The Time Russians Really Did Target Americans With Microwaves
A year before his arrival, State Department officials had told embassy staffers and their families that the Soviet Union had been blasting some kind of microwave beam at the embassy for up to 14 hours per day. But American higher-ups said there was little reason for concern. Issuing a "Fact Sheet," [1976] the State Department said that this microwave beam — later dubbed the "Moscow Signal" — was "no cause for concern," as "no causal relationship had been established between these microwave transmissions and any health problems."
There was, in other words, nothing to worry about. As a precaution, American officials erected aluminum "screening" around the embassy — all the better to "reduce the anxiety of employees." But that was it. And so Schumaker went about his work, day in and day out. For years, he and dozens of others operated out of the American embassy, assured that the microwave radiation was perfectly normal.
It was only years later, when Schumaker received a surprise leukemia diagnosis — and after multiple American ambassadors had already died from cancer, with the another diagnosed with a "severe blood disorder" — that Schumaker realized that microwave radiation, and the U.S.'s lackadaisical response, was far more disastrous, and even fatal, than he ever thought. And in recent months, that realization only deepened, for a pair of reasons.
First, a tranche of newly declassified documents confirmed that the Soviets saturated American embassy staffers in decades of elevated microwave radiation — and American higher-ups spent years trying to sweep the entire affair under the rug. And second, recent revelations about the so-called "Havana Syndrome" have given Schumaker and other diplomats who remember the days of Moscow Signal a sense of, as he sees it, "déjà vu all over again."
Unfortunately for recent victims of this Havana Syndrome, whose symptoms range from migraines to vertigo to cognitive difficulties, a long-awaited report earlier this month from U.S. intelligence agencies didn't provide any answers, and only more questions. As U.S. intelligence concluded, the symptoms were "very unlikely" to have been caused by a foreign adversary.
But even with the recent conclusion, the idea that a foreign power — say, Russia — could launch a global campaign of "directed pulsed radio frequency energy" is hardly farfetched. Not only is this the conclusion that others, such as the National Academy of Sciences, have come to. But it wouldn't even be the first time the Kremlin has launched such a campaign.
Related Stories
Newly Declassified Government Report Suggests Havana Syndrome Might Be Caused by an Energy Weapon:
After years of debate about the cause of the strange malady, a recently declassified document points the finger (once again) at "electromagnetic energy."
Several weeks after the intelligence community came out to disavow claims that "Havana Syndrome"—the bizarre rash of neurological disorders plaguing U.S. foreign service officers—was the result of a directed energy weapon, a newly declassified report alleges that may very well be what it is.
The group behind the report, the Intelligence Community Experts Panel on Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs), was established by the government to figure out just what the heck had happened to the 1,000-ish American officials who claim to have suffered from "Havana"'s bizarre symptoms. Those symptoms, which first cropped up at a U.S. embassy in Cuba in 2016 and soon spread to other parts of the globe, include a rash of inexplicable ailments—things like hearing and memory loss, severe headaches, light sensitivity, nausea, and a host of other debilitating issues.
Well, after a substantial research effort to get to the bottom of Havana Syndrome's seemingly impenetrable mystery, the IC panel ultimately released their findings to the government, but the contents of the report have remained classified—until now, that is.
[...] According to the report, a plausible explanation for the disorders may be "pulsed electromagnetic energy." It reads:
Electromagnetic energy, particularly pulsed signals in the radio frequency range, plausibly explains the core characteristics, although information gaps exist. There are several plausible pathways involving forms of electromagnetic energy, each with its own requirements, limitations, and unknowns. For all the pathways, sources exist that could generate the required stimuli, are concealable, and have moderate power requirements.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13, @02:43AM (6 children)
B-b-b-but lots of people and cellphone makers were insisting that non-ionizing radiation is not harmful at cellphone levels (even though there's scientific proof that it's enough to cause some effects[1]).
