For quite a while there have been those amongst us who feel that it’s a good idea to wear a hat made from tinfoil, usually to stop aliens (or possibly the CIA) trying to control their minds. My attitude to this, at it’s most benevolent, is something along the lines of ‘they don’t do me any harm,’ though even with my limited fashion sense you wouldn’t catch me wearing a foil accessory.
However, I have resorted to my own equivalent of the tinfoil hat. I have a wireless network transmitter in my office, less than a metre away from my head (and, specifically, my already challenged brain). While I absolutely accept that the risk of radiation from wi-fi is slight (see this BBC report), it still does slightly worry me – so I now have a tinfoil screen between me and the transmitter.
Is this stupid? Quite possibly. Certainly my long-time correspondent Professor Guenter Nimtz of the University of Cologne would say so. Prof Nimtz very kindly helped out with interviews for my first popular science book Light Years (out next month in a new edition) where he told me about his most publicized work on superluminal signals, but he has also written a lot on the way that risks from mobile phones etc. have been exaggerated. All I can say in my defence is it doesn’t do any harm, and the foil is hidden behind my LCD monitor, so it isn’t particularly unsightly.
PS – I did toy with including a picture of the foil, but not only could I not be bothered to get the camera out etc., you know what a piece of tinfoil looks like. Use your imagination!
Be careful, if the foil is too reflective you might be inadvertedly creating an interference pattern in the room, and if one of the antennas in the network happens to be over a node, this will force both the machine and the access-point to work in their maximum powers, thus throwing huge ammounts of radiation everywhere else. Some might even bounce to your head, making your situation worse than before… The best solution is really a hat. It’s either this, or pay a coffee to your electrical engineering friend to supervise your photon shield project! :)
If it makes you happy, Brian :)
I worked in a radiochemistry lab for a few years and you would think that this would make me quite relaxed about “radiation in general”. This is not the case. It seems that for me, fear is an on-off switch rather than a continuum between relaxed and anxious. I was rightly taught to be careful about gamma rays etc and now the thought of walking about with any radiation source in my pocket just seems stupid. (self-mocking-smile rather than laugh-out-loud)
It’s very decorative, and saves making a Blue Peter advent crown at Christmas.
Bronwen, the funny thing about gamma emitters in biology is that they’re a lot less dangerous than beta emitters, because they go straight through without hitting anything: But it’s the 125-Iodine that people get most upset about.