Irrational Fear of RF Radiation Gets Ugly
May 27th, 2008
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Oh those silly RF Radiation Scaremongers! They’re so comical how they fail to understand the difference between gamma rays, thermal infrared and radio frequency emissions. Annoying as they may be, occasionally they offer an opportunity to point and laugh. (Which if you ask me, is one of the most effective ways of fighting this kind of thing).
But it’s not all fun and games when it comes to the bad science of radiophobia. These groups can end up costing public and private institutions a lot of money, disrupt wireless coverage and create unnecessary and costly restrictions. They can even get violent.
Yes, violent. In this case, the story is out of Sweden, the original inventors of the idea that electronic devices will kill you. The story concerns an elderly man who apparently took some major offense to his granddaughter using a wireless phone while holding her newborn daughter (his great grand daughter). Believing that the phone was somehow going to somehow endanger the safety of the infant, he verbally accosted his granddaughter (reportedly with some nasty language). Then things got physical, as Grandpa started to whack the young woman on the back of her neck, all while she was still holding the baby, who luckily was not injured in the scuffle.
The man’s daughter, the mother of his granddaughter and grandmother the newborn looked on in horror. This may very well be the first recorded incident of a Swedish cell phone scuffle involving four generations, quite an achievement!
The man was reported sentenced to fifty hours of community service and a fine roughly equivalent to $1300. The relatively light sentence for assault and domestic violence was based on the individual’s “settled lifestyle.” Although it does it has not been reported, it’s likely that the “just a crazy old man” defense may have also come into play here.
A big thanks to reader “Ray” who pointed out this news story.
(I’m not sure if the submitter would like his whole name used or not, but feel free to claim due credit in the comments if you’d like a better citation than just “Ray”.)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 8:21 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Just LAME, 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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May 27th, 2008 at 8:32 pm
I know it’s not funny in reality because I’m sure it’s a horrible experience to have your grandfather suddenly start yelling and hitting you while you are holding your baby. It’s not funny at all. So why is it that every time I picture this I can’t stop laughing? Maybe it’s because the grandfather in my minds eye is the Swedish Chef from the Muppets. I guess it’s a crude stereotype but I’m still chuckling.
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May 27th, 2008 at 8:55 pm
All I can say if my elderly father ever went after my daughter and her baby, he would get a one-way ticket to a home, and I hope that my kids would do the same if it were me.
Nevertheless the hysteria over this non-problem is getting way out of hand, and it’s time to push back more pro-actively than just dissing these idiots. I say again that each of us has to be prepared to face these idiots down in public forums, and we have to have the facts at hand, packaged to hand to the political decision-makers when this comes up in our communities. These morons have to be shown up for what they are, which is hypochondriacs, attention whores, and drama queens. If we don’t, this does have the potential to get out of hand as it has in some jurisdictions and we will be saddled with a bunch of idiotic restrictions that we do not need.
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May 27th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Naw, Ray is good. Thanks for the credit.
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May 27th, 2008 at 9:54 pm
Nothing will make a person act out of character and to the extreme more than fear, especially when it is a threat which they know little about or is some kind of unknown danger.
I can’t say I blame a person for reacting that way against that such an unknown but feared threat. If my kid was being put in some kind of dangerous situation that I had no control over and little understanding of I’d flip out too. Like if they were in playing with a gun and I didn’t know if it was loaded or not or if the safety was on, all I know is it was a threat then I’d assume the worst and panic. Likewise if they were on a train track, the worst thing might actually be worse than seeing a train coming would be not having a view to see because then it could come from nowehere and that’s helplessness.
This guy may just be reacting that way because enough activists have bombarded him with fear and told him to run away from these phones. Some of these activists do a pretty good job of coming off as credible authorities.
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May 27th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
I can blame him, because even though I know very little about how cell phones work, I can still tell an overblown and baseless scare tatic when I see it because it just has all the classic stink of one. Also, I know that people are not dropping dead left and right from them either and that the ones who run in fear are the same who seem to run in fear of everything. It’s not like this is the first time. Anyone remember chemical sensitivity that was all around about twenty years ago? Anyone remember ’sick buildings’ that turned out usually be okay? What about breast implants?
It’s deja vu all over again.
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May 27th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
I’m not always sure how much to blame people who fall for this kind of thing but aren’t actively involved. However, those who make a living off of this and put up websites, organize protests, go on the news over it and make a life out of spreading this bull**** I never have a doubt on, they are scum. The leaders there is no excuse. If you are going to go so far as becoming an activist you should know what the hell you’re talking about and stick to the truth.
