Philosopher
The scientist collects his
Facts, figures and information
In a sun hat of his own
The philosopher look at the facts
Ignoring the fat hat that contains
The information
But consider wearing it
In style and comfort
The scientist analyze the data
Without dropping the irrelevant
In formulating his concepts,
Law and order
The philosopher frees
The facts
From it confined enclosure
Into public domain
Whether it is relevant or not
The concept that he develops
Are contemporary in content
In time, space and person
So he can wear the hat freed
From constraints
With colourful feathers adorning
It fringes
But the scientist
Who has a hat collection of facts
Cannot wear it
On a sunny day
Unless he decides
To drop all his
Concepts into
The public or
Dustbin or Domain
Friday, February 16, 2018
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Scatter or not to Scatter
Scatter or not to Scatter
Or, well this is not on scattering of light or scattering of rubbish in my neighbourhood but a rejoinder for the scat and scatology I penned sometime ago.
It is on a subject at hand every one of us have had some problems associated with at some stage in life be that it may be childhood, adulthood or old age.
Writing on medical subjects is an antithesis to me.
This is a departure from that line of thinking. Away from clinical work having enjoyed academic activity liberally I have lost count of how many millions of our fellow beings are affected by the mother nature's call and its aberrations. So writing on a commoner garden topic was due for sometime. What I am going to talk about is our scat, the human variety not animal and the difficulty of its elimination first thing in the morning for most of us.
The topic is constipation not the emotional (I had this at the time of election) variety but the physical variety of all that afflict my fellow beings. First of all this does not affect the animals in the jungle be that it may be an elephant or an ant to any alarming degree. If at all if it affects the animal kingdom it is the domesticated ones, the cats and the dogs that we associate with that have this man’s perennial problem inherited from our bad habits.
In any case they (animals) do not need any special medication except for changing the diet.
Going back in history I don’t think that humans like animals were made to use toilets. When they were in the jungles when they got the urge they would go furtherest away from their dwellings and would scatter the scat like any other animal. But I don’t think they ever made use of this activity for marking the territories like animals. If they have done that animals would be in real trouble looking for a free space to populate their kind.
Their nature is to avoid contact with this ambivalent species who have love and hate both at the same time in abundance and instance.
I believe even our Vaddha’s children enjoy this activity what we call the nature’s call. By becoming domesticated apart from breeding mosquitoes in our cesspits we add complications to our own lives and to me constipation is just one of them.
This bad habit is probably cultivated and originated in early days of toilet training and tends to last our life cycle.
If one looks at a child he has his freedom restricted even in his early days and expected to adhere to a protocol that adults wish him to do. Whereas adults would do what ever they feel like at whatever time they like which applies even to going to the loo or postponing the desire.
This is the beginning of the story and I have no intention of going into that except briefly stating that any child would use this scattering as a tool (not stools) against adults to score a point or two in their formative years.
I am interested in the adults for the time being and just a few tips for them especially the elderly. But what I say may apply to some but not to all. Intension is to make adult life easy and simple.
First and foremost majority of the people with constipation have no associated medical conditions but have created a bad habit for themselves and unlearning this bad habit is difficult in adult life.
This discussion is for those who are without medical or surgical conditions.
A simple warning for adults at the outset is due before any further probing on this matter. If one has (his / her) bowel habits altered for no reason it is worthwhile seeing a doctor early lest a bowel cancer may be missed. Bowel cancers when detected early can be treated easily but if missed for a considerable length of time the treatment is painstakingly difficult.
Constipation can simply be avoided with right understanding of the process. Evacuation when loaded is a physiological process and its frequency and consistency depends on the type of food one eats and the constitution of the individual. There is broad variation and nothing specific can be termed as normal and if the process is automatic with no straining involved one need not worry about this activity. However, if the consistency is hard and needs quite an effort to empty there is a little problem. What one has done is to complicate a simple process into complicated obsession, which needs divine (medical people) intervention.
One should make lifestyle changes gradually and not in an ad hock manner. If one has learnt a bad habit like taking a paper to the toilet (or having a cigarette to while away the time) it is one of the most difficult habits to get rid of. However, these habits automatically disappear when one's personal difficulty improves and his wellbeing is achieved.
1.Take the shortest time as possible to finish one's activity. Think that other people are (home folks) waiting in the queue.
2.First thing in the morning (what ever one has got used to, a cup of tea, a banana or a toast) fill one's empty stomach with something. Moment one fills the stomach it initiates a reflex action call a Gastro-colic reflex that makes one to void almost immediately and answer this call at once without delaying.
3.The voiding is a simple autonomic function and does not need any help from the individual except for relaxing the outlet gate (sphincter) which is the only part under voluntary control.
4.Wait for the automatic process to finish (relaxing) without any voluntary action.
5.Even if one still feels full do not wait in the toilet just get out. If the next wave of Gastro-colic reflex does not come it would never come on your voluntary effort. Each one has his own rhythm and just make a note of how it comes the next time around and attend to it with the same relax mood.
6. Always talks to oneself that it is an automatic process and needs no help.
7. Beginning of the training may be difficult but once one has overcome the voluntary intervention the battle is won.
Some people think they should have a bowel movement every day. That is not really true. There is no "right" number of bowel movements. Each person's body finds its own normal number of bowel movements. It depends on the food one eats, how much water one drinks and among other things exercise and personal habits.
At one time or another, almost everyone gets constipated. In most cases, it lasts for a short time and is not serious. When you understand what causes constipation, you can take steps to prevent it.
What can one do about constipation?
Changing what you eat and drink and how much you exercise will help relieve and prevent constipation. Here are some steps one can take.
Eat more fiber
Fiber helps form soft, bulky stool. It is found in many vegetables, fruits, and grains. Be sure to add fiber a little at a time, so your body gets used to it slowly. Limit foods that have little or no fiber such as ice cream, cheese, meat, chips and pizza, and processed foods.
My favorite fibre rich fruit is banana.
Kohila and Bellie fruits are supplements that have special properties.
Drink plenty of water and other liquids such as soups and vegetable juices.Liquid helps keep the stool soft and easy to pass, so it is important to drink enough fluids. One has to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day and depending on the dryness and heat (tropical weather) even this may have to be increased. I am not in favour of sugary fruit drinks since the sugar is readily absorbed and defeats the benefits of slowing down of absorption of sugars by high fibre diet. The sugar in banana and starch in soy are absorbed slowly over long period of time without a surge in blood sugar upsetting the insulin secretion. This will help soften your stool. Try not to drink liquids that contain caffeine or alcohol.
Caffeine and alcohol(diuresis) tend to dry out your system.
Get enough exercise.
Regular exercise helps one's digestive system stay active and healthy. One does not need to become a great athlete and little exercise help in relaxing the voluntary muscles which include the anal sphincter. A 20 to 30 minute walk every day is beneficial.
Allow yourself enough time to have a bowel movement.
Sometimes one feels so hurried that one does not pay attention to the body's needs. Make sure one does not ignore the urge to have a bowel movement.
Use laxatives only if a doctor says you should.
Laxatives are medicines that make stools softer and make one pass a stool easily. Most people who are mildly constipated do not need laxatives. However, if you are doing all the right things and you are still constipated, your doctor may recommend laxatives for a limited time. Your doctor will tell you if you need a laxative and what type is best for you.
Laxatives come in many forms: liquid, chewing gum, pills and powder that you mix up with water.
Check with your doctor about any medicines you take
Some medicines can cause constipation. They include calcium pills, pain pills with codeine in them, some antacids, iron pills, diuretics (water pills), and medicines for depression. If you take medicine for another problem, be sure to ask your doctor whether it could cause constipation.
Points to Remember
Constipation affects almost everyone at one time or another. Many people think they are constipated when really they are not. In most cases, following these simple tips will help prevent constipation.
Eat a variety of foods, especially beans, bran, whole grains, and fresh fruits and vegetables.
Drink plenty of liquids.
Exercise regularly.
Don't ignore the urge to have a bowel movement.
Understand that normal bowel habits are different for everyone.
If your bowel habits change, check with your doctor.
Most people with mild constipation do not need laxatives.
However, doctors may recommend laxatives for a limited time for people with chronic constipation.
Medicines that you take for another problem might cause constipation.
It is important to drink at least 8 to 10 glasses of fluid a day.
What is Psyllium Husk?
Psyllium husk comes from the crushed seeds of the Plantago ovata plant, a herb native to parts of Asia, Mediterranean and North Africa.Psyllium is rich in soluble fiber. Traditionally, psyllium husk is used as a gentle bulk-forming laxative for constipation.
Psyllium Husk for High Cholesterol
3g to 12g of soluble fiber from psyllium seed husk when included in the diet help to lower bad cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease.Soluble fiber from psyllium husk forms a gel when mixed with liquid. One needs to eat a small serving to increase the content of soluble fiber to help achieve the cholesterol-lowering effect.
In addition, recent studies also show positive benefits of psyllium in Crohn's Disease and Colitis. Psyllium acts as prebiotics - aiding to heal the inner lining of the inflamed intestine. Standard preparations of psyllium are available in dry seed or husk form to be mixed with water as needed.
Warning:
In general, prescription drugs should be taken one hour before or two hours after psyllium, because the absorption and effectiveness of many drugs may be reduced.
Or, well this is not on scattering of light or scattering of rubbish in my neighbourhood but a rejoinder for the scat and scatology I penned sometime ago.
It is on a subject at hand every one of us have had some problems associated with at some stage in life be that it may be childhood, adulthood or old age.
Writing on medical subjects is an antithesis to me.
This is a departure from that line of thinking. Away from clinical work having enjoyed academic activity liberally I have lost count of how many millions of our fellow beings are affected by the mother nature's call and its aberrations. So writing on a commoner garden topic was due for sometime. What I am going to talk about is our scat, the human variety not animal and the difficulty of its elimination first thing in the morning for most of us.
The topic is constipation not the emotional (I had this at the time of election) variety but the physical variety of all that afflict my fellow beings. First of all this does not affect the animals in the jungle be that it may be an elephant or an ant to any alarming degree. If at all if it affects the animal kingdom it is the domesticated ones, the cats and the dogs that we associate with that have this man’s perennial problem inherited from our bad habits.
In any case they (animals) do not need any special medication except for changing the diet.
Going back in history I don’t think that humans like animals were made to use toilets. When they were in the jungles when they got the urge they would go furtherest away from their dwellings and would scatter the scat like any other animal. But I don’t think they ever made use of this activity for marking the territories like animals. If they have done that animals would be in real trouble looking for a free space to populate their kind.
Their nature is to avoid contact with this ambivalent species who have love and hate both at the same time in abundance and instance.
I believe even our Vaddha’s children enjoy this activity what we call the nature’s call. By becoming domesticated apart from breeding mosquitoes in our cesspits we add complications to our own lives and to me constipation is just one of them.
This bad habit is probably cultivated and originated in early days of toilet training and tends to last our life cycle.
If one looks at a child he has his freedom restricted even in his early days and expected to adhere to a protocol that adults wish him to do. Whereas adults would do what ever they feel like at whatever time they like which applies even to going to the loo or postponing the desire.
This is the beginning of the story and I have no intention of going into that except briefly stating that any child would use this scattering as a tool (not stools) against adults to score a point or two in their formative years.
I am interested in the adults for the time being and just a few tips for them especially the elderly. But what I say may apply to some but not to all. Intension is to make adult life easy and simple.
First and foremost majority of the people with constipation have no associated medical conditions but have created a bad habit for themselves and unlearning this bad habit is difficult in adult life.
This discussion is for those who are without medical or surgical conditions.
A simple warning for adults at the outset is due before any further probing on this matter. If one has (his / her) bowel habits altered for no reason it is worthwhile seeing a doctor early lest a bowel cancer may be missed. Bowel cancers when detected early can be treated easily but if missed for a considerable length of time the treatment is painstakingly difficult.
Constipation can simply be avoided with right understanding of the process. Evacuation when loaded is a physiological process and its frequency and consistency depends on the type of food one eats and the constitution of the individual. There is broad variation and nothing specific can be termed as normal and if the process is automatic with no straining involved one need not worry about this activity. However, if the consistency is hard and needs quite an effort to empty there is a little problem. What one has done is to complicate a simple process into complicated obsession, which needs divine (medical people) intervention.
One should make lifestyle changes gradually and not in an ad hock manner. If one has learnt a bad habit like taking a paper to the toilet (or having a cigarette to while away the time) it is one of the most difficult habits to get rid of. However, these habits automatically disappear when one's personal difficulty improves and his wellbeing is achieved.
1.Take the shortest time as possible to finish one's activity. Think that other people are (home folks) waiting in the queue.
2.First thing in the morning (what ever one has got used to, a cup of tea, a banana or a toast) fill one's empty stomach with something. Moment one fills the stomach it initiates a reflex action call a Gastro-colic reflex that makes one to void almost immediately and answer this call at once without delaying.
3.The voiding is a simple autonomic function and does not need any help from the individual except for relaxing the outlet gate (sphincter) which is the only part under voluntary control.
4.Wait for the automatic process to finish (relaxing) without any voluntary action.
5.Even if one still feels full do not wait in the toilet just get out. If the next wave of Gastro-colic reflex does not come it would never come on your voluntary effort. Each one has his own rhythm and just make a note of how it comes the next time around and attend to it with the same relax mood.
6. Always talks to oneself that it is an automatic process and needs no help.
7. Beginning of the training may be difficult but once one has overcome the voluntary intervention the battle is won.
Some people think they should have a bowel movement every day. That is not really true. There is no "right" number of bowel movements. Each person's body finds its own normal number of bowel movements. It depends on the food one eats, how much water one drinks and among other things exercise and personal habits.
At one time or another, almost everyone gets constipated. In most cases, it lasts for a short time and is not serious. When you understand what causes constipation, you can take steps to prevent it.
What can one do about constipation?
Changing what you eat and drink and how much you exercise will help relieve and prevent constipation. Here are some steps one can take.
Eat more fiber
Fiber helps form soft, bulky stool. It is found in many vegetables, fruits, and grains. Be sure to add fiber a little at a time, so your body gets used to it slowly. Limit foods that have little or no fiber such as ice cream, cheese, meat, chips and pizza, and processed foods.
My favorite fibre rich fruit is banana.
Kohila and Bellie fruits are supplements that have special properties.
Drink plenty of water and other liquids such as soups and vegetable juices.Liquid helps keep the stool soft and easy to pass, so it is important to drink enough fluids. One has to drink at least 8 glasses of water a day and depending on the dryness and heat (tropical weather) even this may have to be increased. I am not in favour of sugary fruit drinks since the sugar is readily absorbed and defeats the benefits of slowing down of absorption of sugars by high fibre diet. The sugar in banana and starch in soy are absorbed slowly over long period of time without a surge in blood sugar upsetting the insulin secretion. This will help soften your stool. Try not to drink liquids that contain caffeine or alcohol.
Caffeine and alcohol(diuresis) tend to dry out your system.
Get enough exercise.
Regular exercise helps one's digestive system stay active and healthy. One does not need to become a great athlete and little exercise help in relaxing the voluntary muscles which include the anal sphincter. A 20 to 30 minute walk every day is beneficial.
