On vaccines and autism, child pornography, and seeing “bullies” everywhere

It’s funny- it sounds to me that she was the one doing the bullying of the friend who sent her the link to the book.

My personal favorite is when someone comes onto MY blog because of a post that I’ve written and says that I’m a bully for my views. It’s my blog! No one is forcing you to read it!

Interestingly enough, they don’t want to listen to doctors, scientists and researchers either…..

@#2 There is, without question, a lot more we need to learn to understand autism but it is certainly the case that we know an awful lot about 1) what autism is as it translates into a disorder; and, 2) variables related to etiology. None of this knowledge has changed the attitude of anti-vaxers and I doubt the further accumulation of evidence will either. Sad but likely true.

This woman’s behavior, even as self-reported, makes it sound as if she’s really unbalanced.

See, you’re not a skeptic. Skeptics can be persuaded by good evidence. You are what is sometimes called a pseudo-skeptic, one who adopts the rhetoric of skepticism to provide cover for a completely dug-in ideological position.

The other word for this is “denier”. The standard rhetorical technique for defending against this is to vigorously clutch one’s pearls and assert that the word is inextricably linked to Holocaust denial, and how dare you accuse me of that!!! Well, no one’s accusing you of that. It’s an accurate description of the pseudo-skeptic position, because at this point, the evidence that global warming is happening, is caused mostly or wholly by humans, and is likely to be very disruptions is conclusive.

… likely to be very disruptive. Bah.

This is the exact same attitude that leads anti-vaxers to invade pro-vax websites & complain about all the pro-vax “trolls.”

As is one could “troll” one’s own website.

@ Chris Hickie:

“Also, what is it about these AVers and their glasses of wine in hand whilst ‘researching’…” ?

Oh, I know. I’ll venture that it’s a self-soothing mechanism/ affiliation-seeking action/ mind-clouding technique that they use frequently rather than facing reality.

I truly believe that some of these women DO have a hard time taking care of a special needs child and in addition, they are disappointed in their lot- they thought that they’d be in a ‘different place’ when their children were aged 10 or 15. They may become isolated from other parents ( of NT kids who live nearby) and family who don’t understand. So I do understand their predicament.

Thus they seek out comfort in mind-altering substances ( not that there’s anything wrong with that) and mind-numbing conversations amongst their like-minded computer friends who reward their pseudo-science by agreeing and congratulating them on their brilliance. Then they write the whole mess up and post it on AoA or TMR or- an entirely new option- NARRATE their tales on TMR TV! That’s the new thing.

As I always say, these websites/ fanfiction spots are ‘group therapy gone wrong’ because they reinforce unrealistic ideas and interaction.

And believe me, I like to go out, have wine or gin- not both- and talk with associates/ friends/ SOs but seriously, I know what ideas to keep working on when I’ve sober and what to discard.
Although poetry created in that manner can often be superior.
Where’s JP?

@ delta-orion:

“any unhappiness she might feel…is someone else’s fault”

That’s often how young children attribute blame- it’s a means of preserving self-esteem. Everyone does it to some extent but these women appear to make it a habit.

I see this victim mentality as being culturally supported. Otherwise why would the perpetually offended not feel any shame for their own behaviors.

More on self-adulating anti-vax promotion:

TMR facebook announces a new documentary by Christie Dames and Kevin O’Malley, *Moms Determined*, featuring TM, Dragonslayer ( Marissa Ali) – a “quest or unite moms from around the world to help find answers to complicated medical diagnoses”

“a quest to unite”

I’d wish more power to them if they weren’t so entirely misguided. It’s too bad; they might be able to do some good in the world if they weren’t wasting their efforts in all the wrong places.

The ‘worse than child porn’ is so outrageous that yup, I felt some rage on first read. But then I realize it’s hyper-outrageous, i.e. beyond the realm of outrage into utter WTF.

delta-orion’s comment smacks me upside the head, because d-o’s friend reminds me of someone now in my life who frequently resorts to a sort of persecution/martyr worldview (someone’s always ‘screwing them over’), but can also be very combative and hurtful to others (seemingly to a lesser degree than d-o has experienced, thankfully). And what delta-orion sees so beautifully is this friends pain. For which d-o has compassion, a desire to get through. Maybe I’m reading in, but get the impression the fact the friend can’t be reached makes d-o feel sad about the whole situation…

I think to myself that yet again sh!t rolls down-hill. World class WTF doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s hard for me to be sympathetic when my martyr goes on the ‘all about me’ war-path. But I know that this individual was abandoned by their mother as a child, and left in the care of a physically abusive father — a level of traumatic experience I can’t imagine I can ever fully understand.

I know that folks with personality-disorder type issues often have had some formative horrifying experience in their youth – incidents where they were badly hurt through no fault of their own. It’s hardly surprising that they may shut this out of mind, only to have the repressed return as a variety of irrational projections e.g. ‘vaccine damage conspiracies’, or that these mental distortions lead them to do harm to others in one form or another. Sadly, full-on personality disorders appear to be cases where some part of a person’s humanity becomes broken beyond repair. They become monstrous, and the best advice to others appears to be ‘just stay away, because there’s really nothing you can do about it.’

So I wonder if someone did something awful to Dara Berger. I consider the possibility that “more upsetting than child porn would be to me” linked to the viciousness of “your insensitivity explains why you are still alone” is not a random reference pulled out of the air. I sense some serious sh!t is rolling down-hill here. I imagine I might feel sorry for Berger if I knew her ‘whole story’. But I feel sorrier for the people who are caught in its path, and can’t get away…

I’ve learned that ‘my martyr’ is falling under the sway of an anti-vax “friend”… At this point things are still a long way from AoA level crazy… But I’m afraid…

I do take some solace from Orac’s post, though. I take the appearance of Berger’s screed on AoA as another sign that anti-vax is in it’s death throes as a ‘movement’ capable of maintaining enough influence to threaten public health. It’s not just that Berger wrote it, but that it’s typical of how much more fringey the core AVers have become, along with embracing Tea Party politicians and what not. Taking a wider view, the public sphere in the U.S. appears to be approaching a crisis point with Trump-ism. The mass of sheer crazy seems to growing bigger, but more unstable week-by-week. That’s frightening, of course, but I can’t see anti-vax getting any significant boost there, but rather getting kicked to the curb by more broadly held, more dramatic, and more venal obsessions: anti-immigrant, death-to-all-Muslims, arm-kindergarden-teachers-with-AK47s, and so on. Small comfort, maybe, but I guess I’ll take what I can get.

I think it’s pretty clear that Ms. Berger has borderline personality disorder. Grafting an irrational belief onto such a disorder makes for a particularly noxious and difficult person. She gets into high-voltage conflicts with people wherever she goes, but has no insight into how she is the cause of these conflicts. She has no idea how bad she looks, even in her own self-interested description of these encounters. I loved the sentence “I felt silently bullied.” Wow. Even when someone is saying nothing, he is bullying her. “Your insensitivity explains why you are still alone.” How vicious. I hope her victim is not sensitive about being single, and took this crazy lady’s ranting with a grain of salt. Certainly, he has at least decided to have nothing more to do with her.

@ sadmar:

You more or less hit it on the head about my feelings toward my former friend. I honestly can’t help wondering if she was (and maybe still is) suffering from some sort of low-level depression, and turned to a sense of persecution as a maladaptive way of managing it, the way some people self-medicate with alcohol or drugs. I *liked* her. When she wasn’t tearing a strip off someone for some imagined slight, she was fun.

But at the same time — liking someone, and feeling sorry for them, just isn’t enough. Not when they’re doing real harm. I think Denice made an excellent point (which of course she and others have made here before) when she said that, yes, these women *are* unhappy, they *are* struggling. And no, we shouldn’t forget that. But they don’t get a free pass just because they have hardships to deal with. Their hurt does not justify the harm they do to others, including their own children.

@ Denise #23

If you take a thousand people who can’t fix a car and put them all together they still can’t fix a car. Similarly, a thousand of these TMR types aren’t going to be any better at diagnosis than any one of them alone. Perhaps however they will be more entertaining. Definitely more annoying.

AoA commenter Betty Bona chimes in to add refusing to argue with her to the list of bullying tactics:

Two lines I hate hearing from family and friends are, “we get our science from very different sources,” and “we’ll just have to agree to disagree.” It’s their way of ending the argument without having to consider my points. They get to continue with their “more educated than thou” beliefs with the second assumption that I’m a nutcase. I feel bullied then.

Herr Doktor Bimler@ 32
Mr Noakes appears to be well thank you. Though sadly out of pocket having had a tribunal find him guilty of sex discrimination against a former employee.
He has suggested his company be allowed to bid against our Meducal Specialist Group when the contract comes up for renewal. He is offering to treat us all with vitamins and his supplement Golec and promises the island will be cancer free. Not sure what he was planning for obstetrics or orthopeadics and trauma. Even he couldnt be daft enough to expect his wonder treatment would be much use in dealing with a breech presentation or a broken leg.
Anyway, as no one seems keen on taking up this offer he is standing as a candidate in a local by-election next week.

They get to continue with their “more educated than thou” beliefs with the second assumption that I’m a nutcase. I feel bullied then.

Think how much more of a bully I must be for not bothering to find out Betty Bona’s* opinions in the first place!

* I cannot help thinking of Julian and Sandy when I read her nym.

Berger’s claim that a scientific book about the diagnosis of autism is “worse than child porn” is offensive on so many levels.

“We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” is indeed a smarmy, annoying dodge. It doesn’t prevent unpleasantness, because it stinks of undeserved privilege and power to stop discussion. It’s not bullying. It’s haughty dismissal, something people say as an exit put-down they can get away with via faux politese, because everyone now knows the phrase has become a performative cliche.

The thing is, it’s not something you say to actual friends or family you care even a little about. So methinks Betty “Get-Me-A-New-Nym” Bona’ (or is that pronounced ‘big-bo-NAY’) is making that up. That is, either it’s not a direct quote from folks close to her, but a paraphrase expressing how she hears their disengagement, or it’s a direct quote from someone (probably just one person, one time) who is NOT close friend or family, and she’s punching up the martyrdom by framing as coming from multiple close sources. Either way, I’m sensing the sort of hyperbole Denise might characterize as performance for Histrionic Attention Whore Community Theater.

Even if ‘Bona’ did get this form of ‘dis’ from a friend, the ‘bullying’ claim is just so insensitively whiny BS. I was bullied in Jr. High, and I would have celebrated if my tormentors had just dismissed me with an insult. It was physical, creating more fear than anger, and it seemed it would never stop. I’ll credit ‘Bona’ for one thing: saying “I feel bullied then”, not “I know I’m being bullied then.” Yup, it’s all in your mind Betty: either you’re making your own bruises, or you have no idea what actually being bullied feels like.

This woman claims bullying wasn’t so easy in the 1970’s? Thanks, lady. Thanks for telling me that. I’m sure I must have imagined all those bruises way back in middle school since it was so difficult and time consuming to be a bully back then.

SMH

This woman has no idea what it means to be bullied, and her complaint is just a shield against criticism . . . deserved criticism as it happens. She can’t defend her views with logic, so she uses emotion. Cowardly, despicable, and worst of all, dishonest.

Panacea: “This woman claims bullying wasn’t so easy in the 1970’s?”

I sometimes wonder if the kids who bullied me relentlessly in fourth grade are now part of the AoA crowd. I was an Army brat who had lived elsewhere than their little midwest town, and would actually read books. Apparently being different is a crime in some small towns, and small minded communities like AoA.

I was an Army brat who had lived elsewhere than their little midwest town, and would actually read books. Apparently being different is a crime in some small towns, and small minded communities like AoA.

I don’t quite agree with your conclusion there, Chris.

I was an AF brat, back in the days when the Viet Nam war was in full swing, and we moved a lot. Big city schools, small town schools, on base schools, schools near the base, and schools nowhere near a base (because dad was overseas) – all of them had bulling, and anybody could be the target.

I think it’s a fundamental part of the human condition – men, women, boys, and girls. You might as well expect big fish to not eat little fish.

I’m not saying that it should be allowed. You can stop a bully, but you can’t stop them all.

And believe me, I like to go out, have wine or gin- not both- and talk with associates/ friends/ SOs but seriously, I know what ideas to keep working on when I’ve sober and what to discard.
Although poetry created in that manner can often be superior.
Where’s JP?

At a fairly raucous event right at the moment, from the sound of things.

Their hurt does not justify the harm they do to others, including their own children.

Yes, a thousand times. But I think we err when we conflate the harm with the person. We can maintain some sympathy for the human-beings while condemning their actions. I don’t think this is just philosophical nit-picking, either. What we want is to eliminate as much harm as possible, yes? To develop effective strategies to prevent harms, we must understand them, and some form of measured sympathy is typically necessary to do that.

If there ARE something like personality disorders operating in ‘extremist’ anti-vaxers at AoA, TMR etc., that puts them into the ‘probably lost causes’ category, and we’re not going to be very successful in getting their behavior to change. It seems the most we can do is warn others to steer clear, and work to reduce future incidence of the causes of such disorders – the best methods of which are likely to be doing what we can to protect the vulnerable from the harms that can warp their sensibilities in their formative years, and working to counter-act the forces that may trigger ‘dormant’ pathologies to erupt into harm later in life.

My hypotheses here are:
1) The psychological pathologies that lead people to callous actions tend to fall into two general categories:
a) Repeated positive reinforcement of bad behavior in childhood and adolescence.
b) Significant un-addressed childhood victimization. (e.g. child sexual abusers who were themselves victims of sexual abuse denied/covered-up/etc.) I think this has something to do with evolutionary ‘natural selection’ among social creatures, where the worst survival chances fall to those at the lowest rung on the dominance ladder – thus the instinct after receiving a beat-down to turn around and administer another to a weaker member of the clan.
2. ‘b’ is much more common than ‘a’ for the simple reason that brutality is a more common experience for children than basking in unchallenged privilege.
3. Neither ‘a’ nor ‘b’ are universally causal. Some folks will emerge from such environments/experiences with negligible effect, only minor damage, only self-directed harm, etc. Some x-factor likely figures in the equation leading to harming pathologies.
4. Those x-factors are either too varied, unchangeable (genetic?), or unknown to imagine addressing, so our focus should stay on ‘a’ and ‘b’ (as intractable as they may seem to the pragmatic eye…)
5. ‘a’ and ‘b’ aren’t mutually exclusive at all, and the most extreme ‘deviance’ may result from a combination of the two. One scenario might be a ‘spoiled’ child who suddenly experiences a traumatic instance of how cruel the world can be, and then ‘acts out’ in ways that are rewarded in some form. (The play/film The Ruling Class comes to mind as a parable…) Another scenario might be a neglected child who has neither buffers against cruelty nor controls on their response.
7. These pathologies may simmer without leading to significant harms until some triggering incident in adulthood exacerbates them. Obviously perhaps, I’m thinking here that most AV-crazy likely stems from some childhood thing that doesn’t lead to big-time overt wigginess until the individual faces the ‘crisis’ of dealing with parenting a special-needs child. But certainly other life events – divorce, job loss, financial woes, etc. – lead vulnerable folks over-the-edge where more grounded folks regain their footing.
8. Recent history suggests that these psycho-social pathologies are amplified by mutual reinforcement… which has been immensely enabled by the explosion of self-selected immediate communication forms: cable news, talk radio, the blogosphere, social media. Now all the damaged nut-jobs can find each other, and create insular ‘virtual community’ bubbles that support distorted ‘alternate realities’ that rival Philip K. Dick wildest imaginings. It’s hard to imagine either AV or Trumpism being major Things without the internet.

OK. If there’s anything to these hypotheses, the question remains as ever ‘what is to be done?’ How DO we we protect vulnerable kids from the harms that can turn them toward the monstrous? How DO we counter-act the forces that call-up and unleash the waiting monstrous in adults?