The last I checked human brains don't do well if they're heated just a few degrees C above normal.
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/02/22/cell.phone.brain.activity/index.html [cnn.com]
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19726443-800-cellphone-radiation-affects-cells-in-living-humans/ [newscientist.com]
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9411-cellphone-radiation-makes-brain-more-excitable/ [newscientist.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Monday March 13, @05:47AM (5 children)
If you're going to dig into old cellphone RF carcinogenic news then just link the 2011 IARC evaluation of the carcinogenicity of the RF-EMF: https://www.iarc.who.int/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/pr208_E.pdf [who.int]
Similarly, be sure to keep up with Dariusz Leszczynski recent blogging: While he continues to challenge the existing safety guidelines, he and the rest of researchers in the field have changed their position from saying cellphones *may* cause cancer to to saying that *some* people are more sensitivity (Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS)) than others. Which could be rephrased as saying that, people with preexisting brain disorders - like whatever it is that gives people Alzheimer's or a really early brain tumor that is too small to get diagnosed - are having their health deteriorate at an accelerated pace due to RF speeding up brain cells...
Anyhow, RF was one of the first things the Havana Syndrome people looked at and they couldn't really find anything.
compiling...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 13, @06:35AM (2 children)
There might be people who technically don't have brain disorders but are still sensitive.
Analogy: It's just like some people are more prone to skin cancer when exposed to solar radiation. It doesn't mean they already have preexisting skin cancer or a skin disorder, unless you want to define skin disorder as having light skin of a certain type. Light skin could be advantageous in other scenarios.
Anyway nowadays I rarely hold my phone to my head for calls - so the exposure should be a lot lower. Also a fair number of calls are via wifi and not gsm, so the radiation levels are lower. I doubt my brain is sensitive to WiFi - I don't notice anything for whatsapp calls via WiFi- but I do feel a bit "different" during GSM calls, there's an ache in my head and/or an uncomfortable feeling. Maybe I'm one of the sensitive ones or you can say I'm imagining things.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday March 13, @01:21PM
Sensitivity is medically defined in this context: https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/sensitivity [cancer.gov]
The vitamin D synthesis tradeoff you're referring to is at a different scale: 75% of black people vs. 20% of white people [harvard.edu] have low vitamin D levels which has noticeable and easily quantifiable affects on bone development and health. Now, if you could point at some RF sensitivity related advantage at those scales...
Look, 5G isn't tobacco. Even the researchers in the field who suggest there's a problem agree it only affects a tiny percentage of the population with the majority dismissing the whole thing as statistically insignificant. The terminology could be made more politically correct if necessary to signal there's room to investigate socio-evolutionary of some sort... But honestly, it's not at the level where that even matters.
compiling...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by quietus on Monday March 13, @03:25PM
Mmmm. People who work in datacenters recognize your problem. The most extreme case I've experienced myself was completely loosing eyesight in one eye. The reason was that I was sitting with my back against a very powerful server. Moved away half a meter, and regained eyesight. Repeated this on the other side of the server, same effect -- sight in one eye became completely black.
It is common to feel a bit dizzy after working for a while in such high-radiation environments; especially when you've got a bit of a cold.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 17, @10:14PM (1 child)
Smartphones have increased the average phone transmitter to brain distance by a factor of 10, while simultaneously increasing average exposure time by a factor of five... Luckily the RF power drops off on an inverse square, so overall we are still getting 95% less brain heating.
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(Score: 2) by RamiK on Saturday March 18, @10:51AM
And for the inevitable conclusion: I support your motion for a public health ordinance that to mandates everyone to shave their heads and ban beanies.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday March 13, @05:55AM (1 child)
... read "The Spy in Moscow Station" by Eric Haseltine. Absolutely fascinating reading.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday March 13, @11:45AM
I'll just mention one of my college buddies was a kid of US Foreign Service Officers, and was in Moscow in the late 80's and early 1990. There was a church right across the street from the US embassy, and while the Communists had been quite diligent about knocking down churches in a lot of places for some reason they never got around to knocking down that one. The FSOs generally referred to it as "Our Lady of Perpetual Listening".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday March 13, @08:33AM (48 children)
The axis of evil has clearly shifted a lot since WWII.
