Mobile phones and Cancer (on-going)

I’m usually, except for climate change & AGW in my view a special case, a bit of what may be termed a “conservative/main stream" thinker when it comes to technology issues - probably due to my scientific /engineering background and of course a comfortable suburban life in that bustling metropolis of radicalism otherwise known as Billingshurst .

So on being prompted to consider the potential dangers of 5g comms I was a bit surprised to find that one of my existing “perceptions” or “starting points” - I’m using those terms to mean something one thinks but couldn’t say exactly why one thinks it or where they got their position from - was that the mainstream position on non-ionising radiation i.e type of Radio Frequency Radiation (RFR) produced by mobile phones, Wi Fi Television broadcasts etc did not cause cancers .

However on actually checking - Groupthink not happening here my boy 😇, the World Heath Organisation WHO position on mobile phone type RF, which I will take as mainstream, is actually 

“possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B), a category used when a causal association is considered credible, but when chance, bias or confounding cannot be ruled out with reasonable confidence..”.

 http://www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/electromagnetic-fields-and-public-health-mobile-phones

Now decomposing that statement .  

1. It does not say, nor can it by itself be used to support an argument, that “mobile phones do cause cancer”   
2. It does not say “mobile phones don’t cause cancer”
3. It does say “possibly  mobile phones cause cancer”

So even in a mainstream scientific sense it is perfectly legitimate to have and to voice concern /uncertainty about the safety of 5G, RFR  and mobile phone use in general

So digging bit deeper ...

Why do the WHO have this concern ? Well partly it is due to recent studies by the National Toxicology Program (NTP) of the US National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences e.g as reported in an alarmist media piece below . 

https://www.independent.co.k/news/health/mobile-phone-cancer-radiation-rats-tumours-research-science-toxicology-study-a8612641.html

Pretty scary stuff ! and reported, but with more detail on the study also in :

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181101133924.htm

However and back to my theme on remaining highly sceptical of alarmist media representation of "scientific studies" when you look at at some more independent reviews of the original NTP study a pretty different picture emerges (my highlighting )

-----extracts---

1. The animals exposed to radiofrequency fields  lived significantly longer than the controls (and cancer risk increases as you get older).

2. The radio frequency fields are not relevant to mobile phone use (they were strong enough to increase body temperature in the rats by over 0.5 degrees, whereas a mobile phone can’t increase body temperature at all).

3. The results were only reported for male rats, but not female rats, or male or female mice (which makes the relevance of any results to humans questionable).

And most importantly…

4. There is no indication that any of the results are statistically significant (i.e. not merely due to chance). This is particularly important as sensible patterns were not observed within or across rodent groups, and also because the reported findings are inconsistent with previous research findings. If chance was ruled out using statistical techniques, the reported ‘evidence’ of carcinogenicity would vanish.

------------------
ref
https://www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2018/11/02/mobile-phone-cancer-link-in-rats-expert-reaction/

So my current position  :

• I agree with some reviewers concluding statements  i.e 
• "The NTP rodent carcinogenicity study does not provide evidence that the radiofrequency fields relevant to mobile telecommunications can cause cancer.”
• "So here we have a study that found evidence, some of which is pretty weak, of effects of mobile phone radiation on tumours in rats, and which tells us pretty well nothing direct about risks of actual phone use in actual humans. I’m not going to stop using my mobile phone in the light of this.”

• but also support the WHO statement from the earlier ref: above that : 
• "While an increased risk of brain tumors is not established, the increasing use of mobile phones and the lack of data for mobile phone use over time periods longer than 15 years warrant further research of mobile phone use and brain cancer risk. In particular, with the recent popularity of mobile phone use among younger people, and therefore a potentially longer lifetime of exposure, .."

Don't trust the media #1 Drinking Alcohol

The two articles below are well worth reading and show how UK Public Health Advice on safe levels of alcohol consumption is being corrupted by anti-alcohol activists masquerading as independent advisors.