I mean if you’ve plowed through the previous 684 words, I ought to have some pragmatic suggestions for you, amirite?

Wish I did… Wish I didn’t feel so exhausted… So at sea… So old and weak… For tonight anyway, outside of muttering vague platitudes about “justice for all” ‘fighting inequality and exploitation’ or good ol’ “do unto others” human decency, I got nothin’…

Johnny: “Big city schools, small town schools, on base schools, schools near the base, and schools nowhere near a base (because dad was overseas) – all of them had bulling, and anybody could be the target.”

Actually, I was just highlighting the most egregious of them all. Mostly because the fourth grade class I had in Missouri Rural School #xyz was making me repeat what I had learned in my third grade at Stillwell Elementary of Ft. Ord, CA. It apparently was an abomination that I had already mastered long division and would routinely get 100% on most tests. That place actually made be behind my fifth grade peers at the next school, an American ex-pat school in South America.

This is why I locked myself in my brother’s car because I was chased there with threats of real physical violence (well, I already had been hit by full force with by someone on a bike earlier). My brother was in high school, and was supposedly taking care of me while visiting a friend.

It was nothing compared to the teasing (not bullying) I had in 8th in the Canal Zone. Oh, and I did not get bullied in Minnesota during 7th when my dad was stationed in Korea. I just had stupid boys try to toss paper balls down my cleavage in math class (which was self paced, so I made up the time I lost in fourth grade, and having a mathematically incompetent 6th grade teacher in that private overseas school).

The only good thing about living in that wretched place while my dad attend the Command and General Staff School just over the border (and past the prison farms) was that I picked up the habit of going on long walks.

@ ann

Wow, IMHO it’s really cool and considerate that you asked sincerely in response to my rant.* You rock! So I’ll fight my drowsies to attempt a sincere, thoughtful reply…

In person, I think tone of voice usually carries the day. Context matters a lot, too. If you’re getting browbeaten, and say “let’s just agree to disagree” in exhausted resignation, the subtext would be different from the way I’ve encountered the phrase. My experience with it (which may be idiosyncratic) comes in academic settings, where a person in control of discussion employs it to cut off an exchange with putative peers after being caught with a weak argument. Q and A’s after conference presentations or job talks, meetings with The Dean of Faculty, etc.

Actually, I have no problem whatsoever with someone cutting off unproductive discussion, or even ducking a difficult challenge. To me the icky comes from being disingenuous about it when the power dynamic is equal or favors the person withdrawing. The oxymoron of “agree to disagree” is too cute by half, and a sort of coercive gentility in those situations. Thus “Let’s agree” is worse than “We’ll have to agree” if you hear it voiced from a position of authority. You don’t want to ‘just disagree’. You think you’re right and you want to continue pressing the argument to a conclusion to demonstrate that to your interlocutor, or to others listening in.

Of course, people can feel that way when they’re dead wrong, just droning on repeating unsupported assertions, or any intermediate doses thereof. My suggestion then, is that anyone so beseiged should weather the storm long enough to do the small bit of critical reflection on the situation required to generate a specific context-appropriate disengagement instead of invoking the shop-worn generic form – especially in online text forums where tone is damn hard to communicate, and readers often assume the worst and fail to pick up the cues we may to include to indicate otherwise.

And I’ll suggest that some measures of honest disclosure and respect for our interlocutors is the key to ick-avoidance.

Having run a few examples through my mind, I’ll tentatively suggest a form of [apology] [succinct explanation of the problem with the exchange] [withdrawal statement]. And to whatever extent we may be in control of the discussion, I’d suggest we ‘own it’. E.g., if someone drones on and on with the same ‘point’ in a public exchange we might say “I’m sorry, but this isn’t going anywhere, and we need to move on, so I’m going to take the next question.” The apology expresses the minimal respect we expect from anyone honestly taking issue with us. Combined with the problem ID, I think it distinguishes the issue at hand from any broad judgement of the other person as a whole – which we’re not in a position to make with someone we don’t know, and don’t want to make with family/friends who have other opinions or qualities we value.

Again I’m suggesting measured respect and honesty, not profuse apology to the point of obsequious butt-kissing on oe hand, or brutal candor on the other. Thus, we might say “I’m sorry, but this isn’t going anywhere” when we’re actually thinking “Damnit, I can’t take any more of this crap!”

It also strikes me as a good idea to ‘own’ wthdrawal from a position of interpersonal weakness. For example, if we’re being browbeaten with anti-vax conspiracy nonsense by a friend or relative we’re ‘stuck with’, we might say ‘Look, Betty. I’m worn out. I just don’t have the stomach to keep arguing with you. Please let’s drop it and talk about something else.” Or “Look, Betty. I don’t have the stomach to keep arguing with you. I’m sorry, but I’m out of here.” Depending on the situation, we might say we’ll resume the discussion later, or only entertain resuming it under certain conditions (like, being reasonably calm), or have no desire to ever participate in the argument again under any circumstances, or no intent of even listening. “I’m sorry, but I have to preserve what little peace of mind the rest of my life leaves me, and if you go there, I’m gonna have to leave the room.”

Granted, Dara and Betty make it clear that they will take great offense at anything other than total acceptance of their First Principle: “The vaccines ruined my perfect snowflake!” But my premise is that we’re talking to people we don’t have the luxury of writing off, and there will less offense taken and less trouble spilling over to other matters if we choose our words wisely. Doing so is also good practice for when we have to deal with folks who aren’t being bat guano bonkers, but just boorish, tedious, or dumb about a certain given topic at a certain given time. I also like to think I remain true to my own standards – treat others the way I want to be treated – even – or maybe especially – when they’re taking a dump on me. That is, I like the feeling of “I didn’t sink to their level”, or perhaps “I ‘won’ by demonstrating my moral superiority”. That said, there can come a time when nothing but the straight poop will do, “You may or may not be a fine person in a lot of other ways, but on this, you’ve been a total f***nutz spewing out irrational harmful garbage that makes me want to puke, and then go outside for the good long primal scream I’m withholding to speak to you now in this calm quiet voice.” Or something like that…

In sum, whether “Lets just agree to disagree” rises to ick level depends, but while there are certainly worse things we could say, I think we can (and should) do better…
______
* In addition to my long-standing pique at “agree to disagree” my ranting was influenced by sympathetic angst at my SO’s tales of a stressful Thanksgiving dinner spent fending off an aggressive martyr-complex sibling’s attempts (yup, this is the one moving toward anti-vax) to dredge up argument-starting family stuff. Which fending-off the SO has long given up trying to do with delicate, clever, forced gentility because It Does Not Work — now just saying calmly but firmly “I’m sorry, but I am NOT going to talk about THAT!”

Your reference to bullies in the title, Orac, provides me with a hook to post something here on a matter that is dear to me and many skeptics in Australia, and increasingly internationally. So apologies if I am going a little off thread, but the matter is urgent: This is an SOS call-out:
The multi million dollar sham therpay cult leader, Serge Benhayon, is suing Esther Rocket for defamation over criticism by her of Universal Medicine, a sham health and wellbeing therapy group / business / philosophy / cult. Benhayon is trying to silence his prominent critic by financially ruining her.

To contribute to her support (crowd) fund see here:
https://ozcrowd.com/campaigns/esther-rockett-legal-defence-fund/#.VlmDlHYrLIU

To contribute to the Streisand effect, please repost this:
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/jane-hansen-how-universal-medicine-bullied-me/story-fni0cwl5-1227262426186?sv=9363ff3f378085a14130e64e297d13b1

Thank you good people for your patience with this somewhat off topic post.

Not an intellectually respectable article. Just drop the insults and make the case (with evidence, not assertions, please) that there is no causal link between vaccines and autism.

This writer can’t do that, which is why he resorts to ad hominem aspersions. What an intellectual lightweight.

Morning, John boys!

“The autism / vaccines link has been adressed in _several_ other article on this blog,”

You misspelled “innumerable”.

“he resorts to ad hominem aspersions. What an intellectual lightweight.”

Irony not your strong suit?

Just drop the insults and make the case (with evidence, not assertions, please) that there is no causal link between vaccines and autism.

As others have mentioned, the “case” has been made in innumerable posts on this and other blogs.

How about instead you provide evidence that there is no “causal link” between anti-vax craziness and children dying from preventable (by vaccine) disease?

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/whooping-cough-kills-infant-in-laurentians-1.3340923

By the way, Burmese Days, do you now feel like you are being bullied? Do you also think that the book Neurotribes is as terrible as child porn?

Just asking to see where you stand.

@Dr. Hickie #10: ” if you aren’t going to vaccinate then you are a risk to my newborns immunocompromised patients. If that makes me a bully, well bully for me.”

I would be interested in making a computation of the difference in risk between a vaccinated child and an unvaccinated one. What would expect the difference to be? How might we go about making such a computation? What numbers would we seek? Because the parameters would vary enormously between vaccines, a one-by-one approach would be best. I think the probabilities could then be summed. Not quite correct, but the probabilities of the intersections can be assumed to be small enough to ignore.

Consider the MMR? What is the probability that an unvaccinated child will be contagious for one of those diseases at some point prior to adulthood? What is the probability that a vaccinated child will be contagious for one of those diseases? Do you know or know where estimates of those risks can be found?

Just saying – another child in Canada has died of whooping cough – too young for the vaccine and family and friends that infected the baby were UNVACCINATED! A tragic waste.

Check http://www.cbc.ca for more information.

@Beth #72
Of course I can’t speak for Doctor Hickie, but I would modify his statement to something more like this: “If you aren’t going to vaccinate then you are willfully and stupidly posing a risk to my newborn and immunocompromised patients.”

Nice that you raised the topic of herd immunity, though, given that so many anti-vaxxers discount it.

@brian #75

The rephrase doesn’t impact my question. What is that risk? Whether you consider the person making that choise “willfull and stupid” or “naive and mislead” or anything else does not alter the computation.

I don’t consider myself anti-vaxxer nor do I discount herd immunity. You want to reconsider your assumptions about me.

So I’ll fight my drowsies to attempt a sincere, thoughtful reply

I feel bullied by your thoughtful, gracious gesture.

Actually, I have no problem whatsoever with someone cutting off unproductive discussion, or even ducking a difficult challenge.

^^In the latter circumstance, I would never say agree-to-disagree, or even think it. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be very likely to be there to begin with. I enjoy a difficult challenge.
…

I guess that if the difficulty was that I was being outmatched but, for some reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on, still didn’t think I was wrong, I’d say something like “OK, maybe. I’ll have to think about it,” and try not to sound too sulky about it.

If the difficulty was that I was finding the argument too upsetting/disturbing to continue, if among peers I knew well, I’d probably say something like “OK, I don’t want to talk about it anymore” plus a courteous acknowledgment or concession, to whatever degree was merited (ie — “I appreciate that you think x, y, z; I will bear it in mind; I totally agree about x; I think y and z are a stupid, tragic mistake. And now I don’t want to talk about it anymore” or words to that effect.

Although, of course, I’d listen to the other person’s closing statement along the same lines delivered in his/her preferred style, too.

If among peers I didn’t know well, I probably wouldn’t get into the argument to begin with, if I could possibly avoid it.

Except on the internet, in which case I would only say agree-to-disagree if the debate had been going on and on long enough for it to be clear that agreement wasn’t going to happen, and that no other peaceable resolution was possible.

To me the icky comes from being disingenuous about it when the power dynamic is equal or favors the person withdrawing.

That’s a tricky one, though, a lot of the time. Social (as opposed to professional/institutional, etc.) hierarchy is kind of in the eye of the beholder. The parties to the dispute both might think they’re the underdog. I know I always do, despite also knowing that it can’t possibly always be the case.

The oxymoron of “agree to disagree” is too cute by half, and a sort of coercive gentility in those situations. Thus “Let’s agree” is worse than “We’ll have to agree” if you hear it voiced from a position of authority. You don’t want to ‘just disagree’. You think you’re right and you want to continue pressing the argument to a conclusion to demonstrate that to your interlocutor, or to others listening in.

Yes, that’s maddening. Completely agree.

But I’m assuming that both parties are resigned to never prevailing and that both are free to walk away with their dignity — at least in their own eyes, although not necessarily in each other’s.

Nevertheless. I think I’ll think about it more carefully before I use it in future. Thanks for the feedback, although naturally, I feel bullied by your insistence on being a separate and distinct autonomous entity from me with thoughts of your own. Oppressed, even. Unfair. Unfair.

@Denice #63

Sounds like they’ve gone past community right into subculture. With the worst of them bordering on cult.

@Antaeus Feldspar

Of course the probability of infection with a vaccine-preventable disease depends not on some overall (say, national) figure representing vaccine uptake but on much more local conditions. If someone like Beth is concerned about a special snowflake’s risk from disease compared to the much lower risk from vaccination, it would be much better for that snowflake to be among the rare unvaccinateded spawn of an exceptionally selfish and willfully-ignorant person in a community with exceptionally high vaccine uptake than to be among the many unvaccinated children who are clustered in a private institution like the Waldorf school near my home. Bob Sear’s clearly acknowledged this when he advised his selfishly vaccine-adverse clients to keep their anti-vaxx status on the down low.

To digress a little, here’s a story about a life-threatening condition that I had never learned about:
http://www.opposingviews.com/i/health/girls-legs-turn-black-after-contracting-chicken-pox?fb=ptba

Correction:
“That adult will be faced with the possibility of contracting three potentially life-threatening illnesses that are endemic in much of the rest of the world.”

Aargh, stuck in moderation because of one extra link!

Here are the words without the links:

Beth: “What is the probability that an unvaccinated child will be contagious for one of those diseases at some point prior to adulthood?”

A whole lot higher than a child who has had two MMR vaccines as per the ACIP schedule. The risks are relative. They get higher when like minded folk gather together. Like the at a church gathering in Indiana.

The Disney measles outbreak hit at all of the kids of a few families, like one that was written about in the Arizona press. But on the other hand, tens of thousands of vaccinated persons who went to Disneyland at the same time did not get measles.

Of course, it should be pointed out again that those who have no medical reason to not vaccinate, but decide they will be “safe” are parasites on their community’s immunity provided by their responsible neighbors.

Ah, I see we have a brave “Dana” at AoA trying to argue with the denizens. Of course, they will let through a few posts, and then prevent her from arguing back by blocking her responses.

Dana wrote:

You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

Have you ever once thought of those who CANNOT receive vaccinations? Those who have immunological disease, immunocompromised, the very young and the very old, those undergoing cancer treatment, and a plethora of other health conditions. Being near YOUR unvaccinated children puts THEM at extremely high risk.

As for the vaccine-injury compensation court. You do realize don’t you, that this isn’t a trial-based thing – you don’t even have to come up with much proof, just an ambulance-chasing attorney to say something, the panel (who are equally as uneducated), just do their jobs and hand out the compensation funding – no need for medical facts or science. But, you already knew that, right?

Seems like the only bullying going on here are antivaxers who wish ill harm upon the rest of society because you can’t grasp the fact that the most horrendous diseases have been nearly eradicated due to vaccines. Try going to a third-world country and seeing for yourself the diseases you’ll never see in your lifetime because those diseases are virtually eradicated here. It’s easy to ignore them when you’ve never seen them or watch entire families and communities taken because they didn’t have vaccines or their govt. is propagating a conspiracy (African AIDS, anyone?).

Your child’s physician did the right thing by telling you he would no longer care for your unvaccinated child. By doing so, YOU risk putting his other patients at harm. What is so hard to understand that as a society, each of us is responsible to curb deadly disease, to protect those who are the highest risk of fatal disease?

