A New Leaf

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.

via DF and MR.

This is the kind of thing I sit around thinking about all day.

No pictures from India yet, sorry. Working on it. I went to the Apple store today to get a new iMac – a little enormous birthday present to myself. The 27″ monitor is bigger than my field of vision. Anyway, this machine comes with a photo collection tool called “iPhoto” which has the nifty ability to recognize faces in photographs. Nifty, except that it seems to have trouble telling the difference between twins.

iPhoto can't tell the difference between identical-ish twins?

Since two of the four people who read this blog use a Mac, I thought I’d point out that Amazon is taking pre-orders for the new version of OS X (“Snow Leopard”), and that I get a small kickback if you use this link to purchase. Only $29.