Yeah so regarding that Nocebo: I can assure you I had no negative expectations about the outcome of the DECT phone test regarding my headaches. At all. Quite the contrary actually: I used to love all those wireless things because I’m lazy and a techophile, if this is a thing (it isn’t, but figure it out).
I just went through anything that affected me at that time and the phone it was. And I’m speaking major headaches here, not just a fuzzy feeling. I never get any. Never got any since either.
I find it amusing and saddening at the same time how people like you say “I’ve got a degree in … so I know and you don’t”. That’s not how things work. A degree certainly helps understand things but it doesn’t give you almighty knowledge. You’re just a person with certain information, that is a fraction of how our world works.
I imagine additional application of this for amateur/student telerobotics and other field robotics research. I’ve been looking for some off-the-shelf solutions that could apply to making your own space telebase prototypes.
Did you double blind test it, with other people putting both working and dummy DECT phones next to your head in a way that you couldn’t tell which is which? That is where the idea of electrosensitivity fails every time.
If you had followed the link you would have found out that GCSEs are roughly the equivalent of a Mittlere Reife or a high school diploma. They are nothing special. Unless you are in the learning disabilities group at a British school you will have learned about how waves work in nature.
Yes, science has been wrong before. However, the above is 19th century physics that is the basis for everything from broadcast communications to radar to medical technology (MRI anyone?) and astronomy. Challenging the inverse-square law is roughly on par with flat eartherism: it’s not that the subject is unquestionable, it’s that you need more than a radical prouncement and a wild look in your eye.
I hope so – forty years as an electrical engineer (retired) and the last three as a physics student [1], Maxwell’s Laws might as well be tattooed on my forehead.
[1] I don’t golf or play cards, can’t stand television. And there’s a kick-arse university a mile from here.
No. I purchased a DECT phone, started getting violent headaches. Thought I had caught some weird illness or something. Didn’t think about any external source. Weeks passed. Still getting headaches. One day, I talk for 2 hours on the phone with a relative: headaches out of bounds. Suspect the phone, put it away. No headaches.
Look, I’m not looking to become a scientist on this stuff. If you want to come over, do some double blind test on me, you’re invited. I would actually love that. If I found out it was just illusion, great!!! I could stop worrying. Fact is that right now, I can tell if a WiFi emitter is on or off. This has not gone through double blind tests either but it happened that I had turned on WiFi in my home, so that I could use it for some device like the 3DS and then forgot to turn it off. Next day, I will notice that WiFi is on, check and turn it off. I know, this is not scientific but the DECT thing really is close enough because I didn’t have the least suspicion and headaches are headaches. I’m talking about sharp, stinging pain, not just some uneasy feeling. So yeah, anyone want to test me, they’re invited.
Oh and BTW. I’ve already gone through all similar discussions regarding led poisoning due to amalgam fillings in the 90s. Dentists telling me that I was expecting a certain result due to press hysteria, even though I had never read anything about these fillings being toxic. I’ve been explained how long this stuff had been used and how its harmlessness was scientifically proven and look now: amalgam is officially toxic and I didn’t even have to graduate to prove it myself.
Naturally purpose-fitted SoCs are better at the job. I was thinking of cheap ad hoc nodes that could be quickly added to a mesh “backbone” to extend the coverage. Expecting full Internet speed would be unrealistic. Outside of local node access, traffic would probably be down to email and Usenet type traffic, minus the binaries.
Refugee camps are a special case, a permanent fixed disaster area.
Heh, imagine a scenario where the Internet is down, cell phones are down, but landlines are up. Start digging out those modems to bridge between meshes.
The government down situations would be the worst, where the Internet is cut, or heavily monitored/censored. Look at Iran or North Korea.
Just my €0.02: Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity is real; it’s just that it is extremely unlikely that it has anything to do with RF/EM emissions of any kind.
That being said,
(1) Massive RF/EM do have effects on organic tissue, i.e. humans. Which is why MRTs work, or why radio towers are switched off before the technicians climb up, why you don’t stick your head into an active microwave, have strict sefety rules around x-ray machines, and so on. There even is stuff like that research in Canada in which magnetic fields were found to trigger religious epiphanies in test subjects.
But these are massive fields with a lot of energy, several orders of magnitude above anything you’d encounter with WiFi or your cellphone, or basically anything you can lay your hands on outside special, restricted equipment.
(2) Humans have organs that can sense EM radiation - the bit of the spectrum known as visible light.
Birds can sense the Earth’s magnetic field.
Fish can sense and/or generate electrical fields.
It is conceivable that some humans can sense RF/RM outside the usual spectrum.
(3) When people suffer from something, they suffer. Whether it’s from something “real”, i.e. measurable and quantifiable, or not. And a civilized society should at least try to alleviate suffering.
