to us.

Yes we do. We've studied it do death. At the absolute worst it might cause a tiny, tiny bit of increase in certain cancers and / or cause some local radiative effects near the antenna. It probably doesn't cause anything above the noise floor of people dying from the Usual Suspects. In other words, if you're worried about that cell phone, put down the damned cigarette first. And buckle your seat belt.

 

It's like how mercury was first treated... we all just think it's fine and laugh at anyone who says otherwise because we don't experience the problem or haven't seen it with our own eyes. But, we really have no idea.

Actually, Mercury was readily identified as an industrial poison soon after it became widely used (Mad as a Hatter).

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[Anonymous Coward]

You'd better get the hell off the internets RIGHT NOW then. And don't ever post on /. again or YOU WILL DIE.

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[Maritz]

I can't imagine that they DON'T have some effect on us.

I can imagine how they have such a minuscule effect on us that it's virtually impossible for us to detect it. You speak as if this stuff hasn't been studied. It has. Extensively.

There's also the prior plausibility to take into account. Radio waves are non-ionizing radiation, and they by and large go straight through us or get absorbed and re-emitted as heat. They don't knock electrons out of their orbits, and so can't effect biological tissue.

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[moonbender]

Sort of playing the devil's advocate here, but a seemingly tiny, tiny increase in certain cancers across a large enough affected population could still be an unacceptable increase in absolute terms. It all depends on what tiny, tiny is and how large the population is. As far as I have heard, tiny tiny is zero, as in there has been no observed increase, but I may not be up to date.

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[DutchUncle]

I can imagine how they have such a minuscule effect on us that it's virtually impossible for us to detect it. ......they by and large go straight through us or get absorbed and re-emitted as heat. They don't knock electrons out of their orbits, and so can't effect biological tissue.

My MS is CS, not bio, so maybe this is a stupid question: If you can detect radio waves with an antenna and an electronic circuit, they're not going straight through and they're not turning to heat. So *could* biological tissue detect them somehow? Sort of the way your eyes detect EM radiation, and your skin reacts to UV?

We're still figuring out how the brain works; we wouldn't even know how to tell if we're affecting it in minor and annoying ways. Obvious damage, yes, of course, but just enough background hum to be irritating . . . or distracting . . .

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[JoeMerchant]

In 2003, I briefly considered working for a TMS company, but wrote them off as crackpots - they came to my attention just after I had investigated possible employment with a cryonics company, so my BS meter was a little jumpy at the time... TMS is real, it's not just a strong magnetic field, it's a strongly dynamic magnetic field that causes real temporary depolarization of neurons within an inch or so of the transducer. Nobody is going to slip one of these into your pillow without you noticing - but it does do pretty freaky stuff similar to what they were doing with cryo-cooling of specific brain regions during surgery for research back in the 1970s, and it's mostly non-invasive and reversible, they think, at least until you induce a seizure.

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[izomiac]

Thankfully, doctors and hospitals monitor disease incidence for any increases that might suggest an epidemic. Researchers also do subgroup analysis to look for links between behaviors/exposures and disease. Other than more people getting punched in the face in public places, I don't recall any change in epidemiology after cell phones became common.

As for diseases with a long latency period, there's no rational explanation for why non-ionizing EM radiation might cause them. OTOH, for all we know cellphones help convert the alpha helices into beta pleated sheets in the PrP(C) protein and in a few years we'll have the zombie apocalypse as a variant of CJD develops in a large percentage of the population. Reality tends to be more boring than that though. (Plus disease susceptibility is a bell curve, so the least resistant people would show symptoms long before most people did.)

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[Yamioni]

Dear ColdWetDog,

This letter is sent to formally inform you that your reply on the site slashdot (henceforth: 'site') in response to the article '"Wi-Fi Refugees" Shelter in West Virginia Mountains' (henceforth: 'article') is deleterious and defamatory to a the motion picture The Usual Suspects (henceforth: 'motion picture') in that it implicates the motion picture in the deaths of viewers of the motion picture. We represent the rights holders to the motion picture, and are requesting that you cease and desist in your actions. The offending section of you reply is as follows.

It probably doesn't cause anything above the noise floor of people dying from the Usual Suspects.

If this request is not met, necessary legal precautions will be taken to ensure that you no longer harm the rights holders we repesent with your unfounded claims.

Sincerely,
The MPAA

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[Hognoxious]

If you can detect radio waves with an antenna and an electronic circuit, they're not going straight through

Doesn't follow. Your body isn't designed to work as antenna. Or at least, mine isn't. Detectors are specific. If your ears can't detect light, does that mean it's dark?

and they're not turning to heat.

Really? I thought anything with a resistance heats up if you pass a current through it.

CS master and you don't know Ohm's law?

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Sort of playing the devil's advocate here, but a seemingly tiny, tiny increase in certain cancers across a large enough affected population could still be an unacceptable increase in absolute terms. It all depends on what tiny, tiny is and how large the population is.

Sure, but you also have to look at the benefits of having e.g. cell phones, i.e. the income side of the equation. For example, the death toll from automobile accidents is anything but trivial, but that's not to say that people would take kindly to a ban on driving. People obviously don't see the risk outweighing the benefits in that case and I suspect they'd say the same thing when it comes to their cell phones (esp. since the risks seem much smaller than driving).

Re:Sure, maybe these guys are crazy...

[moonbender]

That's a good argument to make. On a purely analytical level, I can see two differences between the death toll from automobile accidents and from an environmental factor such as (allegedly, for the sake of argument) cell phones.

First, car accidents are an exceptional scenario, during normal operations of a car, no deaths results from accidents since no accidents occur. On the other hand, cell phone radiation (allegedly, for the sake of argument, etc.) causes harm during normal operations. In this, it is comparable to car-related emissions (e.g. NOx, particle matter) which affect people in urban areas with few ways of avoiding them. I'm not so sure that this difference is all that meaningful, since I guess it's fair to say that in the big, statistical picture, car accidents are part of "normal operations" just as much as emissions are.

Second, individuals have a much deeper control over the risks due to car accidents. You can chose not to drive a car, watch the road carefully, and so on. To be sure, a huge risk remains, certainly much bigger than even the steepest cell phone radiation risks dreamt up by some people. Nevertheless, environmental factors are much harder to control yourself -- short of moving --, due to their ubiquitary nature. I think a fair argument can be made that these kinds of risks outside of individual control warrant particular attention. Again, not so much the cell phone thing, but other kinds of environment factors such as the car emissions.

Logical treatment.

[UncHellMatt]

Really the best remedy would be homeopathy. What better way to treat an imagined allergy than an imagined cure?

Re:Logical treatment.

[KendyForTheState]

Jim Jones had the cure... too bad they missed that boat!

Re:Logical treatment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Proposing homeopathy as a cute - even ad a placebo - legitimises it and risks bolstering its perception as medicine.

This in turn may cause people to seek it out in place of real medicine, causing harm to them. The notion that a member of the medical community would propose homeopathy for any reasin is disgusting.

Re:Logical treatment.

[gfxguy]

I'm glad you're so smart and have studied the issue so well that you can determine that it's simply not possible that a human being, whose nervous system runs on electrical impulses, couldn't possibly be affected by electromagnetic fields.

I'm not really defending these people - I make no claims to be affected, and I'm sure most of them are hypochondriacs, but isn't it possible that, out of over 300 million people in the U.S., some of them might actually be more sensitive to the effects of electromagnetic fields than you?

Re:Logical treatment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really want her to have sex with another chick? We don't even know if she's hawt.

Re:Logical treatment.

[LateArthurDent]

I'm not really defending these people - I make no claims to be affected, and I'm sure most of them are hypochondriacs, but isn't it possible that, out of over 300 million people in the U.S., some of them might actually be more sensitive to the effects of electromagnetic fields than you?

No, at least now how they describe it.

They only complain about man-made electromagnetic fields. The Earth has this HUGE magnetic field, maybe you've heard of it. The Sun is positively bombarding us with electromagnetic radiation. Basically, the amount energy from man-made electromagnetic radiation you're exposed to on a regular basis is insignificant compared to the natural kinds. The only difference is that the man-made contains ordered signals instead of being purely random noise. It's limited to particular frequencies instead of being at a broader spectrum. These people moved to a place containing a large number of radio telescopes whose purpose is to, wait for it...detect electromagnetic signals.

Apparently only man-made EM can trigger these people's allergies, which pretty much means that what these people are claiming is literally impossible. In addition, every single study done so far has shown that when you tell these people that you turned off the source of EM they think is the cause of their problem, they get better. Even if you lie to them about it, and the thing is still on. Similarly, if you tell them that you turned a device on, they'll suddenly start getting their headaches, even though nothing was turned on.

Now, if you tell me that in a population of billions, there are some humans that are sensitive to electromagnetic fields in such a way that makes them good at finding north...I'm willing to believe that and run some tests. Sounds plausible and interesting.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to open a Web store. I'm not opposed to separating idiots from their money.

Re:Logical treatment.

[d4fseeker]

While it's true that our nervous system runs partially with electrochemical interactions (note the _chemical_ part in that, we do not have conductors in the brain), other parts are plainly chemical.
However for a purely electrical interaction to work you need a receptor, an antenna, which has to be at least a fraction the size of the signal band and made out of a conductor. Now, a lot of our brain works with ions (K+,Na+,Cl-) but these are too small to gather any amount of electricity that could trigger a signal (50mV if I recall correctly)

While I do not say it is impossible for our brain to react to (electro)magnetical signals (a lot of animals have highly attuned magnetic receivers, and we might aswell have some of that capability remaining within our mysterious brain), most of the so-called "Wifi headache" I have encountered could be easily traced back to employees sitting the whole day in front of (often poor-quality) LCD screens, emitting a stimulating bright light, and sit the whole evening in front of the TV while texting.

After you have convinced said people that it's a stress-related headache and given them some time to relax and enjoy nature the headaches disappear.
If you live without electronics, you are usually no longer bound by overly tight schedules and 3min delays but can take the time you need.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm... No?

Re:Logical treatment.

[gfxguy]

Apparently only man-made EM can trigger these people's allergies, which pretty much means that what these people are claiming is literally impossible.

Is it? Suppose any people who were sensitive to the naturally occurring EMF were filtered out by evolution? Suppose people are insensitive up to a certain level, but the tiniest fraction over that level starts to have an effect, and on some people more than others? I'm not suggesting it causes cancer, or even causes headaches, but there's a lot of evidence suggesting that it can affect mood, and some people suggest it can affect sleep.

Again, I'm not defending these people because, like most of the readers here, I really doubt their claims... but it surely seems like it's at least possible that people can be affected by EMFs... not like turning a switch on and off, but overall mood.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Belial6]

The problem is that they are claiming that they are only claiming to be affected by electromagnetic fields that they have been informed about. The symptoms disappear when they are around electromagnetic fields that they don't know about.

Re:Logical treatment.

[HawaiianToast]

Pray to god? Either way..

Re:Logical treatment.

[LateArthurDent]

Is it?

