The town that banned Wi-Fi
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Right, so we can't actually test your crippling sensitivity to EMF in a lab even though, if it's as bad as you say it is, a double blind test to see if you could reliably tell when a radio in a shoe-box is switched on ought to be good enough.
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"the lack of proof from major studies is merely evidence of a conspiracy between interested parties. “Conventional government-funded science isn’t a reliable indicator of health defects,” she told me. “There’s a vested interest in keeping the truth out of circulation."
So, beyond the fact that willing test subjects are hard to find, there's a conspiracy to cover up evidence showing people really are "sensitives".
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"Like Meckna, Dacre felt that there were people claiming to be electrosensitive who were nothing of the sort, who were queering the pitch for the others: “You can tell at once who is just pretending,” she said. "
Even better, the test subjects we can round up are likely fakers!
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"“See those?” he asked.
“Aeroplane trails?”
“Not contrails – chemtrails,” he said. “The government sprays the air – it gets in the atmosphere.” He paused and looked me in the eye. “The world needs to know what’s happening here.” "
My suspicions about what's really going on here are beginning to coalesce...
Really, Starbucks baristas should be dropping like flies.
However, the reality is that Wi-Fi sickness or EHS is not caused by Wi-Fi, it is caused by stories about Wi-Fi. It is a Mass psychogenic illness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
It's like a placebo effect, where fake pills can actually cure sick people (if they believe that they will). However, because it's the opposite effect to a placebo, it's called a nocebo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo
People really do get sick, even though there is no biological reason for them to get sick.
Fortunately, most EHS victims just get the symptoms that are common to all mass psychogenic illnesses, regardless of the imagined cause: headaches (67%), dizziness or light-headedness (46%), nausea (41%) and so on. However. some nocebo's can be fatal, eg witch-doctors.
Journalist training should really include information about nocebos because writing or broadcasting about psychogenic illnesses can cause psychogenic illnesses.
As it is, however, almost all today's EHS sickness is most likely caused by the people who are campaigning about EHS.
Ah the good ol' base rate fallacy.
I can predict with around 90% accuracy whether a given American adult has a cellphone on their person, simply by always answering "yes".
But I doubt you'd be impressed if I pointed at a random stranger and said "That guy has a cell phone".
It would have been more amusing if he had the phone switched off already or no phone at all and they asked him to switch it off.
That would in fact let you determine if breaking someone's leg caused them pain, though.
If the EMF people had a fraction of that evidence, everyone would take them much more seriously.
It's like these free energy guys who give the whole thing up after a run in with a black van and some suits in sunglasses: never-mind that it would completely change the world and solve untold problems. There was a black van and vague threats.
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelat...
or, just maybe, people don't like people who show up and demand everyone change for their sake - see any entertainment venue / farmer that has a new housing development show up in the next property over
My father is allergic to poultry apparently yet chows down on hot dogs made mostly from turkey. Same level of batshit.
I suspect it was a psychological thing after having to process chickens by hand.
That's where I stopped reading.
Shame on the Guardian for giving these anti-science reactionaries the platform for seeking the attention they so desperately crave.
Also I don't know the details (the year and more details about the location would help) but there is the chance that that one carrier used different frequencies to the others. People, their dental works and medical implants will all resonate at different frequencies. However if it turns out she was reacting to only one carrier's AMPS towers (all US AMPS ran on 806-896 MHz) it's total BS.
The town is more like a few houses dotted along a major road and a couple of turn-offs with a few bunched up houses. My wife and I usually comment while driving through something about how it must suck to be an engineer working on the telescope and living there. I always wondered what sort of folks live there and now I know.
This is the area if anybody's interested https://www.google.com/maps/place/Green+Bank+Telescope/@38.4...
You can get tours https://public.nrao.edu/tours/visitgbt
Maybe growing up there, but I actually prefer the solitude. The interesting thing about those few small houses is that you end up getting to know the people in your area and around you pretty well. Nearly everyone. So I wouldn't make the assumption that "it must suck".
I could make the same assumption about any over populated area, like the Bay Area, because it's nearly impossible to really know your community and traffic is horrible. Ugh, it must suck to be an engineer working on some startup and living there.
I guess I should qualify my comment. I mean "it must suck" being in a technical field, but in a real sense quite cut off from interaction with your peers. It's actually a beautiful area, but I can't help but feel that people could very easily feel out of their milieu there.
E1F06 [97.3]
What is the National Radio Quiet Zone?
An area surrounding the National Radio Astronomy Observatory The National Radio Astronomy Observatory sites are located in Green Bank West Virginia, Socorro New Mexico, and Charlottesville NC.
Ok, I recognize the E as meaning this is from the Extra class question pool, The 1 as meaning it is from sub element 1 of those questions (Commission's Rules), and F06 meaning it is question 6 in the group F subset of sub element 1 questions.
The [97.3] completely mystifies me. What is it?
There are quite a few hams on HN. Many checked in here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9445123
>60 “sensitive” people who reported often getting headache-like symptoms within 20 minutes of using a global system for mobile communication (GSM) mobile phone and 60 “control” participants who did not report any such symptoms.
>Participants were exposed to three conditions: a 900 MHz GSM mobile phone signal, a non-pulsing carrier wave signal, and a sham condition with no signal present. Each exposure lasted for 50 minutes.