Allow yourself enough time to have a bowel movement.
Sometimes one feels so hurried that one does not pay attention to the body's needs. Make sure one does not ignore the urge to have a bowel movement.
Use laxatives only if a doctor says you should.
Laxatives are medicines that make stools softer and make one pass a stool easily. Most people who are mildly constipated do not need laxatives. However, if you are doing all the right things and you are still constipated, your doctor may recommend laxatives for a limited time. Your doctor will tell you if you need a laxative and what type is best for you.
Laxatives come in many forms: liquid, chewing gum, pills and powder that you mix up with water.
Check with your doctor about any medicines you take
Some medicines can cause constipation. They include calcium pills, pain pills with codeine in them, some antacids, iron pills, diuretics (water pills), and medicines for depression. If you take medicine for another problem, be sure to ask your doctor whether it could cause constipation.
Points to Remember
Constipation affects almost everyone at one time or another. Many people think they are constipated when really they are not. In most cases, following these simple tips will help prevent constipation.
Eat a variety of foods, especially beans, bran, whole grains, and fresh fruits and vegetables.
Drink plenty of liquids.
Exercise regularly.
Don't ignore the urge to have a bowel movement.
Understand that normal bowel habits are different for everyone.
If your bowel habits change, check with your doctor.
Most people with mild constipation do not need laxatives.
However, doctors may recommend laxatives for a limited time for people with chronic constipation.
Medicines that you take for another problem might cause constipation.
It is important to drink at least 8 to 10 glasses of fluid a day.
What is Psyllium Husk?
Psyllium husk comes from the crushed seeds of the Plantago ovata plant, a herb native to parts of Asia, Mediterranean and North Africa.Psyllium is rich in soluble fiber. Traditionally, psyllium husk is used as a gentle bulk-forming laxative for constipation.
Psyllium Husk for High Cholesterol
3g to 12g of soluble fiber from psyllium seed husk when included in the diet help to lower bad cholesterol and reduce the risk of heart disease.Soluble fiber from psyllium husk forms a gel when mixed with liquid. One needs to eat a small serving to increase the content of soluble fiber to help achieve the cholesterol-lowering effect.
In addition, recent studies also show positive benefits of psyllium in Crohn's Disease and Colitis. Psyllium acts as prebiotics - aiding to heal the inner lining of the inflamed intestine. Standard preparations of psyllium are available in dry seed or husk form to be mixed with water as needed.
Warning:
In general, prescription drugs should be taken one hour before or two hours after psyllium, because the absorption and effectiveness of many drugs may be reduced.
Sunday, February 11, 2018
Going wild in my neighbourhood
Going wild in my neighbourhood
I am not cynical, if I say in another 50 years from now we would be watching wild life from a roof top garden. With the projected land cover less than 10% in less than half a century and with the rate of expansion of high (property development) rising super markets all over the countryside this scenario is not out of place. The super markets would be running a garden centre (only for the very rich) on the roof top with wild life section for display. The wild (what remain of the wild) life would be fully sustainable on the high-tech biodiversity project housed within the same perimeter of the roof top. The animals would be on a strict diet of large capsules simulating natural food articles developed from the space age know-how. Their natural diet dispensed only on special occasion for human display. I would not count on the number of projected species on any of these locations since my calculation of today would be laughing stock for the then (future) scientists.
This scenario not far away I have some suggestions for the future biologists and naturalists of this country. Do have some field work now itself. The descendents of the present day bio-scientists (not doctors) are the most sort-after job of future world. What can we do to train them?
A lot can be done. A section of the one’s garden could be allowed to go wild without any care except liberal watering to sustain vegetation in the dry season. My belief is that every wild plant would sustain a number of animal and insect species as long as it is left without any attention. We should train the children to watch this section of the garden gone wild and observe and make a careful record of their observations. The young scientists should do this observation in the night. There is lot of activity in the night and watching the discovery channel without knowing what is at hand as far as I am concerned is counter productive. Unless the children watch the bees, the spiders, the butterflies, mud-dauber wasp and the birds nesting learning biology has no meaning. Getting a distinction in biological science is only meaningful if that can be matched with the observation capacity and faculties thus developed in young children’s mind.
In fact, this is what I did for the last 10 years and I am fighting a losing battle with my in laws and neighbours.
With the Ministry of Health and Education on a war footing against the dengue phenomenon every body is becoming neurotic and chopping every tree in the neighbourhood.
I have become only a passive watcher in disbelief.
Little science is more destructive than no science at all!
Even though, I have many stories of the garden wild (private) variety that I have observed over the past ten years, I should start with a story from abroad. We had a lovely back and front garden of our (rented) house with a beautiful hedgerow and a stream running at the edge.
One summer day with my children in the garden, the topic of lady birds came up and we took turns and started looking for them.
This is a game we played when we were children.
Catch them and close the fist and with arms crossed asking the question which one of the fists had the lady birds?
Then we palm over the lady birds to the winner and release them when we had enough of fun.
I wonder how many of our children play this game?
Coming back to the story to our amazement we did not find a single lady bird in our garden. Few inquiries later we were out for a long journey nearly 200 kilo meters looking for a patch of safe jungle. Incidentally, I almost dropped to sleep in the driving seat and we had to detour and stopped at a house and beg for some coffee and biscuits from a very old gentleman with a hip problem. He was one of the most charming personalities we met and he was house bound because of his hip problem. No sooner I came back I made arrangements for his hip operation and that was one of the most satisfying days of my clinical career. He of course directed us to the most likely place of all further 50 kilo meters down. We collected bottle full of lady birds for our garden and some wild berries too.
Near at home all the paddy fields are converted into shanty houses there is no room for the small paddy birds to nest.
We left a little patch of land to go wild because of the distance and the incline and this was the place where successive generations of birds had their nests. This time around a pair decided to built a nest on a slender hanging plant from our balcony (relatively safe from any predators) well hidden. I was more concerned of their stupidity. The plant did not have supporting roots and would not support the weight of the eggs let alone the young ones. True to my prediction the nest collapsed in two days and luckily eggs were not laid. They disappeared and I was happy of their departure.
My gut feeling was that this may be the last pair in the neighbourhood. I would not see them again (like the humming birds) in the next season.
Previous season our dog caught (catch them but would leave them when dead) one of the pair and I had to rescue the remaining one who came looking after the companion with great difficulty.
One night my daughter came rushing up to our bed room stating there are four young birds in the sitting room. Having the dog restrained, in about half an hour I managed to catch three of them but the fourth one was smart enough to avoid me and escape. I released them with a threatening gesture lest it would be a prey within my household.
The message is clear I am seeing the last of the Bohemians of nature.
It was with interest that I read an article on “looking for bioindicators”.
The concept is fine in a scientific sense but be of no value unless comprehensive and without a recorded history. It is high time we look at this problem in an integrated manner. The highest in my list of indicators are the human population growth, activity, mobility, the rain fall and failure of rain.
With the unusually prolonged rainy spell this time around I saw a single eagle hovering in the sky to my amazement. There were lot of animals and insect activity. The paddy birds also survived because of the abundance of food with the rainy season.
We are looking down the barrel of habitat destruction and changing whether patterns.
Man is the culprit.
12th of January 2006
I am not cynical, if I say in another 50 years from now we would be watching wild life from a roof top garden. With the projected land cover less than 10% in less than half a century and with the rate of expansion of high (property development) rising super markets all over the countryside this scenario is not out of place. The super markets would be running a garden centre (only for the very rich) on the roof top with wild life section for display. The wild (what remain of the wild) life would be fully sustainable on the high-tech biodiversity project housed within the same perimeter of the roof top. The animals would be on a strict diet of large capsules simulating natural food articles developed from the space age know-how. Their natural diet dispensed only on special occasion for human display. I would not count on the number of projected species on any of these locations since my calculation of today would be laughing stock for the then (future) scientists.
This scenario not far away I have some suggestions for the future biologists and naturalists of this country. Do have some field work now itself. The descendents of the present day bio-scientists (not doctors) are the most sort-after job of future world. What can we do to train them?
A lot can be done. A section of the one’s garden could be allowed to go wild without any care except liberal watering to sustain vegetation in the dry season. My belief is that every wild plant would sustain a number of animal and insect species as long as it is left without any attention. We should train the children to watch this section of the garden gone wild and observe and make a careful record of their observations. The young scientists should do this observation in the night. There is lot of activity in the night and watching the discovery channel without knowing what is at hand as far as I am concerned is counter productive. Unless the children watch the bees, the spiders, the butterflies, mud-dauber wasp and the birds nesting learning biology has no meaning. Getting a distinction in biological science is only meaningful if that can be matched with the observation capacity and faculties thus developed in young children’s mind.
In fact, this is what I did for the last 10 years and I am fighting a losing battle with my in laws and neighbours.
With the Ministry of Health and Education on a war footing against the dengue phenomenon every body is becoming neurotic and chopping every tree in the neighbourhood.
I have become only a passive watcher in disbelief.
Little science is more destructive than no science at all!
Even though, I have many stories of the garden wild (private) variety that I have observed over the past ten years, I should start with a story from abroad. We had a lovely back and front garden of our (rented) house with a beautiful hedgerow and a stream running at the edge.
One summer day with my children in the garden, the topic of lady birds came up and we took turns and started looking for them.
This is a game we played when we were children.
Catch them and close the fist and with arms crossed asking the question which one of the fists had the lady birds?
Then we palm over the lady birds to the winner and release them when we had enough of fun.
I wonder how many of our children play this game?
Coming back to the story to our amazement we did not find a single lady bird in our garden. Few inquiries later we were out for a long journey nearly 200 kilo meters looking for a patch of safe jungle. Incidentally, I almost dropped to sleep in the driving seat and we had to detour and stopped at a house and beg for some coffee and biscuits from a very old gentleman with a hip problem. He was one of the most charming personalities we met and he was house bound because of his hip problem. No sooner I came back I made arrangements for his hip operation and that was one of the most satisfying days of my clinical career. He of course directed us to the most likely place of all further 50 kilo meters down. We collected bottle full of lady birds for our garden and some wild berries too.
Near at home all the paddy fields are converted into shanty houses there is no room for the small paddy birds to nest.
We left a little patch of land to go wild because of the distance and the incline and this was the place where successive generations of birds had their nests. This time around a pair decided to built a nest on a slender hanging plant from our balcony (relatively safe from any predators) well hidden. I was more concerned of their stupidity. The plant did not have supporting roots and would not support the weight of the eggs let alone the young ones. True to my prediction the nest collapsed in two days and luckily eggs were not laid. They disappeared and I was happy of their departure.
My gut feeling was that this may be the last pair in the neighbourhood. I would not see them again (like the humming birds) in the next season.
Previous season our dog caught (catch them but would leave them when dead) one of the pair and I had to rescue the remaining one who came looking after the companion with great difficulty.
One night my daughter came rushing up to our bed room stating there are four young birds in the sitting room. Having the dog restrained, in about half an hour I managed to catch three of them but the fourth one was smart enough to avoid me and escape. I released them with a threatening gesture lest it would be a prey within my household.
The message is clear I am seeing the last of the Bohemians of nature.
It was with interest that I read an article on “looking for bioindicators”.
The concept is fine in a scientific sense but be of no value unless comprehensive and without a recorded history. It is high time we look at this problem in an integrated manner. The highest in my list of indicators are the human population growth, activity, mobility, the rain fall and failure of rain.
With the unusually prolonged rainy spell this time around I saw a single eagle hovering in the sky to my amazement. There were lot of animals and insect activity. The paddy birds also survived because of the abundance of food with the rainy season.
We are looking down the barrel of habitat destruction and changing whether patterns.
Man is the culprit.
12th of January 2006
Palm Tree
Palm Tree
Torrential rains and inclement weather spared me some plant watching activity.
This time of course palm variety.
Looking out side from an advantage, a bird's eye view, I could see only one coconut tree about ten feet tall and probably of the same age with no signs of flowering. Looking down the precipice a few out of the twenty odd palm trees that survived the dry spell has sprung into activity.
After a year long vigil and watering (when I had time) their survival was a bit of a miracle.
The soil not conducive and the water logging not possible (due to the incline) their survival may have been contributed by my vigil, perhaps.
Palms unlike the coconut (which loves the salty soil) are plants that love hot humid and muddy conditions, which support their roots with fungal symbiosis.
The torrential rain was the most conducive and for nearly a decade we did not have similar weather conditions. I have tried all varieties including arecanut with no success over ten year period so my mind wondered the last time there was a spill over at Victoria Dam.
Incidentally this was after the elections and the change over from the previous regime to the present. The saying prevalent at that time was “to wash the sins of the previous regime”.
This time whose sins I would not wonder or ponder!
Coming back to palm trees there are over 1000 ornamental varieties and they are very expensive and home delivered for the wealthy in United States.
In Sri-Lanka context, the “Cap Rukha”, the gifted plant is vandalized by the rich developers.
Very soon they will be exported to US polythene wrapped. This is quite an irony. I am not sure where the coconut, the arecanut and the Kithul tree's position in the merit order on the1000 palm trees of the gardener's guide to tropical trees.
I guess the Americans who are likely to be categorized very tall in the merit list of democracy do not like tall trees in their neighbourhood. Also their democratic nuts are not as hard as a coconut and they do not like the impact of coconut falling on their heads.
This is why the oil industry in America had a vicious campaign against coconut oil for nearly fifty years.
The real reason though is that they have lost their evolutionary talent like that of the monkeys in climbing trees and swinging from one tree to another.
Going from country to country and looking for ecological trouble spots is only a pastime.
This is where our politicians who have a coconut size head and arecanut (some of them peanut sized- the American variety) sized brains should explore the possibility of exporting the coconut trees to America.
The justification is that when the next tsunami hits our shores they can re-export them back as aid for the Sri-Lankans (tourists included) to climb and save their lives. The coconut trunks well preserved would be a new form of life support system developed in America. Few of the tourists of course saved their life hanging on to them a year ago. They could share the experience with the few tree climbers left in this country.
We can promote this as a new millennium sport. Since most of the tree climbers (party climbers) have joined the parliament over the past half a century they can act as trainers and referees in this sport of tree climbing.
One a lighter note and in a scientific sense the real reason for declining interest in coconut, arecanut and Kithul tree is that all three of them are labour intensive like the tea industry.
Only way to revive these flagging industries is to promote selective breeding of high yielding variety with short trunks so that harvesting is not labour intensive.
For some unknown genetic reasons the short plants and animals have the ability to withstand adverse environmental conditions and it is not a challenge to go for such a variety.
One of the reasons that the tall trees and dinosaurs disappeared from this planet is their enormous size. They could not withstand the adversity. One area we are far behind is the palm oil industry and our Asian giant in hibernation, Malaysia, pioneered the research in this. They have gone for palm oils even destroying their rain forest. We have to learn a lot from them.
Biodiesel is going to be an area we should explore instead of drilling for gas /oil in limited resources offshore.
For me looking down the plane at Katunayake and seeing the coconut trees spanning the landing site is a fascinating scene.
