On cellular phones and EMR physiological effects in general

A long-time acquaintance asked a question of me regarding possible effects of cellular phone usage on a person's split-second decisions. So I thought some of my ponderings about that would make a potentially useful blog post here, in my blog that seems unnoticed by others, or at least disdained. He had originally forwarded an article about electric car EMR proclamations. My reply is as follows, more or less:

Thanks for forwarding the EMR electric car item to me. I guess I replied too heavily. I have looked into the car EMR thing for over a decade and concluded that car manufacturers fixed the problem in later models OK. But the new electric cars, I don't know; would have far larger field strengths to start with, and who knows if the engineers that had fixed the older cars' EMR problems, might have not left a legacy for the newer folks. That was mostly a leukemia problem, BTW.

The case you are considering about the cell phone effects on brains and subtle decisions people make, is an important one, in my opinion.

There are large numbers of factors involved in making such decisions, and separating them out to make a particular one causative in a specific instance, such as you have described, is not easy to do.

Anatomy and neural configurations with the dynamic signal patterns ongoing, might well determine the result, if one could define all that down to the moment of decision. So one needs to make the problem smaller in hopes of making it workable to a solution.

One of the persons could be in a greater hurry, and mind engrossed in the urgent task about to be done, and stepped off the curb early so as to get a head start, but was distracted from checking re oncoming cars, by the busy thoughts. Lots of inputs could have caused the failure to stop-look-listen at that moment.

And one kind of that thought process disruption could be due to EMR effects, I think. Could be, but not necessarily so.

This is beyond the distraction effects if the person has a cell phone to ear and is talking on the phone when stepping off the curb, of course. And also beyond the subtle unobvious effects people sometimes have on each other, unrelated to cell phones and EMR. And of course is beyond the games people play against each other at times, which can get quite unobvious and even lethal if set up just right. The turmoil of bunches of people's doings is usually mostly beyond my comprehension, and too often of tragic results.

Much of my life has been spent in the presence of EMR of many kinds. It was involved in my career in electronics, as an incidental factor. I eventually came to the conclusion that there are injurious electrical fields, but one can deal with them if one knows about them and puts a bit of distance between oneself and the source.

I have concluded at this point that there are three basic kinds of EMR that can be injurious to a person, and they all blend into each other in some ways. They range from the high powered directed microwave beam that can cause a severe headache in a brief moment of being hit by it, and the resulting headache and thought disruption can last for weeks afterwards; I have been the target of such a weapon used from a vehicle but I had seen the microwave transmitter horn aimed at me too, thus was able to figure out something of the source, if not the reason. This appears to not be an accidental thing but rather a deliberate assault kind of thing. Other kinds of microwave beams can instead take a longer time but be a bit like being slowly cooked in a microwave oven, also a sneaky assaultive thing. Back at the end of the Cold War, the Soviets sold a technology to an American group, that used microwaves supposedly for sedating rowdy patients in mental hospitals from a distance - and no doubt other folks, too, as some people are ever making clever power plays on each other.

The second basic type of potentially injurious EMR is of much shorter range and much lower frequency. The common wall warts that plug into wall AC sockets to power our many electronic gadgets is one example of this kind of source. But the range of such signals is quite short, staying a few inches away often is enough for safety, as well as not being there physically very long. Some electric motors, like used in some small fans, or even older electric clocks, can put out a huge EMR field that can at least temporarily fog up a person's thinking, and might cause long lasting mental disruption. The back part of the old CRT type computer monitors were also a source of this problem, especially in the early ones; but it was not entirely solvable, so the flat screen LCD computer screens are much better - though they have their own shorter range problem from their back lighting.

The third type of EMR problem is one of my own hypotheses and have not read of it anywhere in the literature. I would call it "pattern effects" and is quite mysterious to me; it seems to be an effect caused by the pattern of electrical circuitry and steady state signals ongoing in them, and has an effect only at very close distance.

All three of the above could be ongoing when one has a cellular phone to one's ear. There is the short wavelength radio frequency being emitted by the antenna. There is the low frequency magnetic fields by transformers in its power supply, in some phones. And finally, the incidental effects of the pattern of the electrical circuitry and recurrent signals flowing through them.

