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What If You Could See WiFi?

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Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#21

Post by everyone »

noonespecial wrote: post #2

Illustrations like these do more harm than good. It lets people imagine that spaces are getting 'flooded' with 'stuff'. Radio is a light. A blinking light. A transmitting antenna like a light bulb. If your receiver can see the light blink (or a reflection of it) the signal gets through. Radio has the added benefit that (especially at longer wavelengths) most of the material world appears to be made of tissue paper.

This is why I like reading HN comments. Most comments on this would be "ohh woah cool amaazing man!!" But here people are not so easily persuaded, thing is not physically accurate!

Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#22

Post by roc »

TomGullen wrote: post #7

I don't know if these pictures make much sense really. Radio waves are part of the light spectrum but not part of the visible light spectrum, so it doesn't make much sense to represent it visually in this way. If an artist pictured grass as if it reflected radio waves and not visible light waves, we'd have a interesting/weird picture but one without much value.

> "If an artist pictured grass as if it reflected radio waves and not visible light waves, we'd have a interesting/weird picture but one without much value."

It wouldn't even be necessarily interesting or weird. It would only need to look like grass that has another set of lights shone on it, which is pretty pedestrian. The 'weirdness' of these images comes from the fairly arbitrary assignment of colors to these wavelengths-we-can't-normally-see. Which is utterly unrelated to the original spectra.

One could 'false color' a scene by arbitrarily shifting color assignments for normally visible wavelengths and achieve something just as visually 'interesting/weird'.

Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#23

Post by toyg »

noonespecial wrote: post #2

Illustrations like these do more harm than good. It lets people imagine that spaces are getting 'flooded' with 'stuff'. Radio is a light. A blinking light. A transmitting antenna like a light bulb. If your receiver can see the light blink (or a reflection of it) the signal gets through. Radio has the added benefit that (especially at longer wavelengths) most of the material world appears to be made of tissue paper.

Well, radio pollution is still under debate. In Italy they've supposedly found significant discrepancies in cancer distribution near large radio transmitters (i.e. higher rates of cancer). We're talking humongous power and extreme proximity though, nothing like wifi.

Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#24

Post by kemist »

everyone wrote: post #21
noonespecial wrote: post #2

Illustrations like these do more harm than good. It lets people imagine that spaces are getting 'flooded' with 'stuff'. Radio is a light. A blinking light. A transmitting antenna like a light bulb. If your receiver can see the light blink (or a reflection of it) the signal gets through. Radio has the added benefit that (especially at longer wavelengths) most of the material world appears to be made of tissue paper.

This is why I like reading HN comments. Most comments on this would be "ohh woah cool amaazing man!!" But here people are not so easily persuaded, thing is not physically accurate!

Sometimes a paragraph can paint a better picture than an illustration.

Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#25

Post by lukeschlather »

roc wrote: post #22
TomGullen wrote: post #7

I don't know if these pictures make much sense really. Radio waves are part of the light spectrum but not part of the visible light spectrum, so it doesn't make much sense to represent it visually in this way. If an artist pictured grass as if it reflected radio waves and not visible light waves, we'd have a interesting/weird picture but one without much value.

> "If an artist pictured grass as if it reflected radio waves and not visible light waves, we'd have a interesting/weird picture but one without much value." It wouldn't even be necessarily interesting or weird. It would only need to look like grass that has another set of lights shone on it, which is pretty pedestrian. The 'weirdness' of these images comes from the fairly arbitrary assignment of colors to these wave…

We actually do have a general understanding of what materials absorb/transmit/reflect radio waves, so if you said "What would this scene look like if you moved the visible light spectrum to where WiFi is" you could actually create a meaningful and even potentially useful picture.

Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#26

Post by noonespecial »

toyg wrote: post #23
noonespecial wrote: post #2

Illustrations like these do more harm than good. It lets people imagine that spaces are getting 'flooded' with 'stuff'. Radio is a light. A blinking light. A transmitting antenna like a light bulb. If your receiver can see the light blink (or a reflection of it) the signal gets through. Radio has the added benefit that (especially at longer wavelengths) most of the material world appears to be made of tissue paper.

Well, radio pollution is still under debate. In Italy they've supposedly found significant discrepancies in cancer distribution near large radio transmitters (i.e. higher rates of cancer). We're talking humongous power and extreme proximity though, nothing like wifi.

Bright lights can give you sunburns. Ask a welder. Caution and common sense should be applied whenever in the presence of bright lights that shine right through us. (eg X-rays)

Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#27

Post by TeMPOraL »

VLM wrote: post #19
6d0debc071 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people implant, I believe it's a small neodine, magnet under their skin with the idea that they can feel electrical fields.

Its almost as effective, much cheaper, faster, zero risk of infection, and easier to reverse to just stick a magnet in the end of a latex/nitrile/whatever glove and wear it for awhile. I'd strongly encourage trying it. Been there done that. The glove thing, not the implant thing. Cheap and fun. You will "stick" yourself to chunks of steel and much simpler to fix that with a glove. It gets boring/annoying after a coup…

I actually spent some time walking around the streets with a neodymium magnet stuck to my finger with a piece of duct tape. What I realized after few hours is that the sensations I had were not coming from magnetic fields - I could just feel my own pulse. i.e. it worked equally well with a similarly-shaped piece of metal instead of a magnet.

(Not questioning the implanted magnets; I just want to point out that one has to be careful when doing the non-implant version of this experiment with jumping to conclusions about what one feels.)

Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#28

Post by jlgreco »

noonespecial wrote: post #26
toyg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, radio pollution is still under debate. In Italy they've supposedly found significant discrepancies in cancer distribution near large radio transmitters (i.e. higher rates of cancer). We're talking humongous power and extreme proximity though, nothing like wifi.

Bright lights can give you sunburns. Ask a welder. Caution and common sense should be applied whenever in the presence of bright lights that shine right through us. (eg X-rays)

UV is a wildly different animal than wifi or cellular signals.

Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#29

Post by afreak »

toyg wrote: post #23
noonespecial wrote: post #2

Illustrations like these do more harm than good. It lets people imagine that spaces are getting 'flooded' with 'stuff'. Radio is a light. A blinking light. A transmitting antenna like a light bulb. If your receiver can see the light blink (or a reflection of it) the signal gets through. Radio has the added benefit that (especially at longer wavelengths) most of the material world appears to be made of tissue paper.

Well, radio pollution is still under debate. In Italy they've supposedly found significant discrepancies in cancer distribution near large radio transmitters (i.e. higher rates of cancer). We're talking humongous power and extreme proximity though, nothing like wifi.

Correlation is not causation. There has been no conclusive link between EM radiation and human ailments other than hysteria. We creatures have throughout history been bombarded with intense radio activity from outer space (such as the emissions from the crab nebula), and we are still alive and plentiful.

Quit it with the fear mongering while ahead.

Re: What If You Could See WiFi?

#30

Post by incision »

I was hoping for something more than an RF crime sketch.

This recent EM visualization was pretty cool and a bit more substantial.

"Through a series of experiments in photographic and lighting techniques followed by customising an Android phone to act as an EMF indicator and then coding our own app in Processing we were able to visualize how these fields change over objects."

http://vimeo.com/65321968

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