Sadly this scenery is not going to be there in another ten years. The developers are eyeing every peace of land to plunder. In the process they are developing social and economic disasters in the so-called palaces they are building. The coconut triangle is going to be zigzag in no time. We have so many ministers and ministries in this country a Palm Ministry would not be a burden to the country. In any case some of the parliamentarians are coming from that back ground both in oiling the palms (heads included) and climbing the trees and this is a one sure way to climb the political hierarchy.
For the super market chains and range for this Christmas should include the imported artificial palm trees from India, which do not need any watering, plant care or plant watching.
For a change we could have Santa on a palm tree. How about that?
21st December 2005
Torrential rains and inclement weather spared me some plant watching activity.
This time of course palm variety.
Looking out side from an advantage, a bird's eye view, I could see only one coconut tree about ten feet tall and probably of the same age with no signs of flowering. Looking down the precipice a few out of the twenty odd palm trees that survived the dry spell has sprung into activity.
After a year long vigil and watering (when I had time) their survival was a bit of a miracle.
The soil not conducive and the water logging not possible (due to the incline) their survival may have been contributed by my vigil, perhaps.
Palms unlike the coconut (which loves the salty soil) are plants that love hot humid and muddy conditions, which support their roots with fungal symbiosis.
The torrential rain was the most conducive and for nearly a decade we did not have similar weather conditions. I have tried all varieties including arecanut with no success over ten year period so my mind wondered the last time there was a spill over at Victoria Dam.
Incidentally this was after the elections and the change over from the previous regime to the present. The saying prevalent at that time was “to wash the sins of the previous regime”.
This time whose sins I would not wonder or ponder!
Coming back to palm trees there are over 1000 ornamental varieties and they are very expensive and home delivered for the wealthy in United States.
In Sri-Lanka context, the “Cap Rukha”, the gifted plant is vandalized by the rich developers.
Very soon they will be exported to US polythene wrapped. This is quite an irony. I am not sure where the coconut, the arecanut and the Kithul tree's position in the merit order on the1000 palm trees of the gardener's guide to tropical trees.
I guess the Americans who are likely to be categorized very tall in the merit list of democracy do not like tall trees in their neighbourhood. Also their democratic nuts are not as hard as a coconut and they do not like the impact of coconut falling on their heads.
This is why the oil industry in America had a vicious campaign against coconut oil for nearly fifty years.
The real reason though is that they have lost their evolutionary talent like that of the monkeys in climbing trees and swinging from one tree to another.
Going from country to country and looking for ecological trouble spots is only a pastime.
This is where our politicians who have a coconut size head and arecanut (some of them peanut sized- the American variety) sized brains should explore the possibility of exporting the coconut trees to America.
The justification is that when the next tsunami hits our shores they can re-export them back as aid for the Sri-Lankans (tourists included) to climb and save their lives. The coconut trunks well preserved would be a new form of life support system developed in America. Few of the tourists of course saved their life hanging on to them a year ago. They could share the experience with the few tree climbers left in this country.
We can promote this as a new millennium sport. Since most of the tree climbers (party climbers) have joined the parliament over the past half a century they can act as trainers and referees in this sport of tree climbing.
One a lighter note and in a scientific sense the real reason for declining interest in coconut, arecanut and Kithul tree is that all three of them are labour intensive like the tea industry.
Only way to revive these flagging industries is to promote selective breeding of high yielding variety with short trunks so that harvesting is not labour intensive.
For some unknown genetic reasons the short plants and animals have the ability to withstand adverse environmental conditions and it is not a challenge to go for such a variety.
One of the reasons that the tall trees and dinosaurs disappeared from this planet is their enormous size. They could not withstand the adversity. One area we are far behind is the palm oil industry and our Asian giant in hibernation, Malaysia, pioneered the research in this. They have gone for palm oils even destroying their rain forest. We have to learn a lot from them.
Biodiesel is going to be an area we should explore instead of drilling for gas /oil in limited resources offshore.
For me looking down the plane at Katunayake and seeing the coconut trees spanning the landing site is a fascinating scene.
Sadly this scenery is not going to be there in another ten years. The developers are eyeing every peace of land to plunder. In the process they are developing social and economic disasters in the so-called palaces they are building. The coconut triangle is going to be zigzag in no time. We have so many ministers and ministries in this country a Palm Ministry would not be a burden to the country. In any case some of the parliamentarians are coming from that back ground both in oiling the palms (heads included) and climbing the trees and this is a one sure way to climb the political hierarchy.
For the super market chains and range for this Christmas should include the imported artificial palm trees from India, which do not need any watering, plant care or plant watching.
For a change we could have Santa on a palm tree. How about that?
21st December 2005
Friday, February 9, 2018
Going Nuts
Going Nuts
I have excluded the most important Coconuts and Cocoa Nuts in this discussion.
Going Nuts
If one walks along the streets of Kandy or Colombo it is quite obvious how thoughtful all our road users are?
Both drivers and pedestrian are all in a mighty hurry?
It looks as every body is on a hitchhike and the situation is free for all.
Nobody seems to spare a thought for another.
It looks as if all of them have gone nuts.
Whether they have gone nuts or not what I would like to talk about is not the nuts and bolt inside one’s skull but the nuts that we eat with our bites.
The amount of money we spent to keep our spirits high on holidays may be a bonanza for the exchequer but a bit of nuts with the spirits that one consumes might keep one’s health in trim condition without any help from the doctor.
All nuts come from plants and are cholesterol-free.
They are rich in mono and polyunsaturated fats and help lower cholesterol. They are high in folate (prevent hardening of blood vessels) and help lower blood homocysteine levels and more importantly blood pressure and thereby reduce the risk of heart attacks.
Soybeans are extremely low in saturated fat and free of cholesterol. Consuming 25 grams of soy protein daily has shown to lower blood cholesterol. Beyond cholesterol reduction, soy foods may favorably affect other risk factors for heart disease (i.e., makes arteries more flexible). Therefore, soy may be helpful for everyone, not just those with high cholesterol. The B vitamin they contain helps the metabolism of alcohol and that is an added advantage for the regular users (I mean alcohol).
Eating lot of meats with alcohol is a bit of a myth that we carry on from our early days.
Valuable potassium, magnesium and copper are all linked to heart health and probably nuts replace most of the salt losses that result from alcohol-induced diuresis.
One can go on and on, with the benefits of these plant products which include various phytoproteins and phytochemicals (plant proteins and plant chemicals) and the antioxidant Vitamin E (also heart protective). If with the holiday consumption of alcohol cannot be cut down a bit of nuts might save one’s nut in posterity. Additionally extra sweets that one indulges in holiday time soy may be a blessing in disguise. Soy foods may slow absorption of glucose into the bloodstream. May also protect against damaging effects of glucose-induced oxidation, common in people with diabetes. The only controversial area probably is its content of phytooestrogens and I had the belief that it may in one-day help very elderly with prostate cancer. Limited data available indicate that it may be so. For the very old who enjoy a bit of spirits having few soy nuts may be desirable after all.
Soy contains high levels of the phytoestrogens (also known as isoflavones) genistein and daidzein, which mimic and sometimes block the hormone oestrogen.
I had my reservation of soymilk for children and this reservation may have to be extended for girls going through their puberty because of its high content of phytooestrogens. But that reservation cannot be extended to the elderly females. Apart from some beneficial effects of post-menopausal symptoms the soy protein helps conserve body calcium better than that of animal protein. Compounds in soy called isoflavones may simultaneously increase bone formation while decreasing bone breakdown.
The next question is what the best nut for the purpose?
We have a narrow selection.
Peanuts, cashew nuts and soy nuts are the ones available and unfortunately the cashew nuts are not within the reach of our purse nowadays.
Since all the foreign nuts are expensive I go for the soy nuts.
It is pertinent to talk little about the soy nuts since it is comparatively cheap and readily available because of its high nutritive value (proteins).
I had my reservation about soy because of high aluminum content but 20 years ago when I was searching for the reason there was no literature available. Now it appears the aluminum came from the tanks (aluminum) used in soy preparation. It was common sense that aluminum kitchenware is not safe but why the researchers kept this as a secret for so long if not to kill the soy industry (just like the way coconut industry was sabotaged) is obvious.
Now that the bio-diesel is emerging, if the food industry is not destroyed by it (now, before it is firmly established in the West) the price of soy nut is going to go up since production cannot keep pace with the demand.
Surely peanut price is going to go up.
I am relaxing my reservation little by little. For children the best milk is the breast milk and I have no reason to change that and I do not recommend soymilk for children. There is concern for mercury in soymilk and this is probably as a result of some contamination down the production chain. There should not be any concern about soy yogurt. The choice of nuts depends on the price and the availability. Cocktail of nuts is probably the best choice. For price soy beats all the other nuts in price. It is probably the best nut commercially exploited in our set up.
All nuts have common features than not.
A few differences set some apart from others. Walnuts are highest in omega-3 fatty acids (also found in fatty fish), popular for helping lower cholesterol. Almonds are good source of calcium. Brazil nuts are high in the antioxidant selenium, linked to helping prevent some cancers. Chestnuts have the least calories and fat, while macadamia nuts have the most. Dry-roasted nuts have the same fat and calories as oil roasted. Nut butters have the same nutritional advantages as nuts.
Peanuts are similar to other nuts nutritionally, but are part of the legume family, which includes dried beans and peas. Fortunately the high fat content of nuts makes them very filling, helping curb hunger for long periods of time. An ounce or two a day of nuts or nut butters is all you need for valuable health benefits.
Health Canada recommends we enjoy at least two plant-based, vegetarian meals per week; hopefully nuts will find a place in your home.
2nd of January 2006
The Man, the Devil, the God and the Cook
The Man, the Devil, the God and the Cook
All beings whether man, devil or god need something for survival.
The cook has the onerous task of preparing the food for all of them in addition to his own food requirements for his survival.
We Sri-Lankans are known for satisfying the needs of all three of them be that may be a devil with dola pidheni after a devil dance, a god with puda pooja before an election and a man (with position) with panduru pakkudam for a favour.
What I am going to describe are three doctors all of middle age with whom I had the opportunity to live in the same cottage in Colombo.
One doctor, I called the Deviya was a doctor who came from a very religious sect where alcohol is a taboo but started drinking with some personal reasons.
The other is a doctor whom I called the Yakksaya who came from a habitual toddy drinking coastal town of the Western Coast.
The third was a doctor whom I called the Manussaya who came from the hill country who had the penchant for this miracle drink for no obvious reason.
The first one I called the Deviya for the simple reason that he would religiously attend to his prayers every day in spite of his drinking problem. I believed the god had being with him all the time in spite of his drinking. With drinks he became godlier of course.
The second one I called the Yakksaya had a deep and rough voice and even before he had high enough to call high enough would make a big racket in the garden and everybody in the neighbourhood knew that there was a drinking spree in our garden.
The third one I called the Manussaya was the one who would leave his car in the garage (which was open 24 hours) and the key in an easily accessible place so that anybody who had a driving license could drive the car away without any formal permission. Those were the days that petrol price was high and our salary was poor enough to have a juice full tank.
A tankful was a luxury and a bellyful was a chicken feed those days.
The missing link was the cook and his driving force. When I was in charge of the chummery and took in charge of the menu, I realized that the food prepared was ordinary on most of the days but come the days the three men in their devil or god or manly incarnation, the food was of a reasonable good taste and standard.
The secret was the miracle drink.
The three of them used to give him a liberal share (the taste was paid separately) and when he was high the cooking standard went up exponentially.
So the common denominator or the virtual link was Pol Arrakku.
Finally, I decided to give him a quarter bottle worth of money as a spare for marketing for two reasons. One reason was the food and menu was kept excellent.
The second reason was that he would not steal money from the food menu.
This worked well and our monthly bill was the lowest for sometime and I did not have any complaints from my colleagues.
However, I did not disclose my secret pact with him to my colleagues. I of course gave him enough money as extras. But not surprisingly he never went home even for a holiday. He was really hooked to alcohol surprisingly enough he never got cirrhosis. We of course had the liberty of visiting all the food joints in Colombo including Union Place, Fountain Cafe and especially the seafood restaurant facing the Galle Face.
The food was nice and not heavy on the purse but when I visit Colombo now I have second thoughts even having a glass of mineral water.
Is this the price we pay for open economy, I wonder?
Coming back to the three men in various incarnations be that may be godly, manly or devilish, alcohol brings out best and worst of all beings.
Blaming alcohol is a lame excuse for lapses in man's own nature.
That is something I never buy or accept.
All of us left the shores within year and strangely enough I never met them there after.
They were in the land of liquor with so many varieties available they probably would have found better companions than Pol Arrakku.
When I returned some years later, I went looking for the cook and I was told that he suddenly disappeared and never returned.
I am sure that he must be in the company of one of the three above, since he did no have any savings for his alcohol spree.
This I call a form of discrimination on the ground of the brand name of alcohol one drinks and enjoys.
Kassippu or Whiskey and the Five Star democracy.
The voter drinks the adulterated stuff and the winner and the champions drinks the champagne.
13th of March 2006.
All beings whether man, devil or god need something for survival.
The cook has the onerous task of preparing the food for all of them in addition to his own food requirements for his survival.
We Sri-Lankans are known for satisfying the needs of all three of them be that may be a devil with dola pidheni after a devil dance, a god with puda pooja before an election and a man (with position) with panduru pakkudam for a favour.
What I am going to describe are three doctors all of middle age with whom I had the opportunity to live in the same cottage in Colombo.
One doctor, I called the Deviya was a doctor who came from a very religious sect where alcohol is a taboo but started drinking with some personal reasons.
The other is a doctor whom I called the Yakksaya who came from a habitual toddy drinking coastal town of the Western Coast.
The third was a doctor whom I called the Manussaya who came from the hill country who had the penchant for this miracle drink for no obvious reason.
The first one I called the Deviya for the simple reason that he would religiously attend to his prayers every day in spite of his drinking problem. I believed the god had being with him all the time in spite of his drinking. With drinks he became godlier of course.
The second one I called the Yakksaya had a deep and rough voice and even before he had high enough to call high enough would make a big racket in the garden and everybody in the neighbourhood knew that there was a drinking spree in our garden.
The third one I called the Manussaya was the one who would leave his car in the garage (which was open 24 hours) and the key in an easily accessible place so that anybody who had a driving license could drive the car away without any formal permission. Those were the days that petrol price was high and our salary was poor enough to have a juice full tank.
A tankful was a luxury and a bellyful was a chicken feed those days.
The missing link was the cook and his driving force. When I was in charge of the chummery and took in charge of the menu, I realized that the food prepared was ordinary on most of the days but come the days the three men in their devil or god or manly incarnation, the food was of a reasonable good taste and standard.
The secret was the miracle drink.
The three of them used to give him a liberal share (the taste was paid separately) and when he was high the cooking standard went up exponentially.
So the common denominator or the virtual link was Pol Arrakku.
Finally, I decided to give him a quarter bottle worth of money as a spare for marketing for two reasons. One reason was the food and menu was kept excellent.
The second reason was that he would not steal money from the food menu.
This worked well and our monthly bill was the lowest for sometime and I did not have any complaints from my colleagues.
