Mobile phone radiation
Is the electromagnetic radiation from mobile phones and mobile phone
transmitters damaging to your health?
Uncontrolled experiments on myself reveal a tingling sensation in the
general area of the ear to which I am pressing the mobile phone. Is
this an effect caused by mobile phone radiation? Is it because I am
getting cramp from clutching my phone too tightly? Or it is merely my
over-fertile imagination? That's what controlled experiments are
supposed to disentangle, so you know which effects occur because of
which causes. Nevertheless, the tingling sensation is sufficiently
strong that I now always use an earpiece for long calls on my moble
phone.
I also hear about electromagnetic standing waves on the wire leading
to the earpiece, but I ignore these stories, which has thus created an
impregnable defence against any ill effects that such waves might have
on my brain.
I would have thought that any form of electromagnetic radiation could
potentially have bad (or good) effects on us, simply because
everything in our body acts as an electrolyte which can therefore
respond to electromagnetic radiation.
The frequencies used by mobile phones are in the 1-2 GHz range, which
correspnds to a wavelength range 15-30 cm. This is in the same
ballpark as the size of a human head, so surely it is possible for
some sort of resonance to occur?
The mobile phone vested interests are strong. I know someone who has
lost around �500k unsuccessfully fighting a court case to have a
mobile phone transmitter mast removed from their building.
A key problem is that in science you can't prove a negative. Absence
of evidence is not evidence of absence. No-one can prove that an
effect does not exist, because people can always claim that the effect
in fact does exist, but people were just looking for it in the wrong
places. So when people claim that mobile phone radiation is not a
problem they are being economical with the truth. What they mean to
say is that they haven't yet seen evidence that it is a problem.
Usually that means that they have turned a blind eye to things that
might be positive evidence, just so they can say they haven't seen any
such evidence. I'm being cynical? No, I don't think so.
posted by Stephen Luttrell @ 10:35 PM 0 comments
Human life: The next generation
New Scientist has an article entitled Human life: The next generation
by Ray Kurzweil, which suggests that the rate of technological advance
is such that it won't be long before we significantly upgrade humans
to a better model.
The key to Kurzweil's argument is Kurzweil's Law (aka "the law of
accelerating returns"), which says that future advances will give us
an exponential growth of technology, rather than merely linear growth.
Potentially, that could mean enormous advances over a human lifetime.
Past experience shows that this may indeed be true.
The problem is to predict in what direction technological growth will
occur. You know that the technology is going to be mind-bogglingly
more advanced than current technology, but you don't know where these
advances are going to manifest themselves.
Kurzweil says that:
"...information technologies will grow at an explosive rate. And
information technology is the technology that we need to consider.
Ultimately everything of value will become an information technology:
our biology, our thoughts and thinking processes, manufacturing nd
many other fields..."
I agree with all of that.
We are way past the stage where owning a steam engine was a good way
of investing your money. Useful engines move bits nowadays.
Kurzweil also says that:
"...By the 2020s, nanotechnology will enable us to create almost any
physical product we want from inexpensive materials, using information
processes."
That is mostly rubbish.
It is certainly true that nanotechnology holds the potential for doing
this. However, the design of a nanotechnological "factory" may require
far more information than we can accumulate in the few years between
now and 2020.
An example is manufacturing a human being, or a fish, or an ant or
whatever. Assuming you start from nothing I don't think you will be
able to manufacture any of these by 2020. We can already make a virus
starting from nothing, but the process is rather hands-on.
Surely, Kurzweil is not suggesting that the same hands-on approach can
be used for making more complicated objects? I assume not.
The production process has to be automated somehow. The obvious way is
to first of all design a set of simple "tools", that then take over to
do the next stage of designing more complex "tools", and so on up the
scale of complexity, until you arrive at the object you wanted to
manufacture in the first place. This sounds very much like the sort of
solution that evolution discovered over a rather long period of random
shuffling about and selection by the environment for "fitness".
How exactly is this evolutionary type of process going to be
compressed into the time remaining between now and 2020? Er ... it's
not. The reason is that Kurzweil assumes an exponential growth rate
that is far too fast if his Kurzweil's Law is to achieve everything it
needs to between now and 2020.
Nevertheless, Kurzweil's Law is probably broadly correct, and we will
be able to drive evolution forwards at an increasing rate, so his
future with nanotechnological "factories" making almost anything we
want is much closer than we think it is. The trick will be not to
specify in advance which particular complex objects should be made,
but to wait and see which complex objects are feasible to make, and
then to try to match these objects up with applications that we find
useful.
Having said that, we'll still have some really cool technology in
2020, and some of it will be built by nanotechnological "factories".
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