Re: cpufrequency
Re: cpufrequency
- Subject: Re: cpufrequency
- From: Howard Oakley <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2006 22:15:14 +0100
- Thread-topic: cpufrequency
On 14/6/06 20:48, Dirk Schelfhout wrote:
> On 14 Jun 2006, at 21:23, Howard Oakley wrote:
> I don't want , or need a health discussion. I just wanted some
> technical help.
> If you want to discuss this with me further off-list, feel free to do
> so.
Dirk,
Please take care when quoting so that you do not misquote as you did above:
*you* wrote those words, not I. And I happen to be providing you with
technical help, as I happen to be a medical practitioner who (among other
things) works with RF and has had responsibility for medical RF safety. I
have also followed the published research and various speculative reports
that have appeared. Now read the following very carefully, please:
1. The only consistently reported biological effect of exposure to
non-ionising radiation of any significance is of heating. There have been
reports of effects on cell division, but for the sort of exposures that you
are talking about, those are both marginal in likelihood, and not relevant
to a complaint of headaches.
2. Tissue heating, particularly if asymmetric, can be supposed as a
potential cause of headaches, because of its effect on blood flow (when
tissues are heated, you get local dilation of blood vessels, which increases
local blood flow).
3. Some studies have suggested that holding mobile phones against the head
*when connected and thus transmitting* can have small local heating effects
as a result of absorbed RF energy. The effects are normally small, but have
provided a possible mechanism for headaches and other effects caused by RF.
However, most mobile phone users do other things, such as talking (which
causes hyperventilation, and more) that are well known to cause headaches,
and dissociating those effects has proved hard.
4. In order to get close to the absorbed energies that equate to those from
transmitting mobile phones, from your processor, etc., you would have to
have your head very close to the keyboard (and even then I don't think that
you could match them), which would make reading the screen so awkward that
that would be far more disturbing than any RF involved. Indeed, if there is
any RF issue with laptops, it is more likely to arise from the purpose-made
transmitters - WiFi and Bluetooth - that most now include. The easy solution
for them is to turn them off, of course. Indeed, if you want to try an
experiment, get a friend to set a laptop up in a room, with wireless
communications running and active, then cover the laptop with a thin sheet
so that you cannot tell whether it is transmitting. Time how long it takes
you to get a headache. Then leave, and get them to repeat with wireless
turned off. Tell them to do this a few times in 'random' order, and see
whether your headaches statistically develop more frequently when the
wireless comms are active. It is essential that you are 'blinded' as to
whether wireless is active, or you could subconsciously influence the
result.
5. Human beings are not Cartesian dolls, and we are always stumbling across
exceptions. Maybe someone can navigate the globe using an inbuilt biological
GPS - I cannot disprove it. But in medicine, common things occur most
commonly: if you *or anyone* has headaches when using a computer, you should
rule out the common and well-understood causes of headaches before
concluding that the cause is RF. The correct way of doing that is not by
trying to apply engineering logic to the body, but by obtaining proper
specialist help and assessment. A very very small number of persistent
headaches, for example, result from brain tumours. Wouldn't you want to know
with reasonable confidence that you were not developing such a tumour?
> I am not unique, do some research.
Everyone is unique, and I have researched this, and keep a careful watch on
the literature. If you feel that you have scientific evidence to the
contrary, I greatly welcome the references to the original papers, please.
I am sorry to dwell on this OT matter, but as it concerns health, safety,
and popular speculative issues, I think it has more general relevance until
the listmom stamps on me!
Howard.
Dr Howard Oakley
The Works columnist for MacUser magazine (UK)
http://www.macuser.co.uk/
http://www.howardoakley.com/
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