Getting your radiation RDA with your technology.

[IainB]

(RDA = "Recommended Dietary Allowance")
There's a post on the DC forum here:
$50 (shipped) Powerlink 802.11n Wireless Router with 1.24-Mile Range e Range

When I read about it, I immediately wanted one of those wireless routers - and then I noticed that someone had queried the transmission range of this device, so I commented:

Wow.
Well, it does say the range is "Up to 2000 meters (Depending on surrounding environment)".

And then I thought about that word "environment" and then about my environment and how it was proliferated with technology and its often necessary attendant radiation - radiation that was almost inescapable in our tech-driven world, unless you walked around wearing tinfoil garmets covering most of your body.

Advice for prudent caution from Naval safety standards makes me say that I'm not too sure whether it would be a good thing to be sat near to as powerful a transmitter as the wifi router has - for any transmission frequency - for too long.
Generally speaking it might be a good idea to avoid any potential risks to yourself or your family from being too closely involved in a "new" experiment in evolution.
Whilst we are in the womb and for all our lives after that, our natural environment means that we are continually bathing in a virtual sea of invisible radiation - most of it from the sun or elsewhere outside the earth.
However, we did not evolve in the sort of radiation-polluted (e.g., including extra X-rays and radio frequencies) environment that we have created for ourselves using technology, so we are the experiment, and we have not always understood the potentially dangerous effects of radiation until it causes harm or loss of life.

"We noticed and did wonder why it was always warm in the radar transmission room, and we would sometimes go in there to warm up on a very cold day."
(Comment from one of the radio engineers who had served on board British warships during WW2 when they were trialling new radar technology - which uses microwave frequencies.)

"WARNING: Never stand in front of a Radar's antenna - the radiation emitted from it can cause sterilization or even cancer." (Standard warning on ship's radar).

"Do not approach beyond yellow line when red light is flashing"
On the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible there is a thick and highly visible yellow perimeter line drawn on deck around the radar transmitter zone, accompanied by the above warning words in yellow (the red light flashes when the radar antenna is transmitting).

Most defence/security equipment is crawling with high-tech and emits radiation covering a large part of the electromagnetic spectrum. For example, tank armour-piercing missiles made with depleted uranium; radar; satelite tecoms systems; gun/missile-sighting systems.
Many of the common civilian tech applications were derived from earlier defence/security/space applications. For example, encryption algorithms and technology (used in telecommunications as standard in modems/routers); police speed-checking devices (which use radar or infrared); face-recognition technology for images (e.g., as now used in Google Picasa); digital infrared tape measures; computer CPUs; GPS devices (which pick up transmissions from GPSO satellite transponders; satellite map systems; and of course there is also saturation satellite and terrestrial wireless broadcasting of radio/TV channels. A great deal of the civilian applications use electronic devices that either receive or emit electromagnetic radiation during operation, either by design or as a byproduct of their function.

Following the USS Texas' visit to New Zealand in 1983, the potential for ships' radar to damage unshielded electronic equipment was recognised and resulted in an unenforceable local bylaw being passed in Wellington, requiring ships to turn off their radar before they entered the harbour. Wellington city is based around a large and beautiful semicircular harbour, and most of the city extends around the docks for large ships. The Texas' radar knocked out some of the main telecoms exchange equipment in Wellington, causing major disruption in the PSTN for an extended period.
At my home approx. 40 kilometres away, my old QUAD electrostatic speakers picked up the Texas' radar quite clearly.
When the HMS Invincible visited Wellington on a world tour following the Falklands war with Argentina (where the Invincible had been the battle command centre), my QUADs picked up the radar again, and when I was given a tour of that ship I was shown around the deserted battle action command and control deck, and I saw that their radar was still operational and that the image of the harbour with its ships was being displayed and was refreshing on a large monitor screen at a desk nearby.

The CPO (Chief Petty Officer) giving me the tour explained that the radar was always "ON" as it was being continually used by the automatic defence systems that could take out a high-speed missile aimed at the ship. The business end of this defence system was housed in what looked like giant pepper-pots with white-domed tops, located on the fore and aft decks. The system had been hastily fitted to the ships in the Falklands war, after two British vessels had been taken out with French-made Exocet missiles launched by aircraft at a distance of 70-odd nautical miles away.
No prospect of more Falklands or Pearl Harbour-type losses now.