The first shows the flaws, distortions and counter reality thinking behind the revised 14 unit limits  for both men and women..

The second shows how the anti alcohol activists & temperance campaigners involved are achieving  their goals

One lesson I take from this is increasing confirmation of my growing belief that anyone promoting any form of regressive tax such as sugar taxes, carbon taxes, alcohol taxes, cigarette taxes, fuel taxes etc is likely to be someone pretending to care about people's welfare but in reality is more obsessed with pushing their own blinkered agenda ie a "do-gooder".

Here you go :

https://health.spectator.co.uk/the-great-alcohol-cover-up-how-public-health-bodies-hid-the-truth-about-drinking/


https://health.spectator.co.uk/revealed-public-health-englands-cosy-love-in-with-the-anti-alcohol-lobby/

Its also depressing to think that there must be an large and possibly increasing number of unhappy people who by God are going to make sure you're unhappy too..

and of course a lot of cynical politicians crying copious crocodile tears as they take their increasing tax revenue to the bank  - "it's for your own good we don't want to have to do it but we must"   - Yeah 

Be careful with Claims about Migration..

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and GDP per capita

Now I ask you to trust me on this - I have not suddenly become one of Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen's supporters nor a xenophobic little islander, I can't be a Little Englander as I am of course 77% Scottish 😉.

A metric that is sometimes quoted to the public as being an indicator of "how well things are going" is Gross Domestic Product i.e. GDP which represents the overall financial activity of a country - the size of its economy and it's not unreasonable (but see the link below for more detail) that an increasing GDP can be presented as a "good" thing at a countrywide level. However at an individual level one is often more interested not in the size of the economy but one's own standard of living. A good, but not perfect, metric for that is the GDP per person (per capita) i.e the GDP divided by the size of the population.

FYI  (Wikipedia)

• UK and India have very similar GDPs around $2.6 Trillion 
• UK GDP per capita is around $40,00 while India is close to only $2,000

for more detail see :

https://www.hebalance.com/what-is-gdp-definition-of-gross-domestic-product-3306038

https://www.statista.com/statistics/263600/gross-domestic-product-gdp-per-capita-in-the-united-kingdom/

How is this affected by population increases 

So let's imagine first a country with a population of 1000 and a GDP of £1 Million i.e a GDP per capita of £1000 which has seen an increase by 5% to £1.05 Million over a year in which the population has not changed. That GDP per capita will thus be:

• £1,050,000/1000 = £1050 

an increase of 5%.

It's therefore reasonable to make a claim, solely on the basis of the increased GDP, that on average everyone should sort of "be pleased"  as individually they are likely to be financially better off.

Now let's take a 2nd scenario where as above over a year the GDP has gone up to £1.05 Million but net migration over the same period has increased the population by 10% to 1100. In this scenario the GDP per capita is :

• £1,050,000/1100 = £95.45 

nearly a 5% decrease in GDP per capita for at least 90% of the original population and hence it could be argued that despite a 5% increase in GDP at least 90% of the original population are worse off.

Now lets take a 3nd scenario where as above over a year the GDP has gone up to £1.05 Million but net migration over the same period has only increased the population by 5% to 1050. In this scenario the GDP per capita is back to :

• £1,050,000/1050 = £1000 

so increased population but no decrease in GDP per capita.

Now finally a scenario where over a year the GDP has gone up 10% to £1.1 Million with net 5% migration over the year making the population again 1050. In this scenario the GDP per capita is:

• £1,100,000/1050 = £1047.61 

so increased population but nearly a 5% increase in GDP per capita.

The point of the above examples is in any sense presented as arguments for or against migration and  has nothing whatsoever to do with racism, xenophobia or nationalism. It's presented solely to illustrate, as if you needed it, that one needs to be very careful interpreting economic metrics presented in the media to avoid being misled and manipulated i.e.

