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Post by everso on Jan 4, 2011 19:53:23 GMT
I was just going through a family photo album, looking at photos taken during the 1950s and 1960s. It has to be said, they looked a lot older in those days than people do nowadays. I don't know if it's the fashions and hairstyles or whether people just had harder lives and looked their age, but on one photo taken at the end of 1959, my mum and dad, who were 33 and 36 respectively, definitely looked older than people of that age nowadays. Also, I don't know whether any of our older board members do it, but do you look at photos taken, say, in the 1960s, and think "well, he's dead, she's dead, he's dead...." Oh gawd, I was just doing it and out of 10 people on the photo, only 2 were still alive . Interestingly, out of the 8 that were dead, 5 had died of smoking related diseases: two with throat cancer, two with lung cancer and one with emphysema. Makes you think. Sorry for the depressing thread.
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Post by Weyland on Jan 4, 2011 21:08:51 GMT
I was just going through a family photo album, looking at photos taken during the 1950s and 1960s. It has to be said, they looked a lot older in those days than people do nowadays. Very true. I'm already four years older than my dad ever reached, and he looked older than I do now long before he died. Honest. Cigarettes. Asbestos (building warships). Certainly not alcohol -- he only ever drank alcohol at weddings and funerals.
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Post by everso on Jan 5, 2011 0:58:23 GMT
Funny you should mention cigarettes AND asbestos. My dad, as you probably know by now, was a docker, and in those days they were hands on with cargo. They handled all kinds of stuff, including asbestos. He smoked too, so hardly surprising when he developed emphysema.
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Post by Weyland on Jan 5, 2011 12:41:59 GMT
Funny you should mention cigarettes AND asbestos. My dad, as you probably know by now, was a docker, and in those days they were hands on with cargo. They handled all kinds of stuff, including asbestos. He smoked too, so hardly surprising when he developed emphysema. Pernicious stuff, asbestos. And nicotine. I never heard anyone mention emphysema, but the symptoms were like that. I was 16 when he died, and on holiday in Scarborough at the time. Got a phonecall from the corner shop. They were the only ones nearby with a phone. (Now everybody's got six phones and there are no corner shops. I blame Hedy Lamarr. *) Britain went through a helluva lot of destroyers in WWII, and a lot of them were built and repaired on the Tyne. In those days destroyers contained oodles of asbestos, and he was an electrician, so he'd be working right inside the guts of the ship where the asbestos would be. ____________ * There'll be points for the winner. What do points mean? Nice chaise.
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Post by everso on Jan 5, 2011 14:57:54 GMT
Funny you should mention cigarettes AND asbestos. My dad, as you probably know by now, was a docker, and in those days they were hands on with cargo. They handled all kinds of stuff, including asbestos. He smoked too, so hardly surprising when he developed emphysema. Pernicious stuff, asbestos. And nicotine. I never heard anyone mention emphysema, but the symptoms were like that. I was 16 when he died, and on holiday in Scarborough at the time. Got a phonecall from the corner shop. They were the only ones nearby with a phone. (Now everybody's got six phones and there are no corner shops. I blame Hedy Lamarr. *) Britain went through a helluva lot of destroyers in WWII, and a lot of them were built and repaired on the Tyne. In those days destroyers contained oodles of asbestos, and he was an electrician, so he'd be working right inside the guts of the ship where the asbestos would be. ____________ * There'll be points for the winner. What do points mean? Nice chaise. Wasn't Hedy Lamarr, besides being an extremely gorgeous actress in the 1940s, some sort of inventor? Something towards the war effort? I seem to remember seeing something about it on t.v. a while ago.
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Post by Weyland on Jan 5, 2011 15:21:07 GMT
Wasn't Hedy Lamarr, besides being an extremely gorgeous actress in the 1940s, some sort of inventor? Something towards the war effort? I seem to remember seeing something about it on t.v. a while ago. You win, Ev. I think I heard about this from a quiz show. She had a patent which has come in handy for mobile (and cordless) phones . . . Spread Spectrum -- US Patent 2,292,387
* Lamarr knew about a real problem. It was 1940 and World War Two had started, with England and Germany locked in combat. Hedy knew an important problem: how can one safely control a torpedo with a radio signal? This was important, since torpedos were not very accurate and the ability to remotely control them could be immensely valuable. The story of how she knew about this problem is long, but her previous husband was an arms manufacturer. She had sat in on his corporate meetings—at his insistence—and there she apparently learned about the torpedo problem.
The difficulty in using a radio signal to control a torpedo is essentially the problem of jamming. If you tried to control your torpedo by a signal, eventually the enemy will find out the frequency you are using. Once this is known they could jam your control signal by putting out a strong noise signal on the given frequency.
* Lamarr had a solution. Hedy’s brilliant idea was to use frequency hopping—her invention. The transmitter on the ship and receiver in the torpedo would synchronously hop from one frequency to another. This would make jamming very hard, if not completely impossible. The jammer could try to jam all frequencies, but this would require too much equipment and power. Or the jammer could try and guess the hopping schedule used, but that would be also very difficult.
* Lamarr found a co-inventor. The story is that at a Hollywood dinner party in 1940 she met the composer George Antheil. George had the experience of using a player piano in his work in the film industry. They agreed to work together, and used the electro-mechanical technology of player piano rolls to work out how to implement her hopping idea.
By 1942 they had received a patent for their invention.She didn't invent the chaise-longue, as far as I know. [From here.]
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Post by jean on Jan 5, 2011 16:30:53 GMT
Doesn't Hedy Lamarr feature in a Dory Previn song?
(She does - in a tangential sort of way:
)
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Post by Weyland on Jan 5, 2011 16:58:05 GMT
Doesn't Hedy Lamarr feature in a Dory Previn song? Gott in Himmel, Sacred Blue, Tjonge Jonge, Caramba! The questions you ask, Jean! One thing I do know about that Dory Previn is that he sings all the right words, but not necessarily in the right order. Or something. I think I got that right.
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Post by everso on Jan 5, 2011 18:18:16 GMT
She didn't invent the chaise-longue, as far as I know. I think the Ancient Egyptians had something to do with it.
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Post by aubrey on Jan 5, 2011 22:07:12 GMT
There is a book I have called [German[/i] - IE, a long title that means nothing to me. Anyway, it's by August (I think) Sander, and it'd just photographs of types - the subjects aren't given names, as i recall, just what they are. They were all taken in Germany in the 30s, and the Nazis hated them, because they showed people as they were and not some Aryan ideal. It's really sad, when you imagine what happened to a lot of the people pictured in the following ten years or so. I'll try and find some pics tomorrow. (Actually, just done it. There's loads. here...)
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