The CPO then demonstrated for me how the radar could be used to target a vessel some distance away in the harbour. I was allowed to roll a mouseball embedded into the desk top, and crosshairs moved on the radar screen. By placing the crosshairs over a vessel blip and pressing a button nearby, the vessel was targetted by GPS and linked in via satellite with a remote database of shipping registers and shipping manifests describing known vessel movements. This identified the vessel by likely name, type specification, owner, insurer, flag and friend/foe status, etc. - these target details all appeared rapidly on the radar screen after a slight lag. If, during war status, the vessel was determined to be a foe and was to be engaged, then one press of a big red button to the right of the desk could unleash all hell and the vessel would be blown out of the water by various means. (The CPO told me not to worry about this because the red button was always disabled except when there was a war engagement status.)

The rate of technological development over the last 75 years or so has been astounding and seems to have been continuously accelerating. We now rely on that technology to an extent where we dare not switch it off. We are dependent on it for our entertainment, our communication, our health, for restarting our hearts, piloting our aircraft, trains and cars, running our computers and IT networks - the list is endless. At the same time, the amount of electromagnetic pollution caused by this technology will have necessarily grown at a great rate. Yet we keep on adding to the pollution, saturating the ether with electomagnetic radiation without knowing for sure whether or how it will adversely affect us or our property in any way (e.g., gamma irradiation of foodstuffs; satellite and wireless radio/TV broadcasts; satellite telecoms; satellite imaging; mobile telephone systems; offshore ships' radar) or cause genetic destruction (e.g., X-rays at the dentist and now at the airports).

Rather than kill or sterilise the planet from chemical pollution, who knows but that we may kill or sterilise ourselves first through electromagnetic pollution?
How will we know whether we have had sufficient or too much?

[app103]

So, if we get a lot more technology into the hands of people living in overpopulated 3rd world countries, we may be able to raise their quality of life and reduce their populations all in one shot? 

[40hz]

So, if we get a lot more technology into the hands of people living in overpopulated 3rd world countries, we may be able to raise their quality of life and reduce their populations all in one shot?  

-app103 (October 23, 2011, 05:00 AM)

Hmm...Doesn't seem to be working in any of the overpopulated industrial nations. Guess that would require a two-pronged approach. First, continue to skyrocket the cost of medical care until only the upper 10% of the population can afford it - then, bring on the rads!!!
 



 

[IainB]

@app103:

So, if we get a lot more technology into the hands of people living in overpopulated 3rd world countries, we may be able to raise their quality of life and reduce their populations all in one shot?

Well, I hadn't thought of it that way... (shakes head at such cynicism).

[mahesh2k]

So, if we get a lot more technology into the hands of people living in overpopulated 3rd world countries, we may be able to raise their quality of life and reduce their populations all in one shot?

Take a look at this ad. It's already going that way. (it's not in english but y'll figure out somehow)

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=EqtB-IaeEo8

[IainB]

Following @mahesh2k's comment, and on reflection, there may be some truth to what @app103 and @40hz suggested in what I hope was jest - but there may be a significantly different implication for Western society.

If PMI (Philip Morris International) can be given unfettered monopoly marketing rights to flog tobacco products to Indonesian (and other 3rd world) children and adults, and if this is likely to have the usual known and statistically predictable effects on the health and death rate of the general population as they pass the age of 40 - i.e., they are likely to die off quicker due to a reduced health and life expectancy - then the relative size of the proportion of the population of consumers in the 35+ age bracket is likely to reduce significantly.

The group that marketers usually target is sometimes called the optimum consumers - or "OC". Statistically the OC have (or have access to) the necessary personal disposable income and have the propensity to consume, and so do actually consume the most. This optimum group is defined as being roughly in the age range of 15 to 35. After that upper age, their potential consumption rate - and contribution to profitability - drops off markedly, so they are typically regarded as being "a waste of space" for consumer marketing purposes.
The lower age limit seems to be because consumption at lower ages is constrained mainly by the basic ability to communicate needs and translate that into consumption.

So, PMI may have it exactly right: condition the consumer to want to smoke as soon as possible after they have come out of the womb, making the product cheap and affordable. This makes the OC group much larger, as it could typically consist of all people in the age range 2 to 35.
The OC will become a captive (addicted) market for their now limited lifespan - which is likely to terminate by around age 45, by which time they will have been able to consistently consume heaps of product and will have experienced great enjoyment of doing so (so everybody benefits), and they will have had time to procreate, and their offspring will undergo the same conditioning starting from year 1 or 2.
If you simultaneously alter conventional mores and encourage a lax attitude towards having casual and unprotected sex (making it "cool" to smoke before/during/after sex, for example, and using suggestive slogans like "A Marlboro tastes better without a filter") at the onset of puberty, and making single mums and teenage pregnancies the acceptable norm, then your OC will sustain its own population growth along with the growth of your profits.