Yes, it is.

Suppose any people who were sensitive to the naturally occurring EMF were filtered out by evolution?

What I tried to say in my post is that there's essentially no difference. That's like saying that some people might be allergic to showers, but not rain. Oooh, the rain drops are more organized when they come out of the shower head. It doesn't matter, it's still water.

Again, I'm not defending these people because, like most of the readers here, I really doubt their claims... but it surely seems like it's at least possible that people can be affected by EMFs... not like turning a switch on and off, but overall mood.

Maybe, but that's not what they're saying. They're saying they get affected by wifi and cell towers and nothing else. That's like the showerhead vs. rain example. It's stupidly insane.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Muad'Dave]

If their argument were true, they would be unable to function during the day. The sun provides about 1000 W/m^2 peak power density at the Earth's surface - that's 100x the Maximum Permissible Exposure limit for uncontrolled access of 1 mW/cm^2 as defined by the FCC (assuming we use the same limit that applies at the top of their scale, 100 GHz).

For WiFi, allowing for a 100 mW 2450 MHz transmitter into a (generous) 3 dBi rubber ducky antenna, the power density falls below the 1 mW/cm^2 limit 5.5 cm from the antenna. To reach the same power density as the sun, you'd have to be that same 5.5 cm away from a 20 Watt 2450 MHz transmitter.

Assumptions: Yes, I assume that all of the sun's radiation falls under the same RF exposure limit. There is some RF that is low enough in frequency to be covered by limits under 100 GHz, but not that much. Also, the MPE is based on SAR, which is frequency-dependent.

Re:Logical treatment.

[zazzel]

That comment just made me google "homeopathic emergency room video" again. Love it :-)

Re:Logical treatment.

[gfxguy]

Like I said, I don't really believe these people, I just believe some people are sensitive to EMF. What does sensitive mean? It doesn't necessarily mean not being able to function; it doesn't necessarily mean getting headaches, or cancer, or any other serious physical manifestations... but there are plenty of cases of people having mood and sleep patterns affected. Wifi may not be strong enough... but that doesn't mean that some people aren't affected, in some way, by EMF.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Muad'Dave]

I sure am. After exposure to as little as 500 W/cm^2 for an hour I develop red patches on my skin. Longer exposure times lead to blistering and painful exfoliation.

Sunburn sucks.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a brilliant idea. A portable cure could be a wifi-enabled cellphone with a flat battery :-)

Re:Logical treatment.

[thomst]

I'm not really defending these people - I make no claims to be affected, and I'm sure most of them are hypochondriacs, but isn't it possible that, out of over 300 million people in the U.S., some of them might actually be more sensitive to the effects of electromagnetic fields than you?

Basically, the amount energy from man-made electromagnetic radiation you're exposed to on a regular basis is insignificant compared to the natural kinds.

Not necessarily.

When my folks first moved to the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio in 1971, they rented a house the back yard of which abutted the fence around the transmission towers of WHIO-FM. My younger brother mounted speakers on the walls of his bedroom and we could clearly hear WHIO's programming through them 24 hours a day, regardless of whether the power to my brother's stereo was on or off.

"Insignificant?" I don't theeng so, Queekstraw. 50,000 watts at a distance of, say, 150 feet (and I'm being generous here) is a non-trivial amount of EM in anybody's world.

Four or five orders of magnitude greater than your neighbor's WiFi router, but still ...

Re:Logical treatment.

[Darinbob]

For instance I heard a quote from a family that their new smart meter was causing them problems and they could even hear it make noise on their baby monitor. Wait... a baby monitor that uses RF also? So infrequent RF from a device you hate must be evil but always-on RF from a device you like is ok.

Re:Logical treatment.

[JoeMerchant]

Maybe, but that's not what they're saying. They're saying they get affected by wifi and cell towers and nothing else. That's like the showerhead vs. rain example. It's stupidly insane.

Take a large enough population sample, and you'll find people who have a problem from showerheads that have no problem with naturally occuring rain... actually, that particular example is pretty easy to explain, showerheads spew "safe" water from the treatment plant containing fairly large quantities of chlorine / ammonia (gasp!) flouride, and God knows what-all.

Cell towers vs natural EM is also pretty distinct, cell towers emit in a focused band with much stronger patterning - more likely to find some weird resonance than the white noise coming from solar flares... not saying that I think it's common or that we're all suffering from it, but I wouldn't have to adjust my world view much if it was discovered that a certain (very very small) subset of the population really was affected.

Re:Logical treatment.

[lgw]

Mordo says "physics does not work that way!". Seriously, EM just doesn't do that. People are just much better at seeing patterns than nature is a creating them, so we get this nonsense, trutherism, and clouds that look like animals.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Zeromous]

I am not defending these people but your analogy is broke:

I can stand in the rain, and in a shower, but if I stand in front of a firehose I'm going to go flying. If I stand in steam, I get burnt. If I stand in a shower too long I might get hypothermia, or if I drink too much I might... In this analogy I see plenty of room for uncertainty surrounding conditions of exposure.

That said, they are batshiat crazy, since the Universe is the firehose, and we're standing right in front of it. Wouldn't it be interesting if somehow it could be discovered that low-power EMF (ie atmospheric pressure water) was the culprit due to some unique properties, though?

I'm not prepared to say we know everything, but clearly there's way more science behind its safety than these people are willing to admit. I'm going to go with hypochondria.

Re:Logical treatment.

[LateArthurDent]

When my folks first moved to the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio in 1971, they rented a house the back yard of which abutted the fence around the transmission towers of WHIO-FM. My younger brother mounted speakers on the walls of his bedroom and we could clearly hear WHIO's programming through them 24 hours a day, regardless of whether the power to my brother's stereo was on or off.

Congratulations, you just discovered electromagnetic induction. If your body happened to be a pretty good conductor and formed complete circuits (like your radio), that energy might affect you in a similarly significant way. You don't have copper coils as part of your organs, though. Did you ever get skin burns from all that EM? Because the fusion generator in the sky that we call the Sun is so strong that it will give you that if you stand under its light. My electric toothbrush charges via induction, because it's not a good idea to have unshielded conductors in the device I'm dunking under water and putting in my mouth. Being around that energy is safe, even as other devices use Faraday's Law to draw power from it.

I will, however, agree with you that under the situation you speak of we're starting to talk about non-trivial amounts of energy. This is not comparable to your wifi router or your cell phone, as you yourself have stated. At this point detailed blind studies are warranted. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if it turned out that it increased your risk to certain conditions. That risk is going to be smaller than the increased risk of cancer from being exposed to sunlight.

All of this is ignoring the fact that studies have been performed with the nutjobs who believe wifi routers are giving them headaches. And they confirmed that these people are not susceptible to what they think they are. I'm not saying they're liars and pretenders, but they're either misinterpreting the cause of their pain or suffering from hypochondria.

Re:Logical treatment.

[LateArthurDent]

I can stand in the rain, and in a shower, but if I stand in front of a firehose I'm going to go flying. If I stand in steam, I get burnt. If I stand in a shower too long I might get hypothermia, or if I drink too much I might... In this analogy I see plenty of room for uncertainty surrounding conditions of exposure.

That said, they are batshiat crazy, since the Universe is the firehose, and we're standing right in front of it.

You're right. In my defense, I used that analogy only after already stating that the amount of energy contained in the EM field these people are complaining about is far less than the amount of background EM, naturally. I'm not arguing that I can't harm you with EM. I can burn you with high energy microwaves pretty easily, but that's not what these people are saying is happening to them.

I'm not prepared to say we know everything, but clearly there's way more science behind its safety than these people are willing to admit. I'm going to go with hypochondria.

There are some things that I feel are a pretty safe bet until somebody proves to me otherwise. Once I first heard of these people, I thought it was a pretty safe bet (about as safe as it gets, I would bet my life on the odds) that it was hypochondria. Now the results are already in, and there's no more uncertainty about it, at all. There have been plenty of studies that prove these people can't tell when a device they complain about is on or off.

I'm not talking about generic safety of the things. However, these people do NOT get headaches and tingly feelings as a result of wifi routers and cell phones.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Jimbookis]

Yes. I saw a doco on a homeopathic emergency ward recently...

Re:Logical treatment.

[thomst]

When my folks first moved to the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio in 1971, they rented a house the back yard of which abutted the fence around the transmission towers of WHIO-FM. My younger brother mounted speakers on the walls of his bedroom and we could clearly hear WHIO's programming through them 24 hours a day, regardless of whether the power to my brother's stereo was on or off.

Congratulations, you just discovered electromagnetic induction. If your body happened to be a pretty good conductor and formed complete circuits (like your radio), that energy might affect you in a similarly significant way.

It wasn't a radio. It was an 8-track cassette player. The RF energy from WHIO's towers was powerful enough to move the magnets in my brother's speakers sufficiently to produce a clearly audible signal.

Again: non-trivial.

I will, however, agree with you that under the situation you speak of we're starting to talk about non-trivial amounts of energy. This is not comparable to your wifi router or your cell phone, as you yourself have stated. At this point detailed blind studies are warranted. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if it turned out that it increased your risk to certain conditions. That risk is going to be smaller than the increased risk of cancer from being exposed to sunlight.

Glad to see that you've already determined the outcome of these "detailed blind studies".

All of this is ignoring the fact that studies have been performed with the nutjobs who believe wifi routers are giving them headaches. And they confirmed that these people are not susceptible to what they think they are. I'm not saying they're liars and pretenders, but they're either misinterpreting the cause of their pain or suffering from hypochondria.

In all seriousness, we agree on this point. My argument was not with the baselessness of the tinfoil hatters' fears. It was with the parent poster's blanket assertion that "Basically, the amount energy from man-made electromagnetic radiation you're exposed to on a regular basis is insignificant compared to the natural kinds."

That's a statement that is generally true. True enough to apply to the vast, vast majority of /. readers - but not to all of us.

And, in that, it's like most sweeping assertions, n'est-ce pas?

Re:Logical treatment.

[Man Eating Duck]

but there's a lot of evidence suggesting that it can affect mood

A lot of evidence? I have never seen even one study that suggests WiFi can affect humans at all (as your parent poster notes, several studies indicate that sufferers can't even tell when a vastly more powerful mobile phone is switched on nearby, much less a meagre WiFi access point). Care to cite some papers? I have access to most scientific journals, don't be shy.

I *do* believe that these people really are anxious around radio sources, and that it's a real problem for them which should be taken seriously, but it's not physiological.

On a side note, of course I know that man-made EM radiation can be very harmful. Try taking a nap in front of a long range radar, put your head in a microwave oven, or stare at even a minuscule laser. That's not what we're discussing here :)

Re:Logical treatment.

[Anonymous Coward]

It could be a weak but cumulative effect that they associate rightly with EMF. For instance I can see 60hz office building lights flicker and it makes me sick to work with them on, but I can't reliably tell the difference between 120hz and 10k+ hz lighting. I still feel like the 120hz light is 'weak' somehow. Over time does 120hz make me feel sick like 60hz does even if I can't consciously see the flickering? Maybe a little bit? Who knows, but something like that could certainly be happening with these people that are 'hurt' by EMF.