Whether any or all of these factors is causing a problem short or long term with a given person, is not known unless properly evaluated. And that would not be easy to do. And there is no incentive by the cellular phone people to pay to evaluate, especially if there were possibility that it might not be in their favor. Corporations usually have a physicist talk about effects of a motionless magnet of some field strength, and falsely imply that its benign effects are the same as an alternating magnetic field of the same strength. And there are many kinds of cell phones, each would need to adequately be evaluated. It is not being done, as far as I know.

There are also the previously mentioned lower frequency-specific effects of alternating magnetic fields, affecting some bodily functions, as played with by Tesla among others - remember the white-suited Mark Twain incident I mentioned.

I also have had a long time hobby that is frequency specific, but involves essentially no magnetic fields, but instead uses the small currents delivered between a couple of copper pipe handholds at a voltage around 9 volts. These are pulsed signals, and follows discoveries made by others far more informed in the field than I am. But I have built and tested instruments that push the envelope a bit and thus give me a sense of doing something potentially useful to mankind. Not likely to be used - people consider me a nobody and thus to be ignored - but I make the possibility happen. Among them are very specific bioresonant frequency signals that appear to target some kinds of parasites that sometimes set up housekeeping in the brain, such as Ascaris or Shigella flexneri; and thus the signals can help remove a potential disruptor of a person's mental function a little, if done correctly. Seems to be helping me, for example. I have made a couple web pages about that, see
http://www.audioprogrammedzapper.com/ if interested.

I consider it best to use a headset for a cell phone, and have the cell phone itself kept in a carrying case down away from the head and preferably from important internal organs, and have something keeping it away from the body an inch or two. Or, in my case, keep the cell phone turned off unless needing to make a call or waiting for a call to arrive in a brief time, thus minimizing the exposure time.

And it is important to have enough of one's attention to be utilized in self awareness and ongoing situational awareness, to avoid the distraction factor too, but that is not necessarily part of the EMR thing, although ongoing EMR might also subtly interfere with the instantaneous decision-making of the brain.

People do not generally ask my opinion about such things, so I hope I have not bored you too much with my taking the opportunity to pour out my otherwise unexpressed opinions on the subject. Thanks for asking, it helps my frustration about it all, a bit.

Equipment can usually be designed to reduce most of such problems to a low level; but, people must actually do that, or it does not get done, and thus things become haphazard as they are now. And overall it involves some factors not taught in college electronics engineering. And, a person can only deal with so much complexity at any given time, including engineers; and their managers might not know or care.

Ruminating about life principles and my place in it all

Another Superbowl Sunday has come and gone now, yet brings to mind football's apparent symbolism. Common male attitude of the world was to get on a team of males, act with them to undermine other males; small contests within one's own male team to climb in status hierarchy within the team; and females will obediently mate with your team if it wins against other male teams, and the higher your ranking in your team, the better opportunities you have for mating.

Taking a wife is mostly like receiving a prize for success and how pretty she is controls some of your status in the male group hierarchy. And this all is to maximize the male's reproductive success,who then strives to continue that whole system of being. Having a wife who believes her success is totally from the success of her man, she will subsequently use her resources to strengthen her husband's successes.

The archetype is for males to strive to prevent other males from reproducing with the females, so as to force the females to be limited to you as their only mate.

This gets spread a bit when lots of males exist, and a single male can be subdued by a group of males; thus the changeover to being part of a team which then strives against other teams, and also easily wipes out lone males not in teams, so as to force the females to not have the option of mating with those lone males nor other team's members.

Early in college I got enthusiastic about the home games; rah rah for the home team and boos for the opponents. I was more aware of the intensity of the excitement of the fans in the stands, than I was for the playing going on down on the field, however.

My one experience in playing football was in college PE class, which gave one personal experience in football, baseball and basketball. I clearly was unable to be adequately aware of what the rest of my team was doing, and my part in it all; and even less so aware of what the opponent team was up to. And I just didn't "get" the part about being physically violent to other people, either. At best i could carry out the appearances of functioning on the team.

This had strange consequences at times, beside the inevitable misfortune ones. For example, when I was put in the place of a lineman on the football team, best I could figure out what to do was from my memories of seeing bullfights, where the bull strove to bash the opponent with his head. So when I was paired up with the largest - and roundest - member of the opponent team - me being quite scrawny and on the short side - when the play happened where I was told to "block" him, I dove at him to bump into him with my head. Well, this did not work very well and fortunately did not injure me - I think. But later when I was exploring a fraternity, and joined it - SAE - and one of them was the same large round young man, who promptly gave me the derisive nickname "Funk El Toro," the inept bull.

