Is Wi-Fi safe?

peterbaker

Well then, I guess I can watch something else instead on your say so, Jzpop.

What do you suggest?

Jzpop

As you have already characterised me as immature, my conclusions premature, and a little out of touch with current affairs, I fail to see why you would have the slightest inclination to follow my suggestions.

I suspect that whatever I chose, you would find reason to disagree with my suggestion.

I'm afraid you will have to continue your discussion without me. I wish you well, and offer my genuine sympathy for your sensitivity to certain electrical fields.

peterbaker

OK. Well while you were thinking about it I did something useful by deactivating my Wireless Access Point as I stopped using it an hour ago.

It is a great pity that wireless routers don't have a visible switch for such purposes I think.

I would guess at the moment, that large numbers of wireless routers are primarily used as wired routers to a nearby desktop and that the wireless feature is less often used, but nevertheless left on all the time.

I would also guess that most people are not au fait with the technology sufficiently to be able to deactivate the wireless but continue on the internet via their wired desktop.

Is it therefore not a bit silly that we've created wireless smog all night in our cities?

By the way, all through this thread no-one has once mentioned DECT (cordless landline handsets). That's my omission. Personally I won't be using one in my house and there are quite a few people in the UK who prefer not to. Some kinds are actually banned in Switzerland I think.

Oh well, looks like the WiFi part of Newsnight will be a short clip of that lady in a kind of metal beekeepers net.

I'm all right Jack is no doubt the great-unwashed's unswer to that one:-)

superscaper

peterbaker wrote: »

Oh well, looks like the WiFi part of Newsnight will be a short clip of that lady in a kind of metal beekeepers net.

Sounds sensible to me. If you're worried about "EM smog" then as has been mentioned several times, use a Faraday cage. It makes more sense than only switching your own router off as you're still going to be exposed to everyone elses' radio and microwaves.

peterbaker

Well you know my thoughts SS. There are a lot of people talking about comparitive power of these things versus mobile phone radiation.

The Kings College scientist contributing was talking about comparative tissue-heating effects. That's extremely simplistic. Any physicist knows that if you want to warm anything you can more or less apply any electric field to it that you have handy. Any old electric field will warm anything to some extent. Broadly, the more power transmitted, the more induced by the field, and the hotter something will get.

Actually I was surprised he as an electrical engineer got himself edited that way. It takes a rather more complex approach to electric fields to operate complex electronics, doesn't it? It might therefore be expected that complex electronic fields which are not well understood (like WiFi & DECT & the latest forms of mobile technology) might interfere with complex electronics (or bioelectronics) in unknown ways. That's why they banned mobiles in aeroplanes originally and have only just got to the stage where they think they understand the interactions with aircraft systems well enough to start allowing their use. AFAIK, authorisation has still not been granted but is imminent. Power of the handset radiation actually has very little to do with the problem. It is the ability to create spurious signals induced in complex navigation and control circuits which is the unknown.

Our brains are full of control circuits. I studied a bit about them in a biophysics course years ago. We couldn't do all the research we wanted to do on human brain circuits of course so it was live cats that had the tops of their heads sawn open and various electrical interventions made. I remember feeling a little bit sick watching the videos, and I might not have been giving the subject my full attention, but I don't think I am far wrong when I say I think we are too blase about the effects of the recent boom in wireless.

It might not surprise you to learn that I got my degree from Imperial, and indeed Andrew Goldsworthy was rather more circumspect than his Kings College peer, wasn't he?

But I guess we'll have to learn the hard way now.

PS I have to confess I hadn't heard of Andrew Goldsworthy before tonight, and on Newsnight he wasn't actually quoted as promulgating a non-thermal theory of biological effects as a foil to the thermal effect arguments. In fact I myself had not really thought about it until I started writing this post. So having written it, I now actually find it quite interesting to Google for AG and find that a warning about the neglected possible non-thermal effects is exactly what he and others think we should heed:
http://www.electrosensitivity.org.uk/Two%20expert%20scientists%20.htm

...and before anyone gets worked up about my motives for posting that last link, then let me just say it's the first time I have seen it and I stumbled across it very quickly by just following my nose after watching Newsnight.

superscaper

So do you have your own Faraday cage then? As I've stated earlier, I really don't know either way whether they are harmful or not. But I'm the kind of person that didn't stop eating beef with the whole vCJD scare.

peterbaker

Nope No Faraday cage yet. But I have a rudimentary detector a bit smarter than the one Newsnight lady had, and I have a Nokia 9500 as my wake-up alarm by the bed which also tells me that there are no less than five BTHomeHubs beaming in to my flat right now, one with an Excellent signal and 5 other networks with Low Weak and Good signals. A year ago there were two or three at most. If I knew where the strong signals came from, I might consider a mesh curtain on the worst wall if that would help. But as I said the other day, there's a lot coming through the window which could be a worse problem. Who knows?

superscaper wrote: »

... I'm the kind of person that didn't stop eating beef with the whole vCJD scare.