They may get hypersensitized and react irrationally to the perceived presence of EMF because it has a long term affect which they have correctly associated with it. In other words the immediate symptoms may be imaginary, but with real long-term symptoms. This would take a lot of effort to test scientifically and I doubt it's been done.

Re:Logical treatment.

[0xABADC0DA]

They only complain about man-made electromagnetic fields. The Earth has this HUGE magnetic field, maybe you've heard of it.

There is a HUGE amount of noise in the world, yet with an annoy-o-tron in your office it's just a tiny man-made noise that drives you batty.

In addition, every single study done so far has shown that when you tell these people that you turned off the source of EM they think is the cause of their problem, they get better.

When I tell you I removed the annoy-o-tron(s) from your office you feel better right away, if you believe me. You also can't tell me reliably if I actually removed them or not (at least not unless they go off again), or how many are hidden in your office and around your home. Maybe they are just in your imagination, unlike that spider in your hair.

I just shot down your argument. Whether these people are actually affected by radio waves or not is a different matter, but you reasoning is not valid.

Re:Logical treatment.

[formfeed]

Really the best remedy would be homeopathy. What better way to treat an imagined allergy than an imagined cure?

Thanks for the hint. Homeopathy sounds great!
I will put a bucket of water next to my wifi card and leave it there overnight for it to get energized. Then I will fill a second bucket with water and add a drop from the first one. At the next full moon -or is a new moon better to ward off radiation?- I will dip a silver pin into the now diluted energized water and hold it into the opening of an inverted blue glass bottle. While the pin heats up to body temperature, the glass bottle can absorb the essence of the wifi-water. Fill the bottle with water and cork it (natural cork of course). One drop in the morning taken with luke warm green tea should protect you from your neighbors wifi for at least 12 hours.

For a more complete wifi-desensitizing I am planning to open an electro-allergy sufferer camp: 4 weeks of intense treatment, sweat lodges, outdoor sleep-healing on natural forest ground, guaranteed no electricity on site! Two daily treatments with wifi-water and a six month protective supply after successful decontamination. Only $6500

Should I copy this over to kickstarter?

Re:Logical treatment.

[gfxguy]

I didn't say wifi, I said EMF.... and it would have to be at substantial levels. If you have a high amp circuit that's not properly grounded in your house... provided you sit close enough to it, it can affect your mood. Not give you headaches, not make limbs fall off or eyeballs explode... a very subtle effect. Google electromagnetism affects mood (I've seen some suggest it can affect sleep patterns, too).

I don't really believe these people, I'm suggesting, though, that some people might be subtly more sensitive to high EMF. Who knows what combination one might need to make it happen... old dental implants, rods or screws from an operation, a metal plate in the head... how can you be so sure that absolutely nobody is affected at all by EM fields?

All you nay sayers keep talking about how we're already subjected to massive amounts... but then so are our electronics, and they can be disrupted by relatively little more. We're not electronics, but we do have electro-chemical nervous system... are you sure nothing could affect that?

Re:Logical treatment.

[grouchomarxist]

I think you found a business model.

Re:Logical treatment.

[adri]

You've fallen for the oldest fallacy in the book - "it's not logically possible, thus it's not possible."

Please read up about AM versus FM and what the "experts" were saying about how FM couldn't possibly work. What changed? Our understanding of communication and information theory.

It's possible some people are sensitive to EM; the fact we haven't established it doesn't at all rule it out as a possibility. It just means we haven't figured out how. What we can say right now is that there's no currently demonstrated link between "health issues" and "EMR". What good scientists should be doing (and are, if they can get funding) is research into why people suffer - looking not only for whether they are or not (ie, if there's a real link), but what other factors (eg psychological) come into play. But you have to be careful - you may end up drawing a conclusion that it's "all psychological" when in fact there may be a slim minority who can detect certain kinds of EM. They're just needles in the haystack of results.

The key thing here is that being right isn't "right". The key thing here is that people believe they're suffering from something, and they've externalised their cause to certain kinds of EMR. Whether they're sensitive or not isn't relevant - the fact they suffer from this is what is relevant. The thing to not do is call them crazy, or loopy, or label them in any way. The key thing to do is to not categorise them all the same.

Blah, why'd I do that psych degree again..

Re:Logical treatment.

[Anonymous Coward]

They probably weren't moving-magnet speakers (do those even exist?). The RF energy moved the coils of wire attached to the speaker cones.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Hognoxious]

If you have a high amp circuit that's not properly grounded in your house... provided you sit close enough to it, it can affect your mood. Not give you headaches, not make limbs fall off or eyeballs explode... a very subtle effect.

For 100 bucks I'll sell you a yellow crystal that will absorb the toxic emanations. And I'll throw in a purple one that cures gullibility at half price!

Re:Logical treatment.

[tehcyder]

FFS it's a simplified day-to-day analogy not an exact one-to-one equivalence mapping of EMF onto water.

Re:Logical treatment.

[Zeromous]

You're on /. buddy. You have 6digits, you know the drill. It's like you're a car and you're in a traffic jam complaining to the cars in front of you that you're in a hurry and just want to get home.

Check the validity

[mehrotra.akash]

I'm not sure if its practically possible, but if it is then, without the knowledge of these people, temporarily shut down the telescopes and blast the town with WiFi frequencies for a few days.

You'll find out if there's any truth in their statements

Re:Check the validity

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is, it would require a scientific mind, which you won't find here. This whole thread of batshit insane prejudice presents itself as evidence.

Even my mother complains about wifi/3g frequencies. Now you'd like to trash her too, just to justify your own limited world-perception.

Weak. You are the doctors telling Semmelweiss he's doing wrong in washing his hands after digging through corpses, before delivering babies.

Re:Check the validity

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is, it would require a scientific mind, which you won't find here. This whole thread of batshit insane prejudice presents itself as evidence.

Even my mother complains about wifi/3g frequencies. Now you'd like to trash her too, just to justify your own limited world-perception.

There is no "batshit insane prejudice" here that is passing itself off as science. Instead you will find... science passing itself off as science.

Electromagnetic sensitivity has never been demonstrated in blind tests (i.e. "we are going to turn an electromagnetic field generator at random, tell us when it hurts.") Our extensive study of electromagnetism and physiology strongly precludes any possibility of genuine sensitivity. Occam's razor leads us to the conclusion that it is psychosomatic. No less troubling for those afflicted, mind you, but calls for a different treatment tactic.

I am sorry about your mother. You need to be a good child for her right now. She helped you when you felt there were monsters under the bed, and now you are functional in society. Now she needs you to help her get the help she needs so she can be functional in society too. Get her to a psychologist (and I am not trying to imply that she is through and through crazy, but she still needs help).

Re:Check the validity

[YoopDaDum]

There's no need for that. A microwave at close distance leaks more power in the WiFi band than a WiFi station at a couple meters of distance. And I don't remember people like this rolling on the floor in pain because they stood in front of the microwave while heating something ;)

The FDA limit for a microwave oven is 5 mW per cm^2 at 2 inches. At 20 inches the FDA web page on microwaves says this would be 1/100th times below, so 50 uW/cm^2. Most microwave use a frequency right in the middle of the WiFi band (same freq then).

A WiFi station transmits 100 mW total. Assuming an isotropic antenna (not true, but close enough), at 1 m it is spread over a sphere of 1m or radius, or a surface of more than 125000 cm^2, so ~0.8 uW/cm^2.

I believe it is very unlikely that microwave makers over-engineer their leakage prevention by a factor of more than 60. So you're likely to get much more radiation power by waiting close to your oven than being at 1m from a WiFi station. And of course if you're WiFi sensitive, you're likely to stay very far from WiFi devices, which would make the difference much much bigger.

But hey, let's not get rational thinking get in the way of a dramatic story ;)

Re:Check the validity

[quacking duck]

Not to suggest any credence to their claims, but microwaves aren't operating 24x7, while many wifi and other transmitters often are.

For example, you can be exposed for several minutes to the horrible electronic hum from an old CRT TV, and not get a headache, but could get one from an even less-audible hum from a cheap CFL light over an hour or two.

Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[Chirs]

I personally have no problems with electronics...I work in front of a computer all day.

That said, it's been shown that cell phone radiation can cause brain activity. Is it such a stretch to imagine that under some circumstances some people could experience that brain activity in a negative way?

I can't find a reference, but I seem to remember my psychology class covering people that could get skin burns because they were touched with a piece of metal that they *thought* was hot, but really wasn't. If the mind can do that, it seems plausible it could cause other symptoms.

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't find a reference, but I seem to remember my psychology class covering people that could get skin burns because they were touched with a piece of metal that they *thought* was hot, but really wasn't. If the mind can do that, it seems plausible it could cause other symptoms.

Isn't this more of a perceived sensation of pain as opposed to an actual burn? Tricking your brain into thinking you got hurt I can buy... tricking your brain into destroying skin cells seems a little bit more farfetched.

In this same way, I could see taking a sinister looking device with a red LED on the front that lights up and hums when you press a button, and saying it's a radio gun that can zap her with waves... it could actually cause her pain if she truly believed it would. However, it's not going to burn her skin or set her on fire. (Unless you actually *were* blasting her with high powered microwaves...)

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[alienzed]

Isn't it more likely that those people were allergic to the metal?

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[MrQuacker]

Are you sure that's not just an X-files plot?

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's a stretch. These people claim that they can feel the radiomagnetic waves, which is trivial to test and was tested under double blind studies. It's BS.

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, it's been shown that cell phone radiation can cause brain activity. Is it such a stretch to imagine that under some circumstances some people could experience that brain activity in a negative way?

Inverse square law.

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[MoonBuggy]

Totally impossible? No. That's why we have scientific tests and double-blind studies; until I see a paper published in a respected journal indicating a positive result (the case study alluded to by TFA is seriously short on details, and apparently disputed), however, I'm happy to write this off as a psychological issue.

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[Omnifarious]

I can't find a reference, but I seem to remember my psychology class covering people that could get skin burns because they were touched with a piece of metal that they *thought* was hot, but really wasn't. If the mind can do that, it seems plausible it could cause other symptoms.

Yes, the brain of someone convinced of a fallacy regarding their health is capable of making them feel all kinds of symptoms. But it wasn't the piece of metal that caused the skin burns.

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[JaneTheIgnorantSlut]

That said, it's been shown that cell phone radiation can cause brain activity.

Considering some of the folks I see on cell phones, I suspect the radiation stops brain activity.

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, it's been shown that cell phone radiation can cause brain activity. Is it such a stretch to imagine that under some circumstances some people could experience that brain activity in a negative way?

It has been my observation that cell phones tend to cause brain inactivity, and that much of the brain activity applied to using cell phones is being applied in a negative way.

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[Anonymous Coward]

You watch fringe too? :_

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[cvtan]

Reading a book can cause brain activity. Even reading Slashdot can cause a few neurons to light up!