Skipping over my subsequent problems with low finances, Asperger's syndrome with no support, getting severe tinnitus in Freshman year, getting ADD and gluten intolerance problems unwittingly, dropping out of the Co-op program with White Sands Missile Range where I worked as an electronics technician, then finally dropping out of the Physics major and trying a Psych major for one semester then throwing in the towel re a formal degree; I just could not cope with the unceasing internal distractions to be able to learn anymore.

A friend sent me email re back when computers were changing over from use of vacuum tubes into using tansisors, and the playout of the above is apparent in my reply this morning, and so I will modify it a bit and put it here.

Apparently thoughts set off in my email talking about computer bits in memory and of when a bit required two vacuum tubes, a simple type called a triode, because it involved three basic parts: cathode with its heater to boil off electrons, plate to receive those electrons when it had a positive voltage applied relative to the cathode, and the grid, which was a sieve through which those electrons had to flow to to get to the plate, and the electrostatic field of the negative voltage applied to the grid, determined how easy it was for the electrons to find their way to the positive voltage plate.

Electrons have an inherent negative charge.

When transistors came along, they worked somewhat similarly, in that they were composed of three sections: the Emitter - which was similar to the vacuum tube's Cathode; the Collector - which was similar to the vacuum tubes Plate; and the Base - which was similar to the vacuum tube's Grid.

Thus transistors fit right in with the two vacuum tube triodes replaced in function by two transistors.

However, transistors were in many ways different from the vacuum tube triodes.


They operated at much lower voltages and power they used, was their main advantage at first.

But the huge racks of hot vacuum tubes along with the big air conditioning units to keep they cool enough, got replaced by transistors to save power and cooling, which got to be a big deal when huge numbers of the components were needed to do something, like in the computers of the time.

Also, the conduction of current within transistors was not limited to the electron flow, as were vacuum tubes, but also current could flow in the form of "holes" where an electron could be but wasn't. So transistors using this mode operated the opposite of the electron mode type.

These two kinds of transistors were identified by the voltage applied to each of their three sections, to make them work.

The one that used electron flow mainly was called the "NPN" type, and the type that used the flow of "holes" was called "PNP" - "N" stood for Negative voltage, and "P" stood for Positive voltage.

And the sequence NPN or PNP referred to the emitter - base - collector sections of the transistor.

The NPN and PNP designation still persists to this day, as well as does NPN vs PNP transistors.

And thus the motivation to do the conversion between vacuum tubes to transistors which you spoke of.

Another part of all this is the reason why two triodes or two transistors were needed to create one bit of data.

They were paired in a circuit called a flip-flop, which was a circuit contrived such that when one transistor was conducting current, the other was prevented from conducting current, by the other transistor.

But an outside-sourced signal could cause the pair of transistors or vacuum tube triodes, to swap states, whatever one that had been conducting before, turned off and the previously non-conducting one turned on.

And stayed that way until it got another external signal causing it to flip back to the other state.

One triode or transistor being on was a "1" for the bit; or if the other triode or transistor was on, the state of the flip-flop was a "0" for the bit.

Other types of transistors were developed too, which would change the kind of circuitry.

Particularly the FET or Field Effect Transistor, which was even more like the vacuum tube triode than the regular transistor, and also needed less power to operate, and thus has become what is mostly used in complex circuitry that needs to draw low power and stay cool.

When the need to minimize mass- weight - when launching spacecraft came along, Integrated Circuits were invented, to greatly reduce the weight and power consumption of the flip-flops in it.

Yet these flip flops were still of the transistor types NPN, PNP or FET, just made very tiny and included the resistors and capacitors that were part of each flip-flop.

My friend had written some recollections of her participation in the early days of computers.

And also of the interactions between the other males involved, how they squabbled amongst each other during routine times, to show who was "better" than someone else, yet they switched to the cooperative mode when the fortunes of all of them went up or down depending on how well they all produced as a harmonious team.

My life as a technician is now more understandable, since I did not know how to squabble and thus was always the low man in any group, yet I was also quite competent in my work, which did not jibe with being low man in the group.

