I found this pretty awesome explanation for why a microwave oven doesn't block cell phone reception:
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/5410
Clearly, this whole "cell phone in a fridge" thing is a clever attempt to make Snowden lose his nerd cred.
Clearly, this whole "cell phone in a fridge" thing is a clever attempt to make Snowden lose his nerd cred.
(How exactly they do this I'm not quite sure, given that the frequency of a phone and the frequency of phones is quite similar.)
^: Where "sane" means "not gamma waves"
(I'm assuming you meant frequency of a phone and microwave oven.) That's not quite accurate. Cell phones use many frequency bands [1]. I only see one frequency on the list (2500 MHz) that is close to the frequency used by consumer microwave ovens (2.45 GHz) [2]. I don't think 2100 MHz is close enough to be attenuated by a microwave oven, but of course I'm just speculating because it depends on the design of the oven's shielding.
Don't forget that phones switch to a frequency on which they have signal. If you don't have 4G coverage, your phone will use 3G, etc. These operate at different frequencies. So attenuating one or two of the frequencies on the list is probably not good enough.
I assumed that the design was that of a Faraday cage, which blocks the frequency it's designed for and all lower frequencies. anotherhue noted however that it's a tuned RF choke, which will only block a certain frequency.
For reference, I'm in Australia with a 3G phone on Optus, so the frequencies here are a little less scattered [1].
The eye has very poor heat dissipation mechanisms, and they showed in the 70's the RF exposure could cause cataracts in rabbits. (I think dogs were exposed too -- it was a new field, so they didn't know what would happen)
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=45025...
dB is a logarithmic scale, so this kind of back-of-the-envelope reasoning is sometimes made easier and sometimes counterintuitive.