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I'm somebody who actually studied the subject. Quantum physics and everything.

And of course it influences their brains. By heating them by 0.2 0.3 degrees Celsius. But: So does the sun!! ^^
And if you ever were out in the blazing sun, you know it doesn't just heat it by a mere 0.3 degrees! Actually its power is nearly exactly a thousand times higher than that of a cell phone / wifi antenna.

Just like the sun changes our mood, so can, in theory, any other EM field.

But if such a ridiculously low field causes people to suffer, how horribly would they suffer under radiation so strong, it actually begins to ionize things and causes them to brown! ^^

They would be long dead by now.

Then again, there is a disease called "sun allergy".

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[Anonymous Coward]

Holding a transmitter with a range of 1+ miles up against your skill can cause a very small, but non-zero change in scanning results.

Moving the devices 3 inches away removes this.

Unless you're sticking the wifi antenna in your ear or your butt, it does not have the requisite power to even penetrate your skin.

Re:Doesn't need to be ionizing to have an effect

[TxRv]

That said, it's been shown that cell phone radiation can cause brain activity.

[citation needed]

I am glad ...

[reasterling]

... that they finally found a place were they can live their lives in peace. It may be an invented illness but it is obviously affecting their lives. Living in this place may just be a 'locational placebo', but if they are happy and can live their lives then so be it.

Ah, good memories...

[djbckr]

I used to live in Green Bank (the area noted) as my father worked there at the observatory in the 70's. A wonderful place with intelligent scientists and friendly people.

Too bad this weirdo makes it sound like a freak show.

Oh dear.

[LWATCDR]

They do need help but EM is not their problem. These people are really sick but it is not EMR causing it.
Nobody tell her but she is getting hit by much higher levels of EMR from those lamps and the sun than Wifi would ever exposer her too. What is worse is she is getting hit with a lot more ionzing radiation there in WV with all that Granite around her.
At some point it is just so sad for these poor people.

Re:Oh dear.

[Jmc23]

except you are comparing the equivalence of white noise (soothing) to dissonance. Ever played a data tape back as audio?

Re:Oh dear.

[LWATCDR]

Really? Are you just nuts or kidding. Humans can not sense EM in the that range except by heating and that follows the inverse square law. I dare you to overlay a high bandwidth dissonance signal over a far ir source in the milliwatt range and have any human detect the difference!

Re:Oh dear.

[Jmc23]

I never said tjeu could, i was just pointing out that the comparison is useless. As for what humans can detect, well, there's a long tail to everythong. So who knows? After all it's clear science doesn't stidy the long tail, we even purposefulu drop outliers from oiur data/

I mightt not be able to sense things with the light sensitive cells on my slin, but what about someone else? What about the emf sensitive cells that humans have that most don't seem to use?

The cool thing about the human body is they're all created differently and the stuff you learn on anatomy doesn't apply to every one, hearts are in different locations, rib and vertenrae counts can be diferent, muscle origins and quantoties, etc...

I bumped into a recently blind jock once who lived his whole live extremely physical and pushed his body to the limits. I was extremelu suprised when he asked me where the sun was. This/person who had extreme control pver his body cpuldn't feel the sun on his skin! We all have different sensitivities and trying to say certain things are impossible is just dumb when dealing with the wide vqriety of humans put there.

I admot i was eqsily skeptical of science becaise i was in the long tail for lots of things, so constantly reading that what i could percieve was impossible just nailed home the fact that theu don't really understand the generaloties that they talk about. For example, they ignore the fact that what our senses are capable of perceiving, like single photons, and what we interpret after filtering and assembling are two different things.

Re:Oh dear.

[Hognoxious]

I admot i was eqsily skeptical of science becaise i was in the long tail for lots of things, so constantly reading that what i could percieve was impossible just nailed home the fact that theu don't really understand the generaloties that they talk about.

Nicely played, sir!

[Golf clap]

Re:Oh dear.

[Jmc23]

not sure if this is sarcastic, but pwrhaps you missed my tag line? I can't see what I'm typing until i press submi t, and trying to edit something under this browser is hell because the cursor doesn' t line up. oh well, that's android hell/

I ought to invent a drug for this!

[EmagGeek]

I could make a killing! An imaginary drug to treat an imaginary illness. It'd be like taking candy from a baby!

Re:I ought to invent a drug for this!

[lgw]

Have you somehow missed the entire homeopathy industry? Believe me, you've been beaten to this punch.

fake em out

[Danathar]

Good Lord. Has anybody taken a wifi base station walked up to these people, claimed it was on just to watch them scream in agony only to show them they had not ACTUALLY turned it on?

I would LOVE to see that.

Of course...You can't rationally argue a person out of a position they did not rationally get themselves into (quote by somebody...can't remember who) so I'd guess they would deny that it was actually off when they screamed in pain.

Re:fake em out

[Anonymous Coward]

BUT... it was just SPEWING electromagnetic radiation. She saw it with her own eyes!

Re:fake em out

[Attila Dimedici]

Something like that has been done. There was a case where a cellphone tower was put in and someone near it complained about how it had caused him/her all sorts of physical woes. My recollection is that it turned out that it had not yet been powered up. However, it might have been that they had turned it on for tests and then shut it down and by the time the guy learned that it was there it had been turned off for several months.
I do know they have done several tests where people who claim this sensitivity have been asked to identify when a EM source was on or off, and their report of symptoms had no relationship with whether or not the EM source was emitting EM radiation.

Re:fake em out

[Jason Levine]

As another poster noted, a company once built a cell tower and people complained about all of the bad things it did to them... until the company informed them that they hadn't turned the tower on yet.

Doesn't matter, though, a side effect of this disease is immunity to reason and logic.

Re:fake em out

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. I recall a interview done with one of these people where they did just that (it was a camera, but the same idea holds). The "victim" claimed that even though it was off, they were still sensitive to the residual radiation it was emitting.

At which point one realizes they're clearly imagining the condition.

Re:fake em out

[black soap]

That story has been referred to several times already, but I don't remember anyone giving enough details that the veracity of the story could be checked out.

Wear a hat!

[KendyForTheState]

So what... she couldn't find any tinfoil?

FFS RTF Links - Radio is not banned there

[OzPeter]

The first link in TFA is all about an additional approval process required for transmitters in the region so that they do not adversely affect the Radio Telescopes. The second link says basically the same thing.

Come back Taco .. we miss you.

Re:FFS RTF Links - Radio is not banned there

[Anonymous Coward]

You think he did any better? He didn't, stop your blubbering.

Re:FFS RTF Links - Radio is not banned there

[ColdWetDog]

The first link in TFA is all about an additional approval process required for transmitters in the region so that they do not adversely affect the Radio Telescopes. The second link says basically the same thing.

Come back Taco .. we miss you.

We've had dupes for years. Now they're just in the same article. It's progress, you Luddite.

Re:FFS RTF Links - Radio is not banned there

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words the people that feel better because they don't live anywhere near radio transmitters are in fact living near radio transmitters and thus their feeling better has nothing to do with an absence of radio waves but is more likely due to another cause such as their disease being purely psychosomatic to begin with.

Re:FFS RTF Links - Radio is not banned there

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe Taco went to live there?

Re:FFS RTF Links - Radio is not banned there

[Anonymous Coward]

The first link in TFA is all about an additional approval process required for transmitters in the region so that they do not adversely affect the Radio Telescopes. The second link says basically the same thing.

More specifically fixed licensed transmitters. Unlicensed WiFi transmitters and their "booming" 0.25 watt signals are not restricted. Neither are much more powerful cell phones.

You see, the real problem is that for most people radio is simple black magic, they have no clue what it is or how it works. It's FM(frickin magic). Some people are afraid of black magic. Very afraid.

Re:FFS RTF Links - Radio is not banned there

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, because unless I'm reading the map wrong, I-81 runs through a good sized portion of that grid. Having just driven through there last weekend, I can say for certain that cell phone frequencies are not banned at least...

Need better shielding

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone needs to tell them that the only true protection from radio waves is at the bottom of the ocean - maybe the Mariana Trench just to be safe.

Re:Need better shielding

[trewornan]

It's important we make arrangements to protect people with this sort of sensitivity from the radio transmissions which make them ill. We should declare Bouvet Island radio transmission free for 500 miles in every direction and encourage them to move there. We could provide a surface ship to supply provisions and carry mail - perhaps it could be scheduled to call once every six or twelve months. I'd be pleased to chip in towards the costs of providing such a supply ship.

In other news...

[eagl]

In other tech news, crazy (technophobes,technophiles) found a way to (avoid,misuse) technology found in (your favorite tech here), conducting activities that resulted in (isolating them,harming people) in a surprisingly (ignorant,creepy) fashion.

The world responded with (shock,anger,compassion) for (1,2,5,30) minutes and then returned to their (pathetic lives,regularly scheduled programming).

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

+1

Radios are not banned there

[leighklotz]

Radio transmitters are not banned there. Licensed ham stations have minimal limitations: for example, the main amateur radio restriction is that it's not allowed without permission to establish a "beacon" (transmit-only) station, and those themselves are already limited to 28 MHz and up anywhere in the US.

Re:Radios are not banned there

[drinking12many]

like you said there are quite a few things not banned and on top of that even the banned items just dont magically stop at the "border" these people are nutzo

...she once lived in a shielded cage...

[kehren77]

Someone should tell her about tinfoil. She could venture out and see the world then and not be stuck in her faraday cage all day.

Someone isn't thinking things through...

[c]

Irony: In order to escape wireless emissions, people move to a place where a bunch of massive radio telescopes stand next door as proof that wireless emissions are everywhere.

Correlation isn't causality: moving from a populated area to the middle of nowhere and having your symptoms "disappear" proves that wireless emissions were the root of the problem.

Re:Someone isn't thinking things through...

[Anonymous Coward]

While these people are crazy, it's not really ironic. Think about it: not being able to stare at the Sun because it will fucking blind you is not the same as living next to a very large optical telescope designed to be sensitive to very, very faint sources of light.

Re:Someone isn't thinking things through...

[Anonymous Coward]

Aggh!! You sir, fail.

They complain that Wi-Fi frequencies are causing them problems. Things like microwave. Not radio. Not TV. Not pulsars. There are collaborating reports that these people do react to 2.4Gz.

There was a report on CBC (TV) here about a *few* kids in Ontario,Canada schools having problems with Wi-Fi. Headaches, anxiety, racing heart. Many would say, nothing to do with Wi-Fi. Initially, I agreed.

In the report, they took one person that said they always had a problem with Wi-Fi, microwaves and the like. They put him in a chair and had a handheld Wi-Fi transmitter. They measured his heart rate and reaction. They moved the transmitter around him and they would turn it on to level that is "well within limits" or turned it to 0. He wouldn't know. The transmitter stays lit and on in both cases. Whenever they turned it on, his HR would start to go up significantly and he would complain. As soon as they turn it off, it would start going down and he would relax.. He even reacted within a second that the transmitter was on or off!

