(can't resist this :-)

Am still amused at how groups of people can get together and conjure up evil & bogeymen when they don't understand something. One of my early careers was as a microwave engineer (microwave dish teletype transmission) & later a radar technitian (in the early to mid 1960s) so have had quite a bit to do with the substance & way it works, how it is generated, the effects it has etc:.

A minor digression ...

- When horseless carriages 1st came out there where people who called them evil (could't wrap their minds around a device that didn't need an animal to move it). Some older people refused to travel in horseless carraiges other than a hearse (this they couldn't argue about). In time that lot died off & that fear & paranoia died with them.

- When telephones 1st came out, there were people who expressed sentiments like "I aint gonna talk to no-one I caint see" - devils toy - etc: again as they died off so did their fear & paranoia. Their great granchildren & later
take telephony completely for granted.

- When electricity started to spread, that created massive fears in many people but also it fascinated those with enquiring minds. Today most people take it completely for granted.

- When flouride was added to water supplies there were people who fought viciously to have the process stopped. Some argued seriously that flouride was a communist plot to slowly poison the west. If I hadn't heard these people say so in person (at community meetings) I wouldn't have believed ordinary folk could get so incredibly & pathetically paranoid (as with radio waves, flouride is largely an invisible substance). In Australia we still have flouride in our water (mostly) & there is no evidence anyone has been poisoned by it. Dentistry as a profession declined in the 1980s & 1990s due to a severe decline in dental demand. The anti-louride paranoics are mostly still alive. Perhaps some have evolved intellectually & finally given up on that rant.

- When microwave ovens came out as commercial products (1970s) I bought a new heavy duty SANYO one from a health food restaurant for a very cheap price. I asked why they were selling it so cheap when it was brand new - they said they had just taken over the restaurant and were going to specialise in health food meals & they began heating people's food in it. So many of their tree-hugging customers threatened never to return if they kept 'irradiating' their food. I explained that the microwaves at 2.4 ghz merely agitated the water molecules in the food & there was nothing that even resembled 'radiation' (in the nuke sense) that came from these things. The owner said, yes he believed that but try telling the customers. In time most of these idiot people's children bought microwaves !!!. The parnoia on this issue seemed to have died but there is now a new twist to it.

- So today the microwave fears resurface - invisible radio waves (WiFi 2.4ghz)are 'irradiating' my children !!!. Ignore the massive amounts of radio signals of all frequencies in the ether and the air around us. Lets hone in on WiFi and kick the heck out of it. Ignore the fact that most wireless keyboards & mice & wireless phones (as distinct for cell phones) & microwave ovens use 2.4 ghz. These same idiots use microwave ovens to cook their food & are standing close to them when they do so. WiFi is new & we need to ramp up our paranoia. Perhaps lawyers are behind this one, tap in on the pathetic irrational fears of the great unwashed & make a buck. Hit the schools !!!.

Yee-haw :-)

Cheers Doug
I guess as long as humans populate earth & there are things we don't understand, we will feed our own paranoia about them - some are better at this than others (e.g. southern baptists). Those of us who have lived through the era of pre-space exploration (prior to sputnik-1) can clearly see how deep seated fears about outer space & martian bogeymen have all but dissapeared from the younger space savvy generation. But as long as paranoia is characteristic of many of us, we will find new bogeymen to get het-up about.

The person who coined the phrase "ignorance is bliss" - should have said "ignorance is blight"