What’s your evidence, Richard Easton??!?

  • VubDapple@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    From the wiki page

    During the late 1930s, Lamarr attended arms deals with her then-husband arms dealer Fritz Mandl, “possibly to improve his chances of making a sale”.[41] From the meetings, she learned that navies needed “a way to guide a torpedo as it raced through the water.” Radio control had been proposed. However, an enemy might be able to jam such a torpedo’s guidance system and set it off course.[42] When later discussing this with a new friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, her idea to prevent jamming by frequency hopping met Antheil’s previous work in music. In that earlier work, Antheil attempted synchronizing note-hopping in the avant-garde piece written as a score for the film Ballet Mechanique that involved multiple synchronized player pianos. Antheil’s idea in the piece was to synchronize the start time of identical player pianos with identical player piano rolls, so the pianos would be playing in time with one another. Together, they realized that radio frequencies could be changed similarly, using the same kind of mechanism, but miniaturized.[4][41]

  • Icaria@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This post is inaccurate. Neither WiFi nor GPS use FHSS, nor is Lamarr anything close to singularly credited with FHSS’ invention (the earliest patent is credited to Nikola Tesla). This also implies that the Allies used her parent - they did not.

    Also Richard Easton is the son of the man who invented GPS and had every right to be skeptical of this claim, and it looks like Internet dipsh*ts have bullied him into deleting his twitter account over this.

  • zik@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    This is mostly wrong: while she did invent what would later be called Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS), it isn’t used in modern WiFi or in GPS. It is used in Bluetooth though.

    I should point out that techniques like FHSS are only a part of what makes up a radio communication method. You can’t say it was “the basis of Bluetooth” just because FHSS is one of the many technologies used in Bluetooth. She certainly contributed though.

  • Sotuanduso@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    To be fair, I’d be skeptical if you told me Andy Griffith was the father of 3D printing.

    Though I’d google it instead of asking for evidence first.

  • Margot Robbie@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It goes to show that being a good actress doesn’t mean that you can’t also be good at tech, even if you don’t like to to brag about it.

    • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Reminds me of that time someone got into a Twitter beef with Rage Against The Machine. They dropped the “it’s not like you have a degree in political science or anything” line. The lead guitarist went to Harvard for social sciences.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m from a Tech and Science background (unfinished Physics degree, most-definitelly-finished EE degree and then about 2 decades at the bleeding edge of Informatics) and some years ago came in contact with the Theatre Acting world for a couple of years whilst living in London (UK), doing various short courses, seeing fringe Theatre and getting acquainted with various (not famous) actors and directors.

      Most were surprisingly (for me, at the time, with my pre-made ideas from my Science background and 2 decades in Tech) intelligent people.

      Good acting using modern acting techniques and good directing do require quite a lot of brains to pull do well, IMHO, since in things like method acting well before there’s any acting of what’s on a script, there’s a whole process of analysing them and various techniques for discovering the emotions of the character (best I can describe in a short space), at least for stage acting.

      The only main difference in capabilities, I would say, is that at least in Acting there is a much higher proportion of Extroverts than Introverts, the very opposite of the proportion in Science and Tech, and Introverts are the ones with the personality type that’s detailed oriented and hence more likely to come up with things like new or changed processes for doing things (IMHO).

    • Icaria@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is one of the strangest sentences I’ve ever read, even with context. In the history of the human race, has anyone specifically accused good actresses of not being good with tech?

  • restingboredface@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    There is a great documentary about her on Netflix. It covers her love of science and her attempts to get her design to the military for the war effort.

  • IvanOverdrive@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    “Mother of Wifi” is a stretch. But “mother of Alka-Seltzer”? Definitely. “Midwife of the traffic signal”? Sure.

  • Cornpop@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    From my research it is not the basis of WiFi though, it was specifically for encrypting communications to torpedos.

    • Edge004@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      It was designed for encrypting communications to torpedos, but it laid the groundwork for wifi, bluetooth, and gps to be made.