Is it so weird that some people could have built-in antennas at wrong spots for wrong frequencies? My hypothesis is these people have just the right neutron lengths for body functions that act as an antenna for Wi-Fi. You may lampoon this all you want, but the report on TV, while not double-blind (the reporter knew in real time what the transmitter readout was), was good enough to signal that some people have problems with Wi-Fi.

Re:Someone isn't thinking things through...

[c]

> They complain that Wi-Fi frequencies are causing them problems.

Right. So you didn't RTFA? Particularly the part about the lady who claims to be so sensitive to EM that she avoids the use of electricity?

Anyhow, I don't discount the possibility that someone might have EM sensitivities. I'm just not going to take ad-hoc experiments with tiny sample sizes as "proof" anymore than I'm going to take the word of random self-diagnosing people.

Re:Someone isn't thinking things through...

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed], and not just the news report. We want to see the full story, the journal submission, we want to know what the methodology is and so on.

Re:Someone isn't thinking things through...

[CreatorOfSmallTruths]

Irony: In order to escape wireless emissions, people move to a place where a bunch of massive radio telescopes stand next door as proof that wireless emissions are everywhere.

Correlation isn't causality: moving from a populated area to the middle of nowhere and having your symptoms "disappear" proves that wireless emissions were the root of the problem.

you mean "doesn't prove", right ?

Re:Someone isn't thinking things through...

[c]

> you mean "doesn't prove", right ?

If you're reading it in the "serious voice", yes, that would be more appropriate. However, I was writing in the "snarky, sarcastic voice".

Re:Someone isn't thinking things through...

[CreatorOfSmallTruths]

Ah, I see now.

My bad, "voices" doesn't go through well in text form, that's why we have ...

Re:Someone isn't thinking things through...

[CreatorOfSmallTruths]

Ouch, I tried to use "<tags>" where it says "we have..."... sorry again

Sadly I don't think it's just your imagination....

[arcite]

Perhaps its precisely due to the internet that we have so many people acting on their neurotic tendencies. With 24/7 access to the 'net and the ability to look up any information desired, we can self-diagnose ourselves like never before. We're now so afraid of disease that we sterilize our homes (and ourselves) to such an extent that our own bodies immune system turns on us. We believe in conspiracy theories, listen to Internet bloggers, form social circles and 'friend' celebrity actors who promote ideologies based on nothing more than being critical of the status-quo (or for it). Critical through is thrown out the window in favor of demagoguery. Oh well, at least this set of self-diagnosed, technologically persecuted individuals can find peace among the dense Virginia forests, safe from harming wider society.

Sometimes I think I feel this

[mehrotra.akash]

Whenever I am maxing out my cheapo WiFi router, sometimes I can hear a very slight humming from the router

Similarly, if its very quiet, under certain conditions I can hear slight noises from my laptop (not the Fan or HDD, seems to come from the CPU), and sometimes from CRT TV's

I wonder if their issue is something like this

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[EmagGeek]

What you are hearing is subharmonic oscillation in a buck converter that is exceeding 50% duty cycle during a current spike.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Humming in what ought to be solid-state hardware is often improperly potted high frequency magnetic passives. Inductors, transformers, and suchlike widgetry. Get a bunch of fluctuating magnetic fields in close proximity, in wires that aren't properly potted, and you'll get some vibration.

CRTs could be doing the same thing(flyback transformer and friends), or could be electrostatic crackling(40Kv has a way of making itself heard sometimes...)

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[PPH]

Its probably magnetostriction.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's usually the power supplies in those devices. Solid state devices with no designed moving parts can still make noise. I have a crummy motherboard that makes high pitch chirps during high network activity. My samsung screen makes an audible whine in low-power mode when the standby LED blinks.

Though the sounds can be annoying, I wouldn't be surprised if the hypochondriacs believed they were "hearing" harmful EM radiation rather than the electronics themselves.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[kannibal_klown]

Whenever I am maxing out my cheapo WiFi router, sometimes I can hear a very slight humming from the router

Similarly, if its very quiet, under certain conditions I can hear slight noises from my laptop (not the Fan or HDD, seems to come from the CPU), and sometimes from CRT TV's

I wonder if their issue is something like this

When my 27" tube TV was on / running, it made a high-pitched noise that drove me nuts. My parents couldn't hear it, but my brothers and I could... I guess it was high enough to be beyond the adult-ear but within the child ear... like those weird ringtones the high schoolers supposedly use.

But yeh, some electric equipment can have a hum... even if the moving parts (HD and fans) are disable. For example, flourescent lights can sometimes hum.

But no, their problem is the hypocondria; some go far as to think it's causing mental / cancer issues. I believe there were some double-blind tests where the people were found to be just thinking it in their mind.

Then again, I'm sure there are those whose believe is so strong they present psycho-sematic responses.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[gnu-sucks]

It's just cheap components. The humming is extremely low frequency compared with the RF. Think 60 Hz vs 2400 MHz. There's nothing dangerous here, although I agree this is really annoying. You'll find it in lots of other electronics too.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you have "Feeling" and "Hearing" confused.

Not all electrical components are silent.

Also, self diagnoses is bad idea in general.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[Brannoncyll]

Yeah, I have always been able to hear when CRT televisions are on, even behind closed doors. Most people didn't believe me until I wore a blindfold and went out of the room while they turned the TV on or off. The high-pitched squealing gives me a headache. I can also hear those devices that send out high-frequency chirps to keep cats of people's yards.

There was one pub in Edinburgh that I could not go into, as they had an aging CRT television that drove me mad.

Now that I live in the city and CRT televisions and monitors have entered the history books I have a much higher quality of living.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[kannibal_klown]

Yeah, I have always been able to hear when CRT televisions are on, even behind closed doors...

Yeh, I can (or at least could) always tell that stuff to. But that one 27" was just... wow. Obnoxious loud. I returned it thinking something was wrong, the next one still had the whine but it was the same as the other / normal CRTs.

Now, I can't tell. There are no more CRTs in my house or at my work. Plus I'm older now so I might be passed the level where I can here stuff past a certain frequency. But I don't have any way to test well anymore.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[Anonymous Coward]

It's usually a ferromagnetic coil being driven by high(ish) frequency (but within audio band). Because it was assembled in the cheapest manner possible, the wires wrapped around the core are capable of slight movement, which as a result of electromagnetic interactions occurs at the drive frequency. See: Old TVs, Switchmode Power Supplies, (Disposable camera flash...I think)

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[kehren77]

Whenever I am maxing out my cheapo WiFi router, sometimes I can hear a very slight humming from the router

Similarly, if its very quiet, under certain conditions I can hear slight noises from my laptop (not the Fan or HDD, seems to come from the CPU), and sometimes from CRT TV's

I wonder if their issue is something like this

I can never hear those noises over the voices in my head.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[gknoy]

You could probably buy or build a sound generator from a kit that could produce arbitrary frequencies -- effectively, a home hearing test. I imagine the parts would be relatively cheap.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[compro01]

The router is a cheap switching power supply.

The laptop is probably a cheap ballast for the florescent backlight.

The CRT sound is a cheap flyback transformer and will sing at about 15.7 kilohertz, which is in the upper end of adult human hearing.

Re:Sometimes I think I feel this

[toddestan]

I have a Samsung monitor that started doing did exactly that. It turned out to be bad caps in the monitor. After it failed completely I pried it apart, saw the bad caps, replaced them, and the monitor has worked fine ever since with no whining.

An alternate solution for the afflicted:

[kheldan]

Dollar-store aluminum foil for headwear construction. Problem solved!

Worth a visit

[Anonymous Coward]

I visited the NRAO facility at Greenbank on their 50th Anniversary a few years ago. It was well worth the visit. The Byrd telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world and it's an impressive instrument. We couldn't use our digital cameras, or electronic film cameras, near the telescope, so they gave us souvenir disposable film cameras to use for pictures. All of that high tech equipment in the middle of nowhere gave me the impression that I'd wandered into a James Bond villain's lair. This was in the Fall and the drive out there with all of the foliage in bright colors was beautiful.

The radio quiet zone isn't just for Astronomers. It's also used by intelligence agencies, although it wasn't clear to me if it was for operational activities or just for R & D.

not so fast with the name calling

[Anonymous Coward]

before i say what i'm about to say; i work in QA with STB's. i work in an environment of many many electronic devices. my desk alone requires 8-12 power sockets to function. what i'm saying is a spend 8hrs, 5 days a week VOLUNTARILY exposed to a lot of EM emmissions...

that said i do think it's possibly insulting to write these guys off as loons. i certainly can "feel" when i'm around electronics, in the main it's not unpleasant but it's certainly there.

i'm of the age when being a teenager with mobile was a new thing, my friend had a nokia that i could predict was about to ring with about 80% accurancy when standing within a couple of meters of him when i happened. it was localised event, it was mildly painful (i'd say a short ping of pain in the center of my head) though brief.

that no one else could feel it didn't change that i could and that i don't suffer as badly as these people claim shouldn't mean they're crackpots.

i understand the difficulty for, what appears to be, the majority to even consider this possible, but from my experience it certainly is....

now whether these people are feeling anything more intense then i have and just being OTT about it all is another matter...

Can you hear the radio in their head....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can't, thank a crazy person. It wasn't long ago people thought others were crazy because they said they could hear the radio in their head. It wasn't long before people figured out that it was caused by mercury amalgam fillings and so dentists learned how to shape them different so that this would not happen.

There are all sorts of people in this world -- most are not "just like us" and it would be wise to see if there is something in their makeup that is acting like an antenna or otherwise making them susceptible to radio frequency radiation. Who knows, we might just learn something.

Re:Can you hear the radio in their head....

[Anonymous Coward]

Err, no:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_amalgam_controversy

I prescribe a daily dose of

[arcite]

sugar pills. Twice a day with distilled water.

I know the feeling

[kbdd]

I know the feeling perfectly well. I am myself allergic to idiots. Unfortunately, there is no "idiot silence" zone anywhere that I have heard of :( Anywhere I go, there is always an idiot willing to open his mouth...

Re:I know the feeling

[Anonymous Coward]

I know the feeling perfectly well. I am myself allergic to idiots. Unfortunately, there is no "idiot silence" zone anywhere that I have heard of :( Anywhere I go, there is always an idiot willing to open his mouth...

Fair enough, it IS kind of tough to get away from one's self.

Eh...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

While this alleged "sensitivity" has borne up quite poorly against basic double-blind testing, which makes me deeply doubtful of its existence, I do have to wonder what is going on when such a comparatively large number of people are exhibiting psychological phenomena strong enough that they will do things like hide out in a faraday cage, move, risk ridicule, etc.

Psych symptoms are real symptoms(albeit often not of what the patient thinks they are), so the prevalence of psych symptoms is worrisome. Given that the usual prescription for the EMI "sensitive" is "get rid of your electronic crap and move to the country", I have to wonder if there is some sort of connection with stress disorders induced by the (undoubtedly hard on you) pace of modern life, constant connectedness to assorted babble sources, and whatnot...

