Free Local Wifi Killed By Fears of Wifi Dangers
March 25th, 2008
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Free wifi is a great thing if you happen to own a laptop or a PDA. It offers an easy way to get online which is generally faster than the alternative wide-area wireless systems offered by wireless phone companies, and since just about all laptops and PDA’s come with integrated wifi, it’s easy to hook up to. Best of all it’s free! And now that there are simple and affordable wifi voip phones, wifi hotspots can even be used in place of a more expensive cell phone to make calls.
Providing free wifi service can actually be a pretty good deal for communities. It can help draw people into parks, downtown areas and other such areas and thereby increase patronage of local businesses and revitalize local community life. It’s turned out to work quite well at this in areas where malls or other attractions have been stealing the crowds from traditional town centers. For the citizens of communities with free wifi it turns out to be a great local perk and it can help increase broadband penetration. Even better, in some cases, it can generate a profit for the local municipality. Alternatively, for a nominal fee, “premium” service with more bandwidth can be offered to local residents.
In Sebastopol, California, a plan for local Wifi was floated but the project ended up being shot down. Was it because of the expense of installing it? Fears that people might over-mooch the free service? That it could cut into the bottom line of broadband providers? Or allow kids to view pornography on city-funded bandwidth?
No, it was none of these. The reason the Wifi plan was candled is that locals were too afraid of the health consequences. Yes, the non-existent health consequences. Apparently however, some locals had been up in arms, claiming “electrosensativity” and that if the city sprung for Wifi they would be DOOMED! A petition was apparently floated and ended up with 235 signatures behind the resolution: “The convenience of this technology does not warrant the increase in radiation and the potential risks to the health of our community.”
Here’s one comment pulled from the petition:
I have had health challenges, and my body cannot handle wifi…it gives me headaches and makes me very sick. I would be unable to go to the store, shop. I have enough problems being limited in my travels, it is outrageous that a place so environmentally conscious would create this in our/my hometown. In Europe they are much more advanced than us, and there wifi is not allowed in cities in the European commonwealth.
Some in the community have claimed that due to their electrosensativity they live without electricity in general except for breif periods when they turn the power on for the purpose of going online and supporting anti-wifi efforts. I personally have my doubts about this. I don’t doubt that some would claim to have to live without electricity, but I do doubt that they actually do.
Of course, we all know that there have been ridiculous amounts of research done on RF/microwave radiation at low levels and there has been a pretty consistent finding of no apparent connection to any health concerns. There’s near unanimous agreement in this field of research that electrosensativity is bull and that the idea of chronic health effects from low-power wireless devices in normal use is at best, unsupported by any evidence and more likely than not completely bogus.
And even if low-power RF radiation does pose a hazard to health (which it probably doesn’t), lets not forget that between the inverse square law and the fact that we’re surrounded by cordless phones, baby monitors, garage door openers and so on, that the actual contribution to exposure from the plan for a few wifi routers is a drop in the electromagnetic bucket. Still, this doesn’t seem to stop those who fear anything related to technology. Sources like “Bioinitiative” have been cited as reason to run in fear from anything that involves RF communications.
But this was never really about science or research to begin with, was it? No, of course not.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:20 am and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, inverse square. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 25th, 2008 at 9:29 am
A perfect application for tin-foil hats. They could be issued free of charge to sufferers of this particular (mental) disorder.
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March 25th, 2008 at 9:35 am
It can’t be true that, “In Europe they are much more advanced than us, and there wifi is not allowed in cities in the European commonwealth.” Do you have any idea where that claim can be found (other than from this person)? The prevalence of 3G cellular technology and all the other wireless usage throughout Europe suggests that they are not banning wireless implementations. Plus, with the population density throughout much of Europe I would bet that EM radiation levels are higher there than in the US.
Thanks for pointing out this interesting development.
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March 25th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Oh so now this hysteria has finally begun to cross the Atlantic and take root in the Americas?
