Tuesday Technology

I heard something interesting the other day, which I must attribute to entertainer, Robert Wuhl, and his HBO special, Assume the Position 201 with Mr. Wuhl.

He talked about the actress Hedy Lamar, an actress some of you may have heard of. She lived way back when everything was in black and white. (I'm not sure that color had been invented yet.) She also starred in the first major film where nudity was shown. According to Wikipedia: In early 1933, she starred in Symphonie der Liebe or Ecstasy, a Czechoslovak film made in Prague, in which she played a love-hungry young wife of an indifferent old husband. Closeups of her face in orgasm, and long shots of her running nude through the woods, gave the film notoriety.

As Mr. Wahl said, she was The Bimbo of her day. Beautiful, racy, artistic...Bimbo. And that's primarily how people remember her.

But here's something else, and it ties in with today's technology theme. Hedy Lamar co-created something called spread spectrum, which is a key to today's wireless communications. As Wikipedia says: Spread-spectrum techniques are methods by which energy generated in a particular bandwidth is deliberately spread in the frequency domain, resulting in a signal with a wider bandwidth. These techniques are used for a variety of reasons, including the establishment of secure communications, increasing resistance to natural interference and jamming, and to prevent detection.

Basically, she discovered a way to block radio communications. Her idea was to make radio-guided missiles difficult for enemies (in 1942, that was the Germans and the Japanese) to detect or jam. This concept was so ahead of the technology of the times that the US was unable to use it until 1962. Today, the frequency-hopping idea is the basis for spread-spectrum communication technology used in cordless telephones and WiFi Internet connections, among other things.

Not bad for a nude girl from the days before color, huh? Speaking of color, here's a link to an HTML code chart:

http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/2007/02/hexadecimal-html-color-codes-and-names.html

Happy Tuesday!