(Score: 2, Troll) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 13, @12:25PM (47 children)
Russia never was "not evil", but in the world wars we took whatever allies we could get.
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(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 13, @03:36PM (46 children)
I think it depends a bit on the era and what you consider "Russia" and "not evil", just like most countries. There have definitely been times when "lesser evil" seemed to be in play, but nowhere near as cool as, say, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
What's also definitely true is that the nation-state known as "Russia" has never been a genuine democracy for as long as we have records for it.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday March 13, @03:52PM (45 children)
It also depends on who was doing the recording of history... there were some bitchin' parties in the Tsars' palace.
Same applies anywhere, including the U.S. - plenty of miserable and oppressed in the U.S., but by the percentages...
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 14, @01:32AM (44 children)
Indeed. The percentages matter. No society is so perfect that it doesn't have miserable and oppressed. But some societies do a lot better than other societies.
A lot of evil is excused because it happens elsewhere to a lesser degree, often greatly lesser degree.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 14, @01:43AM (43 children)
The other important point about degrees of evil is: are we moving in a direction of improvement, or deterioration?
Here's an older movie related to the direction we have been going for a while: Inside Job https://g.co/kgs/zYzM1k [g.co]
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday March 14, @04:58AM (42 children)
You can read similar stories from centuries ago (for example, here [wikipedia.org] and here [britannica.com]). It turns out that financial shenanigans don't have much to do with the directions we go.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 14, @01:20PM (41 children)
>You can read similar stories
The difference in your stories and the movie shown are, primarily, that the beneficiaries of the current bubble are controlling our laws and when that's not quick enough controlling the government officials (all parties) that should be enforcing the laws we still have, such that they reap their rewards without exposure to the risk they entail. The bubble bursts for most of us, but not the people at the top of the industry that pumps it up again and again. In other words: the numbers of people being screwed are relatively large. It's more like this [wikipedia.org], except instead of mostly just abusing the colonies, they're screwing the entire global economic system.
I would argue that the reason it's more important now is similar to the reason that ecological concerns are more important now than they were 100 years ago. We're not just polluting or economically abusing a small part of the planet, we're hitting the whole thing at once. There is a difference.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 14, @03:05PM (40 children)
I challenge you to find a time that was even slightly different. Again, it's not the bubbles and bursts that define our society.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday March 14, @03:53PM (39 children)
>I challenge you to find a time that was even slightly different.
As mentioned in the movie: roughly 1945-1975. In Iceland more like 1945-2000. Granted, it's a pretty small window, but it looms large in my perspective of "how things were, and how they should be" and it's disappointing that the progress made from 1850-1975 has been reversing since 1980.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 15, @02:52AM (38 children)
Has it? I believe we've already discussed how pollution has been reduced greatly since 1975, for a glaring counterexample. And I would expect a larger setback than we've actually seen from globalization. Something's wrong with the narrative again!
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 15, @12:52PM (37 children)
>I believe we've already discussed how pollution has been reduced greatly since 1975, for a glaring counterexample.
I believe you're trying to cheat, again. Pollution has been greatly reduced since 1975 in the U.S. - U.S. pollution has been off-shored to China, India, Africa, and every other place willing to take our toxic waste, run heavy industry, and burn coal for electricity in exchange for a little U.S. currency.
The number of people, globally, living in horrific smog has increased dramatically since 1975. Our chocolate is contaminated at the source by heavy metals which were not there before the recent rapid "modernization" of the chocolate growing countries. Overseas dumps of toxic waste either created directly in the US, or created in service of the US economy, are much larger and worse than the toxic waste dumps which existed in the U.S. prior to 1975.
