Hollywood legend Hedy Lamarr was a tech innovator whose inventions quietly changed the world
This article originally appeared on 11.09.15
Hedy Lamarr was a movie star, and a total hot commodity in Hollywood. If you look around the Internet, you'll find lots of images of her makin' out with famous dudes from the '40s.
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But Lamarr was also an incredible inventor.
She once said, "All creative people want to do the unexpected."
Let's be real: It was the 1940s, and no one was expecting a famous movie starlet to up and invent a torpedo radio system with the goal of fighting the Germans during World War II. But she did!
When she heard that a a German sub had torpedoed two boats carrying British children to Canada to avoid the Blitz, she was horrified.
Before Hedy became a famous movie star, she was married to an Austrian military arms merchant. And while her arms-dealing husband was chatting about weapons ... Hedy was listening. So when she got fed up with hearing about all the crappy news of the war, she called upon her own talents to make a difference.
First stop: torpedoes!
Torpedoes back then were controlled by radio signals, which meant they were easily jammed easily by evil German submarines. And Hedy was not there for that.
So she teamed up with George Antheil, a pianist and composer, and they came up with a solution. Using a player-piano mechanism, they created a radio system that could jump frequencies, making it essentially jam-proof.
Lamarr and Antheil got a patent for their idea in 1942, in the middle of Hedy's career as a Hollywood star! And even though the U.S. military didn't use the technology until the '60s, the work they did laid the foundation for the complex radio communications that are behind cellphones, Wi-Fi, satellite tech, and more.
Not only did Hedy make space in her life to play and invent, but she took herself seriously.
She saw something she wanted to change, so she did it. She got her patent. She made a difference.
On what would have been Hedy's 101st birthday, artist Jennifer Hom celebrated her legacy creating this Google Doodle (below). Hedy's life is a masterclass in following your passion, no matter what.
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Men try to read the most disturbing comments women get online back to them.
If you wouldn't say it to their faces, don't type it.
This article originally appeared on 04.27.16
Trigger warning for discussion of sexual assault and violence.
A recent video by Just Not Sports took two prominent female sportswriters and had regular guys* read the awful abuse they receive online aloud.
Sportswriters Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro sat by as men read some of the most vile tweets they receive on a daily basis. See how long you can last watching it.
*(Note: The men reading them did not write these comments; they're just being helpful volunteers to prove a point.)
#MoreThanMean - Women in Sports 'Face' Harassment www.youtube.com
It starts out kind of jokey but eventually devolves into messages like this:
These types of messages come in response to one thing: The women were doing their jobs.
Those wishes that DiCaro would die by hockey stick and get raped? Those were the result of her simply reporting on the National Hockey League's most disturbing ordeal: the Patrick Kane rape case, in which one of the league's top players was accused of rape.
DiCaro wasn't writing opinion pieces. She was simply reporting things like what the police said, statements from lawyers, and just general everyday work reporters do. In response, she received a deluge of death threats. Her male colleagues didn't receive nearly the same amount of abuse.
It got to the point where she and her employer thought it best to stay home for a day or two for her own physical safety.
The men in the video seemed absolutely shocked that real live human beings would attack someone simply for doing their jobs.
Most found themselves speechless or, at very least, struggling to read the words being presented.
Think this is all just anecdotal? There's evidence to the contrary.
The Guardian did a study to find out how bad this problem really is.
They did a study of over 70 million comments that have been posted on their site since 2006. They counted how many comments that violated their comment policy were blocked.
The stats were staggering.
From their comprehensive and disturbing article:
So what can people do about this kind of harassment once they know it exists?
There are no easy answers. But the more people who know this behavior exists, the more people there will be to tell others it's not OK to talk to anyone like that.