I think you’re behind the ball on this. In Denmark there are engraved bracelets which people wear with medical information should they be found incapacitated. In the past it only had normal medical conditions on it (has a pacemarker, is diabetic, allergic to antibiotics, heart condition etc.) These are not new, but what is new is that now people get these bracelets or medals engraved with a warning that they are electrosensative and to be kept away from any excessive em fields.
It gets much worse than that. People now claim it as a dissaibility. Some ask for compensation because they cannot work due to it. There have even been some who say that the equal-access laws for the handicapped in the EU mean that national governments need to start installing shielded cages in public transit or various other places. They say this is the same as a wheelchair lift or a touch sign for the blind. They say they are being discriminated against. The new disability nonsense is new the past three or four years mostly.
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March 25th, 2008 at 9:42 am
pace said:
No I don’t think it’s not permitted but what does happen is that frequently communities might not even bother with the idea because they know it will make the hypochondriacs with their pretend conditions come out of the woodwork and make a big deal about it.
3G cellular only is around because cellular was around long before everyone started the fuss about this. They can upgrade the existing towers but you couldn’t build a new tower without the people in the area making a fuss about it. This may not be true everywhere but it is in many places. Even the existing transmitters get more than their fair share of complaints.
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March 25th, 2008 at 9:57 am
Oh yes, we have this in the United States. We only have it in a limited demographic, but we definitely have it. It would be in the politically left-leaning communities we call “yuppies” and especially in the groups we know as “soccer moms” and those who were hippies in the early 1970’s and are now holding on to that in their 50’s and 60’s.
The profile of those who complain about this is usually very upper middle class. It seems to be a lot of women who don’t work, but also a lot of the yuppie older men too. They are the ones who shop at organic super markets and then drive their hybrid SUV home (which sounds like it is a contradiction, but yes they are starting to make hybrid SUV’s) and then go into chat rooms and talk about how their kids do so well without vaccines.
You also have a few in the next generation. Younger hippie-mark2 types. They wear a Nader T-shirt and talk about how big corporations are evil and how radiation from power plants causes cancer. Then they go to the store and buy an “energy drink” of the kind that is claimed to have cancer-fighting antioxidants and on their way out they pick up a carton of smokes and head over to the rally against nuclear-caused cancer. Again, a contradiction. You see this all the time.
I predict that there will soon be wifi-free zones at Starbucks because that seems to be where all these douches gravitate to.
Is anyone else familiar with the picture I am painting of this group?
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March 25th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Well, a “depleted cranium” makes a nice Helmholtz resonator.
When I disputed this kind of stuff with another person the other day she said I should keep an open mind at least. My response was that my mind is open, but not so open that the brain falls out.
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March 25th, 2008 at 10:14 am
What the hell is the “European Commonwealth”?
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March 25th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Josh said:
I don’t know. Apparently wifi is illegal there though.
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March 25th, 2008 at 10:41 am
Cellphones, radar, and television transmitters next!
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March 25th, 2008 at 10:46 am
good thing Germany isn’t part of it, then. Otherwise we’d have to turn off all of that WiFi-equipment.
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March 25th, 2008 at 11:04 am
DV82XL said:
Right but how then do we deal with all the horrible EMF from sunstorms interacting with the ionosphere? What about pulsars? Lightning? Geomagnetic activity? Storms on jupiter that cause radio emissions? What about the microwave radiation that lingers from the big bang?
I think if you stopped all human activity involving electronics it actually would not cut down the amount of electromagnetic fields present on any given part of the globe. There are already lots of cosmic sources of it plus the ionosphere and geomagnetic forces at work.
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March 25th, 2008 at 11:29 am
I my opinion all of this nonsense, from this through vaccination fear, to nuclear hysteria, has a single cause: people feel out of control.
Somehow railing against these things gives them a feeling that they are doing something, anything rather than being blown about by forces they do not understand.