Try again.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 15, @04:45PM (36 children)
In other words, you acknowledge that pollution has indeed been greatly reduced as claimed - scope was the US after all. As to the rest of those countries, they would be just as polluting anyway. But now they're polluting with higher value global activity.
And it would have anyway.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 15, @04:58PM (35 children)
>In other words, you acknowledge that pollution has indeed been greatly reduced as claimed - scope was the US after all.
When it comes to pollution, there is no such thing as local scope. I'd accept exporting pollution to Venus as an acceptable short term solution, but even that may turn out to be regrettable in the future. Sustainable closed loop systems are acceptable, anything less is pushing the problem onto future generations, or even just future years in our own lives.
>As to the rest of those countries, they would be just as polluting anyway.
I don't see how without the U.S. leading the way showing them the lifestyle to covet, and providing them with enough economic power to fuel their growth. Without U.S. / European driven development of oil and earlier coal, China, India, and Africa would be nowhere near their current polluted states.
>But now they're polluting with higher value global activity.
Piles of plastic shit in WalMart may be global activity, but it's got poor long term total value.
>>The number of people, globally, living in horrific smog has increased dramatically since 1975.
>And it would have anyway.
In your head. Watch the movie.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday March 15, @05:12PM (34 children)
The obvious rebuttal is that most pollution is local.
We see here the absurdity of the argument. The obvious rebuttal is that "exporting pollution" is a dishonest gimmick, used only to create the perception of an unsolvable problem and generate some cheap guilt. What is missed is that developing world countries would still be just as heavily polluting with the involvement of trade with the developed world, but their economies would generate less value from that pollution for their people.
As I noted before, the only real solution to this problem is to turn the entire world into the developed world. Then the same proven radical pollution reduction that happens throughout the developed world now would happen throughout the entire world and the "exporting the pollution" pretext would evaporate. We're doing that right now.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday March 15, @07:58PM (33 children)
>The obvious rebuttal is that most pollution is local.
Mercury from Mexican coal fired electric power generation stations is falling out on Florida in measurable quantities, so if you call that local...
>The obvious rebuttal is that "exporting pollution" is a dishonest gimmick
Yes, exporting pollution is a dishonest gimmick, we cleaned up Pittsburgh, but Jamshedpur, India [plumelabs.com] is as bad or worse today than Pittsburgh ever was. Meanwhile, the US has moved from net export of steel to importing 80% of the steel we use, from places like Jamshedpur.
>As I noted before, the only real solution to this problem is to turn the entire world into the developed world.
Everybody be just like me, except where will the 80% imported steel come from then?
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(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Thursday March 16, @05:02AM (32 children)
You're not that far away from Mexico. And it'd be a lot more than measurable, if you were a lot closer.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 16, @12:42PM (30 children)
One constant trend through my lifetime has been the evolution of "harmless levels" of radiation and toxins in the environment into significant life shortening and disease causing levels. The levels don't change, but our understanding of their ramifications do.
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(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Thursday March 16, @04:04PM (29 children)
What is really happening is that environmentalism has ratcheted tighter and tighter regulatory thresholds - because that's its nature. The life shortening/disease causing is a narrative not a fact. It's gotten so bad that when someone says "no safe level" holds for a pollutant, that signals they're bullshitting.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 16, @04:22PM (28 children)
>The life shortening/disease causing is a narrative not a fact.
Tell that to the dead people I used to know who have died from radiation or toxin exposure.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 16, @04:34PM (27 children)
If they died from that in reality, then they received a greater dose than you imply.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 16, @07:02PM (26 children)
>If they died from that in reality, then they received a greater dose than you imply.
Two suspiciously radiation proximate deaths I am acquainted with are:
An isotope supplier here in Florida had an "employment opening" which was due to the death of the chief engineer of the last 25 years. He "always wore his dosimeter, followed all guidelines, precautions, never had an exposure event" and yet, died of cancer at age 45. Coincidence is always possible...