• if GDP per capita has gone up during a period of net migration, GDP will also have gone up, then claiming migration has been financially  beneficial for the country and (on average) its citizens I would say a fair claim to make 
• telling people worried by population increases due to net migration (or simply by natural population growth) it's necessarily "all OK" because the GDP has gone up but e.g GDP per capita has decreased is in my view misleading 
• a small decrease in GDP per capita may actually be a very small "price to pay" for a kinder, more inclusive country with a more vibrant and dynamic society - financial standard of living is not the only factor determining your quality of life....

In reality for the UK apart from the 2008 financial crisis impacts the GDP per capita from 1973 to 2015 and hence covering periods of significant net migration, - has been going up  !   

UPFRONT

I am not and I don’t think it’s currently possible to be 100% certain about the validity of Anthropogenic (man made) Global Warming either way and am therefore a climate sceptic - the science is not settled and is unlikely to be so any time soon - the climate is an incredibly complex thing to understand.

The driving mechanism behind the establishment of the current mainstream view on Climate Change and AGW seems to me to a form of "Groupthink" a mechanism behind past major failures in foreign policy e.g. the Korean and Vietnamese wars.

Supporting the mainstream view has and continues to have some very bad consequences one of particular relevance to me as as "sort of" a scientist" (more on that later ) i.e PhD, 30 years working in R&D, ex civil servant, ex Technical Director is covered below

Complexity and large numbers - relevance to Climate Change

HELL, Eternity, James Joyce, Large numbers and Climate Change Policy

A piece of writing that made a great impression on me many years ago in respect of the agonies of Hell (despite not believing in it) and how long one would have to suffer them for i.e. eternity is from James Joyce. See below

Quote by James Joyce: “What must it be, then, to bear the manifold tor...” | Goodreads

Essential to get across the level of suffering for sinners in Hell is the need to convey how long eternity is i.e infinity in a time sense, and I think James Joyce did that extremely well.

However unless you are of a mathematical bent which alas I am you probably won't have tried to estimate how long in years it would take the little bird to achieve its mindbogglingly difficult task. Using the wonders of modern software Excel and the web and some admittedly gross assumptions about "the number of leaves in forests" scales on fish etc one can come up with an estimate as below:

10.1E+324 YEARS that's 10.1 with 324 zeros after it

Now, that's a very, very big number and suffering the tortures of Hell for that long is beyond comprehension. However despite how mind bogglingly large that number is much larger numbers arise in real world problems involving combinations and permutations.

For comparison the age of the Earth is considered to be 4,540,000,000 (4.54 Billion Years) which in scientific notation is 4.54E+9 absolutely minute in comparison to 10.1 E324.

Permutation type problems 

For a quick recap /intro on permutations see 

http://home.avvanta.com/~math/permutations2.html

and to calculate the factorials used in the calculations of permutations especially very large ones see.. 

https://coolconversion.com/math/factorial/

So taking the number above "how long the bird  .. not even first second of eternity" you can find that that is only equivalent to about 178 factorial which contains 325 digits as below 

6235135397241908741680674639927586558582878361231153877729215864681715113389074517106770270394081618113953882713761626619212667044889245663364667862568799843977208366195524719896472807475423880975816549024219691598995799655217698833954618998814300242650289839922492033762220111298560000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

Relevance to Climate Change

Now stories about Hell, little birds and mountains of sand may or may not interest you in the slightest but I assure you they do have a direct relevance to many real world problems. There are according to Wikipedia currently 196 countries in the world. The contention of the mainstream on Climate Changes is all these countries will be negatively impacted to a greater or lesser extent by Global Warming (that's the thrust) and policies  must be adopted to deal with this. 

So if one believes in equality and fairness then the scrupulously right thing to do would be to analyse the needs of all countries and then try and identify an overall global climate change control policy that was in some  sense "the best" for all 196 countries. Now of course there will be quite a few alternatives to consider and compromises to be made - yes, yes you can probably see where I'm going 😀  but perhaps its worth following it through.. 

