Who first came up with the idea of wearing a tinfoil hat
to protect yourself from mind control rays (or whatever)?
Or more seriously, who first told a joke involving this?
When I worked at Deer Valley Ski Resort in Utah there was an eccentric lift operator who had worked there for years and years so he had first choice of the lift he worked on. Of course he picked the one highest up on the mountain with the best view, but it was right next to three very large microwave antennas. He wore mylar(or similar type of material) under his ski hat to protect his brain from excessive radiation. True story.
Well when I was out fishing on the bayou and got transported up into that UFO…
Maybe they help by notifying you when some omniscent being has secretly placed you into a giant microwave oven.
or
WAG maybe it has something to do with why people put it around their TV antennas?
If you are interested, you can buy one here
In Total Recall, Arnold Schwartzenegger (sp?) used a wet towel to block mindcontrol rays. Maybe that movie was made before tinfoil hats were invented.
Tinfoil hats probably date back to the inception of radio broadcasting in the 1920’s. I remember hearing stories about people who wore them in the early 1960’s It was considered strange behavior even for THAT decade.
IIRC, I believe Ah-Nold was sporting the wet towel to dampen (pun intended) the signal being emitted by a tracking (not mind control) device in his head – which gave him time enough to dig the glowing transmitter from his nose, and then proceed to kick the ass of every bad guy in the Earth-Mars vicinity.
I’m not one to argue practicality with a man in a tinfoil hat, but wouldn’t mylar be ineffective? I thought it was completely non-conductive, meaning it wouldn’t provide shielding from E/M. I don’t know if mind control waves use E/M, but I’d think you’d need a grounded conductor to shield yourself from microwaves.
Yeah, I found the whole “wrap the towel around your head” set of instructions to be amusingly similar to one of the reasons the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy lists a towel as an indispinsible travel accessory.
Tinfoil hat or wet towel, both of them are premised on just covering the skull. I have a problem with the underlying assumption that human consciousness is entirely localized in the brain alone. That may be an outmoded model. What about the studies these days showing that every cell in the body is conscious, that the neurotransmitters released throughout the whole body are an integral part of the whole process of consciousness? Even if you block the brain off from microwaves or whatever is supposed to carry mindcontrol rays, I don’t see how that would be enough to totally screen out anything that could affect your consciousness, if consciousness is diffused throughout the entire body.
This is all assuming for the sake of discussion that there really exist such things as “mindcontrol waves.” I’m not taking that as a given, but just suppposing this technology is real, otherwise this thread would have nothing to discuss.
kwm, do you happen to know if wet kilts provide a similar level of protection for other parts of the body ?