Coincidence #2 was a graduate student in his early 20s, studying LinAc dosimetry measurement methods. Same story as the chief engineer, except he only worked with the equipment for a few months and unlike isotopes LinAcs don't emit ionizing radiation when they're switched off. He was diagnosed with an extremely rare, untreatable, and lethal blood cancer just after defending his thesis. No family history, no "known" risk factors.
Radiation is a funny one, some of the heroes of Chernobyl are still alive today, but most of them died from the same exposures rather swiftly. Then there's Jimmy Carter and his personal trip inside a reactor at age 28 which obviously didn't kill him prematurely, but "Carter said that his urine was still testing as radioactive six months after the clean up operation, and that it affected his health for the rest of his life."
As for toxins, there's my grandfather who lived fairly long, but probably died 10-20 years prematurely due to melanoma (aka skin cancer) which originated in his big toe, leading to its amputation and his death within 3 years of detection. He lived in Florida his entire adult life, plenty of sun exposure before there was even such a thing as sunscreen, but his melanoma started in his big toe and spread throughout his system. The number and types of chemicals his feet were exposed to throughout his early life were unaccountable, but high. Many were in classes such as DDT: "perfectly safe" when he was working with them.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 17, @12:20AM (25 children)
The obvious rebuttal: 1) you don't know their actual dosing (for example, you weren't baby-sitting either one and don't know what deviations from the rules they did), and 2) coincidence happens a lot. Seriously, what is more likely to be blatantly wrong, decades of research on the biological effects of radiation or your narratives? I'd say the latter.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 17, @12:41AM (24 children)
Obviously their dosage was higher than measured / reported, but ask yourself: how accurate are dose measurement systems? What can people who work in the field rely on if state of the art dosimeters aren't truly accurate?
The old guy could have gotten sloppy anytime in the space of three decades, but the grad student had very little opportunity for accidental exposure.
Another one: father of a random guy in his 20s I met in Augusta GA his "pappy did hot laundry out in Aiken, they took real good care of mama after he passed." The next day I was interviewing for a job at that Aiken facility (administrated by DuPont at the time) where multiple interviewers assured me about the safety of operations there, lack of accidents or exposures or leaks to the surrounding environment "no problems in 30 years or more." Less than six weeks later a story hit the news about radiation contamination detected outside the 200,000 acre facility.
We know a lot, what we don't know is how much bad stuff goes unreported, underreported and successfully covered up.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 17, @03:40AM (22 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 17, @01:38PM (21 children)
>What makes you think it was a dosimeter failure rather than a user failure?
A user failure is a dosimeter failure. Unless said user failure was a suicide attempt, which seems unlikely in all three cases.
On the other hand, in 2013 I did take a job filling in an "untimely death" opening which was not reported as suicide, but clearly was.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 17, @06:05PM (20 children)
So for example, if I take off my dosimeter and do something risky, then it's a dosimeter failure?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 17, @07:28PM (19 children)
>So for example, if I take off my dosimeter and do something risky, then it's a dosimeter failure?
If you're attempting self-harm, then no, that's not a dosimeter failure.
If you have no intent of self-harm, and yet do still take your dosimeter off and enter a risky area, then yes: that's a failure of the greater dosimeter system.
Radiation hazards are a non-evolved hazard, common sense doesn't cut it. Offhand mention of vague risks don't cut it. If you haven't demonstrated sufficient grasp of the risks, how to mitigate those risks and are yet permitted to take those risks, the system has failed - or intentionally harmed you, take your pick.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 17, @07:36PM (18 children)
So it's not a failure of the dosimeter, but of an imaginary "greater dosimeter system". In other words, the user.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday March 17, @10:10PM (17 children)
You blame the dosimeter user.
