Rating The Windup Girl
for The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. Thorough “Caloriepunk” world-building and interesting morally ambiguous characters!
Archive for February, 2010
Wi-fi Fever?
According to this latest journalistic masterpiece of the intellectually outstanding newspaper The Sun, an English DJ named Steve Miller is allergic to electromagnetic radiation. He’s not allergic to just any frequency, but to signals at 2.4 Gigahertz. In other words, Steve gets nauseous because you just happen to surf the intertubes using Wireless LAN. You are polluting his aether!
Click here to see a simple animation explaining the principles of frequency and wavelength.
Electromagnetic hypersensitivity, as this form of allergy is called, is a known phenomena in the medical literature. However, evidence that this is actually a real condition is lacking. Still, people who have vague symptoms claim it is caused by all the electromagnetic radiation around us, and in certain cases they are even trying to ban Wi-Fi (and other electromagnetic signals) in public buildings and private dwellings. Beam me to the rest of this article»