Our mother who art in WiFi
Thy beacon come
Thou handshake be done
In ac as in 802.11
Science Memes
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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Give us this day our daily bandwidth,
And forgive us our connectivity issues,
As we forgive those who disrupt our signal.
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]
Gotcha, WiFi is a bunch of tiny pianists in a box
That’s why memes are hard to understand- I’m tone deaf.
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.
Wikipedia link for Easton (and Parkinson) credit for GPS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#:~:text=Bradford%20Parkinson%2C%20professor%20of%20aeronautics,with%20the%20rank%20of%20colonel.
Ee times article referencing FHSS and Nikola Tesla:
Eh, i saw easton's twitter before deletion, he was rather full of himself and prone to being pompously challenging without cause.
Also his father doesn't mean shit, i'm the kid of a master printer, buggered if i know anything about ink
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.
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.
I don't know who this guy is. Did he do something to Lamarr?
Note that this frequency hopping is no longer used in most WiFi networks today. It is, however, critical to classic Bluetooth, and BLE still somewhat uses it. I have no idea how it's related to GPS.
Frequency hopping in wifi was never well supported. 802.11a was primarily DSSS and afaik, very few, if any consumer devices supported the FHSS mode.
Indeed. Just speaking from a signals point of view, frequency hopping is not competitive for high bandwidth applications. It is however surprisingly durable in the presence of interference despite its simplicity. We’re seeing this play out in newer Bluetooth standards.
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.
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.
I like both of Brian Mays carreers. The one as the guitarist of Queen, and the one as an astrophycisist
Calling Hedy Lamarr "the Mother of Wifi" because she invented FHSS is like calling E. A. Johnson, who invented the first capacitive touchscreen in 1965, "the Father of the iPhone".
i’m pretty comfortable with calling him that. capacitive touchscreens are a big deal sounds like he deserves the praise.
You could always call him "the father of the capacitive touchscreen".
Great to recognise this invention.
I was surprised by the choice of 'Mother of Wi-Fi' though - Wi-Fi hasn't used 'frequency hopping' as such since 802.11b was released back in 1999 - so very few people will have ever used frequency-hopping Wi-Fi.
GPS only uses it in some extreme cases I think, but I'm not an expert.
However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so 'Mother of Bluetooth' might have been more appropriate.
So her invention isn't used for Wifi now, but was used in the initial design of it? You might even say she helped give birth to it...
I guess my point is that it isn't a particularly important part of the design of Wi-Fi - they included it in the very first iteration in 1997 and realised by 1999 they didn't need it. Therefore Wi-Fi would likely have been born regardless of the invention; Bluetooth would not.
However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so ‘Mother of Bluetooth’ might have been more appropriate.
Considering the namesake of Bluetooth, the "Mother of Bluetooth" sounds like the kind of person who would have a tea party with "Grendel's Mother" from Beowulf.
Woman make thing!? Me no likely! Woke lie!
Fucking troglodytes.
There are plenty of women in STEM who deserve more recognition. Lise Meitner, discovered nuclear fission. Gladys West, came up with the theory that laid the groundwork for GPS. Grace Hopper, inventor of the program linker, without which modern software development would be impossible. Ada Lovelace, arguably the first programmer ever. But calling a woman whose name is one of two on a patent that furthered the development of a radio communication technique originally devised 40 years earlier by Nikola Tesla which Wi-Fi no longer uses "the mother of Wi-Fi" and putting her on a pedestal just because she's a woman, parading her (and only her) around every Women's History Month, and calling anyone who claims she didn't actually invent Wi-Fi (because she died around the time of its creation) a "troglodyte" is not a good look.
Okay, well, I'm a network professional with a specialty in wireless and a keen interest in historical wireless networking, and "non-standard" stuff is also quite interesting. I'm no Richard Easton.
I want to start with a disclaimer, by no means would I, nor should I be interpreted to be saying or implying that any contribution, regardless of source, isn't valuable. Whether it comes from a woman, or man, white, black, or any color in-between, non-binary, gay, bi, trans, whatever. The contributor is valuable and their contribution is always valued.
That being said, FHSS, has its uses, and it's been used in wireless. It's a valid technology that should be recognised as such. As with many things, it wasn't a singular effort, and nobody should imply otherwise.
As others have pointed out, the most commonly known technology which employs FHSS is Bluetooth; and trust me, trying to track down issues caused by BT interference is a nightmare because of it. Generally I avoid the problem by not using the 2.4ghz ISM band as much as possible, but I digress.
For those saying it's not part of 802.11, it actually is. It's an old part of the protocol which has long since been replaced and it is considered obsolete by the IEEE 802.11 group.
However, in the 802.11 protocol, sometimes called 802.11 prime (Wikipedia calls it "legacy"), it states: "[802.11] specified two raw data rates of 1 and 2 megabits per second (Mbit/s) to be transmitted via infrared (IR) signals or by either frequency hopping or direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) in the Industrial Scientific Medical frequency band at 2.4 GHz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11_(legacy_mode)
All I want to really add, is that networking is a team sport. If companies and people didn't work together to make it function, then it wouldn't work.
Only by collaborating and working together towards improvement and an increase in the ability of the technology to work across all platforms, vendors, manufacturers, and devices, can we get it to function at all. This fact is as true now as it was when FHSS was invented. Everyone needs to work together in order to make any real progress. Otherwise, all of our wifi stuff would "speak" different languages, and nothing outside of a single companies product line, would work with anything else.
Everyone's contributions have helped wifi get to it's current state, and that should never be forgotten.
Maybe an ancestor of wifi, but CSIRO invented wifi. https://www.csiro.au/en/research/technology-space/it/wireless-lan
Shame how NeoLibs are destroying our greatest national asset by having it focus on profit generation and being independent of government funding.
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.
From my research it is not the basis of WiFi though, it was specifically for encrypting communications to torpedos.
It was designed for encrypting communications to torpedos, but it laid the groundwork for wifi, bluetooth, and gps to be made.
Fire up the ROFL-copter, we got a live one.
Wait til he finds out that the first computer programs were written by some poet with daddy issues
"Mother of Wifi" is a stretch. But "mother of Alka-Seltzer"? Definitely. "Midwife of the traffic signal"? Sure.
Least sexist blue check
Wifi doesn't use frequency hopping. That's bluetooth.
https://www.ieee802.org/11/Documents/DocumentArchives/1996_docs/1196049D_scan.pdf
Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum PHY of the 802.11 Wireless LAN Standard
Edit: [email protected] is correct. FHSS was quickly dropped for DSSS and OFDM, and FHSS is not used in any modern WiFi specs. You can see the list in table 7.6 here https://www.pearsonitcertification.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1329709&seqNum=4
It may be dropped, but it was used in the beginning
Wouldn't that not still make her the mother of Wifi?