mssr. jeff nye, who's in town from berkeley, took some photos of our holiday party last friday. they're awesome, particularlythis one, which is ESPECIALLY flattering! i'll try to get my photos up tonight.

New study: cellphone radiation can cause non-repairable genetic damage in vitro.

Don't panic just yet, though. Cellphone radiation is non-ionizing, meaning that -- so far as we know -- its absorption has no effect on molecules other than to heat them up. Heating up a huge, delicate molecule like DNA will inevitably increase the rate at which it spontaneously decays, particularly when dealing with tiny cell cultures in which the heat can't diffuse as well as it can in a real organism. The study accounts for this to some extent by using a per-kilogram absorption figure to rate the transmission power, but it's still tough to see how this kind of research can be considered as useful as a population study -- and so far, population studies on the health effects of cell phone use have been inconclusive. This paper may be worth paying attention to, but probably not worth fretting over.

Besides, whether or not cell phones are killing you right now, they'll naturally get less potentially deadly as technology advances. Transmitter power is likely to decrease in the future as network access points proliferate. Take a look at wifi: your laptop's wireless card transmits at 200 milliwatts or so. Compare that to your cell phone's 300 milliwatt capability -- and then consider that for 1.5x the power, your cell phone delivers bandwidth a little bit less than a 56k modem. That's possible because your wireless router is a lot closer to your laptop than your cell tower is to your phone.

Generally speaking, the more cell towers/access points/transceivers you have, the less power you need for a given bandwidth. I think the broad trend is likely to be toward many more transceivers. The upshot will be that you'll have to shoot less electromagnetic radiation into your temporal lobe every time you call home to see if you should pick up some milk.

I'll admit that some technologies -- wimax being the first that springs to mind -- are working against such a movement, but the fact remains: it's a lot easier to send a signal down a wire than through the air. We should use copper to get data as close to the consumer as possible. It might be better for our health; it's definitely better engineering.

Another Monday, another crushing loss at pub quiz. On the upside, we've once again confirmed that it's possible to cash hypothetical credit toward a non-fiery afterlife in exchange for cheap bar swag. Which is to say we won the team name competition with another horribly offensive entry: "Riding Metro Costs an Arm and a Leg". Subtract ten points for the cliche, but add a hundred for poor taste.

A better entry: "You come to pub quiz with the team you have, not the team you want". Fortunately for us, the same joke was made by another team (except involving pencils); I think that's what gave us the win.

And what was our prize? Another set of t-shirts and DC United tickets? Some money of our bar tab? An order of buffalo wings with a laughably sincere Irish backstory? Nope. Four candy canes. Man, that was totally worth sticking around for.