So now lets just consider not 196 but just three countries A,B,C assuming:

• the effectiveness of the policy is time dependent  i.e no point in padlocking the door after the horse has bolted 
• while its important that all countries implement the policy the impact globally will be different depending on the countries e.g its may be really important China stops increasing its build of coal fired power stations and as soon as possible, only slightly less so that India does so and the impact and urgency of  of Poland doing so less than either. 

To work out what is globally best one can draw up a table like that shown where we assign a value to the importance of  a specific country in implementing the policy and a weighting to the timeliness with which they implement it. We can then consider all possibilities and assign an overall Global benefit to each of the options to work out what it is best to do. In the example implementation of the policy should be BCA:

Possible Order of Implementation	Value of A  (weighting 1)	Value of B  (weighting 3)	Value of  C  ( weighting 2)	Global benefit
ABC	10	5	1	27
ACB	10	1	5	23
BAC	5	10	1	37
BCA	1	10	5	41
CAB	5	1	10	28
CBA	1	5	10	36

Now if we try and scale this up to the 196 countries of the World the table of all permutations to be assessed will have 196 factorial rows - you might try and attempt on your calculator or excel to work this out  and be surprised as to what happens. The answer is according to ref:

https://coolconversion.com/math/factorial/_196_

which has 336 digits in it as shown 

• 50801221108670467625027357853474485583272975249470269829299714310435905748001360370554013724211519571926262867104303166750125208816130922846164797282368228049534890346129156088948368782326391586029134561713739265719468698374988750170217611309676677779711031060019608283576803094698692188285748113739606947612227692134400000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

This is so vast a number that even if you could identify simple metrics of importance and weightings for timeliness for each country then the amount of time it would take for the the current fastest supercomputer in the world, which ref Wikipedia, has a processing power of :

• 123 PetaFLOPS (Floating Point Operations per Second) or in long hand 123,000,000,000,000,000  

to even generate the number of scenarios to be assessed is almost beyond comprehension. Even for  40 countries generating  the scenarios required is a 40 factorial type calculation and using said supercomputer the time required would be be in the order of  :

•  4,627,032,271,967,450 times the age of the earth 

Ah!..  so thats why "Deep Thought" took so long answering "The Meaning of the Life Universe and Everything 

Concluding remarks 

Before I hear the well merited howls of "Andy that's crazy in practise for policy setting you would never need to be that rigorous - you could broadly categorise countries into a much smaller set of perhaps less than 10 major types making the problem vast simpler an still get pretty good assessment  - YES I fully accept that.  But and it's a very big but, in practise permutation type problems will still occur when trying to develop simple values of merit e.g for the importance of a given country implementing a specific policy as dozens or more conflicting factors will need to be considered.  

My point is that once you understand how quickly these sorts of permutation type problems become totally quantitatively intractable and cannot be solved without an almost inconceivable leap forward in our understanding, to implicitly claim you can solve them as one is in talking about a global climate change policy ( but see below) is akin to implying you are that hypothetical Omnipotent being "God". 

However good the scientists & policy makers supporting the mainstream climate change view are to consider they can develop even one global policy that's best "for the world" is shall we say "overstating it a little bit".. 

To set policy of course you can as they say "cut through the (crap)" by simply taking a view e.g that coal stations are bad so let's just shut them down - period. OR even simpler you can also simplify the task by claiming - "if we don't do something and right now we are going to die so basically fuck you and your over complicated analysis"

In genuinely accept the either of those simplifying approaches may actually be good approaches to take but their justification I think has little to do with science and a lot to do with the type of decisions made by politicians and resulting from referendums but lets not get onto that ..

Spain trip

A quick summary of the Spanish road trip Denise and I went on this June, inspired in no small part by Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan's Spanish road trip ..

The hotels we stayed in, mainly taken from the Spanish state run Parador chain were a major highlight.

TO DO ...

Cakewalk is amazing

Wow Blog still working - Currently playing with Cakewalk SONAR X2 Producer version which is pretty amazing.Especially the Guitar effects and the Spatial filtering/mixing