Authors Electric

Can you imagine a world without phones? They've been around for a while, but not as long as you might think. 1960s: Two tin cans and a piece of string.  As kids, we built our own in-house telephone system using a piece of string and two tin cans. This worked on the same principle as Alexander Graham Bell's 1877 box phone, which transmitted a voice along a wire. If DIY is not your forte, you can buy a kit from amazon: tin-can phone Alexander Graham Bell's box phone. If you want someone to call you, it's "Give me a bell". 1970s: The age of the landline . Most households had a phone by then, usually situated in the hall, where they were jealously guarded by teenagers chatting to their friends. Landline phone with rotary dial, very satisfying to use with either finger or pencil.  Now something of a collector's item (try ebay). My family, wary of the extra bill, did not get a landline installed until I headed off to university. So if I wanted to call my best fr...

I live in Devon, where I recently observed a family with two teenage daughters visiting one of our beautiful gardens open to the public. The girls were larking about on the lawn, and one of them took their horseplay a bit far, hurting her sister. The mother's immediate response was, "Right, hand it over for half an hour!" and took possession of the offending girl's smartphone.  The teenager grumbled loudly as she surrendered the device (even though she hadn't looked at it once during their boisterous lawn session), whereupon the mother snapped: "Ok, now it's an hour!" Welcome to punishment in the 21st century. In my teenage years, punishment involved staying behind after school for an hour in detention, writing out 100 times: "I must not push my little sister over backwards when she's doing a handstand." while all my friends were down on the beach enjoying the last of the sunshine. But in those days, of course, we didn't have smartp...

You've probably come across the parable of the blind men and the elephant, which is thought to have originated in India although there are several different versions. Basically, a group of blind men come across an elephant, of which they have no previous knowledge, and each one encounters a different part of the creature. The blind man who feels a sharp tusk forms a completely different view of an elephant from the man who feels one of its legs, and since none of them can agree what it looks like they eventually come to blows. After my last month's post about Wi-Fi , I was going to blind you with more figures about 5G and the radiation levels in my town, but since my creativity has happily returned after disabling my home Wi-Fi and staying out of high-intensity signal areas as much as possible, here's a bang-up-to-date 5G version of the elephant parable, which I'm calling 'The Blind Girls and the Unicorn'. (No sexism intended - just balancing out the men of t...

Since living in my current house in a densely-populated urban area, I seem to have developed an allergy to Wi-Fi*, which (quite literally sometimes) is a pain. Wireless technology is pretty much everywhere you go these days... show me a cafe that doesn't offer free Wi-Fi along with its expensive cappuccinos that are no doubt helping to pay for your 'free' connection. I can visit such a cafe and enjoy the cappuccino, and I can stay long enough to have lunch with my friends if I'm not sitting right next to the router, but I would not like to try sleeping there. And it seems I am not alone. According to the  Electrosensitivity UK website , " Surveys suggest 30% of people are slightly allergic to radio exposure, usually without knowing it. " If you sit next to your Wi-Fi router for too long, it can make you sick. Possible symptoms include: headaches, brain fog, concentration issues, anxiety, depression, nausea, insomnia, tinnitus, thyroid changes, heart prob...

Whether or not you are one of the people who can feel them, all living things rely on electrical signals at cellular level. It's how our nerves work, and particularly our brains. Electricity is also in the air all around us, in the form of EMFs (electric and magnetic fields) given off by our modern devices, and it's not too big a leap to see how one might affect the other.  https://www.healthline.com/health/emf#research . Very soon, on top of all our existing EMF producing devices, we will have a new technology: 5G, which promises faster wi-fi connections than 4G and uses microwave frequencies similar to those used in weapons for crowd control . The problem is that digital wi-fi (2G and above) has only been around since the 1990s and so we can't really know the long term effects yet. Also, nobody has actually asked our permission to expose us to this stuff. Following pressure from the public, several places have recently postponed or halted the roll-out of 5G, includ...

It's midsummer, although you wouldn't know it from the weather as I write this (Spain is apparently sending us storms). So rather than yet another summer solstice blog post, I've been thinking about where we might be if you view the publishing industry as a single year. It goes something like this: JANUARY: Stone Age ~ 40,000 - 10,000 BC We live in caves. People tell stories around the campfire at night. Nobody writes them down but somebody might illustrate the most exciting ones on the cave walls. (January is a long, dark month.) telling stories around the campfire (Emeldil, CC*) FEBRUARY: Pyramid Age ~ 4,000 - 2,500 BC Europeans are still living in caves, but in Egypt they are building pyramids. Priests decorate the walls of their temples with religious texts in hieroglyphs, while further east in Mesopotamia people are writing similar texts on clay tablets using a clever pen-press language called cuneiform. Bestseller: The Book of Coming Forth by Day (Ancient...