I used to be afraid of EM but not anymore

[rjforster]

Don't get me wrong, I'm terribly allergic to wifi, mobile phones, even a microwave oven being used next door but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter much. You see, I'm also allergic to neutrinos. Do you know how many of those things pass through my body every single second. Oh it causes me so much pain you just wouldn't believe. :-)

Re:I used to be afraid of EM but not anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's the neutrinos that keep the tigers away! ...on the small British island I live on.

Re:I used to be afraid of EM but not anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't tell me... the diodes down your left-hand side?

Re:I used to be afraid of EM but not anymore

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohh. Mr. Bennett you know not my pain. ;-)

Re:I used to be afraid of EM but not anymore

[drinking12many]

God I hate those things I have a terrible allergy to neutrinos but I take 3 or 4 benadryl and sleep it off until I feel better :)

so the parallel must be drawn

[nimbius]

between these people and southerners in the 1960's. Once desegregated, many of them simply moved to california to avoid equality entirely. I wonder if these mavericks arent simply attempting to escape the digital age entirely.

of course it should be said that this effort is largely to blame for california bearing the greatest number of hate groups in the united states according to the SPLC. what will happen to the people who flee progress and technology?

Re:so the parallel must be drawn

[Anti_Climax]

of course it should be said that this effort is largely to blame for california bearing the greatest number of hate groups in the united states according to the SPLC

Total, or per capita?

Re:so the parallel must be drawn

[Pfhorrest]

Moved to California to "avoid equality"?

California, the state that doesn't have a single majority race at all? Have the demographics changed that much since then?

Re:Literal meaning to "The circus is back in town"

[FredFredrickson]

Escape the radio waves! Go to the place that has nothing but some high tech telescopes! There's no radio waves here! Wait.. what's that? The telescopes are detecting radio waves from space? Quick!! ESCAPE REALITY!

I'm surprised

[beadfulthings]

In addition to being an area of "radio quiet," the area also incredibly scenic, loaded with state parks and national forests, home to wild and scenic rivers, and in general a great place to camp, fish, hike, hunt, canoe, or commune with Nature in your chosen fashion. There are relict populations of assorted plants remaining from the retreat of the last glacier for the amateur botanist. There are plenty of bears around for people who like a little danger with their nature walks. It's also one of the few really dark areas near the East Coast, so the visible "seeing" is wonderful for amateur and duffer astronomers, people wanting to catch a sight of meteor showers, and people like me who just want occasional reassurance that the Milky Way is still out there. There's a well restored logging railroad (as opposed to a tourist trap) for day trips for bored children and/or rail fans. We've been camping in that area for years on end, and I don't think I ever encountered any refugees of the sort mentioned in TFA. I hope the word doesn't get out, because there aren't many people around there in general which is what makes it such a nice place to get away.

Re:I'm surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

At least half of all the crazy inbred hillbilly stories are made up by West Virginians themselves, in order to keep the great hordes along the East Coast from discovering the area.

women huh?

[mikedmoon]

I wonder what % of these women also have gluten "allergies" and fibromyalgia?

X-Men

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that the first person identified with some mutation that causes her to be beyond what other humans can perceive? Faraday would be a cool nickname in that case.

Can we imagine a radio free world?

[Anonymous Coward]

With everyone getting fibre optics eventually why don't we then kill the radio spectrum? It's my fantasy for us to go back to what we lived without radio. And I have one good reason. It keeps the aliens guessing what we're doing. You may think I'm crazy but I believe there is aliens and they can detect us with all this radio pollution, why don't we do them a favour of radio silence for once? Also we've experienced radio for a long period now, many generations, why don't we give our DNA a chance to repair itself if radio has changed over time? You may think this is stupid but I think it's a good idea, we can do more with less and one thing we don't need is radio pollution.

Well instead of killing it outright I'd liike to say I'd like GPS to stay, but we don't need wifi, where in my neighbourhood and surrounding neighbourhoods there is at least 6 access points constantly in range. The aggregate of those sources could cause harm I think.
-

Paging Dr. Venkman

[Anonymous Coward]

So the study had a sample size of 1 person, who diagnosed herself, and she was only "mostly right"?

Dr. Peter Venkman approves! /"It's a square!" //"Wrong again!!!!" *BUZZZZT*

Maybe there's something there

[tchdab1]

Someone should do a study of these RF refugees. Perhaps there's a protein or tissue structure they share that's sensitive to RF.
While it may be only in their head, it also might not until we get evidence.

Re:Maybe there's something there

[tchdab1]

On the other hand, they're probably crazy.

Conspiracy Theorists

[Kamiza Ikioi]

These are the same people that freak out about vaccines, and I don't mean the legitimate concerns. No amount of studies or science will convince these people that their "gut feeling" (or what they learned at Scientology boot camp) is just bullshit.

Re:Conspiracy Theorists

[ArsonSmith]

Yea, anti vaccine, Scientology, AGW fanatics, creationists, flat earthers, EMACS users and most religious beliefs. All part of the lunatic fringe. Best to put them on a reserve somewhere.

Re:Conspiracy Theorists

[badkarmadayaccount]

Emacs user keep unto themselves, usually. They don't deserve that.

EHS is a cry for attention

[SciBoy]

The wikipedia article lists some sources and even a combined study that has looked at 31 studies made.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivity
They very diplomatically concludes that it is very "difficult to find any link between electromagnetic fields and symptoms". Which I find to mean that the research shows that there is none.

Re:EHS is a cry for attention

[madhatter256]

It's funny that the Wiki article starts out by calling it idiopathic.... it seems like it's trying to call this idiotic but in a professional, scientific way.... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiopathic

Re:EHS is a cry for attention

[RadioElectric]

Would you say that about people with idiopathic Parkinson's disease? That word doesn't mean what you think it does (even though you link to an article explaining it).

Re:EHS is a cry for attention

[anyGould]

Well, they do have to account for the fact that random button pushing will occasionally match the test conditions. (also known as: a broken clock is still correct twice a day)

Re:EHS is a cry for attention

[metacell]

No, it means what it says. Absence of evidence is not evidence for the absence.

Shocking News

[Cajun Hell]

This just in: people blindly grope in a fog of religion and superstition. Nobody knew it was happening, and it's all the more surprising because it's happening in, no, not a remote corner of the third world, but right here in America. See the shocking film at 11!

I blaim it all on Art Bell

[DadLeopard]

Not that long ago, these people knew they were nuts because they were the only people that they knew that believed in this stuff, then along came Art Bell, and they found out they were not alone, there were lots of others that believed all sorts of weird stuff! He almost single-handedly legitimized the Kooks, Crazies, Tin-foil hatters, Ufologists and Black Helicopter people! To say nothing of the just plain old conspiracy people!

Relative EM radiation strength

[i.am.delf]

The thing that kills me about this "WiFi allergy" business is that it is a recent phenomenon. For the last 100 or so years we have been surrounded by much stronger EM radiation. Your typical WiFi card/router outputs about 30mW. Average cell phone of today is less than 1W and typically much less. Typical radio communication gear can be from 5W to 1.5kW. Broadcasters can go up to 50kW. Radar transmitters, not including the gain of their antennas, can be in the low megawatt range. Even when you account for the drop in irradiation intensity due to distance on these powerful transmitters. Think of an airport. Think of how many people a day go through an airport. Now think of the radar intensity of a 1MW transmitter at 1 mile(inverse square law). You get a whopping 300mW/m2, but this is still much less than the exposure limit of 10mW/cm2 or 100W/m2. Now put think of the intensity of those cell phones and WiFi cards. If this allergy to radio existed and was present in even a small fraction of the population we'd expect to see people suddenly come down with symptoms every time the approached any of these large transmitters. Even if you absorbed all of the radiation it would still be less than what you would get from radar.

Oh yeah and there is one more source that we are surrounded by all day every day. It is nearly impossible to escape. The 60Hz radiation from the power grid.

Tinfoil Hat?

[WillyWanker]

Wouldn't a tinfoil hat solve all your problems Diane? It's worked wonders in the past for people like you.

Re:Tinfoil Hat?

[Greyfox]

Or my patented Faraday Hat(tm). Now how much would you pay for a hat that protects your sensitive brain from harmful electromagnetic radiation? $49.99? $89.99? Well you can have yours today for the low, low price of $29.99! Statements not evaluated by the FDA.

Re:Tinfoil Hat?

[Bob the Super Hamste]

No some MIT students did a study of various tin foil hats and discovered that they may actually make the problem worse.

Best self-summary ever

[dsinc]

"It hurts to think" 'nuff said.

Just like the low status in other places

[Anonymous Coward]

They have to take and put up with these people. Yes, it's an asshole of the country, and these people are in close proximity to it -- just like Slashdot and the internet. You have to take all of the trolls, because nobody else will.

Victim herself shows it's psychological

[Saishuuheiki]

It was most obvious at the end of the BBC article when she mentions how she could cause/cease the pain by turning the TV on and off....

It doesn't take a genius to realize the TV doesn't *broadcast* EM waves...except for light. And if you're allergic to light...you have bigger things to worry about than cell phones.

Re:Victim herself shows it's psychological

[gknoy]

Wouldn't the magnetic guns in a CRT produce EM?

Re:Victim herself shows it's psychological

[compro01]

They're electron guns (basically little wee linear particle accelerators), and yes, which flies directly into thick leaded glass (which is most of the reason why CRTs are so fucking heavy) and doesn't leave the monitor.

Re:Victim herself shows it's psychological

[toddestan]

A CRT TV set can generate large amounts of RF besides just light. Granted, it can only emit so much in order to pass UL, but it's still there. The analog tuner is especially noisy, which is why you'll often find it encased in it's own little metal box inside the TV.

jokes on us

[Anonymous Coward]

when this is the only enclose of civilization that survives mass adoption of the 802.11X-p standard

Satellites!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to gather a bunch of these people, take them outside, and inform them of satellites broadcasting signals back to earth. Just to see what happens.

laugh all you want

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm. i see a lot of people are rediculing some of the negative effects some implementations of wifi might have.
personally i didn't feel any bad effect either (living just 2m from a fritzbox fon 7170 wifi at 100%). however the other day i set up a TP-Link TL-WA730RE repeater and i got headaches fairly quickly. It might be just my mind playing tricks on me but I do think it'd be a good idea to check various WiFi devices for measurable physical differences and perform a study on how people react to those differences.
While I'm not an expert for WiFi in any way as far as I know (not looking anything up) a digital signal is a 1 or a 0 if it falls into a certain range, so if a certain chip would output a sawtooth pattern that falls into that range and another one a smooth sinus pattern it would work just as well but have pretty different characteristics.
With the little we know about the human body it is entirely conceivable that there are differences between people that make some more likely to feel uncomfortable than others.

All in all I mean to say that even though you Americans like to laugh at a story like this (probably a large part of it is laughable) you should have solid data before assuming that all kinds of wireless signals are entirely harmless and without effect on human wellbeing.
I do hope somebody does test the TL-WA730RE against a broad range of devices and finds a way to fix it.

Why are crazy people news?

