A friend of mine said she didn’t know what Bluetooth is. This is a brief explanation. Bluetooth has aspects that might interest liberal-artsy people.

Bluetooth is a method for transmitting data over short distances, so you don’t need cables. It is transmitted over a frequency that changes rapidly within a narrow band so it doesn’t interfere with other devices using the same method. This method is called frequency hopping.

One method to implement frequency hopping was patented in 1942 by Hedy Lamarr (the actress) and George Antheil (the composer), who wanted to use it to send radio guidance to torpedoes that could not be interfered with. The idea was to use a piano roll to change the frequency rapidly. As you might expect, their method used 88 different frequencies. They never benefited from their patent because clocks in those days weren’t accurate enough.

Hedy Lamarr lived in prewar Germany and was mathematically talented. She married an arms manufacturer who took her to meetings where she learned about military technology. She was disgusted with his fascist tendencies (they were both Jewish) and one day in 1937 arranged to go to a party wearing all her expensive jewelry. She and her maid drugged the husband and she escaped to England with the jewelry. She met Louis B. Mayer and wound up starring in a number of films.

George Antheil grew up in Trenton, New Jersey, and acquired the founder of the Curtis Institute of Music as a patron. His most famous work is Ballet Mécanique, which featured (among other things) several player pianos and three airplane propellers with leather strips flapping in them. At an early concert they blew off toupees and hats from members of the audience. Later concerts had them pointing at the ceiling. I heard a recording of it many years ago and was fascinated by it. In spite of what the description suggests, it is real music.

Bluetooth is named after Haraldr Blátönn, who was King of Denmark in the tenth century. Runestones he erected still exist, in Jelling in Denmark. They have been standing outside for a thousand years but soon they will be moved indoors. If your computer or music player has Bluetooth, you will see its logo on the instrument. The logo is a “bind-rune” composed of the runes for H and B.

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Adam Barr mentioned recently in his blog that Edsger Dijkstra said, “It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”

I have some personal history relevant to this. I started programming in Microsoft Basic in 1979 (I think) when I bought an Apple II Plus. During the next few years I found myself teaching various courses in theoretical computer science at CWRU and in the process learned about many of the early ideas called structured programming. (This was before object-oriented programming came along.) One main point was that you could do everything with assignment statements, if-then-else and while.

My experience was that once I absorbed these ideas and had done some programming in Algol and Pascal I found that I had achieved more clarity and efficiency in programming in Basic on my home computer. What I was doing was implementing the if-then-else and while structures using Basic’s IF and GOTO. Doing this achieved some modularity by separating out the subroutines as separate blocks of code and avoiding GOTOing to the middle of a subroutine.

For what it is worth, this is evidence that Basic didn’t necessarily permanently ruin people. But I have to say that I had programmed in Basic for only two or three years before I started being Structured, so maybe it takes longer to ruin people.

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