Much like the Houston petrochemical industry blames untrained contractors who kill themselves cleaning the inside of tanks. A) they're just a bunch of Mexicans so nobody much cares, and B) they should have noticed they were suffocating in there and gotten themselves out.
Difference with radiation is that you don't feel it at all. If there is no, or inadequate, notice of radiation hazard, you have no way of knowing it is present.
If you hand a six year old a dosimeter, explain what it is for and how to use it, then turn them loose on a site with radiation hazards, who is to blame if they misuse it, or take it off before reaching a safe area?
I have known several six year olds who would more likely follow instructions properly than several 25 year olds I have known.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18, @12:41AM (16 children)
Indeed. There doesn't seem to be much point to the rest of your post.
Or you choose to ignore or bypass that warning.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 18, @12:58AM (15 children)
Do you also blame the six year old?
And when a 25 year old is less capable of following directions, is it their fault?
By the way, dosimeters don't keep anyone safe, they merely tell you how fried you got and provide some sense of future risk from elevated exposure levels.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18, @04:50AM (14 children)
Using a dosimeter in a job? Isn't that illegal in the US for a six year old to have a job like that? I'm not seeing anything else in that post that makes any sense.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 18, @12:21PM (13 children)
Dosimeter is part of a system to keep people safe. Dosimeter by itself is 100% incapable of any safeguarding. Training and effectiveness of that training is actually the most important part of the system.
You know why they stopped making radium watch dials? It wasn't the radioactivity on the wearer's wrist. It was because: despite clear understanding of the danger, the best training and supervision of the day was incapable of stopping the assembly workers from licking their paintbrushes to sharpen the tip to apply the radium paint to the dials. They kept getting tongue cancer.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18, @01:09PM (3 children)
It's not part of a system to keep six year olds safe. And it only works when the involved parties go along. You went ahead and blamed the system even though you had no clue that the system was at fault.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 18, @02:14PM (2 children)
The system employs humans, humans don't always follow directions, that's what training and qualifications are for. If you are qualifying people to do a job who aren't actually capable of doing it safely, you are failing even moreso than the people you are employing.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 19, @03:47AM (1 child)
I still fail to see why we're talking about that six year old. They seem to be the sort of people we shouldn't be qualifying, and - news flash here - we don't qualify.
And you ignore the people who are quite capable of doing it safely, but choose not to.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 19, @01:51PM
Did the radium watch dial painters "choose not to" stop licking the brushes?
The six year old is an example of a human that should not be expected to guard their own safety. The point is: we are all human and will fail to guard our own safety to greater or lesser degrees depending on the situation, equipment available and training.
The dosimer wearing crowd seems to have a significant number of failures, and they aren't "choosing a life of danger" like Alaskan crab boat workers.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday March 18, @01:43PM (8 children)
Do you know when they stopped making radium watch dials? For example, the US Radium Corp stopped hand-painting dials in 1947. That's 75 years ago. There's no point to complaining about modern safety limits and their supposed inadequacy by citing 75 year old examples. The whole of modern workplace safety happened after 1947!
It's a strong tell when all the examples are from the wrong time periods.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday March 18, @02:17PM (7 children)
People 75 years ago knew when to say enough is enough, at least with respect to radium watch dials.
What other examples are from an inappropriate time period, in your opinion?
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 19, @03:43AM (6 children)
If it's a constant trend rather than another JoeMerchant quality fantasy, then you can point to examples of that trend today not 75 years ago! I'll note that at least one of your examples (your grandfather's toe) is of similar age.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 19, @01:45PM (5 children)
Dental (and other) x ray levels of "safe" radiation is a classic moving target. In your own way you acknowledged that accepted safe levels of toxins have continued dropping over the years.
Lead on gasoline wasn't so long ago.
And there is always another "discovery" like:
https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-warn-common-cleaning-chemical-linked-to-500-increased-risk-of-parkinsons-disease/ [scitechdaily.com]
But, you argue "lack of examples" in a discussion about a topic that should be common knowledge.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 19, @02:12PM (4 children)
Which is very different from the claim that that higher levels are "life shortening and disease causing".
