Romm Echoes Groundless Cell Phone/Cancer Fears?

Keith Kloor is having fun being kwuooeeeel to poor Joe Romm, simply because Romm is being an anti-scientific bozo pushing groundless fears of cancer-from-mobile-phones. Keith has a nice collection of links to sane people pointing out that there is no evidence of a problem. One of whom is Orac, in a post entertainingly entitled The bride of the son of the revenge of cell phones and cancer rises from the grave…again. And the key quote is Still, despite my trying to keep an open mind on the matter, I also don’t want my mind to be so open that my brains fall out, so to speak. Alas, Romm has failed to heed that wise advice, so his brains have indeed fallen out.

I can’t be bothered to take Romm and his argument apart, and anyway there is no point, because Kloor has, and Orac has, and so have any number of people. What I found quite entertaining, though, is: what does this remind you of? “This” being the desperate never-ending search for a link between mobiles (apparently called “cell phones” by our colonial cousins) and cancer, which continues despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Yes that’s right: it is just like the denialists’ eternal search for something, anything, that they can blame for global warming other than CO2.

Meanwhile, in related news, the squareheads are also anti-scientific bozos. But I don’t seem to be able to dredge up enough venom for an entire post. Well, its been a long day and I went running at lunchtime and sculling at night (can’t even see the game or the Sugar Ray fight).

Oh… I nearly forgot. Romm’s point 3 is an excellent one:

3. Use a Bluetooth earpiece. A Bluetooth earpiece still has radiation, but it’s at least 100 times less than the radiation you get when you hold a cell phone to your head…. [And don’t keep it on your ear all the time since,] “when you’re not talking; it still sends out a signal.”

or at least, its an excellent point if you happen to be an employee and shareholder of a company that makes bluetooth chips (did you know we now have a blog?). The bit about emitting radiation when you’re not talking is mostly twaddle, though. If its not supporting an audio link, it will either get turned off or at worst drop into sniff, which has something like a hundredth of the radiation of an audio link.

Refs

* Why I’m (still) not worried about my cell phone hurting my brain (Bad Astronomy)
* Deaths per unit of electricity generated
* Rabbits needn’t worry about cell phones’ effects on their sperm count, say three retractions

CSR ships its two billionth chip

I’m hoping that reproducing the Company’s own press releases won’t get me into too much trouble.

CSR is today marking a major landmark in the company’s 12 year history; the production of its two billionth chip on 30 September 2010.

Having celebrated the production of its billionth chip rollout in only April 2008, CSR continues to enjoy healthy growth and continues to lead the Bluetooth market in terms of both innovation and designs. It took eight years for CSR to achieve the milestone of shipping one billion chips to its customers, but only a little over two years to reach the two billion figure. During the summer of 2010, CSR shipped at a rate of around 1.6 million units per day. This figure marks CSR’s continuing popularity amongst OEMs, which is down to a combination of leading, space-saving, power efficient OEM-led designs, low prices and close engagement with partners.

And here is the 2 billionth cake:

The nice plexiglass thingy was given for the 50 millionth chip. That was ages ago, long before I joined. I’m not quite sure how I ended up with that.

Wireless mice and google buzz

Google has signed me up to their “buzz”, which seems to be like facebook but with fewer people and no silly games. This link might work, or it might not. Who knows. Is it any use? I don’t know.

Which brings me on to wireless mice. I’ve had a lot of trouble with my wireless connection over the past couple of weeks, and very annoying it is too. Eventually I realised that this coincided with Miriam buying a wireless mouse. And sure enough, now I’ve turned the silly thing off things are much better. This seems really dumb: everyone is going to want to use both together. She should have got a bluetooth one :-).

This is CSR

We’re branching out into new areas, see video.

Certainly beats our video; and Broadcom’s is even more boring, though they know how to dance.

All of which is a preamble to noting that we’re merging with SIRF. Or perhaps we’re buying them. Who ya gonna trust – PC mag or the FT? Not a tricky one, that. Sez the FT, we’re snapping up a US-based rival at a knockdown price… values the US group at about £91m ($136m), a 91 per cent premium to its share price. I’m not quite sure how come a 91% premium is a knock-down price, and I’m not giving any secrets away there as I really don’t know. You can read our press release or SIRF’s, though I didn’t. Not mentionned much by anyone is that SIRF does bluetooth.

Shares is up, but as Forbes points out that’s on SiRF purchase and Nokia win so it’s hard to disentangle. That also includes the delightful CSR management expects $35 million of costs synergies (from the SiRF deal) – no-one I’ve mentionned this to has ever heard of “cost synergies” before but everyone knows *exactly* what it means.

Other than that, doesn’t look like anyone knows anything interesting.

But perhaps you like King Billy?