Questions about how safe is wifi

just wanted to post back to this thread, basicly I have a lenovo t60p with a netgear net extream access point and standard pipex wireless router on the ground floor, im too floors up.

I can confirm the orginal posters claims about feeling ill, I can even feel a burning senstation in my eyes and if I hunker over the laptop I cant think straight at all which has been cost me a lot of money in some of my work.

There is a deffinate zone around the laptop you dont want your head to be in.

I will continue to use wireless but it will be a desktop behind me with the pci (with external aerial rangemax box) as fair as possible away from my head.

What I wanted to just say is the orginal poster is correct and any one that does not feel or sense the affect of powerfull wireless signal worries me.

I have sat the laptop ontop of a steel series mouse pad sx, incase there is any possiblity of it affecting my balls which are behind the table.. lol all you like but remember... we are the first generation that are unmass testing this sht out.. we are the test animals, the guinea pigs, and as much as you can say I am wrong and have no proof nor do you know one way or the other 100%

 

Well the amount of radiation we've all been exposed to over the last few million years hasn't given us two heads. And guess what, nor will WiFi.

I'll still happily sit with my laptop on my lap, taping away.

 

thing is humanity has gained so much from the use of wireless type devices, even if it was proven 100% one way or the other that wireless signals from mobiles or laptops or what ever is bad for you, what can you do, what can science do issue us a quntium intagled tx rx device?

I expect there will be other ways to communicate wireless other than the currently used freq which may or may not affect us (I personally do believe they affect us ngitively, it kind of makes sense if you put a microwave tx device by the side of your brain its not going to be good for you-mobile phone example).

Any way, just limit your use, if we could see all freq not just light but higher, that would be amazing, to see radio waves, to see microwaves, maybe robots of the future will be able to navigate the world with those capabilitys. it would look like slushing liquid im sure.

 

Gotta love the nocebo effect: placebo effect's evil twin.

People can talk themselves into all sorts of sensations. That's why hypnosis works so well for pain management. That's also why some of my cancer patients who are in remission go practically hysterical with fear when they feel a new, unidentifiable vague pain. One lady felt a vague pain on the left side and was convinced she had a liver metastasis --until I explained the liver is on the right. The pain spontaneously disappeared, and never came back.

Of course it is sensible to be cautious with new technology. The Curie's were rather casual with their discovery of radiation and it cost them their lives. On the other hand we know EM radiation quite well now, it having been in use for nearly a century. there are also a lot more ordinary explanations for why sitting hunched over a laptop staring intently at a tiny screen for hours might make you feel headachy, fuzzy and nauseous and make your eyeballs burn.

The only way to find out one way or another is to do a double-blind comparison test: to work on a laptop that may or may not be hooked to wifi and for you to guess the difference. Keep in mind that you have a 50% chance to guess correctly purely at random, so we'd have to repeat the test a number of times.

 

Nexxo tastes of distilled logic.

 

Of course, but it really comes down to 4 things:

1.) The human body is really complicated.
2.) The human body is REALLY complicated.
3.) These tests are expensive and have a limited amount of data to work with.
4.) If point 3 is not the case then it's easy to do another test if you get a result that you don't want or to simply ignore it.

 

Plenty of research has been done on various forms of radiation and the affect it has on humans and animal life alike, there's a wealth of information out there.

If you feel ill when using WIFI then you should stop using it, use a regular shielded wire connection if possible instead.

 

People that are as suggestable as you worry me. You are feeling exactly what you expect to feel, nothing more.

If there was even a hint that a fraction of the wireless communication frequencies currently in use were in some remote way harmful towards the populace, there would be a panic in the scientific community as we try to find another technology to replace what we currently have. The amount of money involved in this would be substantial, and no engineer or scientist would turn down that kind of paycheque. It would literally cost consumers billions to convert to the new technology, giving those in the white coats billions of reasons to pursue such a tangent.

Wait, what? You've found a link between mobiles and some ailment to humans? We've got to get this published in an accredited, peer-reviewed journal of medicine, post-haste! Forget all the hundreds of studies that've already been done showing, conclusively, that there isn't a link between excessive mobile phone usage and any of the proposed ailments as set out in popular culture, as you've obviously come up trumps on this! We'll be rolling in the Woodrow's, baby!

1 - Yep, but we've got a rather good understanding of it's workings courtesy of the past hundred thousand years or so we've had to play with ourselves.
2 - So it would seem, but we've a neglegable amount of metal or other reactive substances that could have a negative reaction to radio waves in us, which kind of side-steps the point of complication. Though if you think this a good argumentative tactic, then I'd recommend applying for a job at a Creationist museum. They're always looking for somebody like you!
3 - The tests are expensive, which we know because they've been done. Strangely enough, reality still holds it's iron-like grasp over radio waves, just like it does with everything else.
4 - That isn't how science works. If you're going into a study with a precept for how it will turn out, then the study is as good as invalid, and should be ignored as such. Thankfully scientific studies are conducted in such a way as to avoid as much of an effect that bias, ignorance, and incompetence can have. This says nothing to having the results published in a peer-reviewed journal, wherein anybody who has question of the study can take it upon themselves to try and replicate the results and report them in the same journal, confirming or refuting the previous study. This is science, not Hollywood.