Anyone who challenges your beliefs and assertions must automatically be a bully, huh? Sorry you feel that way. Didn’t anyone ever tell you, you don’t always get what you want? Who is the real bully here?

Well, I wasn’t busy commenting on Thanksgiving because I was hard at work making my famous pan-roasted GMO turnips (my pharma Masters gave me the day off, but only because I promised to shill extra hard on Yule and Samhain).

RI’s old friend, Greg, writes that Orac’s minions didn’t comment as much on Thursday because it was their day off

Ah, I remember back when he denied being Canadian and then tried to tune up his spelling tells.

Of course, he has readily acknowledged that he is Canadian at AoA.

I’m not dead or anything, just in case you were wondering. Some kind of mix-up.

“…he was a queer man and would go about the village without noticing people or saying anything. In his own teepee he would joke, and when he was on the warpath with a small party, he would joke to make his warriors feel good. But around the village he hardly ever noticed anybody, except little children. All the Lakotas like to dance and sing; but he never joined a dance, and they say nobody ever heard him sing. But everybody liked him, and they would do anything he wanted or go anywhere he said.”

https://www.academia.edu/18019528/Evidence_for_increased_autism_due_to_electromagnetic_pollution_from_high_power_high_gain_microwave_antennas

Stay classy, Kojak.

76 Brian

A much better formulation of the statement, indeed I hope Chris Hickey will adopt it as a motto for the patients’ waiting room. Perhaps a tastefully knitted or embroidered wall hanging?

@ChemE #102,
I’m not sure if you linked to that paper because you think it is worth reading, or if you are pointing and laughing. An amateur paper that conflates correlation with causation, and has references to Wikipedia and Medical Hypotheses? Hmm. Do you think it’s possible there may be some confounding factors that are also correlated with exposure to EMR?

Funnily enough I was recently reading about how human cognition sees random clusters as meaningful. Researchers in Europe have been particularly gullible (IMO), chasing down clusters of leukemia that are near power lines, or nuclear power stations (PDF) or whatever. The best current evidence suggests that neither power lines nor nuclear power stations cause leukemia, but that hasn’t stopped a lot of people from still believing they do. I strongly suspect the autism/microwave correlation observed in that paper is a similar artifact.

AF,

The author of the paper is a chemical engineer.

I’m not a physicist, but his theory of everything seems a little unconventional to me:

After collecting 11 months of data and running p-Value statistics, I believe our Doppler Microwave Radars are reflecting/bending/ducting and attenuating off the overhead atmosphere, irradiating our children and all biology, as well as inducing decoherence in strings of vacuum overhead in jet streams, causing an increase in local ionization and decay triggering hypoxia and oxidative stress in waterways and chronic algae blooms and fish kills and possibly interfering with bees, bats, whales, dolphins (RNA Damage – Morbillivirus), increasing autism, some cancers in humans and other neurological disorders and an increase in sinkholes(ionizing/dissolving limestone) and waterspouts and other low pressure disturbances in the area around the Doppler towers.

Narad, I was going to include the cases in Québec, but I was running out of time after chasing down the Arizona link (it was not the one I remembered where the mom of the afflicted clan admitted it would have been better to vaccinate).

I also omitted the large outbreak in an Amish community after some came back from the Philippines. They did lots of catch up vaccinating.

@ JP:

Well, I hope at least you’re not wandering about any more because if you live where I think you live, it has probably been freezing and dampish.

Some of us here, despite being preening, self-involved, overpaid pharma shills AND incredibly mean people, DO worry about you because writing a dissertation is not fun and games, depression is no joke and the two situations conjoined can be rather daunting.

Plus you live in a dreary, cold place which certainly doesn’t help.

At any rate, the weather here has been remarkably spring-like although drizzling as usual ( weather charts illustrate that we have nearly equal amounts of days of precipitation, cloudiness and clear). so I decided to take a drive to an odd, ancient town along a river where hippies, hipsters and gay people congregate to buy and sell art, clothes and antiques and serve or imbibe loads of fine alcohol and exotic cuisine.

It took forever to get there – my companion needed to stop to get coffee, to buy organic apples and to look at nonsense several times as I drove over 60 miles of drizzly roads with a reasonable amount of traffic – thus I became very frustrated HOWEVER

as I approached the town, driving over the rusty old bridge, the entire landscape was transformed into a fantasy of mist, rising off of the river and hanging ceremoniously in the air. People were stopping on the bridge ( you can walk or drive) to observe and photograph mystical dampness permeating the scene, rendering it wetly beautiful. Crumbling stucco facades over brick walls glistening with mist and dead, ghostly gardens of weeds, shining in the lamplight.

Then we looked at lots of weird crap and later drank and then ate amongst the heathens resident/ employed there.

I find it emotionally useful to escape from the ordinary- even if it’s just to look at stuff,drink and eat. No wonder the ancients believed that different locales had their own spirits.

@ Narad:

If he is indeed Canadian why is he so concerned about Californ-I-A?
I thought I picked up something about the Maritimes once from him IIRC.
It makes me wonder if people like him can counsel clients as he says he does.

he Disney measles outbreak hit at all of the kids of a few families, like one that was written about in the Arizona press.

any way happy new year 2016 to all

Consider the MMR? What is the probability that an unvaccinated child will be contagious for one of those diseases at some point prior to adulthood? What is the probability that a vaccinated child will be contagious for one of those diseases? Do you know or know where estimates of those risks can be found?

Why don’t you look at the tag “SSPE” on my blog and read about the horrible deaths that occurred as a result of an intentionally-unvaccinated, measles-infected child brought into a German paed’s office. That child infected infants too young to be vaccinated and are now dead.

@jrkrideau #107 I was looking for actual probabilities (i.e. a number between 0 and 1) not the consequences that are being risked. But thank you for your time in attempting an answer.

Why are the “I’m not anti-vaxx” JAQ-offs always asking others to do their homework for them? There are several studies and infographics on risk for various VPDs Beth that include reproduction rates for diseases in unvaccinated. Please avail yourself of them.

Whoops! I mean one more comment not tweet.

Guess I don’t earn triple overtime for the holiday weekend because of that mistake.

@ Chris Preston:

” how could anyone’s brain work in such a way……..”

The same way they get from observations and research to
‘vaccines cause autism’;
‘Wakefield was framed’,
‘GMOs endanger lives’,
‘google = medical degree’

Well, I hope at least you’re not wandering about any more

Somehow I had never realized that the line “don’t sleep in the subway darling / don’t stand in the pouring rain” in The Jazz Butcher’s “Girlfriend” actually came from Petula Clark.

@ Antaeus Feldspar #83. I disagree on the value of the computations, but value is a subjective assessment so reasonable people can hold different opinions. Your example of birthdays isn’t particularly relevant to the situation, but I can assure I am well acquainted with game theory and other mathematical modeling techniques. I agree they would be appropriate, but prior to making those computations, we must have some reasonable estimates of the underlying probabilities for individual static situations, which means answering the questions I asked.

Sorry, but if you read the description I gave of the birthday paradox, and you thought it was about birthdays, I do not think you understood anything. The birthday paradox is not about birthdays any more than Schrodinger’s Cat is about the details of feline endangerment techniques.

Let me try to be more clear, at the risk of being more blunt:

If you want to get an idea of “the underlying probabilities for individual static situations,” specifically calculating how risky it is for any one person to betray the herd and free-ride on herd immunity, then you’d better get ready for a LOT of calculations. Because the answer of “how risky is it for the FIRST person who defects?” is different than the answer of “how risky is it for the SECOND,” “how risky for the fiftieth,” “how risky is it for the ten thousandth,” how risky is it for the hundred thousandth”. The answer YOU are looking for, the one you asked us about, is the one which applies to exactly ONE of several million “static situations” – and anyone who thinks they can generalize from a handful of those static situations, or even more ludicrously from ONE such static situation, is exhibiting utter cluelessness.

So if you would like to offer an explanation of why you only seem interested in one such calculation, please do.

^ Hehe!

The same way they get from observations and research to
‘vaccines cause autism’;
‘Wakefield was framed’,
‘GMOs endanger lives’,
‘google = medical degree’

Denice Walter, all of these, except the last, are just ordinary motivated reasoning. The last is Dunning-Kruger. Greg’s effort over at AOA is right out of the ballpark, down the road, around the corner and into the manhole conspiracy theorising. It is such an exceptional example of adding 1 + 1 to make 6342 that I really wonder how he does it.

I know the difference between correlation and causation. I discuss it in the video I placed online discussing the cluster.

Oh, that’s why you’re back: spamvertising.

^ Fixed link. Note the “published on” bit.

There’s a recent post on the NVIC facebook page with an anonymous (of course) letter supposedly from a mom about how her pediatrician “intimidated” her into vaccinating all 3 of her children (none of whom had any adverse events from being vaccinated as she herself notes). Makes me think of the “Help I’m being repressed” line from Monty Python when this so-called mom writes:

My “research” went on a bit too long, however, for most people’s comforts. My Doctor threatened to cut off services to me and my family if I didn’t get the girls fully vaccinated within a matter of weeks. My family was barely speaking to me. My friends, I’m sure, were laughing at me when they weren’t busy dodging my communications. My life had changed, all in the matter of a few months of “past due vaccinations.” I wasn’t, however, anti-vaccination. I was more “this seems like too many vaccinations all at once.” I wasn’t someone who posted anti-vaccination news on my Facebook all day, in fact, the main reason most people knew was because I panicked over the Doctor’s threat to remove services. Word spread from there. And it was not good.

Orginal “letter” at http://www.donotlink.com/hi2o

Antaeus Feldspar, # 130
In fact, Beth’s question could be framed between two extreme values, depending upon how many people are immune in a particular area.
If no-one is immune (vaccinated or having had disease), then the probability that anyone gets the bug depends on its virulence (e.g.: new strains of influenza). May be over 50%, just to say.
If everyone is immune, then the probability is very near to zero (e.g.: measles in a population with vaccine uptake more than 96%).
But in my view Beth makes a mistake when she thinks that the problem lies in attributing a value to a probability. And it would be a mistake even if she thinks that the problem lies in attributing a value to an individual preference.
The real question is: who has the right to make a choice, when the choice has consequences on other people?

ChemE,

I am an engineer, not a scientist so I thank you for the amateur comment. I make my living solving problems and sometimes engineers create new problems as a result, it creates job security.

I’m not an amateur claiming to know better than specialists in an area not even vaguely related to my field.

“Hmm. Do you think it’s possible there may be some confounding factors that are also correlated with exposure to EMR?”
Sure

Then why are you posting alarmist nonsense about microwaves when there is practically zero evidence for your hypothesis and even less prior plausibility.

“I strongly suspect the autism/microwave correlation observed in that paper is a similar artifact.”
Have you done any research to base your speculation?

No, but others have and they disagree with you.

That Santa Monica Autism cluster has been stable for over a decade and 3% of the autistic children in the State come from that one cluster area. UC Davis and Columbia University researchers identified and verified the cluster in separate studies.

Here’s what researchers at UC Davis have to say about it:

However, the researchers said that in this investigation the clusters probably are not correlated with specific environmental pollutants or other “exposures.” Rather, they correlate to areas where residents are more educated.

“What we found with these clusters was that they correlated with neighborhoods of high education or neighborhoods that were near a major treatment center for autism,” said senior author Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences and a researcher with the UC Davis MIND Institute.

“In the U.S., the children of older, white and highly educated parents are more likely to receive a diagnosis of autism or autism spectrum disorder. For this reason, the clusters we found are probably not a result of a common environmental exposure. Instead, the differences in education, age and ethnicity of parents comparing births in the cluster versus those outside the cluster were striking enough to explain the clusters of autism cases,” Hertz-Picciotto said.

You didn’t account for parental income, age and education. All of these are correlated with autism. What about the presence of an autism treatment center, which is known to lead to increased diagnoses in the local area?

Those high gain microwave broadcast earth stations and microwave relay towers have also been the area for decades. There are 466% more microwave earth station antennas in the area of 400% more autism.

Wouldn’t you expect there to be more microwave towers where there are more wealthy, better educated people who tend to have children later?

I know the difference between correlation and causation. I discuss it in the video I placed online discussing the cluster.

I notice you didn’t mention the ecological fallacy. Perhaps you might try looking at organic food consumption, or smartphone ownership, which I suspect would correlate just as strongly as microwave exposure. I think you are seeing patterns in noise, a popular human pastime but a phenomenal waste of time and effort.

Berger has a NEW post @ AoA today, in which, amongst other observations,
she notes that someone called ‘Orac’ has written up an analysis of her post. It probably took ” 45 minutes to an hour” – and he was probably paid for his work.

Helianthus,
When EM sensitivity comes up I like to remind people of this story from South Africa in which a microwave tower was alleged to be causing continuing, “headaches, nausea, tinnitus, dry burning itchy skins, gastric imbalances and totally disrupted sleep patterns”, before it was revealed it had been turned off for the previous six weeks.

Denice at #23 wrote

TMR facebook announces a new documentary by Christie Dames and Kevin O’Malley, *Moms Determined*, featuring TM, Dragonslayer ( Marissa Ali) – a “quest or unite moms from around the world to help find answers to complicated medical diagnoses”

O’Malley Is the business manager for the Commonwealth Club and Chair of its Business & Leadership Forum. His wife, Christie Dames, is an chemtrail-believing activist. About the Commonwealth Club (CC):

The mission of The Commonwealth Club of California is to be the leading national forum open to all for the impartial discussion of public issues important to the membership, community and nation.

In 2013, Dames had arranged for The Thinking Moms’ Revolution mouthpieces, to give a talk as part of promoting their book — they gushed about it here:

One huge opportunity came along in the form of Christie Dames and Kevin O’Malley of The Commonwealth Club of California. Christie found TMR somehow on Facebook as she is a victim of environmental illness and never knew what to do for herself until she found the autism biomed community. Her husband, Kevin, is the business manager of the Club. Their kind invite to speak there was as shocking and exciting as anything TMR could have expected. As circumstances laid themselves out for our group, it fell to Sunshine and me to make it happen and get there. What an experience it was. San Francisco, that’s one thing, but this place . . . Who would have thought?

Back in March 2015, Dames and O’Malley scheduled Kent Heckenlively, Dr. Judy Mikovits, and Dr. Brian Hooker to give a talk at the CC, “American Whistleblowers”. Some of the other CX members got wind of the presentation, and raised pointed questions to the CX leadership about the wisdom of contaminating CC’s reputation for evidence-based advocacy by giving that trio a platform.

After some pressure, the American Whistleblowers event was cancelled. Heckenlively wrote about it at length at AoA, Commonwealth Club of California Engages in Censorship of Talk entitled, “American Whistleblowers”!.

I have reached out on several occasions to Kevin O’Malley and Christie Dames about rescheduling our talk, but they have given me no reason to believe we will ever be allowed to speak. It’s difficult when those who claim to be your friends treat you no different than your enemies. I never thought it would be necessary in my lifetime to defend free speech. I thought the right to freely express our ideas without fear of reprisal or censorship was something every American would defend to their very last breath. Sometimes it seems even our friends can forget these principles.

Sadly, CC DID host Robert F. Kennedy jr. ranting about thimerosal on April 15, but the event received very little media coverage.

The documentary “*Moms Determined” produced a trailer in 2014, available on YouTube, but nothing since. I wonder if it is stalled for lack of funding.

I am not an amateur when it comes to chemical & environmental engineering, I have been executing projects for 29 years, many required EPA permitting. I have also installed antennas and radiation sensors.

“Then why are you posting alarmist nonsense about microwaves when there is practically zero evidence for your hypothesis and even less prior plausibility.”

The alarming thing is that 1/45 children now across the US have a disorder called autism. The strong correlation I show is just evidence, I guess you did not pick up on that….