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been pretty well proven that the is not a real problem. That all these people have mental health issues. Not a real wi-fi with wi-fi signal. There has even been a court case where the judge ordered the company to turn off the equipment. The company in court replied they can not comply. Because the equipment was not on in the first place. At which point the judge finally realized that the whole suit was fraud, and threw it all out. To date, I have never seen a case where the person could prove this sensitivity. So why do we treat people being crazy as tech news. I am fine with shunning them, let the move to the woods, and not spread the crazy to others.

So long and thanks for all the fish.

Crazy idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

It has been conclusively shown in blind tests that these alleged symptoms manifest when they believe there is EM radiation which isn't there, and do not manifest when there is EM radiation they are unaware of. In fact, some of the symptoms they claim to suffer (and some situations in which they suffer them) show complete ignorance of technology, physics and biology.

It is ridiculous to see their claims taken seriously in the mainstream.

Gonna Open a Key Store!!!

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

The penalties for using your key fob to remotely open your car doors are stiff and severe in this area!! Emergency key cutting services are available for a premium!

Don't mind that overgrown, shadowy figure guarding the door. I can't use RFID for inventory control. If you try to steal anything, Bubba will dispense swift justice on you.

Electromagnetic radition is everywhere

[JohnDShe]

It's sad, really. These pathetic people don't realize that they have been bathed in electromagnetic radiation all of their lives and they can't hide from it. I suppose a Faraday cage or a deep mine or a cavern might help a little, but it won't matter if they use or are visited by someone with any kind of electronic device.

Funny coincedence

[Jumperalex]

I was just camping just slightly north of the middle of that area this weekend. Hiking Seneca Creek to the water fall and walking through the Sinks of Gandy (love that cave). Sure explains why there is no cell signal for a LONG time as we drove out of the mountains except for one place. The top of Spruce Knob at the observation tower gets Verizon (HTC Incredible) and Sprint (HTC EVO) signal at about 2 bars. No data, but you can do voice.

That's not what you said.

[sirwired]

I never suggested otherwise (or at least didn't mean to). The linked article suggests it's possible even while trying to state it isn't... there's nothing conclusive about it. I think EMF can effect mood. I don't know that wifi is enough to do it.

You said: "Majority can't tell = a minority CAN"

What you SHOULD have said was: "Majority can't tell = a minority MAY"

Of course, that isn't really correct case either, as the word "majority" referred to studies in the GP, not people.

Devil's Advocate: COULD humans be sensitive?

[DutchUncle]

My wife is allergic to an antibiotic that is "generally recognized as safe". It's not in her mind, it's in the emergency room medical records and on her medicalert bracelet. She's been in shock because it can be used as a preservative without specific labeling. It's a rare problem that would never have been noticed 100 years ago - or else she would have died of "unknown causes".

Humans can have varying degrees of audible pitch perception, from "perfect pitch" through practical tone-deafness. Perfect pitch is uncommon.

In the electromagnetic spectrum, humans can have varying degrees of color perception, mostly involving missing perception but possibly involving *shifted* perception (relative to the typical norm, that is). Some humans are known to react more quickly to ultraviolet radiation - there are large evolutionary groups of them. Albinos of all species are extremely vulnerable to ultraviolet; they really are, as someone said facetiously, allergic to sunlight (admittedly because of a larger deficiency in their systems).

Is it possible that some subset of humans really ARE sensitive to the increased EM radiation that society has been using and/or to the EM noise caused by electronics? It doesn't seem to bother most of us . . . or if it does, it's like a background hum that we tune out and ignore. But maybe these people should be tested to see if there is something real here.

Re:Devil's Advocate: COULD humans be sensitive?

[wideBlueSkies]

Sure why not? Just like there is a small species of ants that seems to be attracted to electronics/magnetism .Seriously.

Re:Devil's Advocate: COULD humans be sensitive?

[subreality]

Sure, I'd love to meet one. It's easy to test for, and I wouldn't mind some fame and glory for definitively proving the existence of a rare and controversial condition.

The trouble is we've done the test a bunch of times and we're not getting any positive results. That doesn't mean we should halt all testing, but it does mean you shouldn't expect a positive result to suddenly appear.

Re:Sadly I don't think it's just your imagination.

[martas]

who else would we self-diagnose? /semantic nazi

Sugar Grove

[Anonymous Coward]

Sugar Grove is right there in the middle. Makes sense, the Navy doesn't want a bunch of radio waves hurting their chances of intercepting SIGINT from all those sky birds.

A TV set will emit a fair amount of EM radiation..

[Ellis D. Tripp]

Particularly an older CRT set. 60 Hz and 15.75 kHz sawtooth waves are used to deflect the electron beam in the tube, applied through electromagnetic coils around the tube neck. The larger the screen, the more deflection energy is needed. And most ham radio operators can tell you that older TV sets will radiate "birdies" all over the HF radio spectrum because of this.

Even the newer flat panel sets can give off measurable amounts of EM fields. Almost everything uses a switchmode power supply nowadays. The RF front end is a superheterodyne system, so there is likely to be some local oscillator radiation. All the digital processing involves high frequency square waves, which radiate all kinds of harmonics up into the microwave bands. And the high voltage inverters used for plasma panels or LCD backlights can produce broadband RF noise, as well.

None of this should be taken to indicate that "EHS" is anything other than hypochondriac bullshit, of course. But almost every electronic device will emit measurable amounts of EM fields at frequencies literally from DC to daylight.

Place should be a ham's paradise, actually....

[Ellis D. Tripp]

Should make for a better S/N ratio when listening for weak signals, no?

you miss the point

[Chirs]

You are what you experience.

If non-ionizing radiation activated a part of the brain that made that person *think* they were experiencing physical effects, does it matter if the effects are physically happening?

Re:you miss the point

[Omnifarious]

You are what you experience.

If non-ionizing radiation activated a part of the brain that made that person *think* they were experiencing physical effects, does it matter if the effects are physically happening?

Yes, it does. Because it affects what we should be treating. These people act like it's a problem with the world that there's all of this radio-frequency radiation out there that they are somehow incredibly sensitive to. The problem isn't with the world. It's firmly located right between their ears. If they fixed that problem everybody (including themselves) would be a lot happier.

just say not to HFCS!

[Thud457]

George Washington Carver says you're all a bunch of racists!

Might as well try to ban potatoes. ooops, wait...

Darnassus

[sckeener]

Back in December, I moved to Darnassus. I think it's the right place for me. It is very environmentally friendly. To quote a friend of mine "I love Darnassus... trees everywhere." I highly recommend moving there, Diane. That said, there are some horrible little neighbors to the south east. They say things like

"One word: plastics."

"Yes, I'm a gold digger... and copper and silver."

"If at first you don't succeed: blow it up again."

"Skip to step three: profit."

Needless to say these little annoying nats cause all sorts of environmental issues. Still, come to Darnassus for a small subscription fee.

I suspect a cover up culture

[yuhong]

So far, I have done insufficient research to definitely prove whether it is true or not, but I am suspecting a cover up culture particularly surrounding the funding of scientific studies, especially by drug companies.

Or TVs, FTA;

[Xest]

FTA:

"Towards the end of my normal life when I still could watch television I could actually cut my pain off and on with the remote control device"

It seems they also believe that when you turn your TV off, the TV transmitter also stops sending TV signals to just your TV.

I don't know why the BBC posted this, it's obviously complete and utter bollocks, because this makes absolutely no sense. Turning the TV off doesn't stop the TV broadcast.

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[turkeyfeathers]

... it's obviously complete and utter bollocks, because this makes absolutely no sense. Turning the TV off doesn't stop the TV broadcast.

I turned the TV off and the pain stops... works especially well when watching commercial channels.

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[Skal Tura]

even BBC editors can have sense of humour ;)

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[DarwinSurvivor]

I've actually experienced slight head pain when turning on a TV. Of course it was an old CRT emitting that damn high-pitched squeal that was really causing it.

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[Xest]

I kind of wish that was true, but the BBC have been in trouble over this before. They did an episode of Panorama "investigating" the problem previously, and found it was a major issue. The problem is, after a lot of complaints from Wifi firms etc. it seemed the BBC had been less than honest- parts were factually incorrect, for example they claimed Norway recognised it as a valid illness, but Norway had also removed that recognition after it could not be proved there was any validity too it. The teacher who claimed he got headaches from Wifi also couldn't tell when Wifi was on or off in blind tests - the BBC forgot to mention that and made out he could.

The watchdog found against them and told them off for it, but they never apologised publicly or admitted publicly that yes, they were full of shit on it.

So here they are again, with the same old bollocks. They're insistent on pursuing this story, god only knows why when they must surely know now that it's false.

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[metacell]

The cathode ray tube in old-style (non-flat) TV screens generates both a moderate electromagnetic field, and a local electrostatic field. Which is not very strange, since it works by firing electrons onto a phosphorescent glass surface and direct them using electromagnets.

Sigh, what do they teach kids in school today...

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[Xest]

That if something is up with your TV, then buy a nice new flatscreen.

And look, it works!

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[metacell]

The TV still generates an electromagnetic field, although much weaker.

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[Xest]

In all seriousness though how does that field compare to the radio waves they'd be getting hit with from everything from GPS to TV, or even from the sun? Is there a fundamental difference that could have an effect on their wellbeing from that that they shouldn't otherwise suffer from wave sources like those listed above?

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[tehcyder]

I don't know why the BBC posted this, it's obviously complete and utter bollocks, because this makes absolutely no sense. Turning the TV off doesn't stop the TV broadcast.

The BBC are just repeating what the nutjobs are saying, not presenting it as scientific fact. It's a good story, everyone likes to laugh at conspiracy theorists and tinfoil hate devotees, the BBC just have to play it straight and let the loons hoist themselves with their own petards.

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[Xest]

Yes, but the problem is with this subject the BBC has a history of talking bollocks on it:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7122230.stm

I notice that they mention there is some evidence for it being a real problem because blind tests proved it- this is contrary to all scientific evidence I've read which says quite the opposite- that people claiming to suffer from the condition only get it right about 50% of the time - or in other words, the same amount as if they'd just been guessing. It says in the article the the number of correct guesses was significant enough to demonstrate it as a real problem but gives us no detail about what that value was meaning we can't judge for ourselves.

I know what you're saying, but I'm not sure with the BBC it is that innocent, especially when this is about the 3rd time they've brought the issue up, and in both previous cases have been publicly embarassed when it was exposed as bullshit. I suspect someone at the BBC has an agenda relating to this issue judging by the fact they keep pushing it over and over.

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[SkimTony]

I used to get that, but I found tuning to a different channel helped immensely.

(I know, I know, you mean the CRT whine. Pity you couldn't adjust refresh on TV tubes.)

Re:Or TVs, FTA;

[SkimTony]

The Inverse-Square Law would indicate that the intensity of EMR to which you're subjected from a nearby device (e.g., your TV) would be significant as compared to a distant device (e.g., a GPS satellite) because signal strength falls off with the square of the distance (something twice as far away has a signal one fourth as strong). My great-grandmother had a TV when I was a kid that made the hair on your arms stand up if you were standing next to it when it turned on (which you had to be, since that's where the power knob was). I suspect that it was kind of a special case (like most things in that house, it was pretty darn old), but still. That was a fair bit of charge.

