WHAT MORON MARKEY MISSED

But there is not a single point to judge the correlation between brain cancer and a source of electromagnetic waves about 2 inches from your brain. All there is one pending, undecided law suit.

So the veritably Honorable Markey was right in calling such studies "critical"?

Not in the least. There are other methods to rule out any connection between the two, and they would be known to a chairman of the Telecommunications committee if he was not too busy stealing taxpayers' money.

Cellular telephones have been allotted the frequency band of roughly 800 to 900 MHz, which corresponds to a wavelength band from 375 to 33.3 cm. The maximum power allowed for handheld sets is 600 mill. (This means the transmitter is handheld; if it is in a metal box under the dash, with two leads coming out to the telephone receiver, it is essentially like your home telephone.)

All we have to do, then, is look in the neighboring bands and see what health effects they produce. The band above 902 MHz is the "ISM" (industrial-scientific-medical) band, and the applications are too varied to provide obvious data. But the band below 806 MHz is reserved for UHF TV transmitters, which are allowed (and usually use) a maximum power of 280 kW. The ratio of the two permitted maxima is thus 280,000/0.6 = 466,667, but of course, UV TV does not broadcast 2 inches (5 cm) from your brain. To see at what distance a UV TV station has the same power flux (watts/m^2) as a hand-held cellular phone, we must remember that the transmitted power follows the inverse square law, so we must take the square root of the ratio above (683.13) and multiply it by 0.05 m to get the required distance in meters, which is 34.16 m, or about 100 ft. And this does not even take into account that the UHF TV stations broadcast 24 hours a day, whereas a cellular telephone is used only for a few minutes at a time (it costs!).

UV TV transmitter antennas in cities such as New York and other cities with a high population density are usually mounted on the roofs of buildings, and 100 ft would include something like the top five stories. They are all empty and uninhabited, of course, and you know why, don't you.?

Their inhabitants all died of brain cancer.

[More on correlation: P. Beckmann, Elements of Applied probability Theory (1968), sftbd., $7.50 from us. Not a popular book, requires familiarity with integral calculus.]