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May 27th, 2008 at 11:56 pm
Wasn’t the first time that an irrational fear of something harmless has caused someone to lash out. Won’t be the last either.
I don’t know that age really even is relevant here because it’s something I can just as easily imagine someone much younger doing if they were equally uninformed and had bought into this crap.
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May 28th, 2008 at 3:34 am
DV82XL said:
I agree with you on this. If they ever had a protest like the one in San Fransisco near me and I saw it I would not politely walk away but I’d go right up against them and start asking the tough questions. If I saw anyone in the local news about this I’d call up the news and tell them that I wanted to see them provide the full information or I’d write a letter to the editor or something.
These things with this and also vaccine scares and nuclear energy fears and other stupidity is getting way out of hand and is causing some very real problems. I’m 100% ready to crash any rally I see and not turn my back to these clowns when they get in the news or go to a town meeting. I hope I’m not alone in feeling this way!
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May 28th, 2008 at 11:26 am
CtrlAltDel said:
You’re not alone.
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May 28th, 2008 at 11:33 am
CtrlAltDel said:
I tried that before. The problem is that today reporters, especially in television, are often even less informed than most of the public, but have also often the arrogance to belive that they do know more.
Two (non-news) cases I saw recently:
1. In a recent documentary on Discovery Channel about alternative power systems for cars, a car running on compressed air was shown and the reporter claimed that the air motor could also drive a compressor at the same time, so the car never has to be “recharged”. Basically a perpetuum mobile of the first kind.
2. Yesterday in a show on the Science Channel about Saturns moon Titan it was claimed that lighting a match on Titan would blow up the whole moon because the lakes of hydrocarbons and the atmosphere (mostly methane) would explode. It never occured to anyone making that documentary that you need oxygen for that, and Titans atmosphere does not have any.
These is 4th grade science stuff. Mistakes like that should really not happen. Especially on science oriented channels. News of course is even worse and scientific reality gets routinely trumped for “getting a story”, no matter how nutty.
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May 28th, 2008 at 11:43 am
KLA said:
That’s why I didn’t suggest talking to the media, but directly to the politicos. They are the ones left hanging out to dry with a room full of these nuts, and they cannot be expected to take them on alone. If they don’t see broad support for something like city-wide Wi-Fi and are faced with a group telling them it makes them sick, who can blame them for not supporting the project.
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May 28th, 2008 at 11:55 am
KLA said:
Perhaps this indicates the need for a new paradigm for communications over the internet. Currently we have almost an inversion of the situation with, say, television, where a few information providers broadcast to a gagged audience (in terms of being able to engage in direct feedback to the disseminators of news). Blogs and so forth have the opposite problem reaching the masses… important signals are swamped out in a background sea of competing propaganda efforts and random garbage.
Perhaps the key to building a truly effective communications system needs to take the middle path. That may sound like a compromise, but it isn’t. Complexity grows out of a stable background. Perhaps what we need is some kind of large internet domain where the propaganda, program and means can be developed and launched in a way that reaches the broad community of the industrialised world. Individual websites, blogs and so forth are good, but there’s just too many of them. some sort of larger agglomeration, or alliance, is needed for effective action.
Any thoughts?
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May 28th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Finrod said:
What you are referring to is ‘push media’ as opposed to ‘pull media’ on the net. It’s been tried and with little real success. The nature of this type of communications is that it does allow like-minded people to get together and share ideas, and that is its greatest power – it’s also its greatest weakness because it is very hard to include those who don’t share the same world view.
Doc has done a great job attracting posters from both sides of the issues, even when it is clear where he and this web site stand, but this is probably the best that can be done without moving to enforced neutrality a la Wikipedia’s NPOV rules, which anyway don’t work as advertised.
The role you are talking about IS the domain of ‘old media’ and at one time it was what they did. Good journalism meant taking the time to check facts, sort through opinions and offer your readers what amounted to a report on the topic. Now, as KLA rightly pointed out, they all have seemed to slip to the yellow side, and are more interested in sensationalism than reportage.
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May 28th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Alice in Blunderland said:
Thanks. Now I have that vision to look forward to all day.
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May 28th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
DV82XL said:
Yes, and Joe Public is led to believe that “when there’s smoke, there’s fire”. What’s forgotten is that fresh manure smokes too (at least on a cold morning).
