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Flipperwaldt posted:I've got some cds with a code like that. It's limited because there are more steps in the production chain than "recording", "mixing" and (physical) "mastering". The SPARS code wouldn't tell you when an "all digital" recording had to go through an analog conversion between the original multitracks and the mixing board, for example. The SPARS code was just a marketing tactic, meant to appeal to DIGITAL GOOD/ANALOG BAD types in the early CD era. (And if they reversed it to appeal to the analog cultists of today, it would still be just as useless.)
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# ? Jul 12, 2013 01:24 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 14:30 |
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If anyone wants to learn more about Ekranoplans (including the Lun) this video is awesome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr8N0Z4Cl0U
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# ? Jul 12, 2013 02:38 |
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James May did a bit on the Ekranoplan too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch2zs-7je_s
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# ? Jul 12, 2013 07:06 |
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I want one of those chairs with an iPad in place of the control panel.Arsenic Lupin posted:In the Gaylord Model C system,
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# ? Jul 13, 2013 06:56 |
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Gaylord Model C system Mods?
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# ? Jul 13, 2013 15:21 |
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Well, since someone brought up Project Cybersyn, why not a brief, incomplete, Relics of Cybernetics mini-megapost? What is Cybernetics? Cybernetics is a nomad science. Okay, perhaps that is an unhelpful first descriptor. Cybernetics is a cross-disciplinary method of analyzing control systems through an abstraction of information into components of signal and noise. Most notably developed by polymath Norbert Wiener and collaborator Claude Shannon as a way to study communication systems, it quickly became what philosopher/historian of science Peter Galison terms a 'trading zone' -- a conceptual space wherein a variety of different disciplines can share the same common vocabulary in a productive manner, a sort of collaborative zone that escapes the logic of scientific incommensurability. This meant that cybernetic thought entered into everything from sociology/politics/religion (Wiener's own The Human Use of Human Beings and his really quite odd God and Golem, Inc.) to biology (Maturana/Varela's work on vision systems) to anthropology/philosophy of mind (Gregory Bateson) to management (Project Cybersyn). Even though there isn't much talk about cybernetics proper in the modern era, the logic it developed still permeates modern society. , especially in the explication of indeterminate/chaotic systems, many of which rely on the "noise" of the outside to generate novel behavior. (For more on the progression of cybernetic thought through the modern era see N. Katherine Hayles How We Became Posthuman) In addition, early cyberneticists were fond of building little self-regulating machines to emphasize their less pragmatic philosophical concerns. One of the first of this number was, in fact, intended to be quite practical, and quite deadly. Wiener's Antiaircraft Predictor (This section relies on Peter Galison's "The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision," Critical Inquiry 21.1 Autumn 1994. You can probably google it up (and you probably should)) Though far from the foment of militarized research labs like Bletchley Park (he was not invited to the Manhattan Project), Wiener expressed an early desire to make his control-systems research useful to the war effort. With some thought, he decided that an aiming system for anti-aircraft guns would fit wonderfully within the purview of cybernetics. Considered properly, the relationship between an anti-aircraft gunner and the pilot he is attempting to hit becomes a feedback loop: 1. Gunner fires at pilot 2. Pilot adjusts course in order to avoid a flaming death 3. Gunner adjusts aiming in order to hit pilot on his new course 4. Goto 1 Wiener's insight was that if he could make a servo-mechanical instrument that could intervene between steps 1 and 2, predicting the evasive maneuvers to be taken by the enemy, the feedback loop (and the pilot's life) could be cut short. In order to take such a step, Wiener would effectively "black box" the human elements of the gunner and the pilot, abstracting their specific individuality into a pattern of behaviors that have some degree of predictability. In this case, Wiener constructed the universal pilot as, essentially, a game theory robot. By assuming that the pilot would always make the "correct" ie, the most tactically efficient evasive maneuver (and that the gunner would do essentially the same) Wiener not only found a practical solution to the problem of human-cybernetic systems, he also promulgated, essentially, a theory of human mind. Through this reductionist move, Wiener performed the sort of abstraction that would allow cybernetics to tunnel its way through many different departments and think-tanks. This black-boxing of the human sets the ground for something like Gregory Bateson's much later Steps to an Ecology of Mind, a work that uses cybernetics to explore human social and mental systems. Probably good since as a practical machine, the predictor ended an incomplete failure. Ross Ashby and the Homeostat (This one relies on Andrew Pickering's article "Cybernetics and the Mangle: Ashby, Beer and Pask" Social Studies of Science 32.3) This is your brain on cybernetics While cybernetics finds its origins in America, it quickly found foreign enthusiasts like British psychiatrist Ross Ashby. Convinced that cybernetics could model the functioning of the human brain, he built the homeostat as the representative object of this theory. To quote Pickering's more eloquent description of the object: "The homeostat was an electrical device, which took electrical inputs and turned them into outputs. The input current passed through a coil within the homeostat, generating a magnetic field which exerted a torque on a