YRU screwN me?

Got an unlimited text message plan for your cell phone?  Good for you, since the prices are rising.

Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four. [emphasis mine]

And why not?  Texting volume has increased exponentially.  But the cost doesn't.  In fact, the bandwidth for text messages costs nothing - it's always been there.

text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network. That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted. 

In other words, we're getting screwed.  With cell phone companies, that's no surprise.

Cell phones may cause traffic jams

The science slowly catches up to the intuition about driving distracted.

First, a study at the University of Exeter last month noted that traffic jams are not caused by heavy traffic, but by drivers overreacting. Braking too hard or slowing below certain speeds creates a ripple effect that can put you in an area of abruptly slow traffic with no indication as to why. The key issue:

This model takes into account the time-delay in drivers’ reactions, which lead to drivers braking more heavily than would have been necessary had they identified and reacted to a problem ahead a second earlier.

Why is the time delay key? Because that's what cellphone chatting or other distracted driving does - reduce reaction time.

Motorists talking on the phone drive about two miles per hour more slowly than people who aren’t on the phone...Slower cellphone drivers may be increasing overall commuting times by 5 percent to 10 percent, he calculates, and talking on the phone may increase each daily commuter’s travel time by 20 hours a year....other studies have shown that delayed reaction time related to cellphone use is a safety hazard.

The slow driving held true regardless of use of a hands-free headset:

It’s the talking, not the cellphone, that distracts the brain.

Prediction: the findings will lead to the splendid irony of finding that many Americans phone their destination when they get stuck in traffic to report in and pass the time, perpetuating the traffic jam.

Honeybee hyperbole revealed

The Minneapolis Star Tribune took time to debunk some of the more popular myths around Colony Collapse Disorder and this author must report that he's been outed. Cell phones? Nope. Four years of human life to go? Not so much. Here's a few of the juiciest items debunked:

A small German scientific study looking at a specific type of cordless phones and homing systems of bees exploded over the Internet and late night television shows. It morphed into erroneous reports blaming cell phones for the honeybee die-off, which scientists are calling Colony Collapse Disorder.

The scientist who wrote the paper, Stefan Kimmel, e-mailed The Associated Press to say that there is "no link between our tiny little study and the CCD-phenomenon ... anything else said or written is a lie."

Moldy would like to officially say: oops. One other popular myth is the quote attributed to Albert Einstein that humanity has four years left to live if bees die out.

It's wrong on two counts.

First, Einstein probably never said it, according to Alice Calaprice, author of "The Quotable Einstein" and five other books on the physicist.

"I've never come across it in anything Einstein has written," Calaprice said. "it could be that someone had made it up and put Einstein's name on it."

Second, it's incorrect scientifically, Pettis said. There would be food left for humans because some food is wind-pollinated.

See this post for more on the latest scientific study of CCD and the more reasonable hypotheses. And keep checking those facts!

Colony Collapse Disorder update: Are we dialing the bees down?

The UK newspaper The Independent has a story about a "limited" study of the effect of mobile phones on bees. Scientists tried placing mobile handsets near beehives and found that bees will not return to a hive with a handset nearby. The study's results are anecdotal at this time, but the lead scientist says this is a tantalizing "hint" of what may be causing the colony collapse.

These results should be taken with a grain of salt, however. Since European countries are more compact, their mobile phone networks tend to be more pervasive than in the United States, which makes me wonder why - as the article states - CCD has not affected the UK yet. It would, however, explain why CCD has primarily affected the Eastern United States.

Update 5/2: This intriguing hypothesis is apparently complete bubkus. My apologies!