[pronoiac]

Oh man! I knew the answer to this before I read the article. After I heard about contentious community meetings about Google Wifi, I went myself, taping them for posterity.[1] The community seemed generally receptive. I was sad when it fell through; in case of an earthquake, I think a wifi mesh would be much more robust than fiber.

The Google wifi FAQs / complaints I remember:

* radiation concerns.

* extra hardware on telephone poles.

* "low bandwidth." I think someone was miffed that YouTube would take time to buffer.

[1] http://pronoiac.org/recordings/category/wifi-for-sf/

[cnlwsu]

"Radiation" should be better taught and understood I think. A local wind farm got shut down in my home town because someone convinced some townies they give off radiation and will give everyone cancer. There's a big difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radaition - A microwave (cell phone etc) can boil your blood with enough power but it will never cause a chemical change to DNA.

[woofuls]

DNA mutates spontaneously from background radiation and mutagens present in the cytoplasm (oxygen is even one!) and etc. This isn't normally a problem because the rate at which this happens is balanced by protein repair kinetics, however, if you are boiling the blood denaturing these proteins isn't an unreasonable expectation in non-thermophiles... Furthermore, if you're boiling blood, DNA can uncoil and become susceptible to other problems.

The question is what power is required affect this balanced system. Apparently over time mutations occur which cannot be repaired and sometimes after that cancer occurs ordinarily. It is easy to tell when this happens to 100% of organisms you're studying after doing X and waiting less than a year's time, but is considerably harder to answer when you're trying to see if there is a lethal effect over 60 years in 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 or 1 in a million. This is an open and challenging problem.

I don't claim microwaves of some power won't cause cancer, but I also won't claim oxygen can't cause less cancer. In the microwave case there isn't enough evidence to expect it in lower power situations, but to some tolerance there is always a possibility.

The problem with a lot of folks is the way in which they perceive risk. Risk management should be taught. SF should worry a lot more about an earthquake than cancer from wifi.

[pronoiac]

I agree! At the time, I thought of running the numbers to compare them to, say, radio and TV transmissions towers, or microwave ovens, but I had thought it was a done deal, with a few details to work out.

[mikeash]

Science literacy in general is woefully inadequate. You can get amazingly far in life without knowing what "radiation" actually is, or why airplanes leave trails behind them sometimes, but it leaves you open to being extremely easily fooled.

[911_Inside_Job]

I'll just leave this here: http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-...

"Frey tested microwave radiation on frogs and other lab animals, targeting the eyes, the heart, and the brain, and in each case he found troubling results. In one study, he triggered heart arrhythmias. Then, using the right modulations of the frequency, he even stopped frog hearts with microwaves—stopped the hearts dead.

"Frey observed two factors in how microwaves at low power could affect living systems. First, there was the carrier wave: a frequency of 1,900 megahertz, for example, the same frequency of many cell phones today. Then there was the data placed on the carrier wave—in the case of cell phones, this would be the sounds, words, and pictures that travel along it. When you add information to a carrier wave, it embeds a second signal—a second frequency—within the carrier wave. This is known as modulation. A carrier wave can support any number of modulations, even those that match the ­extra-low frequencies at which the brain operates (between eight and twenty hertz). It was modulation, Frey discovered, that induced the widest variety of biological effects."

Well that's food for thought! Seems it might be a bit hasty to just say "well it's non-ionizing radiation, so one is ignorant to fear it"

Or as put by Joe Bageant:

"The Information Racketeers: It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That's why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long-term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet-proof mammalian material."

[mikeash]

> Seems it might be a bit hasty to just say "well it's non-ionizing radiation, so one is ignorant to fear it"

That would be nice if anyone was saying that. But we're not. Instead, we're saying that people fear it out of ignorance, which is considerably different.

Do you have a link to Frey's study? I couldn't dig that particular one up.

[911_Inside_Job]

Try: http://www.ct.gov/csc/lib/csc/pendingproceeds/docket_409/inl...

I found it as one of many papers by Frey at: http://www.cellphonetaskforce.org/?page_id=594

[mikeash]

Is there a later one as well? Because that one shows only a small effect, certainly nothing like stopping the heart altogether.

[the_watcher]

Wait, low bandwidth? Of all the complaints about Google Fiber I've heard (none of which are compelling at all, especially when the alternative is the status quo that literally no consumer enjoys), YouTube speed has never come up. Isn't the big perk of fiber instant video? Or am I misinformed?

[rtkwe]

The person you're responding to was talking about the failed Google Wifi in San Francisco not Google Fiber.

[the_watcher]

Got it, thanks for clarifying.