needle or vane on the top of the machine, causing it to rotate in one direction or the other. The needle was itself part of an electrical circuit, and the end of the needle dipped into a semicircular trough of water across which a constant voltage was maintained by a battery. Thus the varying position of the needle controlled the current that flowed through it - which, after amplification, was in turn the output current of the homeostat unit. (415)" Ashby initially plugged four of the units together, output to input. In this configuration, the machines were nigh unpredictable. They could end up stable, with all of the needles in the middle of their potential ranges, with small perturbations passing through the systems and self-regulating back to center. Or, they could be unstable, where all the needles would stay stuck in the furthest corner of their ranges. By including a device that would reset the homeostat if the system moved too far towards instability, Ashby created a system that would effectively "learn" to become stable through trial and error, a key explication, in his view of how the human brain worked, and a key step towards theories of autopoiesis. Hopefully that was interesting, I can do more if it was. Rides Naked has a new favorite as of 17:43 on Jul 13, 2013 |
# ? Jul 13, 2013 16:40 |
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Rides Naked posted:Well, since someone brought up Project Cybersyn, why not a brief, incomplete, Relics of Cybernetics mini-megapost? Please do. That was brilliant reading.
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# ? Jul 13, 2013 20:25 |
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Call Now posted:Mods? What, you never heard of Gaylord Industries?
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# ? Jul 14, 2013 02:13 |
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Brother Jonathan posted:Here's an example of obsolete technology: the Stanley Steam Car: If you're talking steam cars, I've always been a fan of the Doble, much more efficient and driveable. Leno even takes it on the freeway, no problem at all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACO-HXvrRz8
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# ? Jul 14, 2013 05:23 |
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Loomer posted:What, you never heard of Gaylord Industries? I think he wanted a name change.
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# ? Jul 14, 2013 08:19 |
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I found a pretty piece of obsolete technology while scanning some holiday photos:
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# ? Jul 14, 2013 17:29 |
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ol qwerty bastard posted:Steam engines are so cool Also really loving loud.
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# ? Jul 14, 2013 18:12 |
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ol qwerty bastard posted:And here's another Leno video about a car with a propulsion system that never caught on: Oh man that's awesome They never even sold the thing- just awesome concept experimentation. Also Jay Leno is approximately 500% less irritating when he's talking about cars and not trying to make jokes I hate.
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# ? Jul 14, 2013 20:03 |
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Brother Jonathan posted:Agreed. It has drifted away from "obsolete and failed technology" and into just technology in general. For example, trolleybuses are a well-established and successful technology. I thought that car was the dumbest thing until he blew the steam whistle. Now I think it is amazing.
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# ? Jul 14, 2013 20:18 |
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With all this steam chat, I guess I should mention the Lombard log hauler. Basically someone thought "wouldn't it be great to drive a steam engine without rails?" Pretty impressive for 1901. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lombard_Steam_Log_Hauler There seem to be at least two still running. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAJ0mxp-8j8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw22NSKi38A
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# ? Jul 14, 2013 20:25 |
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Continuing the trend of weird obsolete steam cars, how about something that was never built? The Ford Nucleon, featuring a miniature nuclear reactor used to drive a steam turbine. http://www.damninteresting.com/the-atomic-automobile/ quote:Ford's nuclear automobile embodied the naive optimism of the era. Most people were ignorant of the dangers of the atomic contraption, as well as the risk that every minor fender-bender had the potential to become a radioactive disaster. In fact, the Nucleon concept was often received with great enthusiasm. Some sources even claim that the US government sponsored Ford's atomic car research program. I don't think you can get a more 1950's car.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 11:36 |
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BillyJoeBob posted:The Ford Nucleon, featuring a miniature nuclear reactor used to drive a steam turbine. This car is pretty much Fallout: The Car. It's got that "Yaaayyy nuclear power! Everything should be nuclear powered! My toaster has a small reactor in it! " vibe to it.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 15:52 |
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BillyJoeBob posted:Continuing the trend of weird obsolete steam cars, how about something that was never built? Imagine a world where this and the Chrysler Turbine car actually became the dominant technology.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 18:17 |
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Monkey Fracas posted:This car is pretty much Fallout: The Car. It's got that "Yaaayyy nuclear power! Everything should be nuclear powered! My toaster has a small reactor in it! " vibe to it.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 19:42 |