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March 25th, 2008 at 11:59 am
DV82XL said:
You don’t need to be out of control. This feeling comes from ignorance. People just fear something like nuclear energy because all they know is that theres a big concrete dome and that there is something going inside of it which they have absolutely no understanding of beyond some stereotypical images of buckets of green glowing goo. They don’t feel in control of wireless because it seems like it’s a box that magically allows computers to connect to the internet. Why it will go through a wall made of wood but not metal? they don’t know. It must be magic. Why does it need to be up high? They don’t know, because the principle of line-of-sight is not something they’re familiar with.
The reason this is so unnecessary is that the information is not secret. Not only is it not secret, but for example, nuclear companies seem to go to great pains to put good getting-started educational stuff up about what fission is and why it produces energy and what radiation safety is all about and so on.
Really, most of the stuff involved is not beyond people’s grasp if you actually try to look into it. You don’t need to go to engineering school to know enough basics to just be aware that it’s not magic and what you do not need to worry about.
One thing I remember was that back in the early days of the space program people everywhere seemed to have a great understanding of spaceflight. I think it was just the fact that it was so popular and had such interest but average people who were not rocket scientists understood that Apollo needed a certain orbital period or that TLI was how you accelerated past the velocity needed for an orbit high enough to get captured by lunar gravity.
It’s just because that was the hot topic of the time and on everyone’s minds and lips the same way they now can tell you how many tabloid pictures of Paris Hilton’s crotch were snapped last year and by what magazine.
The problem is that there’s not the same kind of technical interest now in things and people don’t feel like there’s a good reason to go seek out information. It’s more avaliable than ever before.
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March 25th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Russel said:
You may be right, but it begs the question of why they turn to pseudoscience for explanations, particularly when those fields ( to give them more status than they are due) go to great lengths to make the explanations they offer as technical as possible. Not only that, they do it to the point where explanations of why they are in error become so time consuming and difficult.
I think there is something else at work here, and I don’t know quite what it is.
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March 25th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
“I think there is something else at work here, and I don’t know quite what it is.”
Science is hard. Really hard. Handwaving New Age claptrap is easy. It took me 18 years of schooling, from primary school to MSc, to become qualified in RF and microwave engineering. It takes some hippie dip flower child 18 seconds to be convinced that it’s WiFi that makes them suck, rather than that they just suck all by themselves. Most people don’t have the willpower to become educated in science, even if they are one of the scant few who have the brains for it.
I don’t object to neo-Luddites paying 200 bucks for a key fob. But when they mess with my free WiFi, I get mad.
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March 25th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
a. There’s no such thing as the ‘European Commonwealth’ and
b. There most certainly are public wi-fi points here, in every country of the European Union, and more are being set up every day and
c. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
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March 25th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
David Gillies said:
Okay, this I disagree with. I don’t think science is necessarily “really hard.” It’s not hard to learn enough about RF to know how it works and it won’t kill you.
You said it took you 18 years of school to become a qualified RF/Microwave engineer. I don’t doubt that and I’m sure you know a lot more about that field than me. But this is not about asking everyone to be able to design the wifi router and implement the protocol and everything. I sure couldn’t do that. I’m not an RF engineer myself, so if I need to design a microwave system I’ll go hire someone as qualified as you.
But let me ask you: Did it take you all those RF engineering classes to know enough about it to know that the idea that it gives off some kind of radiation that makes you sick was a bunch of bologna? No. I bet you knew that by the time you were halfway through your first RF Electrioncs 101 class, if not earlier.
I don’t think we need to ask people to be RF engineers to understand this. I don’t think we even need to ask them to take RF 101. We just need to ask them to be receptive to science and basically try to think in terms of science and look for the knowledge to figure it out.
I know that my bull****-o-meter works pretty well in areas that I have no education in. I haven’t taken a class in auto repair in my life and I sure as hell could not rebuild an engine. However, if I go to a mechanic and he says “Yeah, the belt that links the front passenger wheel to the gas tank is shot and that’s why you’re going to need a new exhaust system and alternator” Well, honestly I don’t know much about cars (I once had a friend show me how to change my oil and I felt proud of myself for it. That’s how little I know), but I do know enough to be certain that’s a complete lie and I need another mechanic.
