[Ti] Laptop Health Warning!

[Bob Jacobsen]

At 1:34 PM -0500 11/23/02, MBurke6225 at aol.com wrote:
>It is exasperating how little we know and just as frustrating how much we
>assume.

That's the only sentence in this post that I can completely agree 
with.  But the "we" in it refers to the general public...

>The electrical potential of the cells in the human body function in
>a very narrow range, that much we do know.  It doesn't take much to effect
>that narrow band.

So let's be quantitative about "much".  The induced potentials of the 
maximum RF power density allowed by regulation (which is much larger 
than typical doses, including when transmitting antennae are placed 
against the head or lap) is more than a factor of 100,000 smaller 
than typical cellular potentials, and more than a factor of 500 
smaller than the fluctuations in those potentials due to living at 
room temperature.

So "it doesn't take much", but the effects being talked about in this 
thread are very, very, very too small to be considered enough.

>Our bodies are paramagnetic.

Which means that they change imposed magnetic fields by tiny 
fraction, typically less than a part per thousand.

>Wave potentials increase
>when exposed to magnetic fields.

That statement makes no physical sense.

The potential of an electromagnetic wave is not in any way effected 
by a static magnetic field.  If there are several electromagnetic 
waves present (each containing both electric and magnetic fields), 
they add either constructively or destructively.  But they don't in 
any way "increase" due to exposure, nor due to combination.  At most, 
the field strength of two waves can be the sum of the two; it's 
usually less.

>The Ti book releases those fields, albeit
>at low levels.  However, even low levels can be amplified through
>environmental exposure.

If you mean the _effect_ of those potentials, that's certainly a 
possibility.  But to date the evidence for this happening is 
consistent with chance results in both epidemiological and 
longitudinal studies.

So they _can_ be, but the existing evidence is that if that's 
happening, it is invisible in studies of hundreds of thousands of 
people. Which is a very close approximation to saying that it's _not_ 
happening.

Before somebody points out that "absence of evidence is not evidence 
of absense":  If lots of competent people have looked really hard for 
an effect, and have repeatedly found that the effect is smaller than 
they can see with very good experiments, you _can_ conclude that the 
effect is _not_ large, could be zero, and at worst is small compared 
to other problems that we can detect.

>As Paul eluded, living is risky.  When it comes to
>our bodies we have to be the resident experts.

A good place to start is to actually study the scientific literature 
on this.  What you'll find is that most of the popular statements are 
known to be over-wrought to the point of fear-mongering.

Bob
-- 
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Bob Jacobsen (Bob_Jacobsen at lbl.gov, 510-486-7355, fax 510-495-2957)