3 big stories
From the latest edition of News You Might Have Missed (I highly recommend you all go
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Secret US plans for Iraq's oil: A BBC report finds that neoconservatives planned to privatize Iraqi oil prior to the invasion, as means of undercutting OPEC.
"One huge US jail": Investigators say Afghanistan is home to a network of "invisible prisons" built by the U.S. to replace Guantanamo Bay.
Into the Great Wide Open: The FCC is considering "spread spectrum" technology that could break big media companies' monopoly on broadcast frequencies.
...all good reads. And if the sheer volume of text is too daunting--I know I also gave you Gore Vidal today--then at least read this opening, from the spread spectrum article:
In 1940, the Austrian-born actress Hedy Lamarr, considered by some the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, approached her neighbor there, the avant-garde composer George Antheil, and asked him a question about glands. Antheil, known for his propulsive film scores for multiple player pianos, had broad interests: in addition to his music he wrote a syndicated advice-to-the-lovelorn column and had even published a medical book, Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Endocrinology. As the story goes, Lamarr — whose acting exploits (which include the first big-screen nude scene) and marriages (there were six husbands, most notably Fritz Mandl, an Austrian arms dealer with ties to Hitler and Mussolini) are too varied to discuss here except to say that she was a woman far ahead of her time — wanted to know how she might enlarge her breasts. Somehow, though, they ended up talking about radio-controlled torpedoes, and the future of communications was changed.
After years of living with Mandl, Lamarr was familiar with the problem of sending control signals to a torpedo after it was launched from a ship, especially radio signals, which the enemy could easily detect and jam. She had a notion of a radio transmission that, by changing its frequency many times a second, could allow an observation plane to covertly guide a torpedo over long distances. Combining Lamarr’s knowledge of radio control with the model Antheil had used to coordinate sixteen pianos in his BalletMécanique, the pair invented the idea of “frequency hopping,” and obtained a patent for a Secret Communications System. This was the first example of a single radio transmission using multiple frequencies across the radio spectrum — the range of electromagnetic frequencies that are useful for sending broadcast signals — without bumping into other transmissions and causing interference. Sixty-plus years later, frequency-hopping has evolved into a technology, called “spread spectrum,” that proponents claim could put an end to most forms of radio interference, presaging a time when the airwaves (TV signals travel over the same spectrum), one of our most heavily regulated resources, could be opened up.
* Ray, 3/24/2005 07:39:59 PM