You’re assuming that a person needs to be completely versed in a subject to be able to pick out the bull**** claims about it. 99% of the bull**** claims are so out landish and blatant that they’re not going to require a Ph.D. to figure out you can tell right away they’re screwy. And if people don’t know they should just go find a good scientific study or something and look at that.
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March 25th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Eva said:
Yes. But there are also more and more people every day who run in terror from them. It’s been exported to the US as well. We keep setting up wifi hot spots too, but now they’ve gone from universally supported to mostly supported to not-supported in some areas. I hope it does not get worse. There are an increasing number of people so convinced it’s making them sick they’re going to all the trouble of petitioning against them.
Sad.
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March 25th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
David Gillies said:
‘New Age’ has been around for 40 years, and before the net its rubbish filled whole book stores with titles that claimed to have rediscovered ancient wisdom, or purported to successfully show a link between the numerology of tantric Buddhism and quantum physics. When I was taking my degree, during the The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test era, I would often find myself defending ‘my’ science against the claptrap in one or another of these tracts.
Generally speaking the ideas presented leaned more towards the metaphysical, the authors claiming to be ‘going beyond science’ not replacing it. They were interested in expanding the mind, getting in touch with unseen forces and the like. Science was seen as conservative and hidebound, not a tool to control the masses, as it is today.
Panics about the hot-button items we are seeing to-day on the other hand seem to revolve around the belief that institutional science is a tool of, and beholden to, (insert conspiracy here) and is suppressing data that will show (insert horror here) is real. Brave others have collected the data independently however that shows the truth, and the results are always presented so as to outwardly conform with the styles of legitimate science.
That is the difference. What I don’t understand is how we got to this point.
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March 25th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
David Gillies said:
It’s part of a bigger problem though. It’s that these kind of things are going to affect us all in the long run. It doesn’t matter if I think that the local hospital should spend avaliable funds on a better CT-scan machine, if everyone else in my area demands they spend that money on a homeopathic center. I’m screwed when I go in to get a CT-scan for something because everyone else demanded something else.
Then what about people who go for this kind of silly thing instead of signing up for a cell phone or something? If nobody signs up for a cell phone then my cell phone sucks because the service provider has no reason to improve coverage in my area.
What happens when some idiot doesn’t get a vaccine and gets really sick with a preventable disease? They end up needing treatment which is going to hit me next time I pay my insurance premium.
But worst of all: People like this vote.
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March 25th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
One reason we got here is the dismal state of science education. Not even the basics are taught. Most of any of the outlandish claims could be easily dismissed by anybody with even a rudimentary grasp of the laws of thermodynamics:
1. You can’t win
2. You can’t break even
3. You also can’t get out of the game.
Instead the kids are taught esoteria in a convoluted manner. No wonder they get confused. And from that confusion comes a grab for easy answers.
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March 25th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
KLA said:
Of course. A lot of bad science claims work by the concept of making things unnecessarily complicated. Most of them are falsble by very basic concepts if properly understood. The other thing is that a large portion (actually probably the vast majority) are so outlandish that if you know the first thing about basic scientific principals you can dismiss them outright.
It’s part of the whole ‘Obfuscation’ method of arguing something. If you’re debating something like the health affects of uranium you start talking about the interactions of the uranyl ion and the chemical nature of DNA and studyies conducted of rats and people who had been exposed years ago and then start bringing up the quantum aspects of radioactive decay.
That’s unnecessary because people only need to understand something like “you get exposed to a lot more from coal power and phosphate fertalizer” to realize there is a big crack in the foundation of things.
It feeds off the fact that we don’t give very good reenfrocement of the basics in education. We also don’t seem to do a very good job encouraging science as the basis for understanding the world.
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March 25th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
It has also to do with the quality of teachers. When I got my engineering degree MANY years ago, those that could not hack the physics and math transfered to become science teachers. !!?
