SUNDAY MORNING REALITY CHECK


for anyone with a cell phone.

University of Pittsburgh nuclear physics professor Eric Swanson provides an entertaining, absolutely required bit of reading in this morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Professor Swanson lays out in simple, rational detail why it's virtually impossible for cell phone use to cause cancer -- I would repeat his perfect summational metaphor here, but I don't want to spoil the fun of discovering it in context -- and, along the way, delivers a first-rate primer on why you should distrust, or at least always be critical of, much of the hysteria that these days passes for news.

Professor Swanson's common sense strikes an especially resonant chord in my Sunday-Forum-reading heart, reminding me as it does of a couple of other let's not panic pieces I've enjoyed there in the past. And I imagine that, just as we survived Y2K, and just as we have yet to succumb to the Bird Flu, we'll manage to keep on keeping on no matter how many times we all talk on our cell phones.

(Though we may have a few more broken bones to show for it...)

Posted: Sun - August 3, 2008 at 11:01 AM          

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