However, I did not disclose my secret pact with him to my colleagues. I of course gave him enough money as extras. But not surprisingly he never went home even for a holiday. He was really hooked to alcohol surprisingly enough he never got cirrhosis. We of course had the liberty of visiting all the food joints in Colombo including Union Place, Fountain Cafe and especially the seafood restaurant facing the Galle Face.
The food was nice and not heavy on the purse but when I visit Colombo now I have second thoughts even having a glass of mineral water.
Is this the price we pay for open economy, I wonder?
Coming back to the three men in various incarnations be that may be godly, manly or devilish, alcohol brings out best and worst of all beings.
Blaming alcohol is a lame excuse for lapses in man's own nature.
That is something I never buy or accept.
All of us left the shores within year and strangely enough I never met them there after.
They were in the land of liquor with so many varieties available they probably would have found better companions than Pol Arrakku.
When I returned some years later, I went looking for the cook and I was told that he suddenly disappeared and never returned.
I am sure that he must be in the company of one of the three above, since he did no have any savings for his alcohol spree.
This I call a form of discrimination on the ground of the brand name of alcohol one drinks and enjoys.
Kassippu or Whiskey and the Five Star democracy.
The voter drinks the adulterated stuff and the winner and the champions drinks the champagne.
13th of March 2006.
Sonic Boom
Sonic Boom
Sound of music
Of the mosquito type
Is the sonic boom
Of the supersonic age
Of disposal and conquest
Of this planet Earth
Presumed twelve hour vigil
With the incandescent coil
May have been designed
For another planet
Of a different orbit, revolving
On another dimension
Why it does not
Last the said duration?
Of the label and the guarantee
God the creator
Only knows for certain
TV the latest in the media hype
Audio sounds of the ‘Santhush’ type
Mosquito music
And their electric hits
Keep me up
All night long
Neither howls of the fox
In a moonlit night
Nor the cold night draught
Of the December chills
Keeps me awake
But the boom,
Boom beats of the
Mosquito nights
Keeps me awake
All night alone
Carbon dioxide boom
Of the industrials needs
If not arrested now
Will cause
The global warming
Of titanic magnitude
Thus
Would be a boon
For the needs
Of the mosquito deeds
Until and unless
We go for the age of ice
The rhythms of nights
Of the mosquito breeds
The menace and indulgence
Of the electronic age
Would continue at tandem
Day and night
Sound of music
Of the mosquito type
Is the sonic boom
Of the supersonic age
Of disposal and conquest
Of this planet Earth
Presumed twelve hour vigil
With the incandescent coil
May have been designed
For another planet
Of a different orbit, revolving
On another dimension
Why it does not
Last the said duration?
Of the label and the guarantee
God the creator
Only knows for certain
TV the latest in the media hype
Audio sounds of the ‘Santhush’ type
Mosquito music
And their electric hits
Keep me up
All night long
Neither howls of the fox
In a moonlit night
Nor the cold night draught
Of the December chills
Keeps me awake
But the boom,
Boom beats of the
Mosquito nights
Keeps me awake
All night alone
Carbon dioxide boom
Of the industrials needs
If not arrested now
Will cause
The global warming
Of titanic magnitude
Thus
Would be a boon
For the needs
Of the mosquito deeds
Until and unless
We go for the age of ice
The rhythms of nights
Of the mosquito breeds
The menace and indulgence
Of the electronic age
Would continue at tandem
Day and night
Peter Principle
Peter Principle
Peter principle is an instrument that is used in banking management (for that matter any management) to weed out incompetent individuals out of the main stream and isolate them in their own islands of safety without embarrassment to the individual or to the institute.
The underlying principle is that individuals go up the ladder of promotions to the level of their competence (some reach this very early in their work cycle) and once they reach the optimum level of performance there is no way of promoting them higher without substantial risk to the institute. Unfortunately they are not at the age of retirement and the management has to device ways and means of getting them out of the main stream. In that scenario what the management does is to create a glamorous looking (high-sounding) post and sidetracks the individual horizontally in the management structure. This side tracking exercise keep the management and the individual happy mutually and the customers (spectators) do not see this as a fact unless they are privy to the internal dynamics of the institute.
I believe this principle is applicable to our politicians.
For an example when a politician is running out of his or her own steam they need some recuperation somewhere and in the parliament the post of speaker satisfy the Peter Principle scientifically. Even though he is called the speaker he cannot speak on his own as long as he occupies this chair.
What a characteristic of democracy?
I thought democracy is to voice ones opinion. It is quite an aberration?
My concern is what we do with the aging population of politicians who do not want to retire from the limelight and the TV glamour?
In good old days we had the senate for them to come and socialize with the rest of those who have had reached the level of competence. My belief is that our politicians reach their level of competence or incompetence in the kindergarten itself and some of them become very childish in their likes and dislikes.
Why this is so I do not know for certain but my concern is what shall we do with them?
We cannot keep then in cold storage like Stalin and Lenin.
Shall we make them actors and actresses in the local tele-dramas?
After all acting is a glamorous job and most of them were very good in acting in their real life they need not have any training.
That is only one option.
But I have another option.
Why can’t we make them peace monitors?
They had been talking about peace so much in their political life they must be having a real love for peace. I believe they would really enjoy the challenge of peace keeping and traveling all over the world at no expense to them.
The third option is to send them to space.
They can scan the entire world from outer space with an advantage none of us will have with a camera that enlarges an ant to an elephant size.
Looking for trouble spots.
Hope few of the readers would have better options than mine for enlightening the voters who are without any entertainment after the elections.
Cricket? Or No? No cricket please.
15th of December, 2005
Peter principle is an instrument that is used in banking management (for that matter any management) to weed out incompetent individuals out of the main stream and isolate them in their own islands of safety without embarrassment to the individual or to the institute.
The underlying principle is that individuals go up the ladder of promotions to the level of their competence (some reach this very early in their work cycle) and once they reach the optimum level of performance there is no way of promoting them higher without substantial risk to the institute. Unfortunately they are not at the age of retirement and the management has to device ways and means of getting them out of the main stream. In that scenario what the management does is to create a glamorous looking (high-sounding) post and sidetracks the individual horizontally in the management structure. This side tracking exercise keep the management and the individual happy mutually and the customers (spectators) do not see this as a fact unless they are privy to the internal dynamics of the institute.
I believe this principle is applicable to our politicians.
For an example when a politician is running out of his or her own steam they need some recuperation somewhere and in the parliament the post of speaker satisfy the Peter Principle scientifically. Even though he is called the speaker he cannot speak on his own as long as he occupies this chair.
What a characteristic of democracy?
I thought democracy is to voice ones opinion. It is quite an aberration?
My concern is what we do with the aging population of politicians who do not want to retire from the limelight and the TV glamour?
In good old days we had the senate for them to come and socialize with the rest of those who have had reached the level of competence. My belief is that our politicians reach their level of competence or incompetence in the kindergarten itself and some of them become very childish in their likes and dislikes.
Why this is so I do not know for certain but my concern is what shall we do with them?
We cannot keep then in cold storage like Stalin and Lenin.
Shall we make them actors and actresses in the local tele-dramas?
After all acting is a glamorous job and most of them were very good in acting in their real life they need not have any training.
That is only one option.
But I have another option.
Why can’t we make them peace monitors?
They had been talking about peace so much in their political life they must be having a real love for peace. I believe they would really enjoy the challenge of peace keeping and traveling all over the world at no expense to them.
The third option is to send them to space.
They can scan the entire world from outer space with an advantage none of us will have with a camera that enlarges an ant to an elephant size.
Looking for trouble spots.
Hope few of the readers would have better options than mine for enlightening the voters who are without any entertainment after the elections.
Cricket? Or No? No cricket please.
15th of December, 2005
Wednesday, February 7, 2018
Bats /Bets on Hold -Wow Wavula Dot Com
Reproduction
Bats / Bets on Hold -Wow Wavula Dot Com
Unexpected as it was the response to the new party (L.(A)L.P.) was overwhelming. True to the Linux tradition one of the first requests from the new party members was to launch a new web site. My response was an overt enthusiasm but soon I was overcome by the difficulty in finding a suitable name.
The traditional Peradeniya, hoo (hoot) and ha hoo have been hijacked by the yahoo and all the animal of the species including the Kaputa (Raven, Crow and the Cockerel) and Fox (Lion-Fox) have been designated by the IT people and politicians, I was left with only a few choices (options).
It was with few sleepless nights and gazing at the sky in the night of the Sun’s eclipse, I hit upon the new name.
Wow! wavula.dot.com!
You may not be surprised that it was unanimously accepted by the executive committee which is unusual in Linux tradition. With so many nuances in our tradition conformity is exception to the rule. Our political think tanks were able to see the vision and its future.
With the election fever catching up feverishly so many docile bats (Political Wavulas are coming out of hibernation) are coming to perch on the big money trees, there is no room left for the fruit bats. There are so many bats around the major money trees that they almost kill each other to reach a branch or a leaf and many of them have decided to go out in day time instead of at night to relieve the congestion.
So our tree at L. (A) L..P head quarters was good landing site for the undecided Wavulas (Staggering 20% according to our latest estimates in day time polling but this varies at night.
Why we do not know?).
At our tree (site) there are hardly any at night, only night visitors are few political spies and drop outs that just visit us to recuperate their lost energies while trying to cling to the major money trees in the day time.
Barring them our site is bustling with activity.
Our new recruitment drive without any false promises is a true success story.
We in fact, do not have any promises.
Our Widow’s (windows) friends are so tired of the staled stories and boredom, visiting our site day or night is a real retreat to sanity and serenity.
We have made all entries automated and we have decided not to demand any identity or sanity to keep ourselves sane.
Our only requirement (drive) is each one of them learn to laugh loudly even if they have heard the same joke umpteenth time.
Our research team has found startling discoveries.
The bats can be trained to (especially the Political Wavulas) spread there wings by opening their webs even in resting stage to catch any jokes that come out of the mouth of the Presidential Candidates or by email even without opening their (even if they open their eyes with the degree of inebriation they are in, it make no sense to them) eyes. We can make these bats to go totally blind. Hearing only what one wants to hear, the fables or the fallible. Other advantage of resting upside down with the webs weaved (unlike the spiders) is that one can catch a punch or pun instantaneously without even opening the eyes. (Funny thing about these guys are that they think the voters are also doped and sleepy like them).
By turning upside down one is relived of disorientation in time, place and person.
How these people get disorientated of history of our nation is unbelievable. If our politicians can do this once a year instead of once in every six years, their disorientation of the real polity (that set in soon after elections) can be remedied without foreign experts. They do not need to go on foreign sojourns frequently to replenish new ideas. They only have to rest upside down at our site once in a way and the flow of blood to the vital centers are reestablished instantaneously. Only for the disorientated we have a special fruit aroma therapy.
Since our Vedamahattaya in on the campaign run our Aroma Therapy is fast catching up with the Wavulas.
So becoming a Political Wavulas is a welcome change to our polity.
Another research finding is that our Political Wavulas tend to piggy-back on other political Wavulas (whom they consider the heavy weights on both sides of the divide) and because of their own weight they drop down to earth every fraction of a second losing balance and the hold on the political wing.
Some of them of course have split brains and flight of ideas (strictly speaking a psychiatric phrase but appropriate for Sri-Lankan politicians) they even do not know which tree they are hanging on specially of the bilingual variety. They are darting from one to the other the inherent disorientation is a common symptom. Some of these varieties have one side of the brain devoted to one affiliation and the other side of the brain to the other affiliation and split brain is the manifestation of this duality not seen elsewhere in the whole universe. Their split brain is a genetic mutation to accommodate all the views in one brain.
With one side of the brain they shake hand and with the other side they stab you on the back.
The trilingual variety are so confused they happen to land on our site completely disorientated (we have a special treatment center for orientation- to say they are all Sri-Lankans) and release them immediately to their own freedom, free will and luck. The returning rate we have not yet been estimated. They are so elated that they think that they have won the big match on a plate for the finale.
We had an opportunity to scan one of their brains and found and there is an appendage growing forward in the neo-brain. We are hopeful that we get a specimen (going by the previous elections) after the election as a free gift for postmortem examination.
We have devoted a whole section in our laboratory for post election postmortems and we need volunteers to help us.
So please visit our site at wow.wavula.dot.com and be trained to become a winner every time you hit on the world wide web of lies, damn lies.
Postscript;
We need research assistants (plenty of them to analyze all the lies after the poll) to help our research team who are currently tabulating the probable profile of lies in the following categories.
1.notorious
2.consummate
3.inveterate
4.congenital
5.chronic
6.pathological
7.glib
8.incorrigible
9.unconscionable
10.egregious
11.double dealing
12.double crossing
13.wheeler dealing
14.mendacity
15.perjury
16.make believe
17.spurious
18.bloomer
19.fifth column
20.lead up the garden path.
I have added new category called nicampop lies of Sri-Lankan origin.
It is the latest to hit the web market and next president to be of US is eagerly waiting our results.
6th October, 2005
Bats / Bets on Hold -Wow Wavula Dot Com
Unexpected as it was the response to the new party (L.(A)L.P.) was overwhelming. True to the Linux tradition one of the first requests from the new party members was to launch a new web site. My response was an overt enthusiasm but soon I was overcome by the difficulty in finding a suitable name.
The traditional Peradeniya, hoo (hoot) and ha hoo have been hijacked by the yahoo and all the animal of the species including the Kaputa (Raven, Crow and the Cockerel) and Fox (Lion-Fox) have been designated by the IT people and politicians, I was left with only a few choices (options).
It was with few sleepless nights and gazing at the sky in the night of the Sun’s eclipse, I hit upon the new name.
Wow! wavula.dot.com!
You may not be surprised that it was unanimously accepted by the executive committee which is unusual in Linux tradition. With so many nuances in our tradition conformity is exception to the rule. Our political think tanks were able to see the vision and its future.
With the election fever catching up feverishly so many docile bats (Political Wavulas are coming out of hibernation) are coming to perch on the big money trees, there is no room left for the fruit bats. There are so many bats around the major money trees that they almost kill each other to reach a branch or a leaf and many of them have decided to go out in day time instead of at night to relieve the congestion.
So our tree at L. (A) L..P head quarters was good landing site for the undecided Wavulas (Staggering 20% according to our latest estimates in day time polling but this varies at night.
Why we do not know?).
At our tree (site) there are hardly any at night, only night visitors are few political spies and drop outs that just visit us to recuperate their lost energies while trying to cling to the major money trees in the day time.
Barring them our site is bustling with activity.
Our new recruitment drive without any false promises is a true success story.
We in fact, do not have any promises.
Our Widow’s (windows) friends are so tired of the staled stories and boredom, visiting our site day or night is a real retreat to sanity and serenity.
We have made all entries automated and we have decided not to demand any identity or sanity to keep ourselves sane.
Our only requirement (drive) is each one of them learn to laugh loudly even if they have heard the same joke umpteenth time.
Our research team has found startling discoveries.