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March 25th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
KLA said:
Well I can’t say that that is universally true. I got my primary education in public schools in the US. Had a few really damn good teachers in science and technology.
if I had to name one course which changed the way I saw the world it was one in my high school called “Principles of engineering.”
It was just as the name implies: Not a lot of field-related engineering stuff but it was all about the basic principles in engineering in general. Stuff like “Factor of safety” “cost-benefit analysis” “planned obsolescence” “acceptable rate of failure” “future-proofing” “materials conservation” “effeciency of process” “process control”
there was some stuff related to materials though. Basically understanding regions of plasticity and elestecity and what the acceptable factor of safety for various applications are. How one monitors a process of manufacturing and determines whether or not the rate of production failure is acceptable. The idea of how something is designed to maximize the effecient use of materials. How you create a new product while accounting for doing it in a method that will minimize the retooling of existing machines.
Most useful damn course I took in all my education, with the possible exception of learning to read and that stuff early on.
Damn good teacher too. Really an engineer at heart. Really laid the foundation of an understanding of how the world of technology works.
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March 25th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Sounds like a good course. I’ve got more for you. If the educational system taught a few basic concepts then 99% of bad science would cease. A few of these:
Placebo Effect
Errors in human perception
Selective Memory
Cultural Bias
Predispositions and commonly recurring beliefs
Logical Fallacies
Scientific Process
Experimental Control
Statistical Significance
Repeatability
Peer-Review
Anecdotally evidence
If people understood that kind of stuff, most of the really bad science and myths out there would fall immediately.
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March 25th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Russel, I believe you have hit on a key concept which is lacking in how most people see science and that is the importance of some basic but absolutely indispensables and unifying concepts.
I do not know if anyone is familiar with the analogy of the fine filter/course filter. The idea being that simply by understanding the scientific methodology you can be a course filter for baseless scientific data independent of the field it is in.
The idea being: if you are looking at something which you do not know anything about the subject matter, you can ask the question of whether or not it is based on a scientifically valid set of data and well grounded protocol and controls. This is the course filter. It does not get out all of the problems but it is reliable at detecting most of them.
The fine filter is to look carefully at the data itself and examine the validity of it within the field. For this, we need to be much more expert. The expert is required to be the fine filter.
The analogy is that if you use only the coarse filter you will get most of the pollutants and maybe enough for certain situations, but you will still have some. If only the fine filter is used, then you can get out the pollutants but the filter is quickly clogged and overwhelmed. So we need both. Now our stream is pure and the filter has not been clogged.
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March 25th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
People are not going to be any kind of filter in general. The population is too stupid. I’m just glad to know it’s apparently everywhere. At least we’re equal.
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March 25th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Russel said:
What you are saying is that we need a mandatory senior high school level general course on critical thinking.
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March 25th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
DV82XL said:
That’s actually not all that bad an idea.
And yes, a large portion of the anti-scientific claims out there won’t even pass a basic “Does this make any sense” test. A very large amount are also sold using anecdotal evidence or inductive logic as support. Too many people eat it up but really the “evidence” is so thin it can often be spoted a mile away.
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March 25th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
DV82XL said:
It’s possible to get an extensive education and make a career of a branch of science and never learn the idea of scientific controls and critical thinking. Rustum Roy proved that pretty well.
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March 25th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
DV82XL said:
If there is one thing our educational system is missing…
Absolutely that would be great. What would be even better is if it was not only one class but a recurring theme in education.
But that kind of a course would be a brilliant addition to the science curriculum. I took biology, chemistry and physics in high school. All of them were honors level (except biology).
I do not remember ONCE in my education having a discussion about human bias or the importance of experimental controls or the fallacy of anecdotal evidence, flawed observations, how myths are disseminated, common misconceptions. I had to seek out that stuff on my own.
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March 26th, 2008 at 4:25 am
CtrlAltDel said:
Well if I had my way I’d see a return of the trivium which was comprised the three subjects: grammar, logic, and rhetoric as the core of schooling. These were taught in cycles during a classic medieval liberal arts education. This is why the first level of schooling is called ‘grammar school’ to this day in some places.
