Wi-Fi Internet and Sleep Disturbance

[Balrog]

My Maxwell equations=a good night's sleep was supposed to be a lightheaded joke

And my answer was meant to hop on that joke, not to hurt you in any way. I did not actually believe that you were mentally incapable of reading the equations and if anything, the fact that you are reading this forum instead of any of the fitness bullshit out there is an indication that you likely are capable of using your brain. My guess, rather, was that either you had an engineering degree or else a while back and were a bit rusty, or were only taught the static equations as part of an introductory class as a freshman undergrad.

The reason of your confusion is, I think, that you confuse field and wave. Waves being temporal oscillations of fields, they cannot be static.
While a static magnetic field can be created without an electric field (magnet, solenoid with a continuous current), it is not the case of an oscillating field.

Anyway, I hope your wound isn't to deep and we can close this digression with no hard feelings. I present you, again, my apologies for this misunderstanding.

[CommanderFun]

Dear Mr. Venerable Mark Rippetoe,

I wanted to post this here in case it may help some who are struggling with sleep. It will be a mix of anectdotal evidence along with minor hypotheses in consideration of my professional engineering background.

The other day, I was going to have someone move into the apartment so I switched from a guest room I was staying in to the master bedroom where the wi-fi box is located. After a nice jog (I know) I was feeling sleepy and ready to get to bed after a nice day. While almost asleep, I felt a jolt as I was on the verge of sleep and woke up, like a defiblirator. I decided it may be the Wi-Fi which was in the room so I moved back to the guest bedroom and went to sleep there while closing the door. Sleep was a bit better away from the Wi-Fi radiator (Wi-Fi radiates off of the modem). The second piece of anectdotal evidence, is I was playing a DOS game on my computer, and when I had the Wi-Fi on, the game ran super choppy like it was overloaded, after turning the Wi-Fi off, the Dos game runs smoothly like it was supposed to. The Wi-Fi was literally frying my frail made in China laptop.

The next morning I woke up and dusted off my metric conversion text book and to my surprise (I know it shoudln't be) I realize that 5Gigahertz is a 5 billion cycles per second signal. I'm sure the magnitude of frequency is low, but the sheer speed of the signal wave I'm hypothesisizing may have an effect upon the heart, brain and the blood, (I'm sure everything, but those are the important ones). The heart is an electro-magnetic organ, metallic in nature, run by electric signals sent by the brain. I think for me the 5G Wi-Fi may have been effecting me as I have had trouble sleeping the last 4-5 years. Since unplugging the Wi-Fi on Friday, my sleep has been decent the past 3 days. I think I'll also post an update later on if this sustains. Additionally, I believe that the hemoglobin that transports oxygen to our cells is also affected by the 5 G radiations. Iron in our blood that carries oxygen is metallic, meaning it has it's own electric field, and would therefore be affected by 5 billion cycles per second in my opinion. I'm sure it affects the brain as well, which is also a highly metallic organ, even more so now that we focus so much on education. If you look up a chart, "New Cases of Diabetes Diagnosed Among U.S. Adults Aged 18-79 Years, 1980-2009" you'll see that in the early 90s there was a minor spike in new diagnoses (IMO the introduction of the desktop computer, but I don't think that's bad, we adapted and the new cases leveled off) but in 1998 the cases took off in a linear upward fashion at a pretty good slope. Wi-Fi was invented for retail use in 1997-1998. I remember that I never used it because I was a nerd, and the Wi-Fi didn't run the games over the internet very well so we used the cable modem with wires plugged into it. But later on certainly I was exposed to wi-fi.

I believe that people are being exposed a whole host of health issues (metabolic food cravings, inability to sleep, anxiety) due to these radiowaves microwaving us. The human body is certainly electro-magnetic, that is science, and to ignore the possible effects of a FIVE BILLION cycle per second radio wave on a highly complex electro-magnetic system would be folly in my opinion. Trust me, I'm a professional engineer LOL. Either way, the main point of this post is to let people know if you are really having a hard time sleeping, maybe try turning off your Wi-Fi box. I'm not saying don't use the internet, I'm saying wire in, take out the radio waves and see if that helps. It may help with pre-diabetic symptoms as well (which I was having). I'll post an update a week from now if there's any interest.

Best Regards,

DBM77

Source for chart: CDC - Page Not Found

Type the title of the chart name into Google images to pull up the chart if you need to.

Welp, as an unemployed IT guy I think you're missing a few things. First, unless the signal radius is turned way down (or there are some really weird signal interrupting material consideration in your home), you are still getting hit by the signal in other rooms of your house. Second, if you have ANY wifi enabled devices in your proximity, they are also emitting signals. Same frequency, wavelength, all that jazz. So the likelihood that moving rooms actually escaped the signal is pretty small.

As for your laptop, I can't say for sure. It definitely wouldn't be related to a sleep disturbance, though. Depending on what DOS game this was and how you were playing it, DOS emulators can end up being bigger resource-chewers than you might expect. Despite the games being old and using only a fraction of what modern programs use, emulating the environment they need to run can be a lot more consuming. There's also the reality of things like background downloads/updates that newer versions of windows love to sneak in on you. Turning off the wifi might have simply forced your computer to stop messing around in the background with something that was competing for resources with your game.

What's probably happening here is what's called a nocebo effect, I think? Which can be powerful stuff. You've become so convinced that your modem is wrecking your sleep that when you get away from it your mind makes the expected positive change happen.

[jfsully]

Being a "professional" doctor of physics, not medicine, it's a bit out of my area of expertise. But, in a case of self-diagnosed electro-sensitivity, wouldn't an homeopathic treatment be just as effective as living in a Faraday cage to treat the "symptoms" ? It would be much cheaper and more convenient, with the added bonus that any homeopathic medicine would work just as effectively regardless of whatever is written on the label.

Being a physician, i.e. what is commonly referred to as a “real” doctor, I can assure you that expensive placebos (whether in cost of money, time, effort, or pain) work better than cheap ones. So, going to the trouble of building a faraday cage would generally work much better than buying a vial of water at the supplement store. Also, the label of a placebo definitely affects its efficacy, as should be obvious when you consider the mechanism of action of a placebo.

[Theseahawk]

I never went to university, I joined the Navy as an aircraft maintainer. I have a foundation degree in aeronautical (RADAR) engineering (the first two years of a bachelor’s) and I don’t remember being taught Maxwell’s equations as the course was mainly around the electronics within systems. So all that stuff about resonance frequencies of oscillators. “1 over 2 pi root L C gives us the resonance frequency” and other crap I’ve never used while turning spanners on aircraft.

I’ve been studying for a physics bachelors on and off over the past few years and was supposed to sit an Electomagnetism module in July as part of the 3rd year work but I was at sea and due to a manning issue my workload was too high to realistically study for it, so I’ve put it on hold.

Sorry I reacted the way I did. Put it down to an inferiority complex.

[JFord]

I don't know about sleep disturbances and WIFI but I do know there's a precedent for CT scans causing loss of psychic abilities:

Interesting scientific case

I believe this verdict was overturned but the science behind it (as in today's topic of discussion) is unassailable.