The bats can be trained to (especially the Political Wavulas) spread there wings by opening their webs even in resting stage to catch any jokes that come out of the mouth of the Presidential Candidates or by email even without opening their (even if they open their eyes with the degree of inebriation they are in, it make no sense to them) eyes. We can make these bats to go totally blind. Hearing only what one wants to hear, the fables or the fallible. Other advantage of resting upside down with the webs weaved (unlike the spiders) is that one can catch a punch or pun instantaneously without even opening the eyes. (Funny thing about these guys are that they think the voters are also doped and sleepy like them).
By turning upside down one is relived of disorientation in time, place and person.
How these people get disorientated of history of our nation is unbelievable. If our politicians can do this once a year instead of once in every six years, their disorientation of the real polity (that set in soon after elections) can be remedied without foreign experts. They do not need to go on foreign sojourns frequently to replenish new ideas. They only have to rest upside down at our site once in a way and the flow of blood to the vital centers are reestablished instantaneously. Only for the disorientated we have a special fruit aroma therapy.
Since our Vedamahattaya in on the campaign run our Aroma Therapy is fast catching up with the Wavulas.
So becoming a Political Wavulas is a welcome change to our polity.
Another research finding is that our Political Wavulas tend to piggy-back on other political Wavulas (whom they consider the heavy weights on both sides of the divide) and because of their own weight they drop down to earth every fraction of a second losing balance and the hold on the political wing.
Some of them of course have split brains and flight of ideas (strictly speaking a psychiatric phrase but appropriate for Sri-Lankan politicians) they even do not know which tree they are hanging on specially of the bilingual variety. They are darting from one to the other the inherent disorientation is a common symptom. Some of these varieties have one side of the brain devoted to one affiliation and the other side of the brain to the other affiliation and split brain is the manifestation of this duality not seen elsewhere in the whole universe. Their split brain is a genetic mutation to accommodate all the views in one brain.
With one side of the brain they shake hand and with the other side they stab you on the back.
The trilingual variety are so confused they happen to land on our site completely disorientated (we have a special treatment center for orientation- to say they are all Sri-Lankans) and release them immediately to their own freedom, free will and luck. The returning rate we have not yet been estimated. They are so elated that they think that they have won the big match on a plate for the finale.
We had an opportunity to scan one of their brains and found and there is an appendage growing forward in the neo-brain. We are hopeful that we get a specimen (going by the previous elections) after the election as a free gift for postmortem examination.
We have devoted a whole section in our laboratory for post election postmortems and we need volunteers to help us.
So please visit our site at wow.wavula.dot.com and be trained to become a winner every time you hit on the world wide web of lies, damn lies.
Postscript;
We need research assistants (plenty of them to analyze all the lies after the poll) to help our research team who are currently tabulating the probable profile of lies in the following categories.
1.notorious
2.consummate
3.inveterate
4.congenital
5.chronic
6.pathological
7.glib
8.incorrigible
9.unconscionable
10.egregious
11.double dealing
12.double crossing
13.wheeler dealing
14.mendacity
15.perjury
16.make believe
17.spurious
18.bloomer
19.fifth column
20.lead up the garden path.
I have added new category called nicampop lies of Sri-Lankan origin.
It is the latest to hit the web market and next president to be of US is eagerly waiting our results.
6th October, 2005
Introduction to Abhidhamma
Introduction to Abhidhamma
Abhidhamma is colossal and any attempt at simplifying it is difficult, simply because of the fact that Abhidhamma in Buddhist terminology is an attempt to finely describe the working of the Mind.
It is a conceptual framework of “phenomena of existence” of physical and mental formations; i.e; analysis of mental phenomena and their conditioning.
This analysis is the basis for expounding the very nature of existence of the being (Bhava) conditioned by Anitta (impermanence), Dukka (unsatisfactoriness based on impermanence) and hence Anatma (selflessness).
The expression of this at fine mental formation is Upppada (beginning), Thithi (rising to a peak) and Bhanga (dissolution) of one thought moment to another with similar beginning, crescendo and dissolution; i.e; in other words “a state of flux” of mental formation and dissolution.
This formation does not end at physical death but extends into the next round of existence in Bhava. The mental process is described as a stream (Bhavanga Sota) which invariably accompany the being.
One experiences only one thought moment at any particular time. No two thought moments coexist. Each thought moment hangs onto some kind of object. No consciousness arises without an object either physical or mental.
When a person is fast asleep and is in a dreamless state he experiences a kind of consciousness which is more passive than active (note no mention about subconsciousness in Abhidhamma akin to Freudian analysis). It is similar to consciousness at the time of conception and at the final moment of death.
This type of consciousness in Abhidhamma term is Bhavanga. Like any other consciousness it consists of genesis (Uppada) steady state or static (Thiti) and cessation (Bhanga). Arising and perishing it flows on like a stream not remaining the same for two consecutive thought moments. According to Abhidhamma, two types of (conscious and subconscious) of consciousness does not exist.
Bhavanga is not a sub-plane but a continuous stream of existence.
In Abhidhamma the word that aptly describe the state of the mind is Javana (running, no exact English rendering). This Javana thought moment lasts seven thought moments or at times of death five thought moments. Javana state is arrested by Thadarammana when an object (physical or mental) of attention is registered by the thought process and consists of two thought moments.
The death occurs immediately after the Cuti consciousness.
Cuti and Patisandhi are continuous, within the same thought moment and there is no room for Untharbhava in Abhidhamma!
It lapses into Bhavanga sota of enormity (of Samsara) which each one owns of his own, with neither beginning nor end.
A super being cannot pardon actions (Kusala or Akusala) of a being or arrest this process.
Though, with death, the physical body disintegrates and the flow of consciousness temporarily ceases yet the stream is not annihilated as the Kammic force that propels it remains.
Death is only a prelude to rebirth.
As Patisandhi (relinking) is the initial thought moment of life so Cuti the final thought moment. They are the entrance and exist of a particular life. Cuti occurs between Javana and Patisandhi, Thadarammana and Patisandhi and Bhananga and Patisandhi.
So the Samsara is the conditional existence (sort of cause and effect process) of beings, all inclusive (not only human but Deva and Preta included) and the goal of Buddhist Practice is to strive for Unconditional Existence of the Mental Culture (not a zero sum game or state) of Bliss without attachment (Tanha).
Way to achieve this is by one’s own effort of Meditation (not just meditation) with clear understanding of the above premises of Anitta, Dukka and Anatma.
Mind’s response to sense organ’s perception of an impulse as part of an object (Kaya/Rupa) of attention sets in a chain reaction.
1. Impulse has to be above the threshold value.
2. That causes to arise sensation from the sense object.
3. Perception of that sensation as agreeable, disagreeable or neutral.
4.Volitional (Cetana) attachment (Tanha) to that Citta (i.e; awakening of the life stream (Bhavanga sota) of continuity).
5. Momentary focus of attention to that state of Mind.
6. Brings to life the mental phenomenon associated with that state of mind (within the Mind or arise from sense organ).
7. Attention to the same until another (Citta) thought process begins.
Upppda, Thiti and Bhanga process recurs in an undulating form in each thought moment of the present. In terms of the life process, Patisandhi, Bhavanga and Cuti operate, in the ever recurring Samsara Cycle.
Javana is the most important of all where the free will operates and the action (good or bad) falls into either Kusala or Akusala Kamma. One owns or inherits the merits or demerits of his or her action or deed.
Thought process has 17 thought moments and Javana has 7 thought moments and Tadarammana has two thought moments and the rest of the eight thought moments are given separate names starting from Atita Bhavanga to Votthappana ending in Javana and Tadarammana.
This in essence embodies the basic tenets of Abhidhamma but does not include all the finer classifications.
Summary;
1. Bhavanga sota
2. Bhavanga uppaccheda
3. Bhavanga calana
4. Avarjana (focus of attention)
5. Tadarammana (focus of attachment)
6. Javana (there is no proper English rendering of this word)
7. Kusala and Akusala (or Kriya of the Arhaths)
Uppada, Thiti and Banga of the thought moment or process ensues with extreme rapidity.
8. Bhavanga sota.
Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Radiation From Cell Phones and WiFi Are Making People Sick- Are We All at Risk?
Reproduction;
This is for Quorora writer to read;
This should be read in conjunction with the experimental evidence of brain tumour Schwanoma in rats and mice!
Radiation From Cell Phones and WiFi Are Making People Sick-
Are We All at Risk?
We are now exposed to electromagnetic radio frequencies 24 hours a day. Welcome to the largest human experiment ever.
December 2, 2011
Consider this story:
It's January 1990, during the pioneer build-out of mobile phone service. A cell tower goes up 800 feet from the house of Alison Rall, in Mansfield, Ohio, where she and her husband run a 160-acre dairy farm. The first thing the Rall family notices is that the ducks on their land lay eggs that don't hatch. That spring there are no ducklings.
By the fall of 1990, the cattle herd that pastures near the tower is sick. The animals are thin, their ribs are showing, their coats growing rough, and their behavior is weird -- they're agitated, nervous.
Soon the cows are miscarrying, and so are the goats.
Many of the animals that gestate are born deformed. There are goats with webbed necks, goats with front legs shorter than their rear legs. One calf in the womb has a tumor the size of a basketball, another carries a tumor three feet in diameter, big enough that he won't pass through the birth canal.
Rall and the local veterinarian finally cut open the mother to get the creature out alive. The vet records the nightmare in her log: "I've never seen anything like this in my entire practice... All of [this] I feel was a result of the cellular tower."
Within six months, Rall's three young children begin suffering bizarre skin rashes, raised red "hot spots." The kids are hit with waves of hyperactivity; the youngest child sometimes spins in circles, whirling madly. The girls lose hair. Rall is soon pregnant with a fourth child, but she can't gain weight. Her son is born with birth defects -- brittle bones, neurological problems -- that fit no specific syndrome. Her other children, conceived prior to the arrival of the tower, had been born healthy.
Desperate to understand what is happening to her family and her farm, Rall contacts the Environmental Protection Agency. She ends up talking to an EPA scientist named Carl Blackman, an expert on the biological effects of radiation from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) -- the kind of radiofrequency EMFs (RF-EMFs) by which all wireless technology operates, including not just cell towers and cell phones but wi-fi hubs and wi-fi-capable computers, "smart" utility meters, and even cordless home phones. "With my government cap on, I'm supposed to tell you you're perfectly safe," Blackman tells her.
"With my civilian cap on, I have to tell you to consider leaving."
Blackman's warning casts a pall on the family. When Rall contacts the cell phone company operating the tower, they tell her there is "no possibility whatsoever" that the tower is the source of her ills. "You're probably in the safest place in America," the company representative tells her.
The Ralls abandoned the farm on Christmas Day of 1992 and never re-sold it, unwilling to subject others to the horrors they had experienced. Within weeks of fleeing to land they owned in Michigan, the children recovered their health, and so did the herd.
Not a single one of the half-dozen scientists I spoke to could explain what had happened on the Rall farm. Why the sickened animals? Why the skin rashes, the hyperactivity? Why the birth defects? If the radiofrequency radiation from the cell tower was the cause, then what was the mechanism?
And why today, with millions of cell towers dotting the planet and billions of cell phones placed next to billions of heads every day, aren't we all getting sick?
In fact, the great majority of us appear to be just fine. We all live in range of cell towers now, and we are all wireless operators. More than wireless operators, we're nuts about the technology. Who doesn't keep at their side at all times the electro-plastic appendage for the suckling of information?
The mobile phone as a technology was developed in the 1970s, commercialized in the mid-80s, miniaturized in the '90s. When the first mobile phone companies launched in the United Kingdom in 1985, the expectation was that perhaps 10,000 phones would sell. Worldwide shipments of mobile phones topped the one billion mark in 2006. As of October 2010 there were 5.2 billion cell phones operating on the planet. "Penetration," in the marketing-speak of the companies, often tops 100 percent in many countries, meaning there is more than one connection per person. The mobile phone in its various manifestations -- the iPhone, the Android, the Blackberry -- has been called the "most prolific consumer device" ever proffered.
I don't have an Internet connection at my home in Brooklyn, and, like a dinosaur, I still keep a landline. But if I stand on my roof, I see a hundred feet away, attached to the bricks of the neighboring parking garage, a panel of cell phone antennae -- pointed straight at me. They produce wonderful reception on my cell phone. My neighbors in the apartment below have a wireless fidelity connection -- better known as wi-fi -- which I tap into when I have to argue with magazine editors. This is very convenient. I use it. I abuse it.
Yet even though I have, in a fashion, opted out, here I am, on a rooftop in Brooklyn, standing bathed in the radiation from the cell phone panels on the parking garage next door. I am also bathed in the radiation from the neighbors' wi-fi downstairs. The waves are everywhere, from public libraries to Amtrak trains to restaurants and bars and even public squares like Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, where the Wall Street occupiers relentlessly tweet.
We now live in a wireless-saturated normality that has never existed in the history of the human race.
It is unprecedented because of the complexity of the modulated frequencies that carry the increasingly complex information we transmit on our cell phones, smart phones and wi-fi systems. These EMFs are largely untested in their effects on human beings. Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson, who teaches at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, tells me the mass saturation in electromagnetic fields raises terrible questions. Humanity, he says, has embarked on the equivalent of "the largest full-scale experiment ever. What happens when, 24 hours around the clock, we allow ourselves and our children to be whole-body-irradiated by new, man-made electromagnetic fields for the entirety of our lives?"
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
The IARC decision followed in the wake of multiple warnings, mostly from European regulators, about the possible health risks of RF-EMFs. In September 2007, Europe's top environmental watchdog, the EU's European Environment Agency, suggested that the mass unregulated exposure of human beings to widespread radiofrequency radiation "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking and lead in petrol." That same year, Germany's environmental ministry singled out the dangers of RF-EMFs used in wi-fi systems, noting that people should keep wi-fi exposure "as low as possible" and instead choose "conventional wired connections." In 2008, France issued a generalized national cell phone health warning against excessive cell phone use, and then, a year later, announced a ban on cell phone advertising for children under the age of 12.
In 2009, following a meeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, more than 50 concerned scientists from 16 countries -- public health officials, biologists, neuroscientists, medical doctors -- signed what became known as the Porto Alegre Resolution. The signatories described it as an "urgent call" for more research based on "the body of evidence that indicates that exposure to electromagnetic fields interferes with basic human biology."
That evidence is mounting. "Radiofrequency radiation has a number of biological effects which can be reproducibly found in animals and cellular systems," says David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York (SUNY). "We really cannot say for certain what the adverse effects are in humans," Carpenter tells me. "But the indications are that there may be -- and I use the words 'may be' -- very serious effects in humans." He notes that in exposure tests with animal and human cells, RF-EMF radiation causes genes to be activated. "We also know that RF-EMF causes generation of free radicals, increases production of things called heat shock proteins, and alters calcium ion regulation. These are all common mechanisms behind many kinds of tissue damage."
Double-strand breaks in DNA -- one of the undisputed causes of cancer -- have been reported in similar tests with animal cells. Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Lund University, has found that cell phone radiation damages neurons in rats, particularly those cells associated with memory and learning. The damage occurred after an exposure of just two hours. Salford also found that cell phone EMFs cause holes to appear in the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain in rats. Punching holes in the blood-brain-barrier is not a good thing. It allows toxic molecules from the blood to leach into the ultra-stable environment of the brain. One of the potential outcomes, Salford notes, is dementia.
