Posts by oldsparks

EC calls for one world internet governance

Leave ICANN to get on with the job

ICANN has done a pretty good job so far, and I would rather trust them than the politically motivated career politicians who know nothing about IT and everything about control of the masses.

Follow the Somali pirate scourge via Google mashup

Pussy-footing with pirates

It is time we stopped pussy-footing around with these pirates. Zim Lines ships (Israeli) are never attacked because they have heavy machine gun mountings on the bridge wings and down aft, and the crew know how to use them.

When I was at sea in the 60s just about every British ship carried some sort of arms (although possibly not sufficient to deal with half a dozen pirates armed with RPGs and assault rifles). Where is the British spirit of yesteryear, when all of our deep-sea merchant vessels were armed, and fully expected to have to fight-off pirates on every voyage?

We really have gone soft when we consider pirates' "human rights" are more important than our own and are not prepared to kill the bastards.

The Electric Car Conspiracy ... that never was

The Electric Car

The TRUTH about electric cars is obvious from a bit of simple arithmetic.

One brake horse power equals 746watts.

What is the bhp of a typical small car? I would guess it is around 70bhp.

So to get an equivalent power in an electric car requires about 52 kilowatts.

This is one helluva lot of power to get from any battery. No matter which way you alter the balance between voltage and current, the battery to provide that amount of power is going to be so large and heavy that there is no room for anyone or anything in the car other than the driver.

THAT is the simple truth about why the electric car is a non-starter.

Mobiles give you brain cancer?

"Radiation"

Let's get back to some basic physics. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves. Light is also electromagnetic waves, but of a much higher frequency than that used by cellphones. In general, the higher the frequency of the propagated wave, the greater the energy of that wave.

The output of a cellphone (or wifi router for that matter) is measured in milliwatts (thousandths of a watt). A person would get a greater dose of electromagnetic radiation standing right in front of a car headlamp. But perhaps a better comment is that the energy of the electromagnetic radiation in sunlight is enormously higher than that from a cellphone, and few people seem to give that much thought.

I spent my whole career working with electromagnetic transmitters at a range of frequencies up to 10GHz. Many of these transmitters put out hundreds of thousands of times greater power than a cellphone. There are certain dangers with extremely high power outputs, but everybody is regularly bathed in electromagnetic fields far higher than those of the cellphones in their pockets or a cellnet base station (whose fields are minuscule at ground level).

All this worry about mobile phones is caused by a misunderstanding of the word "radiation" by ill-educated people and a totally irrational fear of what they do not understand.