There’s a small flap in Madison about the new water meters
the water utility will begin installing in a few weeks. The meters keep track of your usage, and
every so often send a radio-frequency (RF)signal with the data, so the water
company can keep better track of you consumption. The water company won’t have to send a
meter-reader person around to do it; they’ll be able to bill monthly rather
than quarterly; and if you develop a leak, you’ll know about it sooner. The picture at the top of this post is what
they typically look like.
The flap in Madison is not about big brother invading our
privacy (though that’s the angle you might think the east-siders and
isthmus-dwellers might take); the flap is not about replacing humans with
machines; the flap is about the RF emissions of the new “smart meters”.
Americans are, in my estimation, by and large dummies when it
comes to math and science. Most high
school students avoid these subjects whenever possible, unless some math or
science content is mandated, or, for the college-bound crowd, the high school guidance
counselor convinces them they need to get a little math and science under their
belt to be more attractive to the college they have their sights set on.
One of the local TV news stations recently did a story about the apparent discovery
of the so-called “God particle”, the Higgs boson, and the dweeb who wrote the
story (and the anchorette who read it) obviously didn’t have a clue what they
were talking about. The story said “the
particle was found deep underground in Switzerland”, as if some European
physicists had been digging deep holes in the earth looking for this elusive
boson. (Supercollider? What’s a supercollider?)
There are plenty of websites out there on the internets that
have sprung up in opposition to this new generation of water-meters, and people
who don’t understand a thing about science are most easily buffaloed by
quasi-scientific-sounding language.
Surfing a representative sample of these anti-new-water-meter sites will
likely elicit a chuckle from anybody who knows the first thing about RF
emission.
These Madison folks, the noisy handful who are all up in
arms about this RF flying around from these new water meters, obviously are
operating without a clue. They wouldn’t
know a milliwatt from a millirem from a milligram. But they seen on that there innernet that RF
is bad for ya, it’ll fry yer brain, and the gubbmint is tryin’ to cover it all
up!
These are the kind of folks who apparently don’t realize
that their cell phone operates by emitting RF; that the baby monitor they use
in their home emits RF; that their in-house internet router emits RF; that the
TV remote emits RF (a lot of the newer ones work on UHF, rather than infrared);
that their microwave oven emits RF; that their GPS device emits RF; and on and
on.
Don’t bother trying to explain it to these folks. As I’m fond of pointing out, today, we can
have our own opinion about anything, and we can have our own facts about
anything.
You’d be investing your time better by giving a lecture
about dBm values to your dog, rather than to these folks.