The problem with talking to news editors is that they are mostly the cause of the problem. Sensations sell. And if there isn’t any, ordinary things are dressed up as sensations. Especially if it can be spun into a scare angle. That’s one of the reasons for this increase in nut-cases IMHO. News, especially TV news, resembles more and more the headlines of supermarket checkout tabloids than real news. About the only thing of value is the weather report, and even of that only the preceding day’s summary is believable.
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May 28th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
Of all the RF fear out there, fear of cell and cordless phones is the least absurd. They transmit (low power, of course) zero inches from your head.
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May 28th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Chuck said:
Yes that’s true, but you’ll notice most of the protests and civic actions revolve around the cell towers as opposed to the cell phones themselves. The reason for this is pretty simple: if you really wanted to reduce your RF exposure and were deadly afraid that you were being harmed, the way to do it would be to simply choose not to use a cell phone yourself. Possibly you might avoid people who were on cell phones by a good few yards, and if that is not possible you may even ask them to stay away from you with the phone.
This is what would matter. Due to the logarithmic nature of RF power density, towers really don’t matter. However, just avoiding cordless phones doesn’t let you be a public drama queen. If you go after cell phones themselves, then all you can do is maybe occasionally whine at individuals using them near you.
Going after the towers and demanding “wireless free zones” would be scientifically ridiculous even if RF was harmful, because the intensity is so much less – it’s ridiculously low by comparison. But towers are something you can get a public protest going around and you can cry about having no choice and the big bad companies .
Just don’t use a phone? You’ve got to be kidding! That would be discrete and tactful!
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May 28th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
Yes, I have noticed that. Sitting by a lamp cord will give you more ‘radiation’ than living near a cell tower.
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May 28th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
DV82XL said:
So just use the net as an organisational tool, and focus the outreach through some other medium.
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May 28th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
Finrod said:
Well there are various methods of addressing bad science in the media (which reminds me I need to post something about this.. i’ve been meaning to).
Of course, you can call or write the outlet. I’ve had a couple of retractions and clarifications posted in the paper. You can just spread the word online or in other venues, because eventually news organizations notice they’re being talked poorly of in the public sphere. You can refute it elsewhere. You can try to get the attention of a competitor to possibly even run a story like “Fox news drops the ball bigtime with false info on (Instert issue) on MSNBC.
Really though, the thing is that no one person can generally do this. There have been clarifications of stories and apologies and updates and there have been other news organizations rooting them out, but it’s generally when they get a big response. The media will not respond to having a single person call or write. What they will respond to is having a large amount of stuff up against them, because if you get enough blogging and comments and stuff you can (hopefully) eventually get noticed and possibly make the jump to op-ed or something.
If you look, for example, at the 60 Minutes thing with the fake memos about Bush in the Air National Guard, individuals were just as much all over that as news organizations. People were posting how it lined up perfectly with Microsoft word documents and then bloggers published lists of all the typewriters of the time that did superscript and showed none matched. Then other people linked to them and started dissing 60 minutes. Then OP-ED pieces started to question it in the mainstream. Then it finally hit the mainstream news.
But that was a situation where it was a major thing people took notice of.
The key is that it this kind of thing can work if there is enough of it and enough people start passing it on and start listening to the message and making up their minds. The news media is ultimately a business and what they care about is ratings (or readers or site visitors or whatever). Pissing off a few people is one thing, but what makes them concerned is anything that gives the impression that a large number of viewers or readers are dissatisfied with their reports and are so dissatisfied they may loose them.
So there is something to be said for just bitching about it in public forms. Although you will likely not see an acute action or know you had any part in it, but it helps to add to the chorus of discontent and hope it will eventually get noticed.
This site, for example, I really doubt would alone result in any kind of change in media coverage. However, if it is linked to and cited it might help. If enough other sites also demand it it can help too. It’s all working in the right direction to call this stuff out.
No raindrop believes it is responsible for the flood.
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May 29th, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Maybe they are right, look what happens to a phone in the microwave !
http://jwz.livejournal.com/893031.html
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May 31st, 2008 at 4:47 pm
Did you intend that comment seriosly?
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June 1st, 2008 at 9:00 pm
No of course not, I thought the video was hilarious.
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June 6th, 2008 at 11:03 am
This is really the concern of my blog, Praning’s Thoughts, to raise people’s awareness/understanding on radiaiton. Actually, I have posted two articles about mobile phone radiation, the negative and positive side of it. If you have time, you can visit my site and read these two posts.
http://praning5254.blogspot.com/2008/04/mobile-phone-radiation-is-it-bad.html
http://praning5254.blogspot.com/2008/05/claimed-hazardous-effects-of-radiation.html
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