Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • November 10, 2023 5:04 PM

@ Winter, emily’s post, ALL,

“Somehow, this does not include sunlight and sun’s UV.”

Look up the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation.

Further consider magnitude of any energy radiation. Some level keeps you warm, whilst higher levels causes things to be hot, and if only a little above body heat starts to cook.

By evolution living biological systems have developed ways to deal with this excess heat, thus we can live and function in 50C and for times a little higher.

There is nothing particularly magic in it.

As for direct radiative effects, we know many chemicals that come under “organic chemistry” break down in ordinary “visable light” without having to be in the various UV bands. The effect is small but over many years many plastics for instance are broken down.

The thing is the human body suffurs the same issue, but it’s constantly dying and replacing chemicals by synthesizing new ones.

As long as the bodies repair functions work, esspecially the parts to do with error correction we survive. However at some point an error will get in and get reproduced, and that is when things go wrong. What it takes to cause an error correction failure is something that is under active investigation in many labs around the world.

We also know that you can overwhelm the error correction system. The energy in UV-C destroys surface level DNA and RNA very quickly thus gives us the “anti-pathogenic” properties it has on viri, bacteria, and phages. The human body in part solves this by having layers of dead skin on the surface held there by lipids.

So an argument could be made that the use of soap and similar that causes those dead protective cells to be removed faster is not a good idea as it decreases your protection from sunlight and the higher frequencies.

As far as I’m aware nobody has yet done research into “cleanliness and cancer”. However research has been done on drivers and cancer… And it varies in “handedness” depending on which side the driving position is.

That is the parts of the body that face the windows where high angle sun can strike the body are more likely to be where cancers appear than other parts of the body.

The problem is that of those types of cancer they are all to often very easy to undergo metastasis. Which is the process where, some cells break away from the initial cancer site “primary tumour” and travel to another place in the body via one of the circulatory systems like the bloodstream.

One area of current research is how to stop metastasis, thus the cancer spreading. Thus at the very least improving life expectancy.

But the sad fact is human death by biological aging is kind of like tossing a coin. With Dementia being one face, and cancer the obverse. There will always be a few who get the rim effect and I guess that will increase as we get cancer and dementia causes sorted out and removed from our environment.

But honestly as an engineer who has suffered genuine RF burns and worked in electromagnetic fields as strong if not stronger than you get in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging”(NMRI) systems… I’m over the half century in that swamp and so far no noticable ill effects.

As for EV’s the fields are to be honest very low frequency thus the wavelengths are very long. We do know that the efficiency of a radiator is related to it’s size or loop area compared to the wavelength. Thus personal EV’s are not very efficient at radiating any EM fields they generate.

But for those “Where paranoia destroy yer” consider trains and other public transportation systems. Over all they can be quite large, if you consider the length of a train it could easily be an effective halfwave radiator down in the frequencies used by “series resonant” Switched Mode Regulators 😉

But seriously electromagnetic fields in the longer wavelengths are nothing new, nature has been saturating the Earth’s surface with them for more time than there has been known life on it. Arguably as such it may have created life.

Clive Robinson • November 10, 2023 9:20 PM

@ DB,

“How is the car going to get your”

By the usual two step method,

1, Direct measurements
2, Inference from measurands

Take body temprature, it varies from person to person and for women it has a cyclical variation around every four weeks.

The “heat sensor” for seat heating will measure that with sufficient accuracy when crossed with the ambient heat sensor.

To follow the cycle the car needs to know that an individual is driving… With electric assist for seating position set up for the press of a key fob the car has a distinquisher against which it can establish your sex.

Other sensors measure other things from which inferences can be made.

And lets be honest, way to many people put way way to much information in text messages be they just SMS text, or including pictures etc.

Remember the issues with Alexa having the mic on all the time?

Well have a look at all the stuff OnStar and similar record…

They can probably infrance from it when you break wind or scratch your backside and even if you are hungry.

Clive Robinson • November 11, 2023 10:27 AM

@ emily’s post,

“on the effects of electricity and EM in biological processes including healing of nerve tissue”

It’s not exactly unexpected, nearly all base biological processes can be shown to have some response to DC and LF AC currents, and we know from NMRI and microwave ovens basic organic molecules with oxygen in them like -OH tails resonate in VHF and above EM fields.

The increased healing effects from IR heating of deep flesh and bones where sprains and strains have caused insult, are fairly well documented and standard treatments.

From observational and some clinical testing it’s known that the likes of TENS can increase the bodies production of natural pain killers.

However other claims are not supported by documentation, sufficiently large observational trials, or double blind trials.

And it’s not helped in that respect for two basic reasons,

1, Trials are eye wateringly expensive to run.
2, There is no profit –in fact the opposit– for drug companies and the like to run such trials.

If you want to see a historical perspective on this look up “stomach ulcers” and how out of patent anti-biotics killed a faux market for very expensive ant-acid drugs (which the drugs companies are still pushing, but this time to protect the stomach from all the blood thinners like aspirin that get proflacticaly prescribed to prevent cardiovascular thrombosis, and strokes).