“However, the researchers said that in this investigation the clusters probably are not correlated with specific environmental pollutants or other “exposures.” Rather, they correlate to areas where residents are more educated.”

The researchers never downloaded 8,000 earth station antennas from the FCC database and geocoded them in Google Earth and Python and overlayed them onto an established autism clusters across California and calculated power densities. I also included another 20 thousand or so microwave relay antennas across the US

By the way, the autism cluster map in my paper was prepared by Columbia University, not UC Davis.

The FCC database includes the transmitters, power levels and antenna gains and not just the tower locations. I am showing high gain, high EIRP transmitters. I excluded the receivers

“Wouldn’t you expect there to be more microwave towers where there are more wealthy, better educated people who tend to have children later?”

Yes, humans love their radiation

@ChemE: however, you did NOT apparently address a few important confounders: the changing in diagnostic criteria for autism/Asperger’s, the fact that there are many other things that increased during the same time period (as mentioned – the consumption of organic foods and the use of computers), and the fact that minorities tend to be underdiagnosed, but often live in the more “undesirable” parts of towns.

That means your data STILL has problems. You have to address those issues, not just blame it on microwave towers.

Also, please note that Asperger was working with autistic/Asperger’s children before WWII – how do you account for the fact he felt strongly that many children were misdiagnosed with other mental problems or not diagnosed at all?

senior author Irva Hertz-Picciotto
The professor’s surname indicates an ancestral link to the radio-communication industry; of course she found nothing!

I almost FORGOT

“@ChemE: however, you did NOT apparently address a few important confounders: the changing in diagnostic criteria for autism/Asperger’s, the fact that there are many other things that increased during the same time period (as mentioned – the consumption of organic foods and the use of computers), and the fact that minorities tend to be underdiagnosed, but often live in the more “undesirable” parts of towns.”

I seriously doubt 1/10,000 to 1/45 is due primarily to diagnostic criteria. Columbia researcher mentioned 60% unaccounted for.

I also seriously doubt getting educated by itself causes increased autism. That is the most foolish theory I have ever heard, next to organic foods. That is some crazy BS.

“That means your data STILL has problems. You have to address those issues, not just blame it on microwave towers.”

I am not “blaming” microwave towers, I am just saying there is a strong correlation around the Santa Monica area cluster with higher concentration of high gain microwave antennas, that is all. I also show how 14 overlapping, high gain antennas refracted/ducted off the overhead atmosphere can exceed FCC safety guidelines 8000 feet away and there are 224 in the area!

Get an education (or become a movie star), buy an expensive home on the hillsides in Hollywood and get irradiated!

Also, please note that Asperger was working with autistic/Asperger’s children before WWII – how do you account for the fact he felt strongly that many children were misdiagnosed with other mental problems or not diagnosed at all?

Humanities love for radiation began with the telegraph and radio in the late 1800s and early 1900s. We just upped the power and gain and density over the past 50 or so years.

PS, I also have good statewide statistics in Florida showing more dead fish around high gain antennas over 3 years, which is never a good thing…

@ChemE: you say: I seriously doubt 1/10,000 to 1/45 is due primarily to diagnostic criteria. Columbia researcher mentioned 60% unaccounted for

Actually, yes. It *is* primarily due to diagnostic criteria changes. As an engineer, you should be able to read the graph that shows that as autism/asperger diagnoses increased, mental retardation/childhood schizophrenia diagnoses decreased.

Also: Please name the “Columbia researcher”. There are many people doing research at Columbia. Some of them are very good and professional. Some are not.

You still didn’t address the issue of minorities being under-diagnosed, and many people with “milder” cases not being diagnosed until adulthood.

And hey, if microwave towers can cause autism, why isn’t it likely that computers have contributed to it? Or Organic foods? or (gasp) RAP MUSIC!

Beth, #161
Thanks for your answer. I understand you are new here. I think someone here bristles up his hair, sometimes, believing some posters are only trolling. What sometimes happens.
Really, I think someone other can happen to turn here for some bit of information, and have genuine questions. To which no one has a ready answer.

So, you looked at one single variable that just so happened to have some correlation to autism diagnoses – though given the relative affluence in the area mentioned & we know that families who are more well off get their kids diagnosed at a younger age, I’d say you really need to go back to the drawing board before making such blanket statements.

ChemE:

The alarming thing is that 1/45 children now across the US have a disorder called autism. The strong correlation I show is just evidence, I guess you did not pick up on that….

No, it is not evidence. It is *data*. You need to demonstrate a causal link, or at the very minimum rule out other explanations before you can start calling it evidence. We know radiation can cause harm (although microwave radiation is not ionizing radiation and should not be confused for it). We do not know it can cause *this* harm. So you have more work to do before you can call that evidence.

It is interesting data, and it is useful data, but it is not evidence of a link. The world is a very messy place; be wary of drawing conclusions too quickly. We also know that autism cases increase with greater access to services to treat autism — does this imply those services cause autism? That seems highly dubious, though it’s pretty reasonable that it could cause some of the increase in *diagnoses* (since, of course, people with no access to child psychologists are probably not going to be getting diagnosed by one, for fairly obvious reasons, and of course the professionals who diagnose autism are more motivated to diagnose it in potential clients).

“What does any of that have to do with autism, or the effects of EM radiation on living organisms? How does expertise in those areas translate to exploring the etiology of ASDs? Do you even have a plausible mechanism EM radiation causing autism when there are countless studies showing no effects of microwaves of the frequencies used in communications (that don’t resonate water molecules) at far greater magnitudes than humans are exposed to?”

Actually, microwaves have shown all kinds of biological effects other than just thermal heating. Where have you been?

https://www.emfscientist.org/index.php/emf-scientist-appeal

A bunch of dumbass electrical engineers set the current safe health limit so they could sell more antennas. I have shown how 14 high gain antennas clustered together can exceed FCC safe guidelines 8000 feet away in an uncontrolled environment. There are 224 in the area

I referenced 3 papers linking autism symptoms to RF damage, you obviously have not read them.

My take on causitive effects (from an engineer’s perspective)
Oxidative stress and accelerated corrosion in electrolytes, including you and I. When warships turn on high gain radars their metal hulls corrode faster in electrolytes (salt water). Calcium is one of the most reactive and “corrodable” metals, much more reactive than steel or even zinc. 0.01 mA of DC current accelerates oxidative stress and corrosion of minerals & metals.

Antennas induce currents and electrolytes, including you!

Attack my data, the microwave data and cluster are real.

Autism Capital of California = Broadcast Microwave capital of Califdornia

Simple correlation to figure out. Matches perfectly

If you could see the radiation from the center of the autism cluster:

https://sdsimonson.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/santa-monica-autism-mw.png

Scattered, smothered and covered

I confess I’ve not yet read through much more than half the comments, but wanted to throw something in on AF’s #83. In your first 3-4 paragraphs, if one reads through and follows, one gets a gist of NNT and risk assessment, the latter of which is so totally deficient in the antivaccination “community.”

Completely OT, it’s why Adam Fawer’s first novel, Probability, is among my top 3 contemporary favs. (What a shame that his follow-ups have been published only in German–in which I can limp, but . . . –and Turkish and Japanese, in both of which I am totally rubbish.

With respect to what others have said about possible BPD, I kind of agree, but am uncertain (notwithstanding that we just don’t do Dx over the interwebz). It occurs to me that this thing about seeing the source of the communication problem as elsewhere gives support to the idea of locus of control. In particular, the constant victimised POV reveals an external locus, therefore relieving oneself of very much impact on, or responsibility for, the outcome. (I hate to say that, btw, ’cause “personal responsibilty.”)

I suppose there’a comfort in that, somewhere, for them, kinda like what I may misremeber as the Superman Principal (wherein while one was young, one was effectively immortal), or what “what was she wearing” victim blaming does, meaning that one may feel “safe” from a given risk, because one hasn’t the risk factor given out as wot one hasn’t got, therefore one is (or one’s children are) “safe.”

In a similar way, being able to tell oneself that there’s not strong evidence of genetic concordance (both heritable and de novo) lets one off the blame hook that must bedevil, especially as the evidence of genetic and congenital causes mounts up. It has to be reeeeally difficult to reconcile when one has three kids, all autistic, the youngest of which was never vaccinated, fer instance.

They also fail to recognise that the only person blaming them (and/or seeking to defend them from blame), is them, I think.

*Again OT, I mentioned to my son, a special ed teacher (and awesome musician and all sorts of other cool things) that my brother, who has some commo deficits, that he’d pointed out to me that I must have “some communication difficulties,” because I never understand him. My son cracked up, understanding that what happens (and is frequently underscored) is that I value and respect what he needs or wants to say such that I will confirm whether I’ve got it, and work to clarify that what he meant is wot I heard. (Harder for him.)

Ren,

To answer your question, enough. A few billion watts of EIRP microwave radiation centered over that autism cluster with 224+ overlapping high gain antennas. Is that enough? 1/45 kids, is that enough? How much do you need? Focus on the data.

In related news, “Hispanics” are apparently more resistent to microwaves, which also have E-field penetration to depths of tens of meters of salt water.

ChemE @175 — BILLION watts? That’s equivalent to the output a large nuclear power plant. There’s no way there’s that much microwave power being radiated.

If you happen to be in the refracted focused beam of the microwave radiation from the parabolic dishes it is equivalent to being near an isotropic antenna of that power level(millions or billions of watts equivalent depending upon antenna) Same reason a relatively low power focused flashlight beam can blind you with light, that is high EIRP.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalent_isotropically_radiated_power

“What others keep trying to explain to you is that you don’t control for the numerous confounding variables to see if your observation is real or not”

The observation is real. Other than diagnosis, pollution and weather, the only other possible confounders I can think of are that area produces a lot of bad movies and TV shows…

If you happen to be in the refracted focused beam of the microwave radiation from the parabolic dishes

Good L-rd. Do you even know what refraction means?

Oh, wow, I had never ever heard of Ted Twietmeyer before. I actually thought this had to be a parody that had slipped through (seriously, just skip down to the images), but a quick check strongly suggests that it’s real.

This is way better than ChemE.

^ Wait, I have to think that my browser isn’t rendering the page as intended. This guy has to have known the demographics for CEV Hatch Boulders.

Narad “December 1, 2015
P.S. What does the presence of the round things signify?”

Could somebody please help Narad out…

Narad, here is a hint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antenna_farm#/media/File:Erdfunkstelle_Raisting_3.jpg

Here is another hint: What transmits millions of watts of EIRP radiation, refracts off the atmosphere and irradiates you?

Science Mom

“In other words, you don’t have the foggiest idea of how to actually design a study, collect data, assign the appropriate statistical model and control for confounding variables. Colour me surprised.”

I love it how humans resort to insults and attack people. I have collected so much data over the past 3 years your head would spin.

I am actually building a non isotropic radiation power density model that predicts where radiation and disease will be highest

So far it is pointing to droves of dead fish and dissolved coral reefs (CaCO3 corrosion) around high power, high gain antennas.

http://darkmattersalot.com/2014/01/12/florida-2/

I have other folks smarter than me looking at confounders.

“And if you are admitting you aren’t smart enough to conduct a proper study then what exactly are you doing?”

Teaching you guys about how radiation is bad for you and vaccinations are good for you

The “noise” in my data is 14.5 Billion EIRP watts of confounding microwave radiation to those that think autism is a result of going to college and getting educated and buying a home on the hillside and having children and taking them to the doctor and getting them vaccinated.

Smart dumb people get smart people to help them. I did that two years ago.

The beams…the BEAMS!!!!! Aaarrrrrggghhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now that that’s out of the way, here’s new cause to be thankful – a “health” teacher in Delaware is warning his students about the terrible dangers of influenza and HPV vaccines:

http://www.delmarvanow.com/story/news/local/delaware/2015/11/30/health-teacher-denounces-vaccinations/76363954/

. I have collected so much data over the past 3 years your head would spin.

I doubt it would qualify as data in any statistical sense of the word. It sounds like you’ve simply been getting measurements of stuff – whether meaningful or not – and looking for correlations. One of the first things we teach students – even freshmen – is that if you have any collection of numbers, then if it is large enough you’ll find all sorts of correlations to be significant, even though they are representative of nothing. If you really are an engineer, did you fail the basic stat classes you had?

If your model is now getting good enough that you can predict cancer clusters, what confounders have you controlled for? Or are you claiming the radiation you’re tracking is the sole cause for cancer?

Or is that the job of them smarter folks at some future point?

And about ten more.
For example, I learned that I lived in a county which has extremely high longevity for women. What are some of the factors that may contribute to that? Might factors like that affect the outcome of any research about radiation etc?

My radiation model is now getting good enough now that I can predict cancer clusters

Color me unconvinced. If your model predicts the existence of the ‘clusters’ in your collected data, that means nothing. If your model ‘predicts’ which have been previously unknown – I don’t believe you. The fact that you believe something to be a cluster doesn’t make it one.

My question still stands.

Now why don’t you scientists get off your butts and prove me wrong.

You really don’t get this science thing do you? You have to prove your own hypothesis first…you have yet to do that.

Confounders such as education level, income level, vaccinations were considered but found to be so outlandish and clueless that they were dismissed in their entirety early on in the study

You are indicating the answer to my stat class question.

ChemE,

Confounders such as education level, income level, vaccinations were considered but found to be so outlandish and clueless that they were dismissed in their entirety early on in the study

Good grief! You can’t dismiss confounders just because you don’t like them! There are several confounding factors that you need to take into account, parental age and educational level for example, as well as various lifestyle factors, that most definitely correlate with autism. Look at any epidemiological study on autism and you will find that these are controlled for, otherwise you end with the sort of nonsense Hooker produced that has led to the CDC whistleblower debacle.

Are you saying that senior author Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences and a researcher with the UC Davis MIND Institute was clueless when he wrote:

“What we found with these clusters was that they correlated with neighborhoods of high education or neighborhoods that were near a major treatment center for autism, […] In the U.S., the children of older, white and highly educated parents are more likely to receive a diagnosis of autism or autism spectrum disorder. For this reason, the clusters we found are probably not a result of a common environmental exposure. Instead, the differences in education, age and ethnicity of parents comparing births in the cluster versus those outside the cluster were striking enough to explain the clusters of autism cases,” Hertz-Picciotto said.

The professor is saying that education, age and ethnicity were confounding factors that explained the correlation, not an environmental factor such as being irradiated by microwaves, in case it wasn’t clear.

Another possible confounders: location of available support resources.

“Are you saying that senior author Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences and a researcher with the UC Davis MIND Institute was clueless when he wrote:

“What we found with these clusters was that they correlated with neighborhoods of high education or neighborhoods that were near a major treatment center for autism, […] In the U.S., the children of older, white and highly educated parents are more likely to receive a diagnosis of autism or autism spectrum disorder. For this reason, the clusters we found are probably not a result of a common environmental exposure. ”

I did not say he was “clueless”. I will say he was ignorant of the power density of microwave radiation emanating from those cluster areas. Hollywood Hills is the high gain broadcast microwave antenna capital of the world. Duh

Older people will get more radiation over time in the area of transmitters and more oxidative damage to cells

Educated/higher income people buy homes on the hillsides and get more radiation in the Hollywood Hills

https://sdsimonson.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/santa-monica-autism-mw.png

https://sdsimonson.files.wordpress.com/2015/11/hw2.png

doug December 1, 2015

“With all this wonderful and conclusive data, why is eng here instead of busily preparing papers for publication? Perhaps for some free consulting from people who know lots and point out deficiencies in his work?”

I make a good living doing engineering and all of my work is already published, and not locked up behind some paywall., so what else do I need?

I like solving problems, not writing research papers. Plus, I do not have access to the human health statistics, only transmission sources, so others are looking at that. I have just mapped known clusters vs. my radiation model and transmitter location database.

