"Mike Coslo" wrote in message
...
Dr. Barry L. Ornitz wrote:

The ONLY effect that radio frequencies can do to humans is
thermal. You have to increase the frequencies to the upper
visible region (blue since we are talking frequency rather than
wavelength) before there is any ionizing radiation. Note,
however, that thermal effects can be quite damaging too.

I had posted some links here some months back about the other
effects of rf. Seems there is a little more than just heating
going on. I have noticed that the heating effect I "feel" on
extended cell phone use is not actual heat.

How do you know the effects were not thermal? The "malaise" some
people feel when exposed to strong RF fields is very similar to the
effects felt during a mild fever. My statement was based on how
radio frequency fields interact with atoms and molecules. How the
body "interprets" the molecular heating is an entirely different
matter.

To go back to Jeff's references, any nonlinearity can detect
amplitude modulation. Nerve firing potentials are quite nonlinear,
of course. The cilia in the human ear have mechanical resonances
from typically 20 Hz to 20 kHz (unless you listen to rock music or
are as old as I am). These same cilia have thermal time constants
in the fractional millisecond range too. It seems to me that RF
modulated at audio frequencies could easily be "heard" even though
the effect might still be caused by heating. Then too, the RF must
be in the microwave region for much of the energy to couple into the
ear. This corresponds to experimental evidence shown in the first
article.

Interestingly, most cell phone fear is based on cancer. It's not
hardly likely, for the reasons already outlined.

The biggest danger to cell phone towers is if one falls on you.

And the biggest danger from cell phone use is letting it distract
someone who is driving a car (or train or subway).

I'll not go so far as to say that there are no effects however. I
suspect something is happening that we might not know about at
this time - and there is some tantalizing evidence showing in some
of the research.

Unfortunately, many of the researchers do not understand radio
frequency fields enough to design their experiments properly. Until
they do, we will always be stuck with correlation confused with
causation.

One of the better examples of this was explained by a Japanese
professor who taught my first statistics course. He said that the
average height of Japanese males dropped several inches in the years
following WWII. This could easily be correlated with the dropping
of two atomic bombs on Japan. But the real cause was the fact that
the Japanese army had drafted the taller men first, and many of
these taller men were killed in combat.

Another problem is that in working with human populations, a
correlation coefficient of 0.2 is often considered good. But in
the physical sciences, good correlation is usually over 0.9 and
excellent correlation is usually over 0.99. When working with such
research as cancer studies, extremely large populations must be used
for their results to be meaningful.

73, Barry WA4VZQ

Sorry for the delay in this post. Charter's NNTP server has been down
for over two days.