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Comment by detaro | Hacker News Reader

nice spherical/parabolic dishes with a focus-point in your head is exactly what you don't want

Microwave retroreflectors are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector#In_radar Too large for personal use, but one could certainly line a wall with them. Would increase the danger of using such a weapon, to have a significant portion of the signal reflected back at the operator.

Apparently there's been some very recent research into planar (and presumably more portable) microwave retroreflectors as well: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9060553

Noob q: wouldn’t that be the case only for radiation coming along the body axis? If tin foil reflects these waves at all, having the radiation come from other angles should make it less bad, no? Like if they come face-on, they won’t catch any of the concave part of the “dish” and be scattered away instead.

It was mostly a joke, but there is still a focusing effect for sources that are off-axis, so it'd really depend on direction and shape of the foil hat. e.g. if it covered a lot of the back of the head but left the face open, like a crash helmet, the main axis wouldn't be straight down, for a tinfoil cap it would be.

It would do a great job of amping the signal right into your cranium!

We could bring chain-mail armor back into style. I mistakenly searched for "chain-mail cosplay", not linking to that.

I got some chain mail bikini girls but that's about it.

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