Why is this effect not used to develop a device that converts normal sounds into such microwaves that the deaf can hear?
Cochlear implants do perform a similar bypass
Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
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Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
#62Is there a defense against this kind of thing? Not to sound cliche, but would a tin foil hat work?
Water will shield you I suppose.
Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
#63Okay I'm skeptical. On the one side some 'bad other' could be using an undefined device to attack only American people, only in foreign lands, and for uncertain reasons. That narrative conveniently fuels paranoia and makes for good reading. Alternative explanations exist, based on well established medicine, which I think need air time, link below. Now, I'm all for exciting stories but this one keeps being resurrected…
From the linked article: "A score in the bottom 5% would typically mean there is a problem. But Shura pointed out that the diplomats were found to be “impaired” if they scored in the bottom 40% in any one of the tests. In their letter, the doctors said it was “inappropriate” to conclude that any of the patients were impaired. "
It’s unfortunately quite challenging to diagnose cognitive impairment based on neuropsychological assessment at a single point in time post-injury. That’s because we don’t know what the person’s level of cognitive function was before the injury. If a person had cognitive function 1 standard deviation above the mean pre-injury (equivalent to an IQ of 115, speaking loosely) and suffered a 1 standard deviation loss as a result of the injury, they would then test in the normal range - but still clearly have suffered damage.
The response articles calling for a 5th percentile measure to diagnose impairment are in a sense statistically appropriate - you’d like to see very significant impairment to diagnose it from a single measure - but not sensitive - they will miss a lot of true cases of mild impairment. For example, that threshold would miss virtually all cases of concussion, chemobrain, cognitive impairment in MS, etc.
Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially knowing the USA has been a thorn in Cuba's side since the 50's, repeatedly trying to kill Castro and undermine their economic system. Americans live under constant propaganda from their own government, deployed by their own mainstream newspapers and TV media. Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent' is an eye opening look into the continuous war/regime change drum that's beating inside the USA. This is just more…
Cuba has been led by a dictatorship regime so I can see why US would like to change it. You don't need propaganda to see for yourself that Cuba has no free elections. So far US used sanctions instead of war and it seems it didn't work.
> You don't need propaganda to see for yourself that Cuba has no free elections.
So far I'm with you. But so what? You seem to be implying that if a country's political system is non-democratic, then third parties are justified in intervening.
I would have thought that the whole concept of national sovereignty implied precisely the opposite: that each nation can decide for itself what system of political representation is best suited to its particular history and culture.
Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
#65So in this thread we have mrtksn calling this lousy journalism, and madeuptemcappt saying it’s a well-researched and cited article. So which is it?
It's a series of fairly unlikely assertions backed with plausible looking narrative and interviews. Pretty typical for the NYT these days, and very sad.
IEEE Spectrum did a series of articles on this; I thought the mostly likely explanation was ultrasound jammers and intermodulation distortion. Aka defective gear; which is why the same thing seems to have happened in China as well as Cuba.
Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
#66Okay I'm skeptical. On the one side some 'bad other' could be using an undefined device to attack only American people, only in foreign lands, and for uncertain reasons. That narrative conveniently fuels paranoia and makes for good reading. Alternative explanations exist, based on well established medicine, which I think need air time, link below. Now, I'm all for exciting stories but this one keeps being resurrected…
>On the one side some 'bad other' could be using an undefined device to attack only American people, only in foreign lands, and for uncertain reasons.
If someone were trying to sour US-Cuban relations, then it would make sense that only Americans in Cuba were targeted.
It seems highly unlikely that 21 diplomats with the same symptoms (plus those in China) were afflicted with an innocuous medical condition. None of the doctors who wrote letters of dissent physically examined the patients. Though the specific nature of the cause may be up for debate, I highly doubt there was no adversary here.
Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
#67Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you referring to their desire for immunity in ordering crimes against humanity?
Yes, so they thought. It was their desire to make the West to believe that is a "West vs East" conflict, not "the West vs them personally." All Soviet leaders were quite paranoid when it came to assassination fears, and the West going after right/left hand person.
"The 9th division of the KGB (responsible for the safety of all the members of Politburo, including the leader of the USSR) had 3000 personnel."
"After the fall of the USSR, the president (Boris Yeltsin) had a private guard of 18,000 personnel. Far more government leaders were guarded than they were during the USSR."
Quotes above from "From the KGB to the FSB" by Eugene Michalevich
If you are interested, there is a biography by Victor Medvedev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Medvedev) about his time guarding various leaders of the USSR. If the book is to be believed, security was very light.
Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, so they thought. It was their desire to make the West to believe that is a "West vs East" conflict, not "the West vs them personally." All Soviet leaders were quite paranoid when it came to assassination fears, and the West going after right/left hand person.
"The 9th division of the KGB (responsible for the safety of all the members of Politburo, including the leader of the USSR) had 3000 personnel." "After the fall of the USSR, the president (Boris Yeltsin) had a private guard of 18,000 personnel. Far more government leaders were guarded than they were during the USSR." Quotes above from "From the KGB to the FSB" by Eugene Michalevich If you are interested, there is a b…
>If the book is to be believed, security was very light.
Light compared to what? Numerically, yes. It was making no sense to have more than a regiment of them in a country where the total number of 3 letter agencies staff was comparable to standing army. But the level of paranoia was not light whatsoever.
Yeltsin on the other hand had to live under a constant threat of armed uprising by the same three letter agencies. The internal threat had an entirely different nature.
Re: Microwave Weapons Are Suspect in Ills of U.S. Embassy Workers
#70RF/Microwave EE here. I actually tried this on myself several years ago with no effect. Specifically 20W at C-band into a 10 dBi standard gain horn a few feet away, pulse mod to 1 kHz. That was still not near enough power density. While it’s plausible, it would take a big effort to affect this many people. The peak power densities, as described in the paper, would be tens of W/cm^2; e.g. radar transmitters and big an…
Good commentary but I wonder if inadvertently you may have been out-of-band in your research.
In 'Auditory Response to Pulsed Radiofrequency Energy - Elder (2003)'
URL: http://www.beperkdestraling.org/images/stories/Wetenschap/Ti... Auditory_Response_to_Pulsed_radiofrequency_energy.pdf
Two salient points crop up:
1) 'The fundamental frequency of RF induced sounds is independent of the frequency of the radiowaves but dependent upon head dimensions.'
2) 'RF hearing has been reported at frequencies ranging from 2.4 to 10 000 MHz (see Table 1). Although Ingalls [1967] mentioned 10 000 MHz as an effective frequency, other investigators found that lower frequencies (8900 and 9500 MHz) at very high exposure levels did not induce RF sounds
In Table 2 the experimental frequency range appears to have been 900MHz to 3GHz so C-band at 4 – 8 GHz (7.5 – 3.75 cm) may have be a too short a wavelength to elicit the effect. - but ham radio operators should be worried :-)