I do have good statistics on dead fish around high gain antennas in Florida on my blog though

Gray Falcon

December 1, 2015
“ChemE- Why do you feel you have to resort to childish insults?”

I was trying to be sarcastic, not insulting. That is a sign of trust. I apologize if I sounded insulting. I trust you guys…

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2015/07/go-ahead-be-sarcastic/

ChemE,

I did not say he was “clueless”. I will say he was ignorant of the power density of microwave radiation emanating from those cluster areas. Hollywood Hills is the high gain broadcast microwave antenna capital of the world. Duh

You said that the confounders the professor says are probably responsible for the cluster you are so excited about are “outlandish and clueless”, which seems to me to be much the same thing. It also seems to me that your ignorance of the etiology of autism, epidemiology, statistics and complete dismissal of well-known confounders merits a “duh”, not the professor.

Older people will get more radiation over time in the area of transmitters and more oxidative damage to cells

That’s true for all causes of oxidative damage, which is why it is a confounder.

Educated/higher income people buy homes on the hillsides and get more radiation in the Hollywood Hills

Educated people are more likely to seek medical advice if their child is not developing as they think they should, and are more likely to get an autism diagnosis as a result. This is well-established in the literature. Similarly, those living near an autism treatment center are more likely to consider an autism diagnosis, and those with an autistic child may be more likely to move to an area with a center.

I don’t think anyone mentioned the UK studies that found almost identical prevalence of autism in the UK in both children and adults, which strongly suggests that autism prevalence is not increasing. It also strongly argues against microwaves as a cause of autism – I’m pretty sure UK adults were not exposed to a great deal of microwave radiation in utero or as children.

Various strands of converging evidence point to a prenatal origin of autism. It seems unlikely to me that microwave radiation could cause problems when the fetus is shielded by amniotic fluid and the mother’s body. If something environmental is partly to blame I would look for something that can affect the mother systemically e.g. a chemical or a virus, the way that valproate and rubella do.

The Columbia researchers say different and that 60-75% is unaccounted for, which my maps imply is primarily high gain radiation

The first author of the Columbia study writes:

The study does not attempt to identify the cause of autism—a much debated topic—but it suggests that increased prevalence is spurred by local variables, such as environmental toxins or social influences. In the case of West Hollywood, social influences might include increased awareness of autism, decreased stigma associated with the disorder, or increased number of local advocacy groups, said Soumya Mazumdar, a postdoctoral research scholar at Columbia’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP) and the study’s first author.

Those social influences are known confounders, and there is no known mechanism for microwave radiations causing autism.

I also mapped Autism clusters in LaJolla, Fresno, San Francisco and Minneapolis that match up well with high microwave EMF environmental load areas

Several things that we know correlate with autism are also likely to be associated with lots of microwaves. You still don’t seem to grasp this.

“To answer your question, enough. A few billion watts of EIRP microwave radiation centered over that autism cluster with 224+ overlapping high gain antennas. Is that enough? 1/45 kids, is that enough? How much do you need? Focus on the data.”

Judging from your answer, not enough. You keep having issues of confounding, surviellance bias, recall bias, diagnostic bias, and so on and so forth. And you keep telling us to “focus on the data” instead of clarifying how your conclusion addresses all of these. If I were to go up before my thesis committee with this, they would laugh at me until the cows came home.

Don’t be lazy. Explain it all using good Epi or call it a wrap and go home. Your “research” has issues a priori which you either don’t want to address or can’t, cancelling out (or at the very least calling into question) your conclusions.

Finally, come on, man! Radio waves lack the intensity to cause any kind of damage at a cellular level at the distances and strengths you’re talking about. It’s not like we’re full of circuits that can be affected by radio. (You call it radiation to scare us, but it’s just plain old radio waves. It’s not gamma rays coming out of plutonium.)

Sadmar,

Didn’t they find a common thread that most of these nut jobs are seeking notoriety and relavance in a society that ignores them until they do something vile?

“You mean that you’re afraid to have your work peer-reviewed else it’ll harsh your buzz eh?

Many engineers (I work with 500) have reviewed my work and think I am right. You are welcome to review/criticize my work if you dare stoop so low (wait, you already have)

“And if you don’t have access to the most important data to analyse then how are you coming to your conclusion? ”

I have taken existing, peer reviewed, very important cluster studies and overlayed and correlated with my radiation model containing over 10,000 high gain, high power antennas. That saves me a lot of time as I am an underfunded research garage outfit. Clusters correlate really well with my database: 466% higher radiation in an area of 400% more autism.

Hey I just thought of another Confounder in California, tattoos….

Who are these “others looking at that” and where is their work?

Mom, I can’t tell you who, but a peer review manuscript for academic types will be published. Grammar will be much better than mine, containing many more words with more syllables, confounders and conspirators will be identified as well as good techie stuff like uW/cm2,W/m2, dBi, EIRP, etc… Some results may surprise or dismay, I am really not sure.

But if I do look around at other autism studies that show a strong genetic mutation/environmental link I would start here:

http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003518

“It sounds an awful lot like you are making pathetic excuses for your woeful inadequacies after the fact.”

Now to me, VaxMom appears to be a “bit insulting” but there is something I still like about her…

I told you guys I was just a measly engineer with too much time on his hands.

Thanks for your continued interest.

“ChemE was more entertaining when he was going on about the dummy radar towers whose existence he could deduce to preserve the hypothesis. And their power to cause waterspouts and to dissolve limestone. ”

BTW, I can go on Amazon and buy a pulsed electromagnetic water conditioner that dissolves limestone (CaCO3)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003Z96GR4?psc=1

It gets 4 stars!!!!

What is even more impressive is if you pulse 30 million watts of microwave radiation over a coral reef 2000 feet below, it dissolves it too!

http://www.kkcr.org/archive/ht101915.mp3

Impressive!

Many engineers (I work with 500) have reviewed my work and think I am right. You are welcome to review/criticize my work if you dare stoop so low (wait, you already have)

Who have about as much epidemiology/stats knowledge as you have no doubt.

I have taken existing, peer reviewed, very important cluster studies and overlayed and correlated with my radiation model containing over 10,000 high gain, high power antennas. That saves me a lot of time as I am an underfunded research garage outfit. Clusters correlate really well with my database: 466% higher radiation in an area of 400% more autism.

Bemoaning your lack of funding is no excuse for sloppy work. I’m glad you have a day job…keep it.

Mom, I can’t tell you who, but a peer review manuscript for academic types will be published. Grammar will be much better than mine, containing many more words with more syllables, confounders and conspirators will be identified as well as good techie stuff like uW/cm2,W/m2, dBi, EIRP, etc… Some results may surprise or dismay, I am really not sure.

Oh yea! Another Super Sekrit blockbuster paradigm-shifting study in the works by (undoubtedly) the world’s most eminent scientists.

Oh yea! Another Super Sekrit blockbuster paradigm-shifting study in the works by (undoubtedly) the world’s most eminent scientists.

PLEASE DEAR GOD NOT A BOOK!! OH PLEASE WHATEVER YOU DO NO BOOK PLEASE NO!!!

“Oh yea! Another Super Sekrit blockbuster paradigm-shifting study in the works by (undoubtedly) the world’s most eminent scientists.

PLEASE DEAR GOD NOT A BOOK!! OH PLEASE WHATEVER YOU DO NO BOOK PLEASE NO!!!”

Oops, I wrote a book 2 years ago….

http://www.amazon.com/Honey-They-Cooked-Kids-Illustrated-ebook/dp/B00JBXBCCW

I am trying to keep getting irradiated fun!
🙂

I just found your one and only review “helpful”, Stewart.

Many engineers (I work with 500) have reviewed my work and think I am right.

So people with whom you work and associated, and with whom you share multiple thoughts and views in common, agree with your hack bit of “statistics”.

You don’t realize how stupid that is do you?

So, checking out this author’s other “work” it is now painfully obvious why engineers fall prey to quackery (or in this case, full-blown science fiction as reality)……

Since electrons are fermions, when you increase electromagnetic radiation in an area, you increase uncertainty, (Pauli exclusion principal)

Jeezums, I’m glad the coffee’s not ready yet.

ChemE: “Plus, I do not have access to the human health statistics,…”

So you can’t be bothered to go to a library at your local university? Or you don’t understand demographics as confounding factors? Which is it?

ChemE: “Many engineers (I work with 500) have reviewed my work and think I am right.”

That is hilarious. I echo Calli Arcale’s request that you stop embarrassing engineers.

There is an occasional theme here about engineers who think they can do science that they were not trained in. One classic chemical engineer is Andy Cutler, who is really big on chelating kids with autism. Another engineer that whose bad science and statistics is the biochemical engineer Brian Hooker.

Your appeal to the authority of engineers does not impress the engineers who post on this blog, especially me, a former aerospace engineer. I did structural dynamics, which involves a bit of statistics. Though the level of statistics paled compared to those used with biomedical data. This is where Brian Hooker tripped up spectacularly. I know my limits, perhaps it is time you learned yours.

dean
December 1, 2015

“Many engineers (I work with 500) have reviewed my work and think I am right.
So people with whom you work and associated, and with whom you share multiple thoughts and views in common,

Actually I disagree with electrical engineers much of the time and I work with 100 of them.

What concerns me is that with one NEXRAD radar, they pulse the equivalent of 32 billion watts of EIRP radiation 500 times a second and they don’t know where it is all going!!:
http://www.srh.weather.gov/srh/jetstream/doppler/beam_max.htm
How do we know the path of the beam all times?
Aside from when AP is seen on the radar, we don’t! To know the path of the beam would require us to know the exact composition of the moisture, temperature and pressure in the atmosphere, up to 70,000 feet, every minute or so, within about 240 miles of the radar and that capability does not exist.

I guess you guys are OK with that? I think I know where the electrons are going

” and agree with your hack bit of “statistics. You don’t realize how stupid that is do you?”

I used to be smarter

I have this beautiful non-isotropic radiation model which I can enter dish angle and cloud ceiling and power feed and gain and it computes a radiation profile striking the ground (which incidentally can be 3 times higher a few miles away from the dish transmitter than directly around it (see “cone of silence” – not Get Smart) It can then process and compute the overlapping refracted power density of 10,000 high gain antennas within 30 seconds across the US. It then uses that power density for any point in the US to create maps and data tables that I can than run statistics against incidences of diseases(geocoded with lat/lon and FIPS codes) and my python routine spits out P-values for null hypotheses. It is a beautiful thing I must say. It has led me to correlations with unusual mortality events of stranded dolphins and whales and manatees and dead fish and dissolved coral reefs and autism clusters and cancer clusters and I feel so fortunate I can share it with you guys who are so appreciative.

Let me ask a simple question. How come nobody has checked electromagnetic radiation power density against autism and cancer clusters. Why such a waste of bandwidth and money on Vaccines?

“How come nobody has checked electromagnetic radiation power density against autism and cancer clusters.”

Because of the sixth Bradford-Hill Criterion, which I’m sure you’re aware of being as how you were taught “enough” epidemiology and all.

“Electrons don’t “go” anywhere in EM propagation.”

Next, you’ll tell me that photons don’t have mass.

I used to be smarter

It would be hard to have been worse off.

You are looking at huge amounts of “data” you collected, ignoring the things you don’t think are important (despite the fact that the scientists who study this say otherwise), searching for random correlations, and claiming that your results are valid because some of your pals think your work looks good. You won’t bother to look at existing research studies because you know they are wrong. You won’t talk to experts in the field you’re trying to comment on, and you won’t bother trying to present your work to have it reviewed.

That doesn’t pass any test for validity in basic statistics or scientific research, let alone do the things you claim it does.

ChemE @247: ” How come nobody has checked electromagnetic radiation power density against autism and cancer clusters.”

How about *you* tell us what the mechanism of action is? And how in some places this radiation causes autism and in other places the *same* kind of radiation causes cancer?

Let me ask a simple question. How come nobody has checked electromagnetic radiation power density against autism and cancer clusters I haven’t gone outside with a field strength meter?

FTFY.

He’s thinking confounders have to be things that could also cause autism, which means he’s a step ahead of himself. It’s not about other things that could cause autism, it’s about other things that could cause the statistics that we’re seeing.

Exactly, ChemE thinks that the various confounding variables we have listed for him are independent variables. Nothing terribly surprising that he is digging his heels in; we’ve seen it with pretty much every crank and their hare-brained hypotheses who think they’ve indentified autism aetiology.

What transmits millions of watts of EIRP radiation

ChemE’s entire bait-&-switch is based on treating a unidirectional, intermittent energy source as if the same flux of energy were coming from all directions, continually (possibly blinded by the “equivalent” in EIRP).
In the real world, fortunately, a laser pointer will not vaporise a blackboard.

“Real crop circle patterns (reflecting plasma/heat/magnetic damage) may actually be triggered from dark matter and energy, passing through Earth. In this case, dark matter can be both beautiful and deadly. Are some of these intricate patterns actually trying to tell us something? (Yes)”
(from the Honey, They Cooked the Kids Illustrated Ebook)

It’s a mighty fine book you’ve written, full of wisdom and insight, for sure. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what the patterns are trying to tell us as they pass through our planet.

What’s my impedance?

Well, if you like the guy on this sign, if must be infinite.

^ IT – IT must be infinite
So few words, so many errors.

I think he misunderstands our objection. Earlier, he asked how more education could possibly cause autism…but that’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying they could cause increased *diagnosis*

In a sense, advanced education could be considered an indirect cause of autism because people pursuing advanced education often put off having children until later in life, and advanced parental age is a known risk factor. Of course, there’s also the “assorted mating” hypothesis – if you get enough highly-educated people in one place, they’re likely to have higher-than-average rates of autism-like traits that likely share a genetic basis with ASD, such that when they interbreed they produce offspring with higher-than-average rates of ASDs. I’m not totally sure I buy that, but it’s an interesting thought. Anyway, my point is that its not totally impossible that some of these clusters could actually have higher rates of ASDs than the general population, but there would still be more plausible explanations than ChemE’s hypothesis.

Narad @255 & 256

Looks like you caught him with his amps down.

Guys! Guys! Are we bullying ChemE?

re the quote from the book.

Yiiii!

Vicki: What the heck is a “refracted focused beam”?

Vicki, it is known as “ducting” or “super refraction” of a beam of radiation:

If the atmospheric condition that causes superrefraction bends the beam equal to or more than the earth’s curvature then a condition called ducting, or trapping, occurs. Ducting often leads to false echoes also known as anomalous propagation or simply AP.

Oh, good L-rd. The coinage isn’t just redundant, it makes you sound foolish right off the bat,* as though you’re babbling about refractive focusing (“refracted off the atmosphere” is a similar garbling). The existence of conditions for ducting varies from uncommon to rare (PDF).

I showed in my paper where 14 antennas in a group exceed the FCC safe limit for uncontrolled areas 8000′ away (along the path of the beam)

“Uncontrolled areas”? Why would all the antennas be pointing in the same direction? Is this just some sort substitute for isotropy in your word salad? Before you start combining antennas, you have to demonstrate that you’re not hopelessly wrong for one (and no, I’m not going to go read “your paper”; if you can’t explain it here, you don’t understand it in the first place):

Do the calculation for a perfect waveguide.

* Rather than letting the true crankery sink in over time.

Oh, and — JP: I really, really hope you’re OK.

We all do.

Seriously.

“Martha Rocks!”

Martha Herbert, the anti-vacc non-expert on autism? Good lord.

Looks at #281.

Ok: this clown is not serious – he’s just posting random bullcrap picked from an orifice. Nobody is stupid enough to write “While I was looking for Dark Energy, which routinely knocks houses over” or “We have lots of cold dark matter in our atmosphere.” and be serious about it.

