[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.

[911_Inside_Job]

Well, if I know the typical populace, which includes people who have conditions, or know loved ones with conditions, which make arrhythmia life-threatening, they would not regard such effects lightly.

But, sure, the GQ author may be guilty of using a mis-leading characterization of the induction of irregular heart patterns as the full "stopping" of heart patterns. ("Hey it's true it 'stopped' for a little," plausibly says the misleader.) Kind of like industry just may be guilty of mis-leading us in the opposite direction.

Oh, and thanks for not trying to make me substantiate the Joe Bageant quote. He's more of a dead, angry, neo-communist Hunter Thompson who values rhetorical effect above all, and will play loose with facts. I just like his rhetoric.

But back to the bottom line: "The data as a whole clearly indicate that the heart responds to EM energy, particularly if it is pulsed and the pulses impinge at the right time in the cardiac cycle... [but] are not sufficient to draw conclusions about mediators.... [but, again,] the neural system is responsive to the energy."

Anyway, in my long experience, people let their preferred conclusions guide them persistently (if sub-consciously) to interpret perceptions, observations, and "facts" accordingly. The conclusive ends justify the means of getting there. When people want to persistently deny something, they can, easily. With that in mind, I just say "I exhort you draw your own conclusions -- you probably were going to do just that anyway."

Profitable as this conversation has been, I think I'll exit stage-left now.

[mikeash]

This is a good example of the difference between "fear due to ignorance" and "fear can only come from ignorance". Perhaps there are reasons to think that heart arrhythmia is a potential effect of microwaves. Certainly there's an obvious and plausible mechanism, i.e. microwaves induce electric currents, the heart is sensitive to electric current, and the two could very well interfere.

However, this is the first I've heard of it. Which is not to discount it, but rather to point out that people fear microwaves for completely different reasons. I've never seen anyone say "it'll interfere with my heartbeat!" No, they think that they'll get brain cancer or something that makes little sense, and for which there is no real evidence.

Regarding Joe Bageant, I don't think that quote really contained any facts, so there isn't much to substantiate. Anyway, I'd rather learn about irradiating frogs than argue, so thank you for the link to the paper on that.

Edit: one big fat exception to not hearing about this is, of course, the common warning that people with pacemakers should stay away from microwaves. Which illustrates this in the opposite direction: while there's debate about how realistic the danger is, nobody thinks it's a crackpot idea, because it's fairly well founded.