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Today I was hit with a slight case of what the nineties used to call future shock at the ubiquity and power of computing devices I have at home compared to old supercomputers. After some looking around I see two computers (old Intel E6700 with 13 GFLOPS and newer Intel i3 540 + Nvidia GTS 450 with 20.8 + 601.3 GFLOPS) and a notebook (ATOM-N455 with 0.4 GFLOPS) adding up to 635.5 GFLOPS. FLOPS for other things are either a) hard to find (kindle, printer, mp3 player, some phones); b) old and therefore irrelevant (why do I still have a GeForce FX 5700LE) or c) tiny (how powerful is the processor in my bread machine or old TV), so I won't bother and round up to 640 GFLOPS. And yes, I know that FLOPS (floating-point operations per second) are estimates, can't be used in direct comparison and are problematic as a measure of performance to begin with. I do what I want . After some googling at first I was slightly less smug about my nerdtoys when I saw Dawning No.1 (Shuguang Yihao, 曙光一号), a Chinese supercomputer series that looked like this: and that google translate helpfully describes as http://server.zol.com.cn/180/1805690.html posted:October 1993, under the leadership of the Guo-Jie Li, smart center independently developed China's first SMP (symmetric multiprocessor) Architecture Computer - dawn on the 1st computer, thus breaking a Chinese road to high-performance computers. Dawn on the 1st 863 made our country a major achievement, which indicates that China has mastered the design and manufacturing support for symmetric multi-threading mechanism tightly coupled parallel machine of the world's advanced level, reducing the country in parallel processing technology with foreign gap. Fortunately I was off by an order of magnitude (briefly and shamefully confused mega- and giga-) and the amazingly named Dawning No.1 had 640 MFLOPS not GFLOPS. What I should have been looking for was Hitachi SR2201, a distributed parallel memory system with a theoretical peak performance of 600 GFLOPS introduced in March 1996 and looking like this: It was No. 1 in June 1996 Top 500 list, was upgraded to 2048 nodes reaching 614 GFLOPS in September 1996 and stayed on top until Intel ASCI Red reached 1.06 TFLOPS in December 1996. I have more computional power at home than the best computer in the world when I was not only alive, but played Civilization II on Windows 95. Duke Nukem 3D was released in January 1996 and Nintendo 64 in June. Independence Day with its heroic "uploading virus" scene was released in July. At this point I wanted to compare computational power I have at home and the total of computational power in the world. Unfortunately FLOPS as a measure is even more useless for historic purposes and I soon began seeing either fluff pieces about the power of the human brain or academic papers with terms like "Moravec’s Information-Theoretic Measure of Performance" and stopped while I was ahead.
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# ? Jul 15, 2013 19:52 |
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MadScientistWorking posted:Well truth be told this actually did happen to a certain extent. Russia has about a 1000 of RTGs them lying around the country side and combined with scrap metal hunters you can imagine what happens. Its not even an obsolete technology though as nuclear batteries are in use right now. Nuclear batteries have been phased out in medical implants. They are and will forever be in spacecraft, but that’s even more exotic that nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, and everyone knows that those exist.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 03:43 |
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I also heard some stories that one of the northern norwegian ham groups were offered these amazing little totally safe (with all the shielding sold for scrap of course) RTGs to power repeater stations. Surprisingly importing them proved harder than thought. I really like the concept of a nuclear battery, apparently the soviets thought so too, using them liberally to power light houses. The problem is mainly that the thermocouples that convert the heat of decaying plutonium is sensitive to the radiation and the efficiency goes down over time. They also produce a fairly enormous amount of heat compared to electrical power, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for a arctic mountain-top type installation. A soviet Gorn type RTG producing 60W of electrical power (when new) and 1100W of heat (also when new, but heat output is only affected by the nuclear decay). It also weighed 1050 kg. As mentioned, they are still in use for deep space probes -- and are the only reason we can still talk to the Voyager probes, -- this is a problem, since should the rocket launching the probes need to be terminated, it would spray fairly poisonous and radioactive substances (remember: lower half-life = more nuclear energy) over a pretty wide area. Hopefully the area would be large enough that individual casualties are not an issue, but the environmental concerns are huge with launching RTGs.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 11:00 |
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Monkey Fracas posted:This car is pretty much Fallout: The Car. It's got that "Yaaayyy nuclear power! Everything should be nuclear powered! My toaster has a small reactor in it! " vibe to it. Speaking of that I came across this wikipedia page the other day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery Basically can be summed up as 'we're not quite sure what radiation does but its obviously a health benefit' I particularly like this thing: which is a pot specifically designed to irradiate your drinking water quote:The Radium Ore Revigator was a pseudoscientific medical device consisting of a ceramic water crock lined with radioactive materials. It was patented in 1912 by R. W. Thomas, an invalid in California,[1] and manufactured by the Radium Ore Revigator Co., which sold thousands of the devices in the 1920s and '30s. Brilliant
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 11:12 |
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edit: woops. I'm dumb.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 11:57 |
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dissss posted:Speaking of that I came across this wikipedia page the other day: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_quackery My favorite crazy radioactive "therapy" story is of Eben Byers. The headline for the story of his death was "The Radium Water Worked Fine until His Jaw Came Off."
