thanks, internet

Thanks to Slashdot and Wikipedia I have now learned that Avant-garde composer George Antheil, a Lutheran, and actress Hedy Lamarr--yes, DeMille's Delilah--invented and held the patent on a secret communication system. They built it to help precision torpedos avoid jamming! (hey, David Weber fans take note, these guys helped invent the very EW which has saved Honor Harrington's life innumerable times, perhaps At All Costs should have named the technology "Lamarr" or "Delilah" instead of "Apollo") As wiki points out "Lamarr's frequency-hopping idea served as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology used in devices ranging from cordless telephones to WiFi Internet connections. In 1997, the two of them received an EFF Pioneer Award for the invention."

Apropos of...well, everything I'm sure...Antheil was also notorious for carrying around a pistol in his jacket and he would take it out during concerts, placing it on the piano if the audience grew restive.

I wonder what the conversation was like on the day they hit the idea.

George, be a dear and pour us another martini. Cecil, darling, I simply cannot be on the set tomorrow. George, you remember George? The little kraut with the gun we met in Paris last year? Well George and I have just been talking about how hard it is to control a torpedo with a radio since the enemy could find the frequency of the control signal and block it. Yes, jam, dear, very good. But if the signal was always changing it would be very hard to pin down and we could simply steer the torpedo right up to the enemy ship and blow it up! Boom! Hahahaha. Well, you'll just have to wait.

emerson inspires me

RW Emerson was a tremendous thinker. He hated quotes, but here's some that moved me today:

"Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry."

"Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."


"Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." (this accords quite neatly with Luther, btw)

"When Nature has work to be done, she creates a genius to do it."

"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not been discovered."

"There are always two parties; the establishment and the movement."

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do."

"Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real. Perhaps they are."