Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

August 11, 1984: Ronald Reagan's "we begin bombing in five minutes" joke. Story broken by the late, Ann Devroy [1948-1997] then of Gannett.


Press: On and Off the Record


On August 15, 1984 a coded message was transmitted from Soviet military headquarters in Vladivostok: "We now embark on military action against the US forces." One military unit in the region went on red alert. Soviet ships in the northern Pacific were confused.







That October, just before the 1984 election, the ad hoc duo of Jerry Harrison and Bootsy Collins performing as "Bonzo Goes to Washington" released the single "Five Minutes" inspired by Reagan’s remarks. The song was produced by Harrison and Daniel Lazerus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k4TNtUZnM4

In the pre-Internet days most people did not hear Reagan's joke until this song release.


IT'S NOT THE FIRST JOKE ABOUT NUCLEAR WAR


From the same TIME issue:

The Military: Downgrading a Whistle Blower

Monday, Aug. 27, 1984

The Pentagon has long been tough on employees who publicly challenge its way of doing business. While working in the Penta gon's Program Analysis and Evaluation (P A & E) office, Franklin ("Chuck") Spinney (TIME, March 7, 1983) earned the ire of his superiors with reports on how the military routinely underestimates the costs and overrates the effectiveness of high-technology weaponry.

Spinney has been given a mediocre rating ("fully successful," Pentagonese for soso) on his civil service evaluation, which could sink his chances for a promotion or a pay raise. His supporters charge that David Chu, a Reagan appointee and head of P A & E, pressured Spinney's immediate superiors into underrating the dogged whistle blower. When Republican Congressman Jack Edwards of Alabama called Deputy Secretary of Defense William Taft IV to complain, Taft denied that Chu or any other political appointee had tried to influence the evaluation. Such action would have violated civil service rules. Spinney maintains that he will go to court, if necessary, to fight the evaluation. At week's end there were signs that the Pentagon might review its finding.

Your guide to surviving a nuclear war. Only 65 pages from all good newsagents. (1981) The Bentall Simplex was one of many commercial fallout shelters available in the UK in 1981. Protect & Survive Monthly suggested gov't could put 1 million people in employment by installing them.


Walking in a nuclear winter land

August 11, 1942: U.S. actress & amateur inventor, self-taught,  Hedy Lamarr and U.S. composer George Antheil receive a patent for Secret communication system. Although the invention wasn’t immediately implemented, it did lay the groundwork for technology used to maintain security for military communications, cell phones, WiFi and Bluetooth. This work led to their being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.

She was born as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria. By the 1930’s she was a film star in Europe, and by early 40's she achieved super stardom recognition in the US. On the eve of WWII she married a wealthy Nazi sympathizer (unknowingly) who was a leading Austrian ammunition manufacturer. Shortly thereafter she made her great escape to Paris according to her story. She was married and divorced 6 times, had 3 kids (James Lamarr Markey, Anthony Loder, Denise Loder-DeLuca) remained single from 1965 (after divorcing her divorce lawyer) to her death (heart disease) on January 19, 2000 in Casselberry, Florida. Damn, 6 times. Almost tied with Elizabeth Taylor but beat out Judy Garland.

On August 27, 2019, an asteroid was named after her: 32730 Lamarr.


Beauty and brains, (not so much on the marriage side, but nobody is perfect) The hottest actress-science nerd, ever. The most desirable woman in world history! lol

In an age when we ought to know better, the public perception of the evolution of science and technology retains the flavor of old just-so stories. In these tales, great discoveries or inventions are typically made by a single person.

...

Recently, attempts to address historical slights have lapsed instead into another kind of just-so story. Over the past two decades it has become standard, even fashionable, to credit the invention of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even cell phones to 1940s movie star Hedy Lamarr. The story is appealing and exotic: Lamarr, an intelligent woman and amateur inventor, was shoehorned into a Hollywood culture that valued her as a screen siren and nothing more. Since a Google doodle was devoted to the actress in 2015 and Bombshell, a documentary about her, was released in 2017, the popular history has become chiseled in marble—well, let us say, arrayed in bits.

It is true that Lamarr and her unlikely partner, the radical modernist composer George Antheil, hold a patent for an important radio-transmission method that finds its way into several modern communications technologies, including Bluetooth. But it is equally true that their patent was hardly the first in this area. It is further true that the earliest operational systems employing this technique were created after World War II independently of their patent, and the essential idea can be traced back nearly to the birth of radio itself. If Lamarr and Antheil’s attorneys had performed a more diligent patent search, different doodles might well have graced Google.

The Actress and the Composer

The tale of Hedy and George might have been written by Arthur Conan Doyle, or even Graham Greene. Briefly: At an early age Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Kiesler in Austria, married Fritz Mandl, a Nazi sympathizer and Austria’s leading munitions manufacturer on the eve of World War II. Lamarr escaped this unhappy union (as she tells it, disguised as a maid whom she had drugged) and soon after ended up in Hollywood. Through a mutual interest in the obscure field of applied endocrinology, she met George Antheil. Revealing that she possessed a flair for inventing weapons, Hedy shared with him an idea for a secure torpedo guidance system that employed a novel technique known as frequency hopping.