Wow. I mean, wow. I’ve been busy with life for several days and didn’t notice this thread. As someone with professional (and hobby) s/w and RF/antenna design expertise, and the degrees to back it up, there’s really only one thing I can do while skimming this fellow’s blathering. I am sitting here with a silly grin on my face and occasionally laughing as I read. That may be a bit cruel since he appears to need professional help, and I don’t mean the technology sort.

rs, this you see this admission by ChemE: “Actually I disagree with electrical engineers much of the time and I work with 100 of them.” ?

I assume you agree with his dissenting co-workers.

I have this beautiful non-isotropic radiation model which I can enter dish angle and cloud ceiling and power feed and gain and it computes a radiation profile striking the ground (which incidentally can be 3 times higher a few miles away from the dish transmitter than directly around it (see “cone of silence” – not Get Smart)

No sh*t, Sherlock. That’s because they’re not aimed at the ground. And cloud ceiling tells you exactly nothing about n(h), which moots the whole thing.

It can then process and compute the overlapping refracted power density of 10,000 high gain antennas within 30 seconds across the US. It then uses that power density for any point in the US to create maps and data tables that I can than run statistics against incidences of diseases(geocoded with lat/lon and FIPS codes) and my python routine spits out P-values for null hypotheses.

This is idiotic. You don’t even have a time series for your “computation” of “power densities.”

It is a beautiful thing I must say.

Yah. Surely there must be some AREPS output floating around that you could benchmark it against.

^ I presume that the start of the b0rk3d blockquote is obvious.

I NEED HELP!
Can anyone point me to some “most probable” sites where germ theory denial is a big thing. There is some complete idiot on a CBC vaccine-related comment thread that denies germ theory (“Measles is a vitamin deficiency disease, polio is a chemical poisoning disease.” and he flat-out denies germ theory), and I’d like some idea of where the big cheeses of denial hang out.
Thanks.

“Also, dark matter exiting from Earth into ocean may be responsible for fish kills… How does this coincide with your dead fish as evidence for human-caused electromagnetic radiation causing autism-theory, ChemE?”

We have cold dark matter in our atmosphere and it is causing electromagnetic radiation to duct and refract and scatter. Since it is cold, it is also condensing water vapor, which creates our weather.

“Dark matter’s existence is inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter and gravitational lensing of background radiation”

Waterspouts and tornadoes and hurricanes have cold dark matter along their eyewalls in my model, which are really domain walls. They are all vacuum disturbances, not just a temperature disturbance. They decay and give of “dark energy” That is why you get “hook echoes” when you point a radar at a tornado as the atmosphere bends the radiation. Basically tornadoes are small wormholes that evaporate and decay.

Simple concept.

NOt really, but I do have a theory of everything based upon M Theory. “The Theory of Everything” that nobody knows what it means…

If you’re conceding that “M Theory” doesn’t mean anything, then that’s a start.

Can anyone point me to some “most probable” sites where germ theory denial is a big thing.

@ doug, there is no one hovel where these loons congregate. AVN (not the porn site), Natural News and Prison Planet spring to mind though.

I never called it a laser beam…

But isn’t your model based on exactly that?

According to your model as you post #284, 100% of the EIRP is returned to the earth, but if that happened, all those satellite uplinks would go dark. That doesn’t happen in real life. In fact, nothing close to that happens, and you’d know that if you had the slightest idea what you were talking about.

Don’t you think that maybe your model is off just a wee little bit? Like a coupla dB?

You do know what a dB is, right?

Based on your post #284, what would be the free space loss?

Narad
December 1, 2015
“OK, at least you’ve clarified that you most certainly do not know what refraction is.”

??

You used the words “100% refraction.” What you would have meant if you had the slightest idea what you’re talking about would have been 100% reflection.

Path losses change all of the time with weather conditions. Just because a signal ducts heavily in one area does not mean a portion of the signal still does not make it to the satellite along a multi paths outer.

You guys are totally missing the point that in an area of LA with 466% more high gain broadcast antennas you have 400% more autism. And that does not include the extra relay antennas. And it is a similar situation around the LaJolla and Fresno clusters. Microwave Radiation fills up an area due to path losses such as refraction, reflection and scattering, just like light(visible radiation) does.

Path loss normally includes propagation losses caused by the natural expansion of the radio wave front in free space (which usually takes the shape of an ever-increasing sphere), absorption losses (sometimes called penetration losses), when the signal passes through media not transparent to electromagnetic waves, diffraction losses when part of the radiowave front is obstructed by an opaque obstacle, and losses caused by other phenomena.

The signal radiated by a transmitter may also travel along many and different paths to a receiver simultaneously; this effect is called multipath. Multipath waves combine at the receiver antenna, resulting in a received signal that may vary widely, depending on the distribution of the intensity and relative propagation time of the waves and bandwidth of the transmitted signal. The total power of interfering waves in a Rayleigh fading scenario vary quickly as a function of space (which is known as small scale fading). Small-scale fading refers to the rapid changes in radio signal amplitude in a short period of time or travel distance.

ChemE,
If you want to be truly scientific about this you will try your very best to break your hypothesis. By this I mean you should be looking very hard for an alternative explanation for this correlation, perhaps look for natural experiments in other areas where microwave exposure is particularly high or low, maybe look at people who are occupationally exposed to microwaves, or those who are hardly exposed at all, maybe those living in remote areas off the grid, and see if they have more or fewer children with ASDs.

Ask yourself what else would have to be true or false if your hypothesis is correct and look to see if this the case or not. A real scientist would chase down and correct their figures for confounders, not flippantly dismiss them.

What you appear to be doing at present is looking for evidence to support your hypothesis, and ignoring any that does not, which is the unmistakable mark of the crank and dilettante.

I could have chosen more antennas and “higher” path losses and come to the same conclusion.

I meant to say “lower” path losses

“Greater than what?”

Greater then the rest of the LA area. Read the hypothesis paper

Greater then the rest of the LA area. Read the hypothesis paper

How did you control for differences in demographics? Migration? SES? Education? Parental age and health status?

Oh wait that’s right…

Greater then the rest of the LA area.

And how did you define the area used? (In addition to the confounding variables Science Mom mentioned.) How did you determine what was in your experimental area vs. what was in your control area?

palindrom:

To all my biomed and medical statistics oriented commentariat friends out there: the physics is just as bad as the epidemiology.

I am reminded of a joke my uncle (a statistician at 3M) likes to tell:

Biologists defer only to chemists.
Chemists defer only to physicists*.
Physicists defer only to mathematicians.
Mathematicians defer only to God.

*Except for ChemE, who is of course a chemical engineer, not a chemist. There is a distinction.

Sarah A:

Anyway, my point is that its not totally impossible that some of these clusters could actually have higher rates of ASDs than the general population, but there would still be more plausible explanations than ChemE’s hypothesis.

That is a very good point, and I also have a hunch that autism might be more disabling among the highly educated and wealthy urban families, because they are more likely to put their children into highly structured academic courses and intense extra-curricular activities where a kid with autism may experience a lot more stress than if they, for instance, grew up on a farm. A farm is a perfectly good place to grow up, BTW. I just kind of wonder if maybe high-functioning autistics might be less likely to display concerning symptoms if they’re in a less stressful environment to begin with. ADHD too. I wonder if ADHD is more diagnosed now not because there are more people with it but because it is more disabling, since a critical

But mostly I wanted to point out that the most obviously plausible explanation for the difference in diagnosis is nothing more than access to services, and ChemE has dismissed it because he cannot envision the data being wrong. And that is a huge deficiency in his logic to which he still has not responded.

ChemE:

Because they are transmitting up to the same geostationary satellite.

Ah, you do know there’s more than one geostationary satellite, right? And that’s without even considering Molniya-orbit commsats, popular for those high-latitude regions where there’s a crappy line-of-sight to the geosycnhronous ring, and all the lower orbit ones, like the Iridium constellation, and if we’re being honest, we should really also be counting the navigation satellite constellations, mainly GPS but also GLONASS, Beidou, and the nascent Galileo, as they also receive transmissions from the ground.

Good gracious, can you imagine what cancer rates must be around Goldstone, California, with the Deep Space Network site located there? 😛

By the way, “dark matter” and “dark energy” aren’t discrete entities. They’re placeholder terms for matter and energy which we know exists but cannot observe directly and so can’t identify. Cranks tend to assume they’re specific entities, rather than quite likely a whole bunch of things we haven’t discovered yet. Thus, dark matter and energy tend to be a very useful litmus test for cranks.

Guys,

Thanks for all of your support!

You’re now in the top 4% of researchers on Academia by 30-day views!

THIRTY-DAY STATISTICS
129
PROFILE VIEWS
123
DOCUMENT VIEWS
102
UNIQUE VISITORS

Thanks,
The Academia.edu Team

I have to say, this thread has become quite entertaining and educational. I appreciate the comments from Science Mom, Calli Arcale, et al, who have pointed out ChemE’s errors that I wasn’t aware of (physics, radio waves, etc are WAY out of my knowledge base). While I readily recognized he was ignoring any cofounders, I couldn’t call him/her on the radiation stuff.

Thanks to all of the minions who have this knowledge! 🙂

“Good gracious, can you imagine what cancer rates must be around Goldstone, California, with the Deep Space Network site located there? ”

Yes, Hinkley, California is near Goldstone. Lots of health issues there. I mapped it on my blog and the radar is in my database. If you look at the autism map of california it is high in the South/SouthEast.

EMF increases corrosion/oxidative attack of positively charged metals/minerals like Ca2+, etc…in electrolytes

If we are going to immerse ourselves in all of this EMF we need cathodic protection for our children

Non-Isotropic radiation profile from Goldstone

http://darkmattersalot.com/2014/11/28/hinkley-ca/

Cali, thanks for reminding me!

Krebiozen
December 2, 2015
ChemE,
If you want to be truly scientific about this you will try your very best to break your hypothesis.

I did. I received assistance from a computional biologist at a university in the SE US three years ago to help me setup a null hypothesis in Florida for dead fish, built a metric, ran 10,000 iterations sorting 3 years of fish kills along with radar locations and dummy(not stupid) locations and computed P-values for null hypothesis. p-values ranged <.01 to less than 0.001. Info on my blog. His initial comments are on my blog if anybody even cared.

Since many of the marine mammals around the radars appeared to be dying of "shock" I said hell, maybe they are getting shocked!

By this I mean you should be looking very hard for an alternative explanation for this correlation

I did, and I have narrowed it down to electrical engineers and witches

, perhaps look for natural experiments in other areas where microwave exposure is particularly high or low,

I have, it led me to the North Shore of Kauai where the Calcium Carbonate coral reef is dissolving below the 30M watt pulsed microwave radar stations and the reef fish are turning black and going belly up. So bad they are making a movie!

maybe look at people who are occupationally exposed to microwaves, or those who are hardly exposed at all, maybe those living in remote areas off the grid, and see if they have more or fewer children with ASDs.

For ASD I mapped clusters throughout California

Ask yourself what else would have to be true or false if your hypothesis is correct and look to see if this the case or not. A real scientist would chase down and correct their figures for confounders, not flippantly dismiss them.

I am an engineer, I like to identify and solve problems. I did not flippantly dismiss confounders, I agree with the Columbia researchers that those other confounders mentioned are only a small part of the answer.

What you appear to be doing at present is looking for evidence to support your hypothesis, and ignoring any that does not, which is the unmistakable mark of the crank and dilettante.

I actually handed off my research to others with faster computers, larger databases, more initials after their names, and more money to either falsify or support my hypothesis.

We shall wait and see…

I am just the color commentary

I drew a bounding box in Google Earth around the Autism Cluster in Santa Monica/Hollywood Hills area identified by Columbia Researchers

But how did you determine precisely where the boundaries were drawn? A difference of a block could greatly change your results. And how did you account for people who moved into/out of the region? How did you control for treatment center proximity? How did you control for parental age? How did you control for pre-natal exposure to drugs like valproate? How did you control for pre-natal infections, like rubella?

And wrong post. Delete as needed.

ChemE,

I did not flippantly dismiss confounders,

Then I must have misunderstood you when you wrote:

Confounders such as education level, income level, vaccinations were considered but found to be so outlandish and clueless that they were dismissed in their entirety early on in the study

BTW, are you aware that no one here, other than the occasional crank visitor, believes that vaccines cause autism?

Todd W.
http://www.harpocratesspeaks.com
December 2, 2015

But how did you determine precisely where the boundaries were drawn? A difference of a block could greatly change your results.

I zoomed in in Google with a high res monitor and set the box as close to the boundaries of the autism cluster identified by Columbia University. I used my reading glasses for extra magnification. I then duplicated the box using cut and paste to make sure it was exactly the same size…(~20km x 50 km)

And how did you account for people who moved into/out of the region?

I can move the box anywhere in California and most places in the US and they will not have that many microwave transmitters, so I have that covered. I guess if they move out of the country I have a problem…

How did you control for treatment center proximity?

I figured if I can move my box anywhere in California and not have that much microwave radiation, I have that covered. some boxes will have treatment centers many will not.

How did you control for parental age? How did you control for pre-natal exposure to drugs like valproate? How did you control for pre-natal infections, like rubella?

ditto, I can move my box anywhere in California and not have that much microwave radiation from one area. Some areas will have young people, some will have old people some will have healthy people, some will have sick people.

Whatever Columbia & UC Davis did in defining their cluster maps are included in my research (because I used their maps)

That is exactly why you guys can’t figure out autism, you can’t see the forest through the trees. You are stuck in the weeds and trying to separate gnat shit from pepper.

I took a look down from 30,000 feet up in the atmosphere and the cause is obvious, that area of Hollywood Hills is glowing with microwave radiation (in a non-visible sort of way). I can move my box anywhere in California and they don’t have that much radiation. It is the microwave broadcast capital of the WORLD!

Reminds me of the extra crispy meal at KFC

OK, my bad it was VAxBlogMom that set me off.

Set you off about what? And are you twelve years old?

was joking about that confounder stuff. What I meant to say was that if you get a good education and income, buy an expensive home in Hollywood Hillsides near all of the high gain microwave antennas and buy lots of electronic/wireless toys for you and your kids, their chances of getting autism are higher. And as you get older and spend more time in the area, your chances of genetic damage and having a kid with autism increase since you are getting oxidized/corroded faster than others due to the extra EMF load in the area.

And once again, you weren’t joking about your lack of controlling for confounding variables…you are really that out of your depth and got called out on it. Furthermore, you can’t make this claim because you haven’t collected any relevant data, just your one variable. Shall I assume you are kidding about that too amateur?

And are you twelve years old? Please, let’s not unnecessarily malign twelve year-olds.

Is it a surprise that cheme references (and inhabits) one of the more infamous homes for weak-minded conspiracy theorists and science-deniers, darkmattersalot dot com? It shouldn’t be.

The Autism Watch website has diagnostic requirements for three different states listed. It turns out that is one big confounding factor, as explained here:
http://www.autism-watch.org/general/edu.shtml

“So, what is happening in Oregon and Minnesota? ”

Oregon gets lots of weather which is linked to the autism rate
http://darkmattersalot.com/2014/11/19/precipitousprecipitationparadox/
http://darkmattersalot.com/2014/11/19/oregon/

Radiation refracts/reflects off weather

Minneapolis, MN is the midwest broadcast capital:

http://darkmattersalot.com/2015/11/28/lots-of-high-gain-microwave-antennas-in-minneapolis-also/

The jump in autism rates in MN in the mid 90’s correlates fairly well temporally with radar installation time frame:

http://darkmattersalot.com/2013/11/03/ok-now-i-feel-worse-again/

@Sarah A

I’m just waiting for his Nobel winning paper showing that radio waves are ionizing radiation.