>Headache severity increased during exposure and decreased immediately afterwards. However, no strong evidence was found of any difference between the conditions in terms of symptom severity. Nor did evidence of any differential effect of condition between the two groups exist. The proportion of sensitive participants who believed a signal was present during GSM exposure (60%) was similar to the proportion who believed one was present during sham exposure (63%).
Beyond that (imagining you somehow eliminated all of those) the biggest source of radio frequency garbage is going to be from space rather than a consumer grade <1W transmitter, the atmosphere is pretty opaque to 2.4GHz. Somewhat coincidentally the cosmic noise we can hear from earth is mostly in the microwave range.
Maybe if people's skulls started vibrating in time with the woodpecker [0] or something I'd believe it.
But if you have people who will claim that every study contradicting their belief is a conspiracy by the phone industry that doesn't help a lot.
It's like homeopathy: You can throw as many studies as you want at the believers. They don't believe in science, therefore it's not working.
That being said, blind-folding a bunch of these people and asking them to simultaneously stumble around and find the router would be pretty hilarious.
> None of which gets round the core issue: if EHS is real, I asked Diane, then why has it not shown up in formal experiments? “I encourage scientists to go to where we are and measure the environment,” she replied. “Don’t try to pretend that you’re God and expose us to different frequencies in a lab. That’s like taking someone and breaking their legs and asking how much it hurts.”
Of course it's just one data point and it doesn't prove people aren't suffering.
Overillumination has been known for some time to cause various other deleterious health effects anyway, and flicker aside fluorescents just put out plain terrible light. It completely baffles me why so many establishments install it (well, workplaces; retailers like it because it makes you buy more apparently).
That phrase is straight out of a Deliverance-like horror film.
I hypothesize that if these people had some unusually high metallic content in the skin/bone in/around their inner ear that moves slightly in response to EMR then that might actually do something to them, like trigger complex migraines. You'd need two highly unlikely (and unlucky) problems for this to be real, but it's not exactly the same as Morgellons[1]. Also, tooth fillings + bone conduction can pick up radio signals, so I'm not sure why these people are being dismissed so quickly as psychiatric cases.
Diane's demanding nature sounds like it caused more problems for her than her condition.
I hear them too.
Tooth fillings and bone conduction could pick up AM signals, because of the nature of AM.
I am sure I cannot appreciate music as well, in fact I have sold almost all my high end audio gear, but I will take the lack of high-frequency sounds in everyday life over slightly better range when listening to music.
You just tune the AM demodulator off center from the FM signal. This is called slope detection. If you have an SDR you can play around with this. Here's an article on slope detection [1].
I think this only works if the bandwidth of the AM detector is fairly small compared to the FM signal. I have no idea what the bandwidth of tooth filling receivers is.
[1] http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/rf-technology-design/f...
I go out of my way to find amperage controlled LED fixtures because they seem to be the only light source that doesn't hum.
Worse are those ultrasonic occupancy sensors. In some spots i the room I can hear a really high pitched buzzing noise. I think it has to with beat frequencies and the caps they use to step up the frequency internally.
I have more sympathy for people with Morgellons than for the electro-sensitives (apart from the fantastic amounts of stigma about mental illness they generate - both from people looking in but also from themselves.)
The fibres didn't match any of the 85,000 organic substances they had on their files. "I was both shocked and not shocked," recalls Wymore. "I already thought these fibres were kind of unusual, and this just validated it."
Wymore has now been working on the DNA of the fibres for five years. So far, none of the samples he has sent into the laboratory has proved to be anything mysterious. Results have included nylon, cotton, a human hair, a fungal fibre and a rodent hair.
The author moves on to another "expert" without pressing Wymore for either the status of the non-matches or an explanation of why human hair was not part of their 85,000-large library.
Are you sure they don't simply emit 20+ kHz sound?
They do. Sorry, didn't mean to imply high metal content in the inner was responsible for both phenomena. Was just trying to give the benefit of the doubt to these people's claims; it sort of bothers me when "science" is quick to dismiss people's claims. I'm sure a lot of people would call me (us) crazy for thinking we can hear such a high pitch - but since it's kind of unimportant trivia, like being able to roll your tongue, it doesn't matter. If hearing the high pitch was the cause of great suffering, being called crazy to think that was the cause would hurt a great deal more, I imagine.
This does not lessen the problems or make them less real, but it suggests the treatment looks more like treating a thin person convinced he is fat, than like treating allergies, for example.
By the way, the ability to hear CRTs is common among young people with good hearing. Many switched PSUs make high pitched noises too, for example. Nosie pollution is quite a problem, and there's been studies that suggests links between noise even slightly in the ultrasound and stress levels.
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From the headline I was expecting some woo people, had managed to ban wifi in a town. (reversed cause and effect)
Lame.
So, I wondered whether time warner, comcast et al, were funding these complaints via nonprofit foundations.
BPL did not take hold because it fundamentally caused interference to HF radio. BPL itself has nothing to do with wireless anything.
It is not the usual case that cities own powerlines. The cities that do own such utilities have generally preferred to lay fiber instead of experiment with BPL, as they frequently own utilities that deliver telephony and video services.
From an engineering standpoint, sending broadband over the power infrastructure is seriously ugly, because the SNR is poor, shielding is poor, and spectral distortion is high. Power lines were never designed to be constant impedance, low loss and shielded for broadband frequencies. Due to all the impairments, the transmit power must be relatively high, and coupled with the poor shielding, interference with legitimate radio users is inevitable.