[frequency hopping explained]
...

An invention notebook in George’s handwriting reveals that he was influenced by Philco’s 1939 Mystery Control, the first commercially available radio remote controller. With the help of Samuel Mackeown, a California Institute of Technology engineer, George ironed out the bugs in their invention, and he and Hedy applied for a patent in June 1941. Considering the familiarity with patent conventions and technical radio concepts on display, it seems likely that Mackeown wrote the patent itself. On August 11, 1942, Lamarr and Antheil received U.S. Patent 2,292,387 (issued to Lamarr under her married name, Hedy Markey) for a “secret communication system.”

Despite the novelty of their approach, the pneumatic player-piano mechanism made their system unwieldy—and certainly unworkable in battle. Antheil made strenuous lobbying efforts to get the invention adopted by the Navy, but it was shelved. According to George, the Navy brass thought he wanted to put a player piano in a torpedo. Nevertheless, one frequently encounters claims (for instance, in Richard Rhodes’s 2011 book Hedy’s Folly) that because of its military potential, the Lamarr-Antheil patent was classified by the Navy. Although it adds to the story’s drama, that detail does not appear to be true.

The authors of the Spread Spectrum Communications Handbook state that the patent was processed routinely with no imposition of secrecy. A tiny New York Times notice dated October 1, 1941, did report that the National Inventors Council “classed Miss Lamarr’s invention in the ‘red-hot’ category,” but two days later Lamarr and Antheil’s patent attorneys, Lyon and Lyon, wrote a letter (provided to me by Antheil scholar Mauro Piccinini) to their clients making a contrary claim:

We noticed considerable publicity to the papers recently resulting from statements of Col. Lent of the National Inventors Council. This publicity is rather puzzling in view of the fact that the Patent Office has not issued a Secrecy Order. It is also difficult to understand why the Secrecy Order has not been issued in view of the fact that the Examiner has found nothing antedating the invention.

George himself apparently didn’t believe the invention was classified: He gives the patent number in his 1945 autobiography Bad Boy of Music and is under the impression that anybody can get a copy of the thing by mailing 10 cents to the Patent Office. In addition, in their letter Lyon and Lyon also expressed surprise that “the Patent Office did not discover more pertinent patents than those cited.” That surprise turned out to be well-founded.

Claims and counterclaims have been made as to whether Lamarr originated the frequency-hopping scheme or learned of it in meetings at Fritz Mandl’s firm, the Hirtenberger Patronenfabrik. In Bad Boy, George affirms that she got her education at those meetings, and although he is not exactly the world’s most reliable memoirist, he could hardly have received the information from anyone but Hedy. Robert Price, an engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Lincoln Laboratory and a pioneer of spread-spectrum technology, interviewed Lamarr. He told me that he came away convinced that she had heard the idea in her husband’s boardroom, and with tongue somewhat planted in cheek, Price called her “the Mata Hari of World War II.” Still, one must be mindful of historical gender roles—of how Lamarr might have presented herself as well as how her statements might have been received.

The notion that Lamarr’s patent might have begun with an idea she heard from her former husband’s colleagues is dismissed in the documentary Bombshell, where the filmmakers claim that German engineers at the time were unaware of the technology. However, Hans-Joachim Braun, whose 1997 article in American Heritage of Invention and Technology spurred the current interest in Lamarr’s role as an inventor, informed me that documentary evidence in the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv in Freiburg shows that German engineers before World War II were aware of frequency hopping, although they lacked the means to put it into practice.

...

If ideas are born of necessity, then the mother of secret communications has been war. Most of the research into spread-spectrum transmission took place in anticipation of war, or during war itself. By some estimates, during World War II as many as 90 percent of German electronics engineers were involved in the country’s (ultimately unsuccessful) anti-jamming campaign. Under such circumstances, the invention of frequency hopping was not just probable, it was inevitable.

...

As a rule, scientists engaged in fundamental research would rather do something novel themselves than try to duplicate someone else’s results, which only adds to the noise. In that regard, the overwhelming concentration of talent at the old Bell Labs had its advantages. It may be too much to hope that a new system can be devised to streamline the chaos. Failing that, one can at least take solace from knowing that recognition for one’s accomplishments depends largely on the diligence of the patent search, and that the march of ideas will continue regardless of who gets the credit.

Lengthy very interesting article on the ideas & inventions of randomness history with info graphics & illustrations if you're curious... Random Paths to Frequency Hopping

In 2019, actor and musician Johnny Depp composed a song called "This Is a Song for Miss Hedy Lamarr" with Tommy Henriksen. It was included on Depp and Jeff Beck's 2022 album "18".


Fire power Friday
USS Missouri (BB-63) firing at Iraqi targets with her 16-inch cannon battery during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. The "Mighty Mo" fired a total of 783 16-inch shells and launched 28 Tomahawk cruise missiles during the campaign.










IS EVERYBODY HAPPY?


Trump’s 2024 Campaign Seeks to Make Voters the Ultimate Jury And I see NY Times is back to the old photo ops of posting shots of Trump's backside, exiting. NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, The Atlantic, did this crap relentlessly back in 2020.

Meanwhile, over in dem left fields...