ChemE: “Oregon gets lots of weather which is linked to the autism rate”

So does Washington. A point you missed because you did not read Dr. Laidler’s article. Perhaps you were not aware that the “Washington” stated on the page was the state that borders Oregon and was once part of the Oregon Territory, and not our nation’s capital city.

You’ll have to understand I will take the writing of Dr. Laidler, a medical doctor and biochemist PhD, over your website. Especially since you are further showing a lack understanding about the geography of the Western USA.

Sarah A
December 2, 2015
@ChemE – Are you being serious? You know that humans aren’t made of metal, right?

Calcium is a metal, one of the most corrodable

http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/electrode-potential-d_482.html

You know that, right?

Our bodies have complex systems in place to balance oxidation and reduction, just like we have systems in place to maintain pH and osmotic pressure.

Until you irradiate the human and blood and increase ORP and throw it out of balance.

Just because something corrodes metal doesn’t mean its going to corrode people, any more than drinking lemon juice lowers your pH or drinking water lyses your cells.

Our bodies fight oxidative stress their entire lives. EMF increases corrosion rate in electrolytes by increasing ORP

You know that your cells/bones have calcium in them and that calcium is a metal right??

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium
Calcium is a chemical element with symbol Ca and atomic number 20. Calcium is a soft gray alkaline earth metal

Listen to these doctors discuss it, don’t believe me.
http://www.kkcr.org/archive/ht101915.mp3

It appears that ChemE has taken Heinlein”s Waldo and thrown some numbers in to it. The idea that em radiation causes X is as old as our knowledge of em radiation. The last one I remember is that cell phones cause brain cancer.

Sorry, ChemE, when I said I prefer Dr. Laidler’s writing, I also meant I will never click on your website for any reason. Especially since your idea of precipitation and microwave radiation trumps the difference of school assessments.

If you want to be taken seriously you will stick to providing us PubMed indexed studies by reputable qualified researchers (no lawyers or engineers, please).

“So catch a clue”

Oh, the irony!

Chris
December 2, 2015
“Sorry, ChemE, when I said I prefer Dr. Laidler’s writing, I also meant I will never click on your website for any reason. Especially since your idea of precipitation and microwave radiation trumps the difference of school assessments.”

Uh dude, that is how a pulsed microwave weather radar works, it pulses 1,000,000 watts ~ @ ~ 45 dBi gain and 2.8 Ghz (same freq as a microwave oven) a few hundred to 1000 times per second and bounces the radiation off the clouds and precipitation. What you see on your 6:00 weather news is microwave radiation scattered back to the dish, not the actual clouds… very little of the radiation makes it back to the dish, most of it scatters and is absorbed in the surroundings.

Duh

Oregon gets lots of weather

The only way to avoid “lots of weather” is to live underground.

Perfect example of how engineers can fall victim to this kind of quack thinking…..

Sally

December 2, 2015
For everyone enjoying this back and forth (I am!), there’s an excellent episode of This American Life where they talk to an electrician who claims to have disproved Einstein’s theory of relativity. It seems pretty applicable here.

Actually, I am trying to prove Einstein’s theory, ie. we live in spacetime, not space and it routinely gets curled up, creates tornadoes, waterspouts and hurricanes (all wormholes) that decay in our atmosphere, knocks over our houses, condenses the atmosphere and bends radiation back on our heads!

Reminds me of “What a Wonderful Life”

OK. That proves it. ChemE is now just trolling. Time for killfile.

Lawrence

December 2, 2015
I’m wondering how much LSD ChemE has partaken of, over the past few days of this “interesting” conversation?

Mostly coffee and Mtn. Dew…

My bones is just a brimmin’ with metallic calcium, so I’m terrible a-feared of it losin’ its precious electrons or even havin’ to share ’em. Don’t even want to think about my stock o’ heme.

A little ear worm I have due to ChemE:

Trollin’ Trollin’ Trollin’
Trollin’ Trollin’ Trollin’
Trollin’ Trollin’ Trollin’
Trollin’ Trollin’ Trollin’
Rawhide!
Trollin’ Trollin’ Trollin’
Though the threads are swollen
Keep them comments trollin’,
Rawhide!

Move ’em on
(Head em’ up!)
Head em’ up
(Move ’em on!)
Move ’em on
(Head em’ up!)
Rawhide!
Cut ’em out
(Paste ’em in!)
Paste’em in
(Cut em’ out!)
Cut ’em out
Paste ’em in,
Rawhide!
Keep trollin’, trollin’, trollin’
Though they’re disaprovin’
Keep them comments trollin”,
Rawhide
Don’t try to understand ’em
Just rope, laugh, and ignore ’em
Soon we’ll be discussin’ bright without ’em

doug — have they ever tried knitting with copper wire, should be the question. I’ve knitted with silver wire and it’s hell on the fingers..

For the spouse who has everything…

http://www.lessemf.com/personal.html

^ “where are all the great snail die-offs?”

[Quoting me] Do the calculation for a perfect waveguide.
[The reply] Total Power at the Antennas 1330 watts (14 earth stations pointing at same satellite)
Antennas avg Gain in dBi 53.2 dBi
Distance to the Area of Interest 4000 feet
1219.2 metres
Frequency of Operation 5000 MHz
Are Ground Reflections Calculated? Yes
Estimated RF Power Density 3.8084 mW/cm2
Controlled
Environment Uncontrolled
Environment
Maximum Permissible Exposure (MPE)
5.005 mW/cm2
1.005 mW/cm2
Distance to Compliance From Centre of Antenna
3490.9796 feet
1064.0506 metres
7806.0059 feet
2379.2706 metres
Does the Area of Interest Appear to be in Compliance?
yes
no

Great, you didn’t understand the question, which means that you don’t understand ducting, which further means that the “8000′” value disgorged from your calculation “beautiful thing” has no connection whatever to the real world.

Narad

“His inability to consistently and competently indicate quotations is enough for me to quickly be losing interest in sifting his comments.”

I am typing many of these responses from my IPhone so I apologize for the grammar.

“Lobsters are not mollusks. Their carapaces are not “CaCO₃ based.”

https://www.mpg.de/5720889/W004_Materials-Technology_072-079.pdf

“On closer examination of the lobster
shell and the crab carapace, pores
can be seen that pervade the structure
from top to bottom in the shape of long
canals. They are formed while the epithelial
cells create a new carapace before
molting. Tiny bulges therefore protrude
from the cell surfaces of the
lobster or crab epithelium, and the layers
of chitin fibrils must be woven
around them. Gradually, elliptical, helically
twisted pore canals are formed.
Initially, they serve as a transport system
for the minerals that the animals
use to quickly harden the soft skeletal
structure of the new carapace once they
have shed the old one.
When Fabritius zooms even further
into the electron microscope samples,
the particles that constitute the second
main component of the natural composite
become visible: essentially, they
consist of different types of calcium carbonate,
similar to the limescale deposits
we know from kitchens and bathrooms.
In the lobster shell, the particles
are arranged between the chitin fibrils
in the form of tiny spherules. In some
parts of the crab shell, similar particles
create solid tubes around the fibers. The
type of crystal lattice and the shape and
number of calcium carbonate particles
determine the hardness of the exoskeleton,
which may vary both according
to species and within one shell.”

What ocean did you crawl out of?

Just because a signal ducts heavily in one area does not mean a portion of the signal still does not make it to the satellite along a multi paths outer [sic].

Asserting a leaky waveguide (which is what you’re doing; it also looks offhand as though satcom links are designed to reject multipath) merely highlights the fact that you don’t even have it together enough to deal with the idealized case.

Regarding clothing and metal – I believe it was Gaffer Gamgee in “Lord of the Rings” (the books, not the movies) that asked Sam what happened to his weskit “I don’t hold with wearing ironmongery, whether it wears well or no.”

doug – Christmas ornaments..little silver leaves.

You don’t need to knit copper wire to make an effective shield – .1 inch copper screen should have about 14 dB attenuation at 10 GHz.

The biggest problem is that you’d need to ground it. That would limit your mobility.

If anybody wants to support coral reef & marine life research here is a link to a new non-profit group in Kauai, HI

http://www.reefguardians.org/

Funding will go towards protecting our coral reefs and near shore ocean environment. I am listed on the team as an advisor, I am not being paid. Donations are tax deductible.

Happy Holidays

I am much more interested in the the transmitter power that never makes it up to the satellite through pathlosses: free-space loss, refraction, diffraction, reflection, aperture-medium coupling loss, and absorption(into biological contaminants…)

I could care less about the ideal case since we do not live in that world. Electrical engineers don’t have a clue where all of that radiation is going and they even admit it:

From NOAA:
[same old link]
“How do we know the path of the beam all times?
Aside from when AP is seen on the radar, we don’t! ”

I rest my case

One would hope. You’re simply switching back and forth willy-nilly between satellite uplinks and weather radar. You don’t understand RF propagation, particularly that you can’t say anything about ducting if you can’t even work things out about an ideal waveguide, and you and your “beautiful thing” therefore can’t calculate your way out of a wet paper bag.

Narad

December 3, 2015
“You don’t understand RF propagation, particularly that you can’t say anything about ducting”

Ducting is well established science, pathloss will vary with atmospheric conditions. This is not new science. You can’t tell me how much power is hitting the ground at any given point time around those antennas, it changes all of the time.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/RS020i005p01061/abstract

On top of that, you have shown a complete incompetence in anything chemical or biological.

ChemE- Large numbers of people, even today, have claimed that witches are responsible for diseases and famines. Why shouldn’t we believe them?

Gray Falcon

December 3, 2015
“ChemE- Large numbers of people, even today, have claimed that witches are responsible for diseases and famines. Why shouldn’t we believe them?”

If I have learned one thing in my life, it is that people will believe whatever they want, so more power to them!

You can’t tell me how much power is hitting the ground at any given point time around those antennas, it changes all of the time.

Well, they have this stuff called ‘test equipment’.

In particular, there is what they call a ‘spectrum analyzer’. It makes some very pretty pictures showing what frequencies there are in a signal, and how strong each frequency is.

If you hook an antenna to a spectrum analyzer, it’s possible to measure just exactly how much RF is hitting the antenna. This is one of the best and fastest ways to track down interference. I have done this. I wasn’t the first.

I never saw anything like what you think happens.

If you want to prove your silly idea, get a spectrum analyzer and an antenna, and go gather a few plots. It’s not hard. Any half competent radio tech can show you. Then you can say exactly how much RF is hitting exactly what spot the earth, and exactly when it happened. Nobody will be able to argue with you. If you find the sorts of signals you claim are out there, you will be able to call the FCC, show them your data, and they will shut down the offending transmitters.

Pro tip – be prepared to spend some time at it. You won’t find what you think you will find.

Johnny
127.0.0.1
December 3, 2015
“You can’t tell me how much power is hitting the ground at any given point time around those antennas, it changes all of the time.
Well, they have this stuff called ‘test equipment’.
In particular, there is what they call a ‘spectrum analyzer’. It makes some very pretty pictures showing what frequencies there are in a signal, and how strong each frequency is.”

Dude,

You are acting like I don’t know what a spectrum analysis is and we discussed the measurements we are doing in Kauai on the radio show & site.

I agree with everything you are saying, on top of spectrum analysis we are also testing for ORP, salinity, stray electrical current, pH, TDS, corrosion test strips, Calcium testing, etc. Full environmental survey. Underway for a few months now.

Ever try one of these?
http://www.narda-sts.us/products_highfreq_srm.php

What ocean did you crawl out of?

The one in which your CaCO₃ babbling fails to correlate with degrees of mineralization, I suppose. What part of “bacteria” and “chitinase” did you not understand? Given that you snipped this right out of your reply, I’m guessing all of it.

I am not an amateur when it comes to chemical & environmental engineering, I have been executing projects for 29 years

Perhaps the most plausible of your utterances so far. Lethal injection?

Gray Falcon
You didn’t answer my question, ChemE. Why shouldn’t we believe witches are responsible for illness?

I’ve never given it any thought, but here is a good article on it, they have a comment section

http://elections.peacefmonline.com/pages/politics/201210/143168.php?storyid=100&amp;

You are acting like I don’t know what a spectrum analysis is…

I very much believe you don’t, nor do I believe you are competent to conduct such a test, nor interpret such a test.

When you say things like “You can’t tell me how much power is hitting the ground at any given point time around those antennas, it changes all of the time”, and people have been doing those test continuously for over 50 years, yeah, it makes me think you don’t know a thing about it. Sure, I can’t tell you exactly what you will see at any location at any time, but if the power levels you claim are hitting the ground were, in fact, hitting the ground, somebody would have noticed by now.

As far as the SRM-3006, no, I’ve never used one, but from reading the spec sheet, it looks to be a fine piece of field service gear. It isn’t bench quality, but it’s OK. It would find the signals you think exist, if they were there, but they ain’t so it won’t.

Johhny,

Thanks. You misinterpreted what I said. Because power levels change over time with atmospheric effects, I was saying you can’t know the power density level at ground (without measuring with a scope/receiving antenna).

I am not doing the testing in Kauai, we have technicians doing it and PhDs interpreting. I will also tell you that we will be measuring levels when the weather is “worst” and the 2.8 GHz Doppler weather radar reflectivity is highest and showing blue and the cumulative power density hitting the ground is highest and most testers stay inside and play Xbox.

Also, I have been quoting EIRP values above(reported to FCC ) and not actual power densities and you are smart enough to know that. The one example calc I gave above shows a power density slightly above the FCC guideline. It does include high power pulsed radars or the other 200 plus high gain antennas in the area of 20 km X 50 km. But you can spin it any way you would like.

What happens to the focused beam of microwave radiation when a low flying aircraft flies through the beam(s) hundreds of times a day?

You guys can go ahead and believe microwave radiation is good for you and I will cook my food with it.

I appreciate the opinion on the Narda unit.

Wait – they are going to test for RF scattering in the rain?

Why, I’ll bet in the last 60 or 70 years, nobody, and I mean nobody, ever thought of testing microwave propagation, satellite uplinks and downlinks, or RADAR in the RAIN!!!!11!!!

It’s that kind of out of your mind the box thinking that will win you the Nobel, sir.

/sarcasm

And remember that microwave radiation does not just heat things, like the dumbass IEEE standard addresses, it also triggers electrical current in electrolytes.

http://popsci.typepad.com/popsci/2007/01/grape_balls_of_.html

P.S. “Voltage potential”? You can’t make this shіt up.

Except when it doesn’t. There is something(s) critical missing in the statement.

Don’t be silly. That’s why Pedialyte is always kept in Faraday cages.

#418
Narad,
December 4, 2015
P.S. “Voltage potential”? You can’t make this shіt up.

Right, EMR is measured in Volts/Meter, Amps/Meter or power density (watts/m2)

http://www.narda-sts.us/pdf_files/Brochure/SRM3006_Brochure.pdf

You were joking right?

I sure hope you are not a doctor…

Narad
December 4, 2015
“P.S. “Voltage potential”? You can’t make this s*$t up.”

“The results can be shown in physical units, e.g. electric field strength in V/m (Volts/meter), magnetic field strength in A/m, and power density in W/cm2”

https://www.narda-sts.com/en/safety/products/high-frequency/srm-3006/

Voltage is a potential

Dude, I hope you are not a brain surgeon…

Dippy, you have completely missed the point, which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.

From northern Canada to Saudi Arabia to points beyond there are installations that utilize controllers I designed to manage such currents. I will not elaborate.

And isn’t it normal to have an enormous “voltage potential” between the sky and the earth during storms, so high it sometimes leads lightning? Imagine the free radicals a thunderstorm generates.

Imagine the free radicals a thunderstorm generates.

That’s what she said. Or maybe it was him, I don’t remember anymore…

Sorry, that should be 300 MHz to 300 GHz for microwaves, but my question stands.

