Internet of Things (IoT) possibly Carcinogenic to Humans

An obscure part of the World Health Organization, the International Agency for Research of Cancer (IARC), published an even more obscure paper: IARC Classifies Radiofrequency [RF] Electromagnetic Fields as Possibly Carcinogenic to humans in 2011.

I bring this up as Epidemiology just published (January 2014 - Volume 25 - Issue 1 - p 23-27;doi: 10.1097/EDE.0000000000000028) Commentary: Mobile Phones and Cancer: Next Steps After the 2011 IARC Review. I've covered this area before so I'll refer you there rather than repeat it here. See also Something Is Rotten in Denmark: Danish Cancer Society Plays Games with Brain Cancer Rates and IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans.

Something else bothers me about the push for the (unneeded?) Internet of Things (IoT). Lots of places talk of or show how to power the low power sensors and such from 'ambient' RF power taken from the environment, such as a local TV or Radio Station. At what point does the source transmitter get overloaded with the million(s) of IoT devices drawing power from it? What do the owners of these transmitters think of this? Isn't this technically illegal under the same laws that prevent farmers from drawing power from the power company via inductive coupling to their mile(s) long electric fence wires?

Ponder this, as related to many receivers drawing from a single transmitter: If I strike a tuning fork in a room of a 1000 identical tuning forks what happens? Leave your answer in the comments.

Hacker's Delight 2nd Edition

I covered the book Hacker's Delight (1st Edition) in the past. So wanted to mention that there is now a expanded second edition.

This book is about obscure high efficiency ways to write code. If your looking for ways to do things you shouldn't, this is not the book you are looking for.

• A new chapter on cyclic redundancy checking (CRC), including routines for the commonly used CRC-32 code
• A new chapter on error correcting codes (ECC), including routines for the Hamming code
• More coverage of integer division by constants, including methods using only shifts and adds
• Computing remainders without computing a quotient
• More coverage of population count and counting leading zeros
• Array population count
• New algorithms for compress and expand
• An Least Recently Used [LRU; Cache] algorithm
• Floating-point to/from integer conversions
• Approximate floating-point reciprocal square root routine
• A gallery of graphs of discrete functions
• Now with exercises and answers