Other effects from cell phone radiofrequencies have been reported using human subjects. At Loughborough University in England, sleep specialists in 2008 found that after 30 minutes of cell phone use, their subjects required twice the time to fall asleep as they did when the phone was avoided before bedtime. EEGs (electroencephalograms) showed a disturbance of the brain waves that regulate sleep. Neuroscientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia discovered in 2009 a "power boost" in brain waves when volunteers were exposed to cell phone radiofrequencies. Researchers strapped Nokia phones to their subjects' heads, then turned the phones on and off. On: brain went into defense mode. Off: brain settled. The brain, one of the lead researchers speculated, was "concentrating to overcome the electrical interference."
Yet for all this, there is no scientific consensus on the risks of RF-EMFs to human beings.
The major public-health watchdogs, in the US and worldwide, have dismissed concerns about it. "Current evidence," the World Health Organization (WHO) says, "does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields." (The WHO thus contradicts the findings of one of its own research units.) The US Federal Communications Commission has made similar statements. The American Cancer Society reports that "most studies published so far have not found a link between cell phone use and the development of tumors." The cell phone industry's lobbying organization, CTIA-The Wireless Association, assures the public that cell phone radiation is safe, citing studies -- many of them funded by the telecom industry -- that show no risk.
Published meta-reviews of hundreds of such studies suggest that industry funding tends to skew results. According to a survey by Henry Lai, a research professor at University of Washington, only 28 percent of studies funded by the wireless industry showed some type of biological effect from cell phone radiation. Meanwhile, independently funded studies produce an altogether different set of data: 67 percent of those studies showed a bioeffect. The Safe Wireless Initiative, a research group in Washington, DC that has since closed down, unpacked the data in hundreds of studies on wireless health risks, arraying them in terms of funding source. "Our data show that mobile phone industry funded/influenced work is six times more likely to find 'no problem' than independently funded work," the group noted. "The industry thus has significantly contaminated the scientific evidence pool."
The evidence about the long-term public health risks of exposure to RF-EMFs may be contradictory. Yet it is clear that some people are getting sick when heavily exposed to the new radiofrequencies. And we are not listening to their complaints.
Take the story of Michele Hertz. When a local utility company installed a wireless digital meter -- better known as a "smart" meter -- on her house in upstate New York in the summer of 2009, Hertz thought little of it. Then she began to feel odd. She was a practiced sculptor, but now she could not sculpt. "I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even finish sentences," she told me. Hertz experienced "incredible memory loss," and, at the age of 51, feared she had come down with Alzheimer's.
One night during a snowstorm in 2010 her house lost power, and when it came back on her head exploded with a ringing sound -- "a terrible piercing." A buzzing in her head persisted. She took to sleeping on the floor of her kitchen that winter, where the refrigerator drowned out the keening. There were other symptoms: headaches and nausea and dizziness, persistent and always worsening. "Sometimes I'd wake up with my heart pounding uncontrollably," she told me. "I thought I would have a heart attack. I had nightmares that people were killing me."
Roughly one year after the installation of the wireless meters, with the help of an electrician, Hertz thought she had figured out the source of the trouble: It had to be something electrical in the house. On a hunch, she told the utility company, Con Edison of New York, to remove the wireless meter. She told them: "I will die if you do not install an analog meter." Within days, the worst symptoms disappeared. "People look at me like I'm crazy when I talk about this," Hertz says.
Her exposure to the meters has super-sensitized Hertz to all kinds of other EMF sources. "The smart meters threw me over the electronic edge," she says. A cell phone switched on in the same room now gives her a headache. Stepping into a house with wi-fi is intolerable. Passing a cell tower on the street hurts. "Sometimes if the radiation is very strong my fingers curl up," she says. "I can now hear cell phones ringing on silent. Life," she says, "has dramatically changed."
Hertz soon discovered there were other people like her: "Electrosensitives," they call themselves. To be sure, they comprise a tortured minority, often misunderstood and isolated. They share their stories at online forums like Smartmeters.org, the EMF Safety Network, and the Electrosensitive Society. "Some are getting sick from cell phones, some from smart meters, some from cell towers," Hertz tells me. "Some can no longer work and have had to flee their homes. Some are losing their eyesight, some can't stop shaking, most cannot sleep."
In recent years, I've gotten to know dozens of electrosensitives. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, I met a woman who had taken to wearing an aluminum foil hat. (This works -- wrap a cell phone in foil and it will kill the signal.) I met a former world record-holding marathoner, a 54-year-old woman who had lived out of her car for eight years before settling down at a house ringed by mountains that she said protected the place from cell frequencies. I met people who said they no longer wanted to live because of their condition. Many of the people I talked to were accomplished professionals -- writers, television producers, entrepreneurs. I met a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratories named Bill Bruno whose employer had tried to fire him after he asked for protection from EMFs at the lab. I met a local librarian named Rebekah Azen who quit her job after being sickened by a newly installed wi-fi system at the library. I met a brilliant activist named Arthur Firstenberg, who had for several years published a newsletter, "No Place to Hide," but who was now homeless, living out of the back of his car, sleeping in wilderness outside the city where he could escape the signals.
In New York City, I got to know a longtime member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who said he was electrosensitive. I'll call him Jake, because he is embarrassed by his condition and he doesn't want to jeopardize his job or his membership in the IEEE (which happens to have for its purpose the promulgation of electrical technology, including cell phones). Jake told me how one day, a few years ago, he started to get sick whenever he went into the bedroom of his apartment to sleep. He had headaches, suffered fatigue and nausea, nightsweats and heart palpitations, had blurred vision and difficulty breathing and was blasted by a ringing in the ears -- the typical symptoms of the electrosensitive. He discovered that his neighbor in the apartment building kept a wi-fi transmitter next door, on the other side of the wall to his bedroom. When Jake asked the neighbor to shut it down, his symptoms disappeared.
The government of Sweden reports that the disorder known as electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, afflicts an estimated 3 percent of the population. A study by the California Department of Health found that, based on self-reports, as many as 770,000 Californians, or 3 percent of the state's population, would ascribe some form of illness to EMFs. A study in Switzerland recently found a 5 percent prevalence of electrosensitivity. In Germany, there is reportedly a 6 percent prevalence. Even the former prime minister of Norway, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, until 2003 the director general of the World Health Organization, has admitted that she suffers headaches and "strong discomfort" when exposed to cell phones. "My hypersensitivity," she told a Norwegian newspaper in 2002, "has gone so far that I react to mobile phones closer to me than about four meters." She added in the same interview: "People have been in my office with their mobile hidden in their pocket or bag. Without knowing if it was on or off, we have tested my reactions. I have always reacted when the phone has been on -- never when it's off."
Yet the World Health Organization -- the same agency that Brundtland once headed -- reports "there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure." WHO's findings are corroborated by a 2008 study at the University of Bern in Switzerland which found "no evidence that EHS individuals could detect [the] presence or absence" of frequencies that allegedly make them sick. A study conducted in 2006 at the Mobile Phone Research Unit at King's College in London came to a similar conclusion. "No evidence was found to indicate that people with self-reported sensitivity to mobile phone signals are able to detect such signals or that they react to them with increased symptom severity," the report said. "As sham exposure was sufficient to trigger severe symptoms in some participants, psychological factors may have an important role in causing this condition." The King's College researchers in 2010 concluded it was a "medically unexplained illness."
"The scientific data so far just doesn't help the electrosensitives," says Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of Microwave News, a newsletter and website that covers the potential impacts of RF-EMFs. "The design of some of these studies, however, is questionable." He adds: "Frankly, I'd be surprised if the condition did not exist. We're electromagnetic beings. You wouldn't have a thought in your head without electromagnetic signals. There is electrical signaling going on in your body all the time, and the idea that external electromagnetic fields can't affect us just doesn't make sense. We're biological and chemical beings too, and we know that we can develop allergies to certain biological and chemical compounds. Why wouldn't we also find there are allergies to EM fields? Shouldn't every chemical be tested for its effects on human beings? Well, the same could be said for each frequency of RF radiation."
Dr. David Carpenter of SUNY, who has also looked into electrosensitivity, tells me he's "not totally convinced that electrosensitivity is real." Still, he says, "there are just too many people with reports of illness when chronically near to EMF devices, with their symptoms being relieved when they are away from them. Like multiple chemical sensitivity and Gulf War Syndrome, there is something here, but we just don't understand it all yet."
Science reporter B. Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer's Guide to the Issues, says the studies she has reviewed on EHS are "contradictory and nowhere near definitive." Flaws in test design stand out, she says. Many with EHS may be simply "too sensitized," she believes, to endure research exposure protocols, possibly skewing results from the start by inadvertently studying a less sensitive group. Levitt recently compiled some of the most damning studies of the health effects from cell towers in a report for the International Commission on Electromagnetic Safety in Italy. "Some populations are reacting poorly when living or working within 1,500 feet of a cell tower," Levitt tells me. Several studies she cited found an increase in headaches, rashes, tremors, sleep disturbances, dizziness, concentration problems, and memory changes.
"EHS may be one of those problems that can never be well defined -- we may just have to believe what people report," Levitt says. "And people are reporting these symptoms all over the globe now when new technologies are introduced or infrastructure like cell towers go into neighborhoods. It's not likely a transcultural mass hallucination. The immune system is an exquisite warning mechanism. These are our canaries in the coal mine."
Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson was one of the first researchers to take the claims of electrosensitivity seriously. He found, for example, that persons with EHS had changes in skin mast cells -- markers of allergic reaction -- when exposed to specific EM fields. Other studies have found that radiofrequency EMFs can increase serum histamine levels -- the hallmark of an allergic reaction. Johansson has hypothesized that electrosensitivity arises exactly as any common allergy would arise -- due to excessive exposure, as the immune system fails. And just as only some people develop allergies to cats or pollen or dust, only some of us fall prey to EM fields. Johansson admits that his hypothesis has yet to be proven in laboratory study.
One afternoon not long ago, a nurse named Maria Gonzalez, who lives in Queens, New York, took me to see the cell phone masts that irradiate her daughter's school. The masts were the usual flat-paneled, alien-looking things nested together, festooned with wires, high on a rooftop across from Public School 122 in Astoria. They emitted a fine signal -- five bars on my phone. The operator of the masts, Sprint-Nextel, had built a wall of fake brick to hide them from view, but Maria was unimpressed with the subterfuge. She was terrified of the masts. When, in 2005, the panels went up, soon to be turned on, she was working at the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Hospital. She'd heard bizarre stories about cell phones from her cancer-ward colleagues. Some of the doctors at St. Vincent's told her they had doubts about the safety of their own cellphones and pagers. This was disturbing enough. She went online, culling studies. When she read a report published in 2002 about children in Spain who developed leukemia shortly after a cell phone tower was erected next to their school, she went into a quiet panic.
Sprint-Nextel was unsympathetic when she telephoned the company in the summer of 2005 to express her concerns. The company granted her a single meeting that autumn, with a Sprint-Nextel technician, an attorney, and a self-described "radiation expert" under contract with the company. "They kept saying, 'we're one hundred percent sure the antennas are safe,'" Maria told me as we stared at the masts. "'One hundred percent sure! These are children! We would never hurt children.'" She called the office of Hillary Clinton and pestered the senator once a week for six months -- but got nowhere. A year later, Gonzalez sued the US government, charging that the Federal Communications Commission had failed to fully evaluate the risks from cell phone frequencies. The suit was thrown out. The judge concluded that if regulators for the government said the radiation was safe, then it was safe. The message, as Gonzalez puts it, was that she was "crazy ... and making a big to-do about nothing."
I'd venture, rather, that she was applying a commonsense principle in environmental science: the precautionary principle, which states that when an action or policy -- or technology -- cannot be proven with certainty to be safe, then it should be assumed to be harmful. In a society thrilled with the magic of digital wireless, we have junked this principle. And we try to dismiss as fools those who uphold it -- people like Gonzalez. We have accepted without question that we will have wi-fi hotspots in our homes, and at libraries, and in cafes and bookstores; that we will have wireless alarm systems and wireless baby monitors and wireless utility meters and wireless video games that children play; that we will carry on our persons wireless iPads and iPods and smart phones. We are mesmerized by the efficiency and convenience of the infotainment appendage, the words and sounds and pictures it carries. We are, in other words, thoughtless in our embrace of the technology.
Because of our thoughtlessness, we have not demanded to know the full consequences of this technology. Perhaps the gadgets are slowly killing us -- we do not know. Perhaps they are perfectly safe -- we do not know. Perhaps they are making us sick in ways we barely understand -- we do not know. What we do know, without a doubt, is that the electromagnetic fields are all around us, and that to live in modern civilization implies always and everywhere that we cannot escape their touch.
1. Training my Virtual Medical Secretaries (V.M.A)
I love the idea of using a Virtual Medical Assistant (V.M.A for short.).
Thank god I am in my twilight years and listening to birds singing is one of my natural pastimes and trying to figure out which bird is calling and which bird is answering is not an easy task.
But the idea of voice activated cellphone is a welcome addition to an armory of medically offensive gadgets that are springing by numbers.
Dictaphone was in my armory when working abroad. I could do a very good dictation without punctuation marks and my secretaries never bothered to phone back and ask me for any clarifications. That was a very positive effort on my part and my superiors very much like my approach except a few, since I did not try to show off any accent but pure and simple Queen's English, I dictated.
Mind you I was taking to a voice machine and not a person.
The idiot, the Dictaphone does not have any emotions and only records my voice.
I tell them that putting fullstops, commas, semicolons and apostrophes are her job and not mine.
When things were difficult unlike S.M.S. I wrote down the specific stuff clearly to save their time.
I hope and prey that smart-phone becoming intelligent and telling me back you are creepy and some sort of a sob.
Advantages.
1. After some time smart-phone will instantly know what you are trying to do.
2. Unlike human secretaries who make the same mistakes over over again smart-phone would never repeat mistakes.
3. One can take home the Virtual Secretary unlike the human with bizarre consequence at home boundary.
4. One can switch off the VMA with just a push of a button unlike a jabbering soul with money / home problems.
5. At worse I can thrash it on the floor.
I have to think of the 6 to 10 as and when my lateral thinking make me to do so.
For me it is a smart innervation.
6. If I see a guy/girl I hate (on my war-path) to meet or talk or exchange any greetings I can pretend I am very busy talking to it (of cause switched off and with so many adversaries including politicians I do not want to run dry the battery life) and escape harmlessly. I see this happening evry day of my life since i do not still carry a smartphone.
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
2. Training my Medical Secretaries
Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers
By NICK WINGFIELD
Published: December 2, 2011
Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?
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Illustration by The New York Times
Jimmy Wong, of Los Angeles, called an overheard conversation with Siri on an iPhone “creepy.”
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The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example.
But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.
In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.
“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.
Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a conversation with a phone on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University.