Re:Sadly I don't think it's just your imagination.

[avandesande]

I think people having the luxury to fixate over things has more to do with it- if you worked in the fields dawn to dusk I think your context about what is important/annoying changes quite a bit.

fuuuuuuuu

[nege]

I'm literally sitting in the middle of the datacenter right now, in the middle of all the racks. I read this article and now I have a headache. Damn it!!

I worked for NRAO Quiet Zone enforcement

[CaptainPhoton]

I worked at this observatory in the 90's to help enforce the quiet zone. The people in the area were highly educated, not typical hillbillies. I met a few nobel prize winners and had the opportunity to meet Grote Reber who was there one summer delivering his memoirs to the observatory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grote_Reber

Green Bank has easy access to a ski resert, whitewater rafting, caving, rockclimbing, and mountain biking. That part of W Va is quite an outdoor sports mecca. The location and the people should not be dissed at all, since they are exceptional compared to the average Slashdotter!

The quiet zone is a regulatory creation, and I know local folks in the area sometimes had non-compliant transmitters. For those obsessed with EM, note that just because there's a regulatory quiet zone, it doesn't mean that people aren't still using Wi-Fi. They just haven't been busted yet!

It was usually only an issue if an astronomer complained about interference swamping out their observations. The interfering frequency would have to be in the RF passband of the observation. If the signal source was in the band, it still has to be in the beam of the antenna or couple into the system via cabling, etc. to be a problem.

There is a schedule that shows which receiver is installed for the observations being done today:
https://dss.gb.nrao.edu/schedule/public

If interference was seen, we tried to identify the modulation on a spectrum analyzer to decide if it was a faraway source such as a TV transmitter, satellite, or aircraft. We had a communications receiver where we could snoop conversations to identify the nature of the broadcast. If we suspected a local source, we would drive around town in a truck fitted with a spectrum analyzer and a directional antenna. When we found the source, we would help the individual or organization come to compliance. Interference could be nonintentional, such as power lines or even a farmer's tractor. :)

I have fond memories of the observatory, I got to experience Ethernet when it was coax and TCP/IP before the Web existed! (Gopher, Archie, telnet BBSes and such). One former employee ran a MUD at the observatory that wasn't discovered for years. If that's not Slashdot-worthy, I don't know what is! :)

What she said/should have said.

[Anonymous Coward]

What she said - 'It's a horrible thing to have to be a prisoner'
What she should have said - " 'It's a horrible thing to have to be a prisoner of your own delusions."

Tell them about neutrinos.

[Jimbookis]

That should push one or two over the precipice.

maybe the big stuff just isn't killing people?

[fantomas]

Maybe the big stuff isn't killing so many people so other stuff is catching folk, and as you say we're becoming more sensitive to more subtle things? Not to say that there aren't more crazy folk out there, but given that the average lifespan for a working class person in the nineteenth century was about 40, and now you'd expect to live to 70 no problem, maybe we're more aware of less lethal issues?

  A friend of mine just got diagnosed as having to go gluten-free, docs thought he had cancer, luckily an internal examination and sample showed it wasn't that but on the way found some gut damage that can be managed by him being gluten free for the rest of his life. Maybe 100 years ago they'd not have picked it up and then ten years down the line would have got cancer and died (or something like that which the continued eating of gluten would have caused, I think it can set off conditions) and the records would have had him down as death from cancer. Instead he's down as having a life condition rather than a death condition because we're better and analysing bodies. I'd never heard of this before but he says it's pretty common these days.

Plus of course might be stuff in our diets and lifestyles that have changed in the last 100 years but hey if you read histories of food production and hygiene discussing the nineteenth century you'll realise most of the world is a whole lot better off than it used to be...

What will they do ...

[PPH]

... during a thunderstorm?

Shhhhhhh...

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't work if they don't believe there are no transmitters, or EM waves of any kind.

Funny citation in the article

[Anonymous Coward]

'You become a technological leper because you can't be around people. It's not that you would be contagious to them — it's what they're carrying that is harmful to you.'"
Sorry to break it for you, Diane. But being bats*** crazy IS contagious to peoples around you.

clinical research on the subject

[bityz]

A good reference for clinical research is: http://www.rfcom.ca/clinic/general.shtml People with real symptoms need sympathy, but clinical research is the only way to discern causes.

Someone please inform them:

[random_ID]

This will be ground zero when aliens get pissed about being spied on with space telescopes.

You just associated Thoughts to actual Illness.

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem I see with the Slashdot community is we continually mock people around us whom seem to have a lower intelligence, perhaps even under-educated and thus without any student debt that they can travel away from perceived harm, while the Slashdot crowd just plays-down the illnesses reported around them as though student debt prevents us from traveling away because we need to stay where are job compels us as the only way to pay-off our debts.

I guess you believe the hole scars on Hesus the Chryst's carpals got there by him thinking of being crucified, and not after the event, but like I and others must conclude is that I wasn't there to witness such just like how all the trauma and scar tissue of former prisoners of US Army and Intelligence personel was all concluded not from incarceration but the prisoners did it to theirselves. Yea. We live in an honest age, where everyone comforts eachother, and the water in the well is always pure and clean that none would think about throwing poisonned meat down that well.

I'm so ashamed.

My studies in Homepathy are...

[Anonymous Coward]

if we put some small particles of foreign matter into a little pill-shaped object to slide it easier into the gut beyond the stage of possible regurgitation, then the body will retrain itself when that capsule opens deep in the guts by either absorbing the compounds and enzymes pr training the Immune System to better identify and isolate those particles as perceived threat.

I think I'll incorporate into a Pharmaceutical company, and preach that everyone should buy nutritional supplements while I lobby for Amish to be kicked-out of selling whole foods and to close-down all Organic Heirlooom agriculture in favor of Food Chemistry by GMO farms. Then rather than allow people build-up their own immunity to virus that dies in moments of not having a host, I'll lobby that children be forcibly educated until they are 18, and now that they are in a forced communal environment passing-around delicate dangerous pathogens then I'll lobby that they be vaccinated and hold myself harmless from all damages that could go wrong while I control the statistical reporting of the vaccine mortality rate. Nobody knows the difference between my Innoculations so I'll just keep calling them Vaccines. Nobody will never know that my Pharmaceutical company is nothing more than a bunch of rogue Homeopath bi-socio Psychopathic liars trying to reverse-patent all science as though it's a modern invention so none other than the few government-chosen companies have the privilege of deciding who lives and who dies at the threat of our guns and communal disease-spreading prisons.

Fuck America!

More than that... Intel-based laptops

[Burz]

If you search on 'Intel C4 noise' you will find a widespread problem with motherboards having a Core Duo or newer processor. It is related to the C4 energy saving state of the processor.

Four - nice red uniforms. I'll come in again.

[Hognoxious]

The fourth cause is that where there's an illness, there's a remedy, and where there's a remedy there's profit.

That's the nature of religion, too.

[choke]

Holy crap, you've just explained religion in one sweet motion. Impressive.

verification

[Tom]

There was a TV show about a guy like that here in Germany a couple years ago.

I felt so horrible. This bullshit is told to the masses, some of them too young and many too stupid to realize what a load of nonsense they are being fed.

A responsible show would have done what the guy himself should have done years ago, before moving out into the wilderness: Run a double-blind test.

Here's what I would have done for the show (not a double-blind test, but good TV):

Bring him into a school to tell children about his "disease" (he really did that, and they filmed him). Instead of standing there passively and waiting for him to break down with his shivers and what not and whine that he needs to get back to his retreat, in one of the schools, turn the room into a faraday cage and ask all the kids to hand in their mobile phones, iPods, everything - but don't tell him. Let him run his hour of bullshit-telling, until he starts to whine about how it's all making him sick, all those phones in the room, and the outside... let him whine for a while. Then, when he is about to leave, tell him that for the past hour, the only electronic device that could even theoretically have any effect whatsoever on him was the TV camera.

We need that shit tested, and once debunked, debunk it publicly.

There was a time when media and politics liked science and supported it. When did that change? Why have they become enemies of progress? And yes, getting rid of superstitious nonsense is one part of progress.

Crackpot ignorant

[Anonymous Coward]

Our body's reactions depend on the TYPE of electromagnetic radiation. In fact, that is the reason why we see and why we see a specific part of the spectrum only. Also, people do have problems with the radiation coming from the sun. But yeah, maybe sunburn is just a scam from the cosmetics industry. Following your logic, electromagnetic radiation is either harmful or harmless, depending on what you want to sell.

The cause of problems for the people in the article might likely be psychological. But scientific evidence about effects of exposure to radiation from cell phones and the like is yet to come - in particular from long-term studies on humans.

Fifteen Million Americans

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ms Schou is one of an estimated 5% of Americans who believe they suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), which they say is caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields typically created by mobile phones, wi-fi and other electronic equipment. "

Seriously, 15,000,000 people just in America are claiming to suffer from EHS? I have met and talked to several thousand people in my lifetime and none of them claimed to suffer from EHS. Somehow I doubt the 5% figure quoted here.

Re:Sadly I don't think it's just your imagination.

[mangst]

Perhaps its precisely due to the internet that we have so many people acting on their neurotic tendencies.

Maybe there is a grain of truth in China restricting internet access and outlawing Western pop culture.

Wifi free area only four square miles?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I've read the two linked articles, they seem to say the restricted area for unlicensed transmitters (such as wifi) is only within two miles of the ground station. "The FCC doesn't control unlicensed transmitters, but West Virginia's Radio Astronomy Zoning Act prohibits any RFI-generating device - licensed or not - within 2 miles of the telescope."

It doesn't seem practical to me limiting unlicensed devices within the full 113 mile x 113 mile area, so maybe Ms. Schou will still have problems?

Re:Wifi free area only four square miles?

[Hognoxious]

It doesn't seem practical to me limiting unlicensed devices within the full 113 mile x 113 mile area, so maybe Ms. Schou will still have problems?

I won't tell her if you don't.

Oh bugger it, shall we, just for teh lulz?

Part of America's Obesity Problem

[SkimTony]

It's not just the inhabitants who have expanding waistlines; America has bigger belts, these days. Bible, Rust, etc...

Re:Part of America's Obesity Problem

[Grishnakh]

I guess the expanding waistlines go along with shrinking brains, which is a prerequisite for fundamentalism, and also shows up many other ways in society, such as in voting.

Re:Sadly I don't think it's just your imagination.

[Anonymous Coward]

WEST Virginia, not Virginia, please. We do have our own wackos: Pat Robertson in Virginia Beach and Jerry Falwell (jr, now that dad has passed on to the special hell reserved for TV preachers) in Lynchburg; not to mention the beltway wackos that run the government, but we don't have quite so many of the hillbilly types in our part of the world.