Cell Phones Do Not Cause Cancer
Granted, perhaps mine is a premature conclusion, but I feel pretty confident making it. Newspapers have to drive traffic, so they use different headlines, like “Cellphone Radiation May Cause Cancer”, though the proper headline is something boring like “No Compelling Evidence Linking Cellphone Radiation to Cancer”.
The WHO says (pdf):
The evidence was reviewed critically, and overall evaluated as being limited among users of wireless telephones for glioma and acoustic neuroma, and inadequate to draw conclusions for other types of cancers. The evidence from the occupational and environmental exposures mentioned above was similarly judged inadequate.
where “limited” means:
A positive association has been observed between exposure to the agent and cancer for which a causal interpretation is considered by the Working Group to be credible, but chance, bias or confounding could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence.
In other words, they cannot reject the hypothesis that cell phone usage does not increase the risk of cancer. Looking at summaries of the evidence does not change my mind; there is really only one study that finds a statistically significant increase in cancer risk. And if you pool it with the other data points, there is no effect at all:
Also, if you ask University of Maryland physics professor Bob Park about it, he will say:
All cancers are caused by mutant strands of DNA. Electromagnetic radiation can’t create mutant strands of DNA unless the frequency is at or higher than the blue limit of the visible spectrum the near-ultraviolet. The frequency of cell phone radiation is about 1 million times too low.
around the world
I can’t believe I didn’t already know about this: for a few thousand dollars, you can buy a “round the world” ticket that lets you spend a year flying anywhere in the world, as long as it’s fewer than 16 segments and you decide on the cities in advance.
Here’s a sample itinerary:
- San Francisco
- Vancouver
- Washington DC
- Buenos Aires
- Madrid
- Cairo
- Warsaw
- Tashkent
- Beijing
- Honolulu
- Chicago
- San Francisco
This has 16 flight segments (Tashkent adds 3 or 4 by itself, I think) for a total of 34,771 miles of travel and costs only $8,137. Which is a lot of money, but if you are not paying rent and travelling frugally, it’s doesn’t seem so out of reach. Also, consider that this is 16 flights, so the cost per flight is around $500. You can save money by not originating in the North America, or by travelling a smaller number of miles. And you can change the dates of the flights as many times as you want, without any of those service charges they usually hit you with when you change an itinerary.
Also, it looks like the other major “round the world” ticket, from the oneworld airline network, is cheaper and has more straight-forward pricing. The “six continent” economy fare is only $7099.
Where would you go if you had one of these tickets?
Mumbai
Photos from Mumbai and trips to the surrounding countryside in Maharashtra. (The full set is here.)
Software is designed
This is the kind of thing I sit around thinking about all day.
Tax plans
Stark comparison of Republican and Democratic tax plans by the Washington Post. It’s such a rare thing these days to compare tax proposals by looking at average benefit to an individual. So often it takes the form of “$X trillion tax cut will explode the deficit.” But at the end of the day, tax policy is complex – taxes affect different people in very different ways.
Reprinted here without permission:
Madness
I don’t know if anyone noticed that the latest Mad Men episode (413 – Tomorrowland) ends with Sony and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” – a clear reference to Groundhog Day. What an awesome television show.
What you get for… 5 years
This, plus a lucite “plaque” and a telescope. Or a travel fishing set.
tt1104 (17k) vs natec (?)
Rated game 2. What a wild fight – white captured 20 stones, and black 21. The fast pace of the game (5 minutes for 25 moves) keeps things interesting.
For those of you who are curious, I am playing on “IGS” (internet Go server), an old-school text-console server with several GUI clients (like Goban) that make playing against other players easy.
Result: victory by 4.5 points.
TaTu 17k vs natec (?)
I am trying to establish my IGS rank, which requires 20 rated games. Here is the first. Move 31 felt awkward just as I placed the stone. The alternative was S4-S5-S3-R5-P2.
Result: victory (by forfeit on time).
Book Trailers?
A trivial and short-lived marketing experiment? I just don’t get it. It’s not a movie, people; it’s a book.
Witness: Simon & Schuster book trailers and Knopf Doubleday’s attempts. The KD trailers are better than S&S – they have better music, and don’t try to make you think it’s a movie. Because it’s not a movie. It’s a book.