The technology behind voice-activated mobile phones has been around for a few years — allowing people to order their phones around like digital factotums, commanding them to dictate text messages, jot down appointments on their calendars and search for nearby sushi restaurants. Apple, though, has taken it to another level with Siri.
“Happy birthday smiley face,” was what Dani Klein heard a man say to his phone on the Long Island Rail Road, using the command to insert a grinning emotion into a message.
“It sounded ridiculous,” said Mr. Klein, 28, who works in social media marketing.
Talking to your phone is so new that there are no official rules yet on, say, public transportation systems.
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the train line’s quiet-car policy applied to any use of voice with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only “phone calls,” not banter with a virtual assistant. “We may have to adjust the language if it becomes a problem,” Mr. Cole said.
Voice-activated technology in smartphones first appeared a few years ago when mobile phones running Google’s Android operating system and other software began offering basic voice commands to do Web searches and other tasks.
Apple’s Siri, introduced this fall, is a more sophisticated iteration of the technology; it responds to natural-sounding phrases like, “What’s the weather looking like?” and “Wake me up at 8 a.m.”
Apple gave Siri a dash of personality, too, reinforcing the impression that the iPhone’s users were actually talking to someone. Ask Siri for the meaning of life, and it responds, “I find it odd you would ask this of an inanimate object.”
Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.
“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.
Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.
“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”
James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, said people who use their voices to control their phones are creating an inconvenience for others — noise — rather than coping with an inconvenience for themselves — the discomfort of having to type slowly on a cramped cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the behavior with that of someone who leaves a car’s engine running while parked, creating noise and fumes for people surrounding them.
While Apple has tried to enable natural-sounding conversations with Siri, they are often anything but. Nirav Tolia, an Internet entrepreneur, was riding a crowded elevator down from his office in San Francisco recently when a man tried to use Siri to find a new location of a cafe, Coffee Bar. The phone gave him listings for other coffee houses — the wrong ones — forcing him to repeat the search several times.
“Just say ‘Starbucks,’ dude,” another passenger said, pushing past the Coffee Bar-seeker when the elevator reached the ground floor.
When talking to their cellphones, people sometimes start sounding like machines themselves. Jimmy Wong, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends in Los Angeles recently when they found themselves next to a man ordering Siri to write memos and dictate e-mails. They found the man’s conversation with his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discussion between two people.
“It was very robotic,” he said.
Yet the group could not stop eavesdropping.
People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.
“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.
But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”
This is for Quorora writer to read;
This should be read in conjunction with the experimental evidence of brain tumour Schwanoma in rats and mice!
Radiation From Cell Phones and WiFi Are Making People Sick-
Are We All at Risk?
We are now exposed to electromagnetic radio frequencies 24 hours a day. Welcome to the largest human experiment ever.
December 2, 2011
Consider this story:
It's January 1990, during the pioneer build-out of mobile phone service. A cell tower goes up 800 feet from the house of Alison Rall, in Mansfield, Ohio, where she and her husband run a 160-acre dairy farm. The first thing the Rall family notices is that the ducks on their land lay eggs that don't hatch. That spring there are no ducklings.
By the fall of 1990, the cattle herd that pastures near the tower is sick. The animals are thin, their ribs are showing, their coats growing rough, and their behavior is weird -- they're agitated, nervous.
Soon the cows are miscarrying, and so are the goats.
Many of the animals that gestate are born deformed. There are goats with webbed necks, goats with front legs shorter than their rear legs. One calf in the womb has a tumor the size of a basketball, another carries a tumor three feet in diameter, big enough that he won't pass through the birth canal.
Rall and the local veterinarian finally cut open the mother to get the creature out alive. The vet records the nightmare in her log: "I've never seen anything like this in my entire practice... All of [this] I feel was a result of the cellular tower."
Within six months, Rall's three young children begin suffering bizarre skin rashes, raised red "hot spots." The kids are hit with waves of hyperactivity; the youngest child sometimes spins in circles, whirling madly. The girls lose hair. Rall is soon pregnant with a fourth child, but she can't gain weight. Her son is born with birth defects -- brittle bones, neurological problems -- that fit no specific syndrome. Her other children, conceived prior to the arrival of the tower, had been born healthy.
Desperate to understand what is happening to her family and her farm, Rall contacts the Environmental Protection Agency. She ends up talking to an EPA scientist named Carl Blackman, an expert on the biological effects of radiation from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) -- the kind of radiofrequency EMFs (RF-EMFs) by which all wireless technology operates, including not just cell towers and cell phones but wi-fi hubs and wi-fi-capable computers, "smart" utility meters, and even cordless home phones. "With my government cap on, I'm supposed to tell you you're perfectly safe," Blackman tells her.
"With my civilian cap on, I have to tell you to consider leaving."
Blackman's warning casts a pall on the family. When Rall contacts the cell phone company operating the tower, they tell her there is "no possibility whatsoever" that the tower is the source of her ills. "You're probably in the safest place in America," the company representative tells her.
The Ralls abandoned the farm on Christmas Day of 1992 and never re-sold it, unwilling to subject others to the horrors they had experienced. Within weeks of fleeing to land they owned in Michigan, the children recovered their health, and so did the herd.
Not a single one of the half-dozen scientists I spoke to could explain what had happened on the Rall farm. Why the sickened animals? Why the skin rashes, the hyperactivity? Why the birth defects? If the radiofrequency radiation from the cell tower was the cause, then what was the mechanism?
And why today, with millions of cell towers dotting the planet and billions of cell phones placed next to billions of heads every day, aren't we all getting sick?
In fact, the great majority of us appear to be just fine. We all live in range of cell towers now, and we are all wireless operators. More than wireless operators, we're nuts about the technology. Who doesn't keep at their side at all times the electro-plastic appendage for the suckling of information?
The mobile phone as a technology was developed in the 1970s, commercialized in the mid-80s, miniaturized in the '90s. When the first mobile phone companies launched in the United Kingdom in 1985, the expectation was that perhaps 10,000 phones would sell. Worldwide shipments of mobile phones topped the one billion mark in 2006. As of October 2010 there were 5.2 billion cell phones operating on the planet. "Penetration," in the marketing-speak of the companies, often tops 100 percent in many countries, meaning there is more than one connection per person. The mobile phone in its various manifestations -- the iPhone, the Android, the Blackberry -- has been called the "most prolific consumer device" ever proffered.
I don't have an Internet connection at my home in Brooklyn, and, like a dinosaur, I still keep a landline. But if I stand on my roof, I see a hundred feet away, attached to the bricks of the neighboring parking garage, a panel of cell phone antennae -- pointed straight at me. They produce wonderful reception on my cell phone. My neighbors in the apartment below have a wireless fidelity connection -- better known as wi-fi -- which I tap into when I have to argue with magazine editors. This is very convenient. I use it. I abuse it.
Yet even though I have, in a fashion, opted out, here I am, on a rooftop in Brooklyn, standing bathed in the radiation from the cell phone panels on the parking garage next door. I am also bathed in the radiation from the neighbors' wi-fi downstairs. The waves are everywhere, from public libraries to Amtrak trains to restaurants and bars and even public squares like Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, where the Wall Street occupiers relentlessly tweet.
We now live in a wireless-saturated normality that has never existed in the history of the human race.
It is unprecedented because of the complexity of the modulated frequencies that carry the increasingly complex information we transmit on our cell phones, smart phones and wi-fi systems. These EMFs are largely untested in their effects on human beings. Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson, who teaches at the world-renowned Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, tells me the mass saturation in electromagnetic fields raises terrible questions. Humanity, he says, has embarked on the equivalent of "the largest full-scale experiment ever. What happens when, 24 hours around the clock, we allow ourselves and our children to be whole-body-irradiated by new, man-made electromagnetic fields for the entirety of our lives?"
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
The IARC decision followed in the wake of multiple warnings, mostly from European regulators, about the possible health risks of RF-EMFs. In September 2007, Europe's top environmental watchdog, the EU's European Environment Agency, suggested that the mass unregulated exposure of human beings to widespread radiofrequency radiation "could lead to a health crisis similar to those caused by asbestos, smoking and lead in petrol." That same year, Germany's environmental ministry singled out the dangers of RF-EMFs used in wi-fi systems, noting that people should keep wi-fi exposure "as low as possible" and instead choose "conventional wired connections." In 2008, France issued a generalized national cell phone health warning against excessive cell phone use, and then, a year later, announced a ban on cell phone advertising for children under the age of 12.
In 2009, following a meeting in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, more than 50 concerned scientists from 16 countries -- public health officials, biologists, neuroscientists, medical doctors -- signed what became known as the Porto Alegre Resolution. The signatories described it as an "urgent call" for more research based on "the body of evidence that indicates that exposure to electromagnetic fields interferes with basic human biology."
That evidence is mounting. "Radiofrequency radiation has a number of biological effects which can be reproducibly found in animals and cellular systems," says David O. Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York (SUNY). "We really cannot say for certain what the adverse effects are in humans," Carpenter tells me. "But the indications are that there may be -- and I use the words 'may be' -- very serious effects in humans." He notes that in exposure tests with animal and human cells, RF-EMF radiation causes genes to be activated. "We also know that RF-EMF causes generation of free radicals, increases production of things called heat shock proteins, and alters calcium ion regulation. These are all common mechanisms behind many kinds of tissue damage."
Double-strand breaks in DNA -- one of the undisputed causes of cancer -- have been reported in similar tests with animal cells. Swedish neuro-oncologist Leif Salford, chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Lund University, has found that cell phone radiation damages neurons in rats, particularly those cells associated with memory and learning. The damage occurred after an exposure of just two hours. Salford also found that cell phone EMFs cause holes to appear in the barrier between the circulatory system and the brain in rats. Punching holes in the blood-brain-barrier is not a good thing. It allows toxic molecules from the blood to leach into the ultra-stable environment of the brain. One of the potential outcomes, Salford notes, is dementia.
Other effects from cell phone radiofrequencies have been reported using human subjects. At Loughborough University in England, sleep specialists in 2008 found that after 30 minutes of cell phone use, their subjects required twice the time to fall asleep as they did when the phone was avoided before bedtime. EEGs (electroencephalograms) showed a disturbance of the brain waves that regulate sleep. Neuroscientists at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia discovered in 2009 a "power boost" in brain waves when volunteers were exposed to cell phone radiofrequencies. Researchers strapped Nokia phones to their subjects' heads, then turned the phones on and off. On: brain went into defense mode. Off: brain settled. The brain, one of the lead researchers speculated, was "concentrating to overcome the electrical interference."
Yet for all this, there is no scientific consensus on the risks of RF-EMFs to human beings.
The major public-health watchdogs, in the US and worldwide, have dismissed concerns about it. "Current evidence," the World Health Organization (WHO) says, "does not confirm the existence of any health consequences from exposure to low level electromagnetic fields." (The WHO thus contradicts the findings of one of its own research units.) The US Federal Communications Commission has made similar statements. The American Cancer Society reports that "most studies published so far have not found a link between cell phone use and the development of tumors." The cell phone industry's lobbying organization, CTIA-The Wireless Association, assures the public that cell phone radiation is safe, citing studies -- many of them funded by the telecom industry -- that show no risk.
Published meta-reviews of hundreds of such studies suggest that industry funding tends to skew results. According to a survey by Henry Lai, a research professor at University of Washington, only 28 percent of studies funded by the wireless industry showed some type of biological effect from cell phone radiation. Meanwhile, independently funded studies produce an altogether different set of data: 67 percent of those studies showed a bioeffect. The Safe Wireless Initiative, a research group in Washington, DC that has since closed down, unpacked the data in hundreds of studies on wireless health risks, arraying them in terms of funding source. "Our data show that mobile phone industry funded/influenced work is six times more likely to find 'no problem' than independently funded work," the group noted. "The industry thus has significantly contaminated the scientific evidence pool."
The evidence about the long-term public health risks of exposure to RF-EMFs may be contradictory. Yet it is clear that some people are getting sick when heavily exposed to the new radiofrequencies. And we are not listening to their complaints.
Take the story of Michele Hertz. When a local utility company installed a wireless digital meter -- better known as a "smart" meter -- on her house in upstate New York in the summer of 2009, Hertz thought little of it. Then she began to feel odd. She was a practiced sculptor, but now she could not sculpt. "I couldn't concentrate, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't even finish sentences," she told me. Hertz experienced "incredible memory loss," and, at the age of 51, feared she had come down with Alzheimer's.
One night during a snowstorm in 2010 her house lost power, and when it came back on her head exploded with a ringing sound -- "a terrible piercing." A buzzing in her head persisted. She took to sleeping on the floor of her kitchen that winter, where the refrigerator drowned out the keening. There were other symptoms: headaches and nausea and dizziness, persistent and always worsening. "Sometimes I'd wake up with my heart pounding uncontrollably," she told me. "I thought I would have a heart attack. I had nightmares that people were killing me."
Roughly one year after the installation of the wireless meters, with the help of an electrician, Hertz thought she had figured out the source of the trouble: It had to be something electrical in the house. On a hunch, she told the utility company, Con Edison of New York, to remove the wireless meter. She told them: "I will die if you do not install an analog meter." Within days, the worst symptoms disappeared. "People look at me like I'm crazy when I talk about this," Hertz says.
Her exposure to the meters has super-sensitized Hertz to all kinds of other EMF sources. "The smart meters threw me over the electronic edge," she says. A cell phone switched on in the same room now gives her a headache. Stepping into a house with wi-fi is intolerable. Passing a cell tower on the street hurts. "Sometimes if the radiation is very strong my fingers curl up," she says. "I can now hear cell phones ringing on silent. Life," she says, "has dramatically changed."
Hertz soon discovered there were other people like her: "Electrosensitives," they call themselves. To be sure, they comprise a tortured minority, often misunderstood and isolated. They share their stories at online forums like Smartmeters.org, the EMF Safety Network, and the Electrosensitive Society. "Some are getting sick from cell phones, some from smart meters, some from cell towers," Hertz tells me. "Some can no longer work and have had to flee their homes. Some are losing their eyesight, some can't stop shaking, most cannot sleep."
In recent years, I've gotten to know dozens of electrosensitives. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, I met a woman who had taken to wearing an aluminum foil hat. (This works -- wrap a cell phone in foil and it will kill the signal.) I met a former world record-holding marathoner, a 54-year-old woman who had lived out of her car for eight years before settling down at a house ringed by mountains that she said protected the place from cell frequencies. I met people who said they no longer wanted to live because of their condition. Many of the people I talked to were accomplished professionals -- writers, television producers, entrepreneurs. I met a scientist from Los Alamos National Laboratories named Bill Bruno whose employer had tried to fire him after he asked for protection from EMFs at the lab. I met a local librarian named Rebekah Azen who quit her job after being sickened by a newly installed wi-fi system at the library. I met a brilliant activist named Arthur Firstenberg, who had for several years published a newsletter, "No Place to Hide," but who was now homeless, living out of the back of his car, sleeping in wilderness outside the city where he could escape the signals.