On this foundation the other subjects would be taught.
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March 26th, 2008 at 8:19 am
I think we can agree that our educational systems, it seems around the world, are not doing a very good job in combating the hypochondriac and pro-psuedoscience quack tendency that seems to be taking hold in most industrial countries. There is not enough skepticism and rational discourse. Maybe there never was.
I am not sure that the school system is the only place to address this cultural issue though because there are a lot of adults who are out of school and going for these wacky ideas. I know that children are the future, but if we only go for them then we are going to need to wait a long time for the current generation to die off and the new batch to completely replace them.
We need more of a cultural revolution. It will not happen though. Cultural revolutions are rare and hard to create.
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March 26th, 2008 at 8:26 am
If you had a course in school on rational response, critical thinking, recognizing pseudoscience and the scientific method, you know what would happen?
Parents might accept it if you sold it to them right, but then after the kids started going to it they would all be up in arms and demand its removal once they see the results. “My little Billy started the new school year just fine and after taking the course in critical thinking he won’t go to church anymore!” “Same with my Suzy. She was a nice little girl and then she took your course. Now she won’t say grace at the table and she says that prayers are silly.” “And my Benny isn’t going to synagog anymore! Oy Vey! What have ya done?”
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March 26th, 2008 at 8:38 am
Giant Pulsating Brain said:
Yeah, sounds like the classic joke where little Billy comes home and tells his dad that he learned that humans descended from apes. His dads response: “You maybe, but not me”.
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March 26th, 2008 at 9:35 am
As part of my duties, I’ve had to answer the “electromagnetic radiation fields are giving me a tumor, headache, (fill in any vague physical ailment)” complaint. I’d go measure around their work areas. Invariably if they had an AC clock, it was putting out more electromagnetic radiation than their monitor, the electical box next their work station, and (fill in whatever they thought was the culprit). I would ask them if they used a hairdryer, had an electric stove, used a vacuum cleaner and a whole bunch of other things they likely used daily. I would add up how much electromagnetic radiation (in milliGauss) they exposed themselves to in an average day. The score always outdistanced the “culprit” by a mile.
If it is electrical, it has an electromagnetic field (ELF and magnetic) around it. Vacuum cleaners are one of the worst offenders. I tell folks, who think electromagnetic radiation is dangerous, to quit using all electrical devices; don’t wash/dry your clothes, don’t vacuum, don’t watch TV, don’t use a hair dryer, et cetera. I get deadly serious with them in urging them to go without. It’s truly funny to watch their reaction.
I, and many better than me, have been battling this ignorance since the ’80s. It started with the powerlines and quickly expanded to the latest electronic gizmo. It just doesn’t seem to go away. It is why I frequently use the serious, give-it-all-up approach because rational explanations don’t work with many of these tin foil hat types.
KLA: laughed my butt off with your “Well, a “depleted cranium” makes a nice Helmholtz resonator.” You know I’m a geek when I know what a Helmholtz resonator does!
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March 26th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the West between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century.
The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:
1) To make good people.
2) To make good citizens.
3) To make each person his or her personal best.
These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education’s mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong.
The literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling’s true purpose.
Consider Alexander Inglis’s 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education. Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
Inglis breaks down the purpose – the actual purpose – of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:
1) The adjustive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can’t test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn to do pointless and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to manipulate, harness and exploit a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and this is to be reinforced by training only so far as their selected destination in the social machine warrants – and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placements, and other stigmas – clearly enough that their peers will perceive them as inferiors and effectively bar them from breeding with superior stock. That’s what all those minor humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of overseers. To that end a small, select fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and demotivated in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas.
Within these parameters any course on critical thinking would be a threat to the whole system.