Supervisors would usually then set me aside to take on some loner job that required special competence to do.

But sometimes my high skill level, yet low man status, since it did not support the "competitive" nature of their world, I would be put on a loner task that was thought to not be possible for one person to do alone - apparently to break me - but I did not know that - and sometimes I was able to do it, which must have upset them a lot, in their ego ruled games on the job, now that I think of it.

But usually it turned out that managers appreciated my excellent solutions, and despite my lowest-man group status, I got promotions anyway.

It all irritated my peers of course and sometimes they retaliated.

They did not accept me as a peer, probably because my psychetype was the opposite normally had by a technician, and people prefer to buddy up with same type of psychetype+gender. (My psychetype was more appropriate for work as a teacher or writer, than as a hands-on manipulator of the physical world.)

What my fellow techs did not understand, was that I had been quite bright in high school and got a college grounding both self-taught and in first classes in physics in college, before I got hit by the severe tinnitus, gluten digestive system damage, and ADD, which had suddenly changed me from my prior reading rate of 750 wpm with comprehension, to not being able to remember what I had just read on the previous page. Very hard to study and learn that way.

And also that when working in the FAA, I went through their electronics training that was the equivalent of what an electronics engineer would learn in college; but it was not accredited and thus was unrecognized by employers, but peers did not understand my competency - which was part of their compulsive need to align in a hierarchy that supposedly was based on competency.

But that electronics education was back in the vacuum tube era, and I had to self-teach and take a correspondence course to learn about the early transistors.

And all the rest re Integrated Circuits, computers and lasers etc I learned on my own, often so as to do my work on the job - much as I had learned much of what I knew when graduating from High School - I was disappointed when I was denied college chemistry because college entrance testing showed that I already knew more chemistry than would someone who took basic college chemistry, for example.

My early jobs in electronics involved all-male co-workers.

It wasn't until my middle years in private industry jobs, that women became part of the work groups, first as "wire girls" for their craftsmanship in building things; and in the 1980s some women were showing up as engineers in the groups.

In my retired years this mostly self-taught transistorized electronics knowledge enables me to create such things as on my page
http://www.audioprogrammedzapper.com/zapper2012creation.html

In some of those IC's are many hundreds of transistors, making it lots easier for me to design and build such things.

You are an engineer ....

Attempting today to figure out what can be saved from an external HD needed be cleared to take over some duty as supplementary disk drive space for my computer, I stumbled upon a scan of a letter that I assume has been stolen from my "secure" files in my garage, along with the ones that I know have gone, the very expert burglars who ever seem to be searching for ways to harm me.

This letter was written by my boss at the time of the peak of my career. It is a dim scan and hard to read, and was not very clear as the original. Handwritten, two pages, it was a letter handed to me at the time I (along with a room-full of other engineers) were similarly being processed through in a RIF. I had glanced at it in my daze, read a few words, saw that he was urging me to remain an engineer. Not much else filtered through my dismay at this latest difficulty in my life.

Not long before that, my father had suddenly passed away in distant New Mexico. A few months after that, the always-difficult relationship with my girlfriend had finally broken up (due to the endless pressure from her many significant others which included five mostly-grown kids, a husband who turned out was not divorced from her, and a hustler of strange relationship intensely with her; as soon as I had used much of my savings to rent a 4-bedroom house for she,her kids and I to live in, they immediately and endlessly battered me to leave, despite my desperate last-ditch efforts to have a relationship at long last, I just could not hold it all together with no help. She liked me, however; but none of the others did.) So I was still recovering from shock of my father's passing, my girlfriend and I breaking up, and I was sometimes living in my car and sometimes in a rented room somewhere, when this RIF also happened.

It was not just this bunch of engineers being laid off, a whole industry was collapsing in Silicon Valley at the same time, based on the flexible disk drive technology. It had been taken over by low-cost-manufacturing Asia; and without the manufacturing base to support engineering, engineering went too. The industry had been so prevalent that it was sometimes said that it ought to be called "Ferrite Valley" instead of "Silicon Valley."

A long story from there to the here & now. Suffice it to say that I was a non-degreed electronics engineer, competing with a huge overabundance of degreed electronic engineer for the same few jobs. Even personnel office staff clearly hated anybody who did not have a degree who applying for a position normally reserved for those who had endured the rigors of getting a formal degree, how dare he do such a thing; they would not even let me apply for a technician job.