Krebiozen,

Electromagnetic induction and conduction of EMR generating low level AC currents in electrolytes and increasing oxidative stress and “corrosion”. Many signals are now digital pulse trains that may be more biologically active. FYI most high power, high gain pulsed radars pulse at low freq (200-1000 Hz) with a 2-6 GHz carrier freq. while it is on.

http://www.hese-project.org/hese-uk/en/papers/goldsworthy_bio_weak_em_07.pdf

Calcium is a very reactive metal/mineral

AC causes accelerated corrosion @ 1 mA in electrolytes, which is 0.001 amps (not watts, like you said, which is power) which is still very low current. DC is more aggressive. They say you can feel ~ 10 mA on your skin and 100 mA (0.1 Amps) can stop a mammals heart. Your typical circuit breaker at home is 10 or 20 Amps..

Many pulsed weather radars are pulsing ~ 1,000,000 watts ~ 500 times per second which is focused to an EIRP of 32,000,000,000 (billion watts).

Lots of antenna power density calculators on the web that will show you how you can calculate E & H fields (peak and average), I reference one in my paper.

As far as overwhelming evidence of EMR affects on biology I would start here:

https://emfscientist.org

And here:

http://www.bioinitiative.org

And if you are starting to like me you can visit my blog for lots of environmental evidence and good music. 🙂

Epic Fail!

Darkmattersalot.com

Voltage is a potential

The comedy just keeps coming. You might as well have said “amperage is a current.” What you fail to realize is that you keep blurting out weird phrases that literally scream that you don’t understand the basic subject.

sadmar #432,

3mG long term is not considered safe.

Rotary electrical tools and some smartphones exceed by MT 263’s limit of 250 mG.
http://www.magnii.com/products/mt-263.html
I would not consider a Dremel to be safe.

I was amused to see that some of the overwhelming evidence cited in the Goldworthy paper ChemE linked to, turns out to have been fabricated.

Krebiozen
ChemE,
“That still doesn’t explain where the DC you mentioned comes from. AC only causes corrosion when more than 1 mW is induced”

Not “1 mW”, 1 mA. You show your ignorance. I listed both AC and DC from the slides I referenced. 1 mA AC (0.001 Amps) is a also a very small amount of currrent. 10 mA can be felt on your skin and 100 mA can stop a mammal’s heart. For any given power, amperage will depend upon impedence/resistance. Electrolytes, like the ocean and your bloodstream are very good conductors (1000 x better than Earth.)

NEXRAD Weather radars pulse 1,000,000 watts (32 Billion EIRP watts @ 45 dBi gain) ~500 times per second, plenty of peak power there to produce 0.001 Amps

I suppose these guys are all quacks?

https://emfscientist.org/

Keep making stuff up sweet cheeks. I am done teaching you . Ask Narad now that he knows what voltage potential (energy) is.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electric/elevol.html

Krebiozen

“AC only causes corrosion when more than 1 mW is induced”. I think you meant 1 mA? mW is a measure of power, mA is a measure of current.

Below is a link to a list of 217 scientists from 39 nations. These scientists have collectively published over 2,000 peer-reviewed papers on the biological or health effects of non-ionizing radiation

https://emfscientist.org/

Please visit.

“And, AFAIK, they’re safe as far as EMF is concerned.”

I spent over ten years working with military comm-elect equipment, including some honking big microwaves. If EMF were in fact anything to worry about I’d be past praying for.

I’m going to buy a Dremel but probably not until after Christmas.

Chris, depending on what you want to do, a Dremel with a “flex shaft” can be a lot nicer to use. The handpiece is much smaller and easier to hold for long periods. The drawback is you have to hang the motor so that the flex shaft doesn’t have to bend at a sharp angle.
I destroyed my genuine Dremel flex shaft when I was trying to true a rubberized wheel that was out of balance. The stupid cheap mandrel was too soft, abruptly bent at about 90 degrees and wrecked the bearing in the handpiece. Of course Dremel changes everything every once in awhile, so the new flex shafts won’t fit the older tools.
I have a couple of cheap copies, but the bearings in the flex shaft handpiece seem to be vague approximations of real bearings.

If you are loaded with cash and want something much better, I recommend Foredom Electric products. They are quite expensive, but the motor is much more powerful and there is a wide range of handpieces available. Places that sell tools for jewelers often have them – and other things usable in Dremel tools at prices that are often considerably lower for better quality. One difference is that a lot of burs for jewelry work have 3/32″ shafts and most of the Dremel stuff is 1/8″, but all you have to do is use a different collet in the chuck.
Grobet USA has nifty stuff.

“Rubberized” grinding wheels, which are made with abrasive particles in a rubber-like matrix are fabulous for certain things. Cratex is one brand. They do wear rapidly and usually need to be trued when first used (running lightly against the wheel on a bench grinder is very effective).

I’ve seriously considered getting a low-speed dental handpiece. They run on compressed air, so they can be used with water running over the workpiece and bur for cooling. There are Chinese-made counterfeits that are apparently OK. The major US or European brands are quite pricey.

Cool info, doug… thanks! The Dremel under discussion was bought by dear hubby when he was high school in the 1970s. This does seem like a good thing to upgrade.

“If you are loaded with cash and want something much better,..”

Sorry, I spent it all on dye. Plus I had to return unopened bottles today (but picked up blank newsprint to wrap dyed silk garments for their steam treatment). But I might sneak in a mail order soon. And the jewelry supplies I bought for daughter are somewhere else! Aargh! This includes files, saws, and most importantly wire and flat metal. I know because I am the one who paid the cashiers. grumble, grumble, grumble

Okay, one of those cashiers was at a place that teaches how to make jewelry, and rents out time on their tiny versions of power tools (imagine a tiny drill press for necklace pendants, or other jeweler tools). Instead of signing up for the community college class, I could take a class from them, and get both some education on what I want to, plus a student discount.

Her rent is half of her pay. She is practicing to become a graduate student. So she is really easy to bribe with food.

Ah, yes. Good thing she has a really nice mom, though.

What happens to the focused beam of microwave radiation when a low flying aircraft flies through the beam(s) hundreds of times a day?

Not a lot. It happens all the time. Air traffic control counts on it, it’s how they know where the airplanes are.

I’ve never done much work with RADAR, but I do know a bit about terrestrial microwave and SATCOM. Airplanes don’t fly thru terrestrial links, because the towers aren’t that tall. Flying thru a SATCOM link doesn’t do much of anything. I’ve seen the telemetry from the birds, and watched receivers on the ground, and they don’t even flicker.

Sure, an aircraft will scatter and reflect a bit if RF, but not much and not for long. If an aircraft could reflect a significant portion of a SATCOM uplink, there would be a lot more outages.

Does the FAA keep track? Does the FCC keep track? Does the military know/care? EPA?

Aircraft are painted by RADAR beams constantly, or close enough so that it makes no difference. AFAIK, nobody counts the number of times.

Now I can tell you the military (and some other guys in the government) care very much. If microwaves scattered and were as powerful as you seem to think they are, it would be a lot easier to keep certain databases up to date.

This may be a foolish question, but where does the DC come from? Is there a huge rectifier in the sky?

FSM help me, I’m starting to understand how ChemE “thinks”.

To convert AC to DC, you’d need a rectifier, as you note. Humans have rectums. Thats how the microwaves cause autism – they shock the $#!+ out of our @$$.

“If you are loaded with cash and want something much better,..”

Sorry, spent it all on yarn.

When I came in I was a 2502, by the time I retired that had been changed to 0602 (USMC). The first half of my career was spent in the field, so yeah, microwaves, HF, not to mention radar sweeps (5 years with 3rd MAW) and all that time hanging around antenna farms.

There is good news on the LR front. At least, I think so. I’m not a scientist nor do I pretend to be one. I rely on you all.

Could Small Amounts of Radiation Be Good For You? It’s Complicated.

Krebiozen:

Is it an urban myth that the heating effects of microwaves were discovered when a radar operator’s chocolate bar melted?

I always understood that story to be true and not just a story. In fact, several versions I’ve read mention that as how Percy Spencer found out that microwaves warm food.

Chris, I trust you know about Pro Chemical & Dye and Dharma Trading.

@Not a Troll #465

Personally I am withholding judgment on hormesis until the evidence becomes more definitive one way or the other. That said, one of my colleagues made a point of getting a chest x-ray every year just for the jolting dose of deep penetrating ionizing radiation.

It’s by no means the craziest thing people do in their personal quests to beat the reaper. One acquaintance goes online to scream at strangers that high fructose corn syrup causes ADHD; he is under the impression that he is somehow thereby increasing the safety of the national food supply.

I just remembered when I was about 12 years old, I used to put 9v DC from a battery across my temples and enjoy the light-show (not recommended). I guess I’m lucky to be alive.

NEXRAD Weather radars pulse 1,000,000 watts (32 Billion EIRP watts @ 45 dBi gain)

Just to reiterate, this is totally boneheaded: A moment’s thought (haven’t I said that before?) should tell anyone that a directional transmitter with a peak power of 1 MW does not in fact turn into 32 GW by virtue of being referenced to an isotropic one. The calculation is utterly meaningless. If the klystron is putting out 1 MW, that’s all the power there is.

The actual average transmitted power of a WSR-88D radar is 1.56 kW (PDF).

The actual average transmitted power of a WSR-88D radar is 1.56 kW

And then you consider the fact that the antenna goes up and down and round and round.
Did Joni Mitchell ever write about RADAR?

I guess I’m lucky to be alive.

Yah, me too. Sort of.

^ Dammit: “∂|<S>| / |∂R| =nbsp;0.”

Narad,

https://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/compendium/2700.00-2900.00_01MAR14-1.pdf

“The peak power of the NEXRAD is 1 Megawatt (1×106 Watts) and it employs a directional antenna with a mainbeam gain of 45 dBi; resulting in a transmitted signal power level of 32 Gigawatts. The NEXRAD has a maximum duty cycle of 0.21 percent and a minimum duty cycle of 0.05 percent. Additional information related to ground-based weather radars can be found in ITU-R Recommendation M.1849.14”

The “average” power of 1.5 kW is meaningless since it includes the time the radar is turned off between pulses.

EIRP is very important since it indicates how focused the beam is. Similar principle you use when cooking ants using a magnifying glass and ordinary sunlight

It only takes a nanosecond to shock you.

narad

I also reject local anaesthesia for filling work, just because.

It dulls the senses.

– Jack Nicholson

A brief musical interlude.

Well, I suppose there always could be potential voltage, as distinct from voltage potential.

Potential voltage could be defined as voltage that might appear sometime in the future, as opposed to actual voltage that exists right now.

Narad:

“And? That’s a derived quantity. The only reason one could pretend that it’s “very important” is for embarrassingly dumb rhetorical purposes, viz., trying to put over getting the whole trip backwards.”

It is very important because that is a function of the gain within the beam and the reason the candy bar melted…

shay simmons:

“If you are loaded with cash and want something much better,..”

Sorry, spent it all on yarn.

Ah yes, I have that problem as well. 😉 Yarn stores are dangerous places!

With all the discussion regarding conductive materials to protect against this nasty RF, you can get Faraday protection without having to knit with copper. We use blue ESD drapes to cover open product in our labs, and if the drape completely covers the device, all the way down to the properly grounded ESD mat, then protection is assumed. We also wear our ESD labcoats, which when properly worn (three snaps minimum must be fastened, sleeves extending past the sleeves of our street wear), prevent static buildup on the surface of our clothing. Mind you, we’re mostly interested in preventing static buildup.

Now, for total Faraday protection, I have the delight of sitting next to a construction area at work where they’re building an RF shielded lab. Oh lord, the noise as they cut metal pieces to build the walls….

A while back, I came across a website offering ESD materials and garments for those who believe proper grounding and RF shielding is essential to one’s health. Perhaps ChemE would appreciate it. 😉 I am tempted by the Upper Body Shield they offer. At $70, it’s a pretty good price for a chainmail coif. 😀 Oddly, their one legitimate ESD garment, the ESD labcoat, is $195, which is severely overpriced. But do check this out if you want a laugh.

http://www.lessemf.com/

I am tempted by the Upper Body Shield they offer. At $70, it’s a pretty good price for a chainmail coif.

Hm. Maybe I should re-think this knitting-with-wire stuff. How many could I produce in a week?

sadmar: “A 1970’s Dremel?”

Yes, that is one reason why I really want to find it. After the insanity of the winter holidays, I plan to go through the rooms that dear daughter left stuff. I managed to find a small spool of black thread in one, which will be used in a sewing project today or tomorrow (I am steaming garments right now to set in the acid dye).

Shay:

Alas, the coif isn’t knitted. It looks like real chainmail, which is pretty awesome. I was in the SCA in college, and one of the other participants was working on a coif, bringing it along to every meeting. Meticulously linking ring to ring with a pair of pliers. It was very slow work.

For Lord of the Rings, the costumers found a cheaper version — they cut PVC pipe into rings and then linked that. The pipe is flexible enough you can link it without the pliers, and the result is much lighter but looks perfect.

^ You might want to look up “orgone” and read about “orgone boxes” if you want to be able to figure out why an “orgone blanket” is relevant to the discussion at hand.

Crazy guy, Wilhelm Reich. I hear he used to hang out with Bill Burroughs back in the day.

If anyone here has a dog, and a Dremel, the latter is awesome for grinding down nails. We have a giant Newfie and a Golden Retriever, and I don’t ever cut their nails, just grind. That’s my PSA for the day.

I think the default setting for Goldens is gormless.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Our previous Newf (RIP) weighed only 130ish lbs. This one is closer to 150 lbs.

We call the gormless one Chrissy Snow. The resemblance is uncanny.

“Crazy guy, Wilhelm Reich. I hear he used to hang out with Bill Burroughs back in the day.”

Pseudo-science can be a lot of fun when it’s not scamming people out of their money or health, and functions as a kind of art project instead. I’ve never gotten into Reich, but from a distance he seems like the kind of crazy I appreciate.

One of my former students spent a lot of time at his family’s second home on a lake in Maine. One day he mentioned they were just down their place road from a museum devoted to some crazy guy… Turns out it’s Orgonon, the Reich museum, and the kid (well, he was in his mid-20’s and had moved to L.A. at the time) had never been there and had no idea who Reich was. Sigh. What a wasted opportunity.

Obligatory song:

Obligatory song:
For the Newfies.

The Machine That Goes Ping!
The NEXRAD WSR-88D, when operating with the long pulse period, delivers an energy density at 100 metres of around 1.8 joules (0.43 calories) per square metre per ping (assuming 100% of the output power being is delivered with uniform density in a conical beam of 0.95 degrees).

Don’t forget about Poncho and Lefty, now.

I told you I was pretty much illiterate in Spanish.

You mean an ideal passive antenna can never have a true power gain of more than 0 dB?

I’m still waiting for an analysis of ohmic losses in that well-known “very good conductor,” the bloodstream. I suspect that coagulating the albumin (to which half of the mighty Ca is bound) might change the properties of the transmission line.

But this is how electrocution works, right?

The NEXRAD WSR-88D, when operating with the long pulse period, delivers an energy density at 100 metres of around 1.8 joules (0.43 calories) per square metre per ping (assuming 100% of the output power being is delivered with uniform density in a conical beam of 0.95 degrees).

You’re forgetting about the ubiquitous refocusing of the “diffracted focused beam” by ducting. Which itself somehow seems to be isotroptic in the “beautiful thing,” because clusters.

I went through a 2 year period where Kate Bush was everything. Alles klar, herr doktor bimler?

I wish I knew how to post pictures of Dylan (Newf) and Chrissy Snow (not her real name) because they are the stupidest, kindest, most child-tolerant dogs ever. Did I mention, stupid? Thank God for $500 canister vacuums.