At 03:45 PM 3/2/2011, Jed Rothwell wrote:
I have heard about a guy living under high tension power lines who made a gadget to extract useful amounts of energy. Supposedly the power company sued him. It's outrageous if they actually did! Imagine bombarding his family with RF and then suing him for using it.
The question would be if his device increased the drain. It might. However, a fair settlement would be that he paid for the increased drain. He might still be ahead if he is using otherwise-wasted power.
The authorities still maintain there is no harm from power lines. I don't believe 'em. This is one time I side with conspiracy theorists, per Upton Sinclair's dictum: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Yeah.
Along the same lines, the letters to the editor in a recent edition of the Sci. Am. included several critiques of the assertion that cell phones cause no harm because the radiation is not strong enough to break chemical bonds. Some people wrote to say the same thing we said here: the heat alone may be a problem. The author responded by evading the issue and restating the obvious.
I dislike theory as a proof of anything. It should be possible to determine damage by experiment, and difficult only if the damage is confined to humans, in which case experimentation is iffy. Epidemiological studies remain possible, but they are not so conclusive, generally, way too many difficult-to-control variables.