It has been a bumpy road from here to there. I guess no other path would have gotten me here, exactly here.

Yet having stumbled upon this scan that I had made long ago, suspecting that hardcopies might vanish, a letter that I had thought about several times in recent times, was like finding a treasure. But, I could not read it coherently because of the very distracting dim handwriting. So I decided to transcribe it, so as to be able to read it well. At long last.

And in so doing, I see I missed a real opportunity back then. He might even still be alive now - but I won't go into that, since it involves a hobby of mine, which is resented by much too powerful folks, and I have prattled in this blog about it already a lot.

Anyway, here is the transcription of his note to me, with the Shugart logos and company addresses etc left off. Note at the time, my nickname had been changed to "Jed" as they were my initials - first name and two middle names - in a place full of Jim's and Tim's that all sounded alike.

"Jed,
I am most chagrined and not a little upset that I could not be here to give you this bad news personally, and to support you. However, the balance was between the importance of this trip for Shugart and our immediate and future tasks and the fact that Rudy knows you well and regards you as highly as I do.

Because of this, I know he will in all respects be a surrogate for me.

I think you had some premonition of this event, but you should clearly understand that it is in no way indicative of my feelings toward you or your abilities.

The plain fact is that this reduction has faced assessment on the basis only of any potential duplication of skills and knowledge which are most locally relevant to our tasks.

I am most concerned that this event not stop you from continuing to grow as an engineer. I perceive you as a very sensitive person and that you have been beginning to overcome some of your own self doubts, and to project your inner confidence, and I urge you to continue this trend.

You are an engineer, all you have to do is to continue to demonstrate this! No person, or engineer for that matter, is an island unto themselves.

growth therefore always will depend upon questing for knowledge and understanding, and this comes as much from asking as from reading or doing.

I feel you will do well and paradoxically feel that in some respects this change will be good for you, I just wish I could have continued to guide and lead you.

Even though I do not know where you will end up, I hope it will be in Shugart, please feel free to come and ask me for advise and information, I am more than eager to help you in any way I can.

Yours Sincerely,
Alastair Heaslett "

The last paragraph I do not remember ever having read before. If I had followed that opportunity, my subsequent career and life might well be quite different from the way it is now.

So I now have another one of those "if only ...." things to be on my mind.

Another significant point about all this, is that Alastair was the main reason I was an electronics engineer; he talked me into it. Several years before, it had come time for me to get a raise, and he told me that I was already receiving the highest pay given to a Senior Engineering Technician, and could go no further, in terms of pay.

However, he went on, if I were to take the title of electronics engineer, I could continue to get pay increases.

I told him I did not want to be an engineer, that would require me to be too rigid thinking analytical minded; I preferred to be free to use my full capacity. He told me that I had already been doing the work of an engineer for the past year and a half; I would just continue doing what I had been doing.

So, with some misgivings, I accepted. And thus formally became a design/development electronics engineer. And a year later became a second level one.

And a year after that, the big RIF.

The letter was urging me to continue on with my capacity as a design/development electronics engineer. And the last of the letter, was not even read, where he offered to help me do that.

How different it could have been, had I done that.

In a blog post here a couple of years ago, I mentioned Alastair Heaslett; I then had received a comment from a woman saying that she was his daughter and that he had passed away long ago of cancer, at a fairly young age.

Yet despite my difficulties in my subsequent career in electronics, in which I never again reached the title of engineer, I think that Alastair's belief in me may have propelled me on to do engineering level work as a hobby, both when employed and in retirement. I had mixed it in with my lifelong interest in space, and came up with the "Centristation" and "KESTS to GEO" major concepts as part of that (I was working as a tech in a small car alarm manufacturing company when I did the major creation and development of those space transportation concepts) and even more pertinent, in the design-development-test-usage of the electro-herbalism instruments I currently create as a hobby, that I think can help mankind very much. For my latest instrument's design including schematics, see http://www.audioprogrammedzapper.com/zapper2012creation.html

Ref posts:
http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2010/03/writing-sci-fi-re-management.html
http://kestsgeojedc.blogspot.com/2010/06/rewarding-comment-from-former-post.html