Mobile Phone Popcorn Maker

Straight from the “How dumb do they think we are?” department comes this little “demonstration” floating around YouTube. In reality, it’s a feeble attempt by a company called Cardo Systems to flog their range of Bluetooth headsets, and they proclaim that they “are very happy to have made this contribution to an important international public debate.”

“International public debate” my arse! You just want to sell product, which is fine, but trying to scare people into thinking their brains will fry unless they use your headsets isn’t a contribution to anything apart from your bank account.

Although the phones transmit within the approximate band used for microwave ovens, there’s no way this is going to work, regardless of how novel it appears to be. Here’s why:

• Mobile phones put out, at most, 2W (Watts) of power, and that’s only when they’re farthest away from a base station. In most cases, you’re going to be closer to a base station, and so the phone’s transmit power is typically going to be lower.
• Even assuming that you are at maximum range and the phone is putting out its maximum transmit power, the average output power itself (which is what’s important in getting things to heat up) is not going to be 2 Watts, but typically about 20% or so of that figure, because mobile phones do not operate in continuous mode: they transmit in a series of pulses. So let’s say the best average output power your mobile phone can manage is 400mW (milliwatts). Hell, let’s be generous and say the phone puts out 500mW.
• Now, in the video, we see four phones pointing towards the centre of the action, where the poor victims (the popcorn kernels) anxiously await a painful death. Whoever arranged this setup has obviously been watching too much Star Trek. Mobile phones do not transmit to each other using phase-inverted, collimated subspace beams. They don’t focus their energy via the deflector array and shoot out a death ray, like a Klingon disruptor. Mobile phones transmit in a (roughly) omnidirectional fashion back to the base station. Ah-ha! That’s IT! One of the popcorn kernels must have been hiding a rebel base station inside itself, so it will naturally attract all of the energy and cause itself to explode in a massive warp-core breach! Pointing a mobile phone does nothing, except show you if there are any scratches on the top of the housing. Hence, “aiming” these four phones towards the centre in an attempt to make the popcorn kernels confess so as to end their suffering from being caught in a hot-spot of lethal radiation at the point where the beams cross just isn’t going to do anything. Besides, even if the phones did emit beams, the intersecting point would only be drenched with about 2W of radiation, at best, and that’s one fifth of the power used by the little light inside the glove box of my car.
• Also, consider the timing: about five seconds after the phones ring, the popcorn pops from being exposed to an energy source of no more than 2W (and that figure is nowhere near achievable as we’ve just seen, but we’re being kind). On the other hand, I notice that when I put popcorn inside my 800W microwave oven (which is a specially-designed device for heating food, being constructed from a high-power cavity magnetron, a sealed cooking chamber, a resonant waveguide, and a few other bits and pieces), the first popping doesn’t occur until after about 45 seconds (sometimes later).
• Hmmm….. do the math…. that means that four mobile phones are able to pop popcorn nine times faster than my 800W oven, which means they must be providing at least 7200W of effective heating power. Therefore, each mobile phone must be able to provide at least 1800W of effective heating power all by itself. And you don’t even need to enclose the radiation inside a metal box to concentrate all of the energy into the target! WOW! That’s serious shit! No wonder the bloody battery in my Nokia N80 doesn’t even last one day on a single charge!

So we can only conclude that mobile phones are lethal weapons. We’d better be very careful how we carry them. A lot of people like myself carry them on belt clips. Now that I know how much power one of these little babies can pump out, I’m not going to use my belt clip any longer, lest someone rings my phone and blows my balls off.

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Late edit: scientific proof has been found that popcorn is even MORE dangerous than your mobile phone, as can be seen below. For your own safety, it’s recommended that you do NOT eat popcorn whilst making a mobile phone call!

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