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 15:23 |
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope Yes, I want a perfect fit for my shoes. Please shower me with radiation.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 15:45 |
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It was a simpler time
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 16:00 |
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When the X-Ray was in it's infancy as a technology people would have parlor parties where they would gently caress around with unshielded X-Ray machines, exposing themselves to untold amounts of radiation. "Look! I can see the bones in my hand! Now everyone else give it a go!"
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:03 |
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It makes me wonder what we do today that in 50 years will seem too stupidly absurd to be true.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:18 |
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DNova posted:It makes me wonder what we do today that in 50 years will seem too stupidly absurd to be true. Probably wi-fi or cellphones.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:22 |
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KozmoNaut posted:Probably wi-fi or cellphones. Low-power non-ionizing radiation? We are literally putting radium up our assholes here.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:29 |
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Pham Nuwen posted:We are literally putting radium up our assholes here. How, with what, and why? Not kinkshaming, just confused (apparently we are all literally doing it) e: Monkey Fracas posted:When the X-Ray was in it's infancy as a technology people would have parlor parties where they would gently caress around with unshielded X-Ray machines, exposing themselves to untold amounts of radiation. E.g., Tesla and Mark Twain "Look! I can see the bones in my head! Now everyone else give it a go!" http://www.studio360.org/2012/jan/27/tesla-and-twain/ joat mon has a new favorite as of 17:41 on Jul 16, 2013 |
# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:34 |
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DNova posted:It makes me wonder what we do today that in 50 years will seem too stupidly absurd to be true. All of our politics from Reagan onward.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:34 |
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DNova posted:It makes me wonder what we do today that in 50 years will seem too stupidly absurd to be true. Goddamn I hope it's Facebook.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:37 |
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DNova posted:It makes me wonder what we do today that in 50 years will seem too stupidly absurd to be true.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 17:39 |
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Speaking of these why has it taken so long for cordless charging to come about? Induction has been understood for a very long time so what is so hard about using a coil to induce a current in another coil in a phone to charge a battery?
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 18:04 |
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Because it means packing more electronics into a phone just so no one has to plug them in. A 20 cent connector is cheaper, faster, easier, more efficient, and smaller. They do get full of dirt eventually, but that just means you need to buy a new phone, it's not exactly a downside to the manufacturer.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 18:08 |
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Fozaldo posted:Speaking of these why has it taken so long for cordless charging to come about? Induction has been understood for a very long time so what is so hard about using a coil to induce a current in another coil in a phone to charge a battery? It's rather inefficient.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 18:08 |
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joat mon posted:How, with what, and why? I was just pointing out that the radiation from cell phones and wifi is incredibly harmless compared to actual ionizing radiation. All the cell phone will do is potentially warm your body very very slightly when in use.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 18:15 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 14:30 |
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Pham Nuwen posted:I was just pointing out that the radiation from cell phones and wifi is incredibly harmless compared to actual ionizing radiation. All the cell phone will do is potentially warm your body very very slightly when in use. The fact that we have understood the dangers of radioactivity for the better part of half a century and I still meet people who don't understand what electromagnetic radiation is is something that should surely be obsolete. It also pisses me off when I'm told either that "well we don't know conclusively do we" or just plain "no, cell phone radiation causes all sorts of problems and I get a headache from using one". It just demonstrates a complete lack of understanding of the science involved. I have also literally had a family member tell me that she didn't want a cell phone tower near where she lived because of radiation. Coverage was poor enough that they could only use the phones in one spot, and they were all glued to their phones anyway. I have never met anyone dumb enough to think wi-fi emissions are a health risk but I'm told it often comes up in school boards. Here's something that's either obsolete or never existed in the first place: the general population appreciating science.
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# ? Jul 16, 2013 18:38 |