In New York City, I got to know a longtime member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) who said he was electrosensitive. I'll call him Jake, because he is embarrassed by his condition and he doesn't want to jeopardize his job or his membership in the IEEE (which happens to have for its purpose the promulgation of electrical technology, including cell phones). Jake told me how one day, a few years ago, he started to get sick whenever he went into the bedroom of his apartment to sleep. He had headaches, suffered fatigue and nausea, nightsweats and heart palpitations, had blurred vision and difficulty breathing and was blasted by a ringing in the ears -- the typical symptoms of the electrosensitive. He discovered that his neighbor in the apartment building kept a wi-fi transmitter next door, on the other side of the wall to his bedroom. When Jake asked the neighbor to shut it down, his symptoms disappeared.
The government of Sweden reports that the disorder known as electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS, afflicts an estimated 3 percent of the population. A study by the California Department of Health found that, based on self-reports, as many as 770,000 Californians, or 3 percent of the state's population, would ascribe some form of illness to EMFs. A study in Switzerland recently found a 5 percent prevalence of electrosensitivity. In Germany, there is reportedly a 6 percent prevalence. Even the former prime minister of Norway, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, until 2003 the director general of the World Health Organization, has admitted that she suffers headaches and "strong discomfort" when exposed to cell phones. "My hypersensitivity," she told a Norwegian newspaper in 2002, "has gone so far that I react to mobile phones closer to me than about four meters." She added in the same interview: "People have been in my office with their mobile hidden in their pocket or bag. Without knowing if it was on or off, we have tested my reactions. I have always reacted when the phone has been on -- never when it's off."
Yet the World Health Organization -- the same agency that Brundtland once headed -- reports "there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF exposure." WHO's findings are corroborated by a 2008 study at the University of Bern in Switzerland which found "no evidence that EHS individuals could detect [the] presence or absence" of frequencies that allegedly make them sick. A study conducted in 2006 at the Mobile Phone Research Unit at King's College in London came to a similar conclusion. "No evidence was found to indicate that people with self-reported sensitivity to mobile phone signals are able to detect such signals or that they react to them with increased symptom severity," the report said. "As sham exposure was sufficient to trigger severe symptoms in some participants, psychological factors may have an important role in causing this condition." The King's College researchers in 2010 concluded it was a "medically unexplained illness."
"The scientific data so far just doesn't help the electrosensitives," says Louis Slesin, editor and publisher of Microwave News, a newsletter and website that covers the potential impacts of RF-EMFs. "The design of some of these studies, however, is questionable." He adds: "Frankly, I'd be surprised if the condition did not exist. We're electromagnetic beings. You wouldn't have a thought in your head without electromagnetic signals. There is electrical signaling going on in your body all the time, and the idea that external electromagnetic fields can't affect us just doesn't make sense. We're biological and chemical beings too, and we know that we can develop allergies to certain biological and chemical compounds. Why wouldn't we also find there are allergies to EM fields? Shouldn't every chemical be tested for its effects on human beings? Well, the same could be said for each frequency of RF radiation."
Dr. David Carpenter of SUNY, who has also looked into electrosensitivity, tells me he's "not totally convinced that electrosensitivity is real." Still, he says, "there are just too many people with reports of illness when chronically near to EMF devices, with their symptoms being relieved when they are away from them. Like multiple chemical sensitivity and Gulf War Syndrome, there is something here, but we just don't understand it all yet."
Science reporter B. Blake Levitt, author of Electromagnetic Fields: A Consumer's Guide to the Issues, says the studies she has reviewed on EHS are "contradictory and nowhere near definitive." Flaws in test design stand out, she says. Many with EHS may be simply "too sensitized," she believes, to endure research exposure protocols, possibly skewing results from the start by inadvertently studying a less sensitive group. Levitt recently compiled some of the most damning studies of the health effects from cell towers in a report for the International Commission on Electromagnetic Safety in Italy. "Some populations are reacting poorly when living or working within 1,500 feet of a cell tower," Levitt tells me. Several studies she cited found an increase in headaches, rashes, tremors, sleep disturbances, dizziness, concentration problems, and memory changes.
"EHS may be one of those problems that can never be well defined -- we may just have to believe what people report," Levitt says. "And people are reporting these symptoms all over the globe now when new technologies are introduced or infrastructure like cell towers go into neighborhoods. It's not likely a transcultural mass hallucination. The immune system is an exquisite warning mechanism. These are our canaries in the coal mine."
Swedish neuroscientist Olle Johansson was one of the first researchers to take the claims of electrosensitivity seriously. He found, for example, that persons with EHS had changes in skin mast cells -- markers of allergic reaction -- when exposed to specific EM fields. Other studies have found that radiofrequency EMFs can increase serum histamine levels -- the hallmark of an allergic reaction. Johansson has hypothesized that electrosensitivity arises exactly as any common allergy would arise -- due to excessive exposure, as the immune system fails. And just as only some people develop allergies to cats or pollen or dust, only some of us fall prey to EM fields. Johansson admits that his hypothesis has yet to be proven in laboratory study.
One afternoon not long ago, a nurse named Maria Gonzalez, who lives in Queens, New York, took me to see the cell phone masts that irradiate her daughter's school. The masts were the usual flat-paneled, alien-looking things nested together, festooned with wires, high on a rooftop across from Public School 122 in Astoria. They emitted a fine signal -- five bars on my phone. The operator of the masts, Sprint-Nextel, had built a wall of fake brick to hide them from view, but Maria was unimpressed with the subterfuge. She was terrified of the masts. When, in 2005, the panels went up, soon to be turned on, she was working at the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Hospital. She'd heard bizarre stories about cell phones from her cancer-ward colleagues. Some of the doctors at St. Vincent's told her they had doubts about the safety of their own cellphones and pagers. This was disturbing enough. She went online, culling studies. When she read a report published in 2002 about children in Spain who developed leukemia shortly after a cell phone tower was erected next to their school, she went into a quiet panic.
Sprint-Nextel was unsympathetic when she telephoned the company in the summer of 2005 to express her concerns. The company granted her a single meeting that autumn, with a Sprint-Nextel technician, an attorney, and a self-described "radiation expert" under contract with the company. "They kept saying, 'we're one hundred percent sure the antennas are safe,'" Maria told me as we stared at the masts. "'One hundred percent sure! These are children! We would never hurt children.'" She called the office of Hillary Clinton and pestered the senator once a week for six months -- but got nowhere. A year later, Gonzalez sued the US government, charging that the Federal Communications Commission had failed to fully evaluate the risks from cell phone frequencies. The suit was thrown out. The judge concluded that if regulators for the government said the radiation was safe, then it was safe. The message, as Gonzalez puts it, was that she was "crazy ... and making a big to-do about nothing."
I'd venture, rather, that she was applying a commonsense principle in environmental science: the precautionary principle, which states that when an action or policy -- or technology -- cannot be proven with certainty to be safe, then it should be assumed to be harmful. In a society thrilled with the magic of digital wireless, we have junked this principle. And we try to dismiss as fools those who uphold it -- people like Gonzalez. We have accepted without question that we will have wi-fi hotspots in our homes, and at libraries, and in cafes and bookstores; that we will have wireless alarm systems and wireless baby monitors and wireless utility meters and wireless video games that children play; that we will carry on our persons wireless iPads and iPods and smart phones. We are mesmerized by the efficiency and convenience of the infotainment appendage, the words and sounds and pictures it carries. We are, in other words, thoughtless in our embrace of the technology.
Because of our thoughtlessness, we have not demanded to know the full consequences of this technology. Perhaps the gadgets are slowly killing us -- we do not know. Perhaps they are perfectly safe -- we do not know. Perhaps they are making us sick in ways we barely understand -- we do not know. What we do know, without a doubt, is that the electromagnetic fields are all around us, and that to live in modern civilization implies always and everywhere that we cannot escape their touch.
1. Training my Virtual Medical Secretaries (V.M.A)
I love the idea of using a Virtual Medical Assistant (V.M.A for short.).
Thank god I am in my twilight years and listening to birds singing is one of my natural pastimes and trying to figure out which bird is calling and which bird is answering is not an easy task.
But the idea of voice activated cellphone is a welcome addition to an armory of medically offensive gadgets that are springing by numbers.
Dictaphone was in my armory when working abroad. I could do a very good dictation without punctuation marks and my secretaries never bothered to phone back and ask me for any clarifications. That was a very positive effort on my part and my superiors very much like my approach except a few, since I did not try to show off any accent but pure and simple Queen's English, I dictated.
Mind you I was taking to a voice machine and not a person.
The idiot, the Dictaphone does not have any emotions and only records my voice.
I tell them that putting fullstops, commas, semicolons and apostrophes are her job and not mine.
When things were difficult unlike S.M.S. I wrote down the specific stuff clearly to save their time.
I hope and prey that smart-phone becoming intelligent and telling me back you are creepy and some sort of a sob.
Advantages.
1. After some time smart-phone will instantly know what you are trying to do.
2. Unlike human secretaries who make the same mistakes over over again smart-phone would never repeat mistakes.
3. One can take home the Virtual Secretary unlike the human with bizarre consequence at home boundary.
4. One can switch off the VMA with just a push of a button unlike a jabbering soul with money / home problems.
5. At worse I can thrash it on the floor.
I have to think of the 6 to 10 as and when my lateral thinking make me to do so.
For me it is a smart innervation.
6. If I see a guy/girl I hate (on my war-path) to meet or talk or exchange any greetings I can pretend I am very busy talking to it (of cause switched off and with so many adversaries including politicians I do not want to run dry the battery life) and escape harmlessly. I see this happening evry day of my life since i do not still carry a smartphone.
We have a few answers. Last May, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC, a branch of the World Health Organization), in Lyon, France, issued a statement that the electromagnetic frequencies from cell phones would henceforth be classified as "possibly carcinogenic to humans." The determination was based in part on data from a 13-country study, called Interphone, which reported in 2008 that after a decade of cell phone use, the risk of getting a brain tumor -- specifically on the side of the head where the phone is placed -- goes up as much as 40 percent for adults. Israeli researchers, using study methods similar to the Interphone investigation, have found that heavy cell phone users were more likely to suffer malignant tumors of the salivary gland in the cheek, while an independent study by scientists in Sweden concluded that people who started using a cell phone before the age of 20 were five times as likely to develop a brain tumor. According to a study published in the International Journal of Cancer Prevention, people living for more than a decade within 350 meters of a cell phone tower experience a four-fold increase in cancer rates.
2. Training my Medical Secretaries
Oh, for the Good Old Days of Rude Cellphone Gabbers
By NICK WINGFIELD
Published: December 2, 2011
Is talking to a phone the same as talking on it?
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Illustration by The New York Times
Jimmy Wong, of Los Angeles, called an overheard conversation with Siri on an iPhone “creepy.”
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The sound of someone gabbing on a cellphone is part of the soundtrack of daily life, and most of us have learned when to be quiet — no talking in “quiet cars” on trains, for example.
But the etiquette of talking to a phone — more precisely, to a “virtual assistant” like Apple’s Siri, in the new iPhone 4S — has not yet evolved. And eavesdroppers are becoming annoyed.
In part, that is because conversations with machines have a robotic, unsettling quality. Then there is the matter of punctuation. If you want it, you have to say it.
“How is he doing question mark how are you doing question mark,” Jeremy Littau of Bethlehem, Pa., found himself telling his new iPhone recently as he walked down the street, dictating a text message to his wife, who was home with their newborn. The machine spoke to him in Siri’s synthesized female voice.
Passers-by gawked. “It’s not normal human behavior to have people having a conversation with a phone on the street,” concluded Mr. Littau, 36, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University.
The technology behind voice-activated mobile phones has been around for a few years — allowing people to order their phones around like digital factotums, commanding them to dictate text messages, jot down appointments on their calendars and search for nearby sushi restaurants. Apple, though, has taken it to another level with Siri.
“Happy birthday smiley face,” was what Dani Klein heard a man say to his phone on the Long Island Rail Road, using the command to insert a grinning emotion into a message.
“It sounded ridiculous,” said Mr. Klein, 28, who works in social media marketing.
Talking to your phone is so new that there are no official rules yet on, say, public transportation systems.
Cliff Cole, a spokesman for Amtrak, said the train line’s quiet-car policy applied to any use of voice with cellphones, though it explicitly bans only “phone calls,” not banter with a virtual assistant. “We may have to adjust the language if it becomes a problem,” Mr. Cole said.
Voice-activated technology in smartphones first appeared a few years ago when mobile phones running Google’s Android operating system and other software began offering basic voice commands to do Web searches and other tasks.
Apple’s Siri, introduced this fall, is a more sophisticated iteration of the technology; it responds to natural-sounding phrases like, “What’s the weather looking like?” and “Wake me up at 8 a.m.”
Apple gave Siri a dash of personality, too, reinforcing the impression that the iPhone’s users were actually talking to someone. Ask Siri for the meaning of life, and it responds, “I find it odd you would ask this of an inanimate object.”
Technology executives say voice technologies are here to stay if only because they can help cellphone users be more productive.
“I don’t think the keyboard is going to go away, but it’s going to be less used,” said Martin Cooper, who developed the first portable cellular phone while at Motorola in the 1970s.
Another irritant in listening to people talk to their phones is the awareness that most everything you can do with voice commands can also be done silently. Billy Brooks, 43, was standing in line at the service department of a car dealership in Los Angeles recently, when a woman broke the silence of the room by dictating a text message into her iPhone.
“You’re unnecessarily annoying others at that point by not just typing out your message,” said Mr. Brooks, a visual effects artist in the film industry, adding that the woman’s behavior was “just ridiculous and kind of sad.”
James E. Katz, director of the Center for Mobile Communication Studies at Rutgers, said people who use their voices to control their phones are creating an inconvenience for others — noise — rather than coping with an inconvenience for themselves — the discomfort of having to type slowly on a cramped cellphone keyboard. Mr. Katz compared the behavior with that of someone who leaves a car’s engine running while parked, creating noise and fumes for people surrounding them.
While Apple has tried to enable natural-sounding conversations with Siri, they are often anything but. Nirav Tolia, an Internet entrepreneur, was riding a crowded elevator down from his office in San Francisco recently when a man tried to use Siri to find a new location of a cafe, Coffee Bar. The phone gave him listings for other coffee houses — the wrong ones — forcing him to repeat the search several times.
“Just say ‘Starbucks,’ dude,” another passenger said, pushing past the Coffee Bar-seeker when the elevator reached the ground floor.
When talking to their cellphones, people sometimes start sounding like machines themselves. Jimmy Wong, 24, was at an after-hours diner with friends in Los Angeles recently when they found themselves next to a man ordering Siri to write memos and dictate e-mails. They found the man’s conversation with his phone “creepy,” without any of the natural pauses and voice inflections that occur in a discussion between two people.
“It was very robotic,” he said.
Yet the group could not stop eavesdropping.
People who study the behavior of cellphone users believe the awkwardness of hearing people in hotels, airports and cafes treating their phones like administrative assistants will simply fade over time.
“We’ll see an evolution of that initial irritation with it, to a New Yorker cartoon making fun of it, and then after a while it will largely be accepted by most people,” said Mr. Katz from Rutgers.
But, he predicted, “there will be a small minority of traditionalists who yearn for the good old days when people just texted in public.”
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