This would be a near-perfect sustainable and self-sustaining marketing model.

Now shift to Western societies and their use of tech and exposure to the spectrum of its attendant radiation.
If the PMI model looks pretty damned effective, then consider that the prototype for this model may well have been in trial in the West for about 65 years, and is only able to be perfected in 3rd-world countries due to the lack of resistance you might generally get from the ignorant and/or uneducated when you attempt to indoctrinate/manipulate them. ("Allahu akbar!" ... "KA-BOOM!")

If the OC in the Western economies is pretty well set at the 15 to 35 age group, then they may well be regarded as a "sunset" market - i.e., they have become increasingly better-educated, less ignorant and sophisticated to the extent that they can usually see through most marketing ploys compared to their unwitting and malleable 3rd-world counterparts - so the best thing you could do with that OC group is to convert it to the PMI model, or kill them in trying to do that.
The latter (kill them) makes a lot of sense as you could mercilessly milk the OC group to death so as to maximise profits in the shorter term at least, and then exit that market when the majority of consumers are literally quite dead.
So, change the product approach. Incrementally introduce new technology in such a way and into so many aspects of life as it becomes ubiquitous and an essential "need":

Whether we like it or not, technology is now a need.

-Paul Keith (October 19, 2011, 10:35 PM)

Make sure that the tech products produce lots of radiation, so that you can reduce the health and life expectancy of the useless "waste of space" 40+ age group. Hopefully, any potential byproduct sterilisation effects of the radiation will not have had time to affect the OC group members' fertility until after the teenage pregnancy years are past.

Bingo! You have another near-perfect consumption model!

I would have been unable to see the truth of this marketing model with such clarity if it had not been for the erudite comments of @app103 and @40hz.
In conclusion, I think that, to play my part as a member of the 35+ age group and so as to make the greatest market contribution, the best thing for me right now would be to go out and buy the 1GW version of the POWERLINK PL-APN Boost N 802.11b/g/n AP Router. I really need that baby. That should give me an approx 200-mile range (depending on environment), and if I plug it in and place it near my bed it should be "sweet as".

I wonder if they sell any of these with a picture of Angelina Jolie stuck on the top...? That would be awesome!
Come to think of it, I may even change my DC Forum ID to "1GW". You can stick that in your frequency oscillator and rotate, @40hz!        

[40hz]

on reflection, there may be some truth to what @app103 and @40hz suggested in what I hope was jest

-IainB (October 23, 2011, 08:09 PM)

Getting your radiation RDA with your technology.

It was. Excessively cynical perhaps. But a jest nonetheless. Chalk it up to my exposure to that Canary Pier/"Everything is OK" video I posted elsewhere. (Lord do I admire those two guys!)

Of course that does nothing to change my current considered opinion that we will ultimately bring ourselves to the brink of destruction and utter misery before we finally get our heads, as a species, screwed on straight. But that's a topic for another discussion thread. And preferably conducted somewhere other than at DonationCoder.
 

[app103]

Following @mahesh2k's comment, and on reflection, there may be some truth to what @app103 and @40hz suggested in what I hope was jest

-IainB (October 23, 2011, 08:09 PM)

Yes, I was kidding, but as they say, there is no such thing as a truly original thought, so if I thought of it then somewhere someone else already has too, and maybe he wasn't joking. And I suspect that every big company (and many small ones) all have on their payroll a guy whose job it is to stay awake all night and think up ways to screw over both customers and employees to maximize profits. And this guy keeps his job by thinking up things we will accept without too much grumbling, and may even like....at least long enough to allow ourselves to be willingly exploited. And by the time we figure out what is going on, it's too late...they have all our money and we have misery wrapped in shiny paper with a bow and a corporate logo.

[IainB]

@40hz: Ahaha. U made me larf.
That's Angelina? Amazing what Photoshopping can do, methinks.
She does look irradiated though. Great wig.

Yes, the Canary Wharf vids were superb.

I think I might copyright some of the marketing epiphanies in my comment post, and go and ask for a job at PMI. I reckon they could use my sort of "out-of-the box" thinking. The Box - that's what we call the asylum where I am currently accommodated, but I'll be outta here next Friday - they give us a certificate of sanity, on our release too.

(And yes, of course I knew you were in jest and being cynical.
I, on the other hand, was being perfectly serious.)   

[40hz]

@IanB- it's her in a wig which she wore for a Vanity Fair photoshoot. The wig was allegedly her idea too.

See here and scroll down.