Sunday, January 15, 2012

ROBBLOG #366



How the heck does it work? 

I was thinking the other day about all this wireless stuff we use.
How does it work?
I don’t know. 

How does the WiFi here in the house travel through walls to reach another room. How does it go through the outer walls of the house to the verandah or the yard?
I don’t know. 

Then there are those huge towers that are all over the place. They send out wireless signals to our cell phones. These signals find us everywhere.
Around corners.
In our vans and cars and trucks.
Walking down the street or driving along a country lane. 

Then there’s the 3G and 4G.
Lock yourself in your bathroom.
It finds you.
Pick the furthest corner of your yard.
It’s right there.
Sitting by the lake and watching a summer sunset-
Yup, there too. 

How does it do it? 

I honestly don’t know but what I think is, if it goes through walls it must slice through us too. My phone rings when it’s tucked away in the breast of my winter coat or in a zippered pocket in my “murse” (that’s manbag for the uninitiated). 

It’s like magic when you think of it.

We take it for granted but those signals are around us and near us and through us every minute of every day. 

What about our health?
Do these waves of energy affect our well-being?
We’ve all heard the dangers that some experts believe exist when cell phones are pressed tightly to our ears. Then, there are the stories of folks who live close to those huge power lines that traverse farmer’s fields.
A higher incidence of headaches, cancers and such. 

It’ll take a few years to study the effects over a long periods of time. After all smoking and the resulting second-hand smoke was never thought to be a problem in the earlier decades of the last century. Our houses were plugged full of asbestos without a second thought. There are numerous other examples. 

In the meantime, we all go merrily along texting, calling, streaming and reading on a vast array of personal electronic devices. 

Does it mean we’ll all see health problems in the future? 

Haven’t a clue.