Well as you might have guessed SS, I am the kind of person that got introduced to McDonalds Kensington High Street when I was still at University, and unfortunately ate too many thereafter. I DID cut down a lot while they were umming and erring and otherwise procrastinating over a couple of years about getting it out of the food chain, because I had become party to an inside view of the meat industry which taught me things that most of the public never heard. That was another example of runaway commercialism of a concept (mechanical recovery of 'useable' meat coupled with the re-processing of what protein matter was left as a feedstuff).

When I was a boy, a friend's father, a baker (of bread mostly) and keeper of pigs, told me he'd never eat a pork pie because there was absolutely nothing wasted of a pig ... earholes, eyeholes and bumholes, it's all in there, he said. He died when I was still a boy. He used to feed wasted bread and boiled up poor quality potatoes to his pigs, with occasional apples from the orchard as treats, preferring not to use fishmeal as was quite economical to use at the time because it tainted the taste of the butchered pork. (Actually I think fishmeal was banned as an animal feedstuff in the 80s for some other reason). However, even this man with his biased pork pie ideas could not have conceived of a situation where in the name of progress our meat industry would start using automatic machines to scrape off every last molecule of protein from bones and to grind up most of what was left as a slurry and then to use it all as human foodstuff. And finally, what little was left after that would be further ground to feed back to the animals.

I also think of him everytime I look at the cheaper end of the potato display in Asda. He used to feed better potatoes to his pigs!

superscaper

Bill Thompson is much more eloquent about technical matters than I could ever be:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6583815.stm

Need_More_Money_2

superscaper wrote: »

Bill Thompson is much more eloquent about technical matters than I could ever be:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6583815.stm

Thank you. A great article. He says everything I've been trying to say, but in a much better way!

peterbaker

Need_More_Money wrote: »

Thank you. A great article. He says everything I've been trying to say, but in a much better way!

You will not be surprised to learn that I disagree profoundly. And I am sure what you have said NMM is far better considered argument than Bill Thompson's. It is not a great article at all. It does touch upon some good bits about philosophy of science and creation of hypothesis and proof in the middle, but those parts are written in such a way that they can be interpreted ambiguously. It starts by trying to make us feel sorry for students in someway hampered by lack of wireless facilities and it concludes with an uninterrupted block of pure narrow-minded and thus unfounded propaganda (my own comments in bold):

(the_Bill_Thompson_article) wrote:

We may come up with a hitherto unsuspected mechanism that explains a previously disregarded effect, or the evidence may be statistical and require detailed investigation. Yes, so what might this mean?

Were that to happen we should take it seriously, but it has not happened and there is no reason to believe it will. ...no reason? That's just blase and arrogant and therefore wrong

The precautionary principle, of avoiding exposure to unnecessary risk, does not apply here because there is no known mechanism by which wireless networks could cause damage. Wrong. I have already mentioned well-accepted fears of not well understood effects in aircraft control systems. Why should the effect on our brains be much different?

We have a sound model of the interaction between electromagnetic radiation and organic matter that gives us little reason to believe that there will be any dangers. Wrong. We have no sound models for recent implementations. There has been far too little research and the research that is quoted is often many years old, limited, and bears little relevance to current proliferation and latest devices. Blind ignorance is not a laudible target in a democratic population. An example of this kind of ignorance is the number of men who may have been part rendered infertile by walking in front of their low-cost jet before boarding (or higher-cost jet if you like - I believe the capacity for a mistake is there with most thesedays to varying degrees) How many of you reading this know what the practical causations of unnecessary risk and ensuing damage might be there? I'll give you a clue - Weather Radar can fry your balls.

For William Stewart, chairman of the Health Protection Agency and a former chief scientific adviser to the Government, to argue for an investigation on the basis of no real evidence that there is an effect, and in the absence of any plausible physical mechanism, is indefensible. William Stewart set out his stall some years ago. How politically strapped is he now by what he said years ago?

Cellphones heat the brain and could cause problems. Wi-fi doesn't, and it is safe. A lay person's conclusion based on a little knowledge of comparative thermal effects only, with no regard to the specific nature of it nor any longer term effect of it and complete disregard for other plausible effects. My daughter is sitting here as I write, her new wireless laptop beside her, and I'm a lot more worried about the damage she would do if she dropped it on her foot than I am about the impact of the low power radio waves it emits. oh right ... and a minister said something similar when he fed his daughter a burger