Back into the fray once more, eh Nexxo?

 

yep, wifi makes it hard for kids to focus the same way violent video games make them shoot one another.

fortunately for us, theres a cure:

 

I wasn't disagreeing with the notion that radio waves are unlikely to cause harm and I strongly believe they don't I was just pointing out why these matters are rarely resolved.

 

Yeah, you're not kidding.

OK, Ending Credits, you make a valid point: the human body is complicated. But science is a discipline, a way of doing things that acknowledges that things can be more complicated than they seem and that we have a way of finding exactly what we seek, seeing what we want or expect to see and talking ourselves into a good story. And science works. Look around you.

And people have always been a bit wary of the new. It is generally a good survival trait, so no criticism here. As I said, the Curie's let their curiosity kill their cat, so to speak. And we all remember the radium pills that were considered such a good idea the 1900's (well, Jhanlon303 does, because he is the wise old master). But it also results in people in the 1800's thinking that moving at a speed of 40mph is very bad for your health (which we now know it isn't, of course --it is only suddenly stopping moving at that speed, against a solid object, that is bad for your health), that women should not study lest they overheat their brains and that Darwin was a heretic.

It took Semmelweis years to convince doctors that washing your hands after handling a corpse might be a good idea --even though his scientifically collected data comparing women's deaths on his labour wards to the others spoke for itself. There have been many other facts we now accept as obvious that were ignored for a long time, because people chose to believe their gut instinct rather than the hard scientific data. People still do: homeopathy, crystal healing, multivitamins, astrology... It all makes gut sense. It is all wrong.

So we should not just trust our gut on this. We should do the science.

 

And therein lies the problem.

I'm sure there are many 'scientific' studies supporting all the things you mentioned and since most people are generally ignorant, it's very easy to present a convincing case in support of these things. Of course we should, in my opinion anyway, then go on to seek and read up on further evidence for or against what we've been told but most people don't. Even when we do it's hard to tell what evidence is reliable and as you have mentioned before, most people don't understand statistics very well including many researchers which exaggerates the problem.

Case in point would be the climate change issue where there is plently of evidence to support both sides and even respected scientists have been found to manipulate evidence. The general public rarely ever comes into contact with raw data, instead we're given large graphs (which require large scissor lifts) and sensational quotes like "Sea levels will rise by 1 meter by 2050" or observations such as "the earth naturally follows this cycle" but no evidence to support this. As a result I personally find it very difficult to come down on one side or the other and while I know the information to help me is out there, being human I don't consider it worth my time to find it.

 

You are correct that it is crucial to consider how the 'evidence' was obtained. Science is all about that. However just because some science is conducted badly does not mean that personal anecdotes are more reliable.

 

Soo, science is prediction based on observation, science as presented by the media is biased depending on the story they're selling, the Curie's killed themselves in the name of science (but had fantastic sex while doing so, tingles in pants etc..) and WiFi still hasn't cooked anyone's noodle?

Is that about it?


Also:



Edit: I'm pretty sure he looks like this in real life.

 

Pretty much. Mwuhwai-hey-hey-gnnn.

(+ rep)

 

I never suggested that personal anecdotes should be any more or less trusted, I was merely stating how the truth is a lot harder to attain than a simple experiment.

That sums it up for me.

 

i'd keep that steelpad if i had my laptop in my... lap. heat radiation cooks your swimmers. that's the only reason. the only.
and since the sun constantly emitts rather high levels of radiation which have proven(!) to be hazardous and causing skin cancer, i vote we ban the sun... like now...

honestly though, even if these people who are afraid of radiation would move under ground, they would have to move several kilometres below surface since there are types of radiation which penetrate pretty much everything known to man. these can be found several kilometres below surface in water tanks (i think some previous poster was referring to this).
i promote the moving of these people since the heat down there would cook their balls, natural selection Cheesecake!

 

If you're talking about my post then I was refering to neutrinos which not only penetrate several kilometers below the earth's surface but are detectable through the earth. In fact, they're so penetrable they move through the sun in a few minutes; light takes 100,000 years to do the same thing.

 

my bad, thought you were referring to something else (like this clicky).

yipes.
so at any time (roughly) a human being is being pierced by 650 trillion (6.5x10^14) neutrinos per second (i've counted them, one by one).
at this time most radiation freaks are probably going "omgwtf!".

anyway, neutrinos are a b*tch unless we could actually invent a shield consisting of antimatter (antineutrinos) which has the antineutral polarity to oppose the neutrinos neutrality... ...

...
i'll get my coat.

 

I wouldn't worry about neutrinos. They have so little mass that they travel at nearly (but not quite the speed of light. They go straight through you, me and the entire friggin' Earth for a reason. They practically interact with nothing --which is why you need a huge water tank to detect just an occasional one if them.