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 19, @03:08PM (3 children)
Except for that recent study (linked) linking common dry cleaning solution with 5x increase in Parkinson's which is both life shortening and unpleasant disease on the way to death. That and hundreds of similar findings in the "recent past."
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday March 19, @06:01PM (2 children)
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 19, @08:38PM (1 child)
Nor yours.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Monday March 20, @04:08AM
Your arguments shouldn't be supporting my position and indeed they don't. However, my arguments do.
There's several key observations that remain unmolested. First, dose makes the poison. We can make a case for microwaves earlier in the thread being at a level where dose could matter (orders of magnitude higher than any natural source). But we run into the problem that human tissue is almost completely transparent to the frequencies in question. You need really high levels to have a harmful dose (at some point it will cause excessive heating of tissue).
Currently arguments for a biological effect are chock full of woo ("Electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS)"). No matter how many bad examples and reasoning you or others give, it can't undermine my arguments because they're not based on your terrible stuff.
And one of the huge things missed here is that we have a good handle on the harm that a huge variety of physical effects and chemicals cause. There's a huge dishonesty in the "heard of X who got some weird type of cancer" arguments because you don't know what they've been dosed with - it might be bad luck even or something unrelated to their job. A single case tells you nothing. If your entire worker population has similar highly elevated levels of the disease or symptom, then that's a different story. But even then, it matters how often it happens. An exotic cancer that only appears in coal miners or nuclear plant workers could be cause for concern, but not if it's one case in a million workers.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday March 17, @04:33AM
What makes you think it was a dosimeter failure rather than a user failure?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 16, @07:10PM
>You're not that far away from Mexico.
500 to 1000 miles is close? In that case, 90%+ of the continental United States is "not that far away" from Kansas City.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by j-beda on Monday March 13, @04:56PM (6 children)
It is a tragedy when someone dies, but it is REALLY hard to link a single death (or even multiple deaths) due to a rare type of cancer to a single cause. Linking multiple deaths due to different types of cancers and disorders to a single cause is also challenging. How would you distinguish between a "natural" death and one caused by magic beams?
From a physics standpoint we have REALLY good understanding of how non-ionizing EM waves interact with mater, and there is no plausible mechanism for increased cancer risk. That does NOT mean it is impossible as living things are really complex, but it does mean that one should require pretty strong evidence that the effect actually happens before starting to panic. Thus studies of cell phone radiation that occasionally show health effects at the very edge of statistical significance should be treated very skeptically.
https://xkcd.com/882/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Monday March 13, @09:53PM (5 children)
Plausible link: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14914 [nature.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 14, @01:36AM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Thursday March 16, @04:34AM (3 children)
That's ok. :) It's plausible enough to be published.
Polarization and constructive interference does not need skin melting-level energy to be destructive -not when it's nanoscale-level organelles within a cell that are being affected, some of which are designed to sense much weaker electric and magnetic fields
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 16, @04:51AM (2 children)
They do need energy though. And there doesn't seem to be a point to mentioning the polarization other than claiming it creates a relevant amount of constructive interference which might create elevated levels of energy, but not that much.
For me, the silly part of that paper is the puffing up of polarization rather than of power. If you hold a cell phone up to your head, it'll emit more power to your head than any natural source in that frequency. Polarization and constructive interference (which will be minor BTW since the human head is mostly transparent) is irrelevant.
Which says nothing.
(Score: 2) by sonamchauhan on Thursday March 16, @12:23PM (1 child)
Hmm.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 16, @03:55PM
Why is that a credible threshold? A lot of people are smarter than me in cooking or car repair, but that doesn't make for plausibility.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday March 14, @12:31AM
Embassies should be full of equipment continuously monitoring all detectable frequencies. Failure to do this is gross dereliction of duty.