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March 26th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Larry G said:
Something one of my friends came up while ago that I liked is “Depleted cranium can penetrate even the most advanced idiot-proof armor”
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March 26th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Has anyone ever come up with any evidence at all that the frequency range of wifi has any health effects beyond dielectric heating? The classic safety measures for even high power microwave basically are only concerned with nearfield acute exposure. I don’t think I have ever seen any evidence that human health could be impacted by microwaves at levels well bellow the levels that might cause thermal damage.
Also, do these people understand the difference in terms of a low frequency electromagnetic field that is mostly inductive in nature (like from AC power) versus something like a microwave field? They are completely different.
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March 26th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
If people say wifi makes them sick then who are you to tell them they are wrong? You can’t feel it. Maybe they are, but I still think it’s not right to use tax money to turn around and build something that a lot of people say is making them ill.
People are different and some people are allergic to some things. There are resteraunts now which have information on the menu that says their products dont contain peanuts or they say if some do becasue some people are allergic. I think it’s good to acomidate others like that because it lets them get out and do the things others can. I think wifi-free zones might be a good idea.
It’s very disrespectful to tell other people what makes them sick and doesn’t. if it doesn’t make you sick, fine
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March 26th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Wooly: Your body is getting bombarded every second of the day from both natural and man-made sources across the whole electromagnetic spectrum. You don’t “feel” any form of electromagnetic radiation, though you can sense light radiation and your body will react to the transfer of radiative heat. Remember that some wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation will be absorbed by our bodies, and some won’t and it is really difficult to know if a specific wavelength is being absorbed by your body. Some wavelengths can be beneficial to us, some can be harmful, and most have no effect either way. All electrical equipment emits some form of electromagnetic radiation, so I recommend you quit using your computer. As you cannot feel the myriad wavelengths, I recommend that you find and live in a really deep cave lined with lead, mu metal, and copper (making sure these metals have no radioactive impurities in them). It is difficult to create a non-electromagnetic environment, but I’m sure the benefits will outweigh the costs in your case. However, while in the cave be careful of the neutrinos that will pass through the shielding and go through you.
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March 26th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Why not just buy that tesla-purple-sheild/cheap medication bottle instead? I mean it promises to make it all go away and it’s about as logical as the mentality that would end up making you live in a cave.
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March 26th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Chuckles: We’ve only accomplished small enclosures that were nearly electromagnetic radiation free. In such an environment, studies with one-celled organisms show they have a very high mortality rate . With a little luck and if these folks take my (mis)advice, they’ll qualify for the Darwin Awards.
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March 26th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Larry G said:
Only small enclosures that are nearly electromagnetic radiation free? Why only small? Who is involved in the conspiracy to keep this down? I want to know. Obviously this is a conspiracy.
Oh also, if we want to be sure that people are not exposed to any electromagnetic radiation at all, not ionizing or rf or light or infrared, then we’re going to need to get the temperature down to damn close to absolute zero, right?
If you have any thermal activity your body can’t avoid radiation because it radiates itself! OMG! PANIC!
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March 26th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
You’re right. If you consider the whole issue of incandescence, then yes. What we call the “thermal” range of infrared is the frequency area that corespondent to temperatures which are common on earth. However, even bellow that you’d have radio emissions if even weak. You would need to be at absolute zero or very close to it to assure no emissions of electromagnetic energy at all.
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March 28th, 2008 at 6:43 am
KLA said:
I’d have said something along the lines of: unlike you my mind isn’t so open that it can be used as a public lavatory.
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March 28th, 2008 at 6:26 pm
The trouble with an open mind is that people dump garbage in it.
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March 28th, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Apparently these protests or community opposition campaigns have actually been successful in stopping wifi service from being installed by a local government. It is stunning to me that these idiots would not be totally outweighed by the number of people who would really want some free wireless highspeed around town. I would think if this happened in my area and they shot down the proposal that ten times as many people would demand it be restarted just because it’s free internet service.
Are there no geeks in these areas? Where are the kids with their Ipod Touch and laptops? Does the other sid have nothing to day?
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March 29th, 2008 at 9:05 am
I would have thought the same in my area too, but it might just be that those people don’t have nearly as much time on their hands.
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