Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Bluetooth

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why Bluetooth is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Bluetooth, known for being technology, famous for being pairing tech. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why Bluetooth is secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there folks, hey there, Ciphalopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie! Yes.

What is your relationship to or opinion of Bluetooth? So, aliens came to Earth approximately, what, like 35 years ago? and did introduce the technology. They're like, oh, we are bad about the, like, when we're making your pyramids for you, we forgot to give you Bluetooth. And they are blue aliens and Bluetooth is like code for them for turning our teeth blue. So this is why I never used Bluetooth. tooth. Instead, I tie a piece of twine between two Dixie cups when I want to communicate.

I'm glad the twine and the Dixie cups are all paper. It's a very sustainable. Yeah. These tin cans will never break down. Yeah. The way to live. Yeah. No, I actually, I use Bluetooth all the time. I sometimes have trouble sleeping, so I have these, like, headphones that are like, it's like a headband, but it's got headphones really thin, one's in it. It makes me look like a huge dork, but it does help me sleep because then I can listen stuff, ASMR boring podcasts. So not this podcast because it's too exciting. I stay awake. Yeah, the show Sleeping with Celebrities is boring. That's a good one. That's a good boring. That's a beautiful boring. Yeah, we have a lot of amazing stuff to get into about why it's named that and how it works

and more. Because yeah, this is from a few folks, including Ticunio, Weig, and Enos, Minus, Minus, Minus, Mosif on the Discord. We're all excited to hear about it, and it ran away in the polls. It's one of those things I truly never think about, even though it's everywhere. Yeah. And I also think about it being kind of annoying. It's like hard to pair. Yeah, I've never understood. Just jack a wire in. Come on. I've never quite understood. It's like printers where it's, it doesn't seem like it's evolved at all since it was introduced. That's kind of true, too. I should just get us into it.

Oh, good. And every episode lead with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week, that's in a segment called Well, it's a marvelous pod for some numbers where the figures and statistics abound. It's a fantabulous way

to learn so many fascinating things that we've found. Very good. Yeah, that was submitted by, Ian McGecko on the Discord. That's a good name. I like it. We have a new name for this segment every week. Please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit yours through Discord or to siftpot at gmail.com.

And the first number is more than $5 billion with a B. That's five more billions that I can count in my head or have a concept of. I can only compare it to the population of the Earth, which is approaching $8 billion or a little over. So $5 billion. that's the number of devices with a Bluetooth capability that are bought each year. Wow. That's a lot. We got a lot of stuff, a lot of devices. Yeah, like for being a relatively new and advanced tech, it's everywhere all the time, and everyone's getting it. It's amazing. I do think that it's gone a little over, like, there have been things that have gone overboard with the Bluetooth.

Like, I saw a Bluetooth egg carton for your fridge, so it's like a plastic. I'm not lying. This is not a joke. It's like a plastic egg carton that you put your eggs in and it's connected by Bluetooth to your phone. I guess it just is a calendar. So it tells you when your eggs are going to go bad. It's not like measuring the eggs. It's just like, ah, it's been 30 days. Your eggs are probably not great anymore. Okay. That's it. Like expiration. That's an interesting. I was thinking it would just be counting the eggs or something. But no. Yeah. There's apparently a Bluetooth I don't want to get too blue with a Bluetooth, but cagels, if you know what they are, you understand what I'm talking about. There's a Bluetooth device that connects to a phone where you do cagels.

And as you're doing cagels, you're controlling a little game on the phone. That's similar to Flappy Bird. That's another YouTube, that's another Bluetooth device I've heard of. To like gamify cagels to make it more interesting to do cagels. Exactly. Gamefying kegels. Sure. Use your imaginations for how that works, because I'm not going to explain or try to figure it out. And then, like, I had a toothbrush once.

I think I got it for free because of podcasting, and it was, like, connected to my iPhone through Bluetooth, where it was, like, telling me how good or bad a job I was doing, brushing my teeth. So there's a lot of stuff. The number is also going up, and we cannot list. every kind of device that now has a Bluetooth version. Basically everything. I bet there's a Bluetooth toilet. Hang on.

Keep going, Alex. I'm going to look this up. I find all of it extra astonishing because of this next number. The next number is 1999. 1999 is when the first ever Bluetooth product went on sale. That's, yeah, that's pretty early. We're only 26 years in and now we make almost enough for like each year two people on Earth could share one.

there's enough, you know, being put out and... It's only... It's taken less than 25 years to come out with Bluetooth toilets since then. Right. Of course there's a Bluetooth toilet. Which I've confirmed there's multiple... It's not just like that there is a Bluetooth toilet. There's many, many different types of smart toilets. There's many different brands of smart toilets.

They range anywhere from around $700 to over $2,000 for your very own smart toilets. toilet that has Bluetooth capabilities. So, yeah, you're all set. Something funny about building intelligence into what you poop into. Like, you don't want to make that sentient, you know? It's going to resent you.

I don't. Yeah, certainly not. I just, like, an AI toilet can, like, talking to you. It should not have any feelings or thoughts. Talking to you when you're doing your morning plopies, like, that's not good. I don't like that at all. Floppies. It's just an overwhelming amount of stuff within most listeners' lifetime. Some of you are born in this century. But a lot of people, it's just a completely new phenomenon. And this first ever product, it was covered by the tech site ZDNet at the time. In November 1999, the tech company Erickson unveiled a Bluetooth-enabled headset at a Las Vegas conference. And the headset allowed the user to

receive phone calls, but it can be wireless and hands-free, and it pairs to a mobile phone. And we'll link a picture of it. It's called the HBH-10. It immediately won design awards, and apparently the shape was partly inspired by stringed orchestral instruments, like violins and cellos. So it's sort of a long thing to your mouth from your ear kind of headset that you probably have seen a version of or seen this thing. Yeah, it doesn't look that different from current Bluetooth. headsets that have like the microphone attachment. Obviously they've changed the design of most Bluetooth earphones, but for something where it's like you want the microphone closer to the mouth, they have not changed that. And they also haven't changed really the specs on how it

works. My favorite number there is 10 meters, 10 meters, which is about 33 feet. That's how far a stable Bluetooth connection usually extends. And that was how it worked when the very first headset from Erickson hit the market all the way to today, mostly because they've wanted to make all of the Bluetooth devices compatible with all of each other. Each year you want last year's Bluetooth devices to talk to this year's new Bluetooth devices. So from 1999, when Erickson put out this first device, all the tech companies involved in developing it, it was really them and Intel and Nokia. But those companies and then other companies, the big selling point has been if you buy a thing that says Bluetooth on it, it talks to everything else that says Bluetooth on it.

And Boyd does it. So because of that, they've kept it the same as a system as much as they can, which means it hasn't gotten wildly more powerful or anything, but also it's pretty compatible. Yeah. Sometimes my husband and I share Bluetooth stuff with our phones. So like I don't really quite understand how these phones vie for dominance over the other when you're playing stuff, but sometimes we'll randomly get stuff playing when we're next to each other, like into each other's headphones. Yeah, that's a thing. Yeah.

The other quick technical number is 2.5 milliwats or less, because that's the power limit of a typical Bluetooth connection. Bluetooth, again, it's a low power short-range radio technology. Right. It's using radio waves, but very differently from, say, a radio station and also even a lot less power than Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi, it's usually up to about 100 millawatts of power for the broadcast versus 2.5 for Bluetooth. So Wi-Fi is much longer range. It's also built to be an access point for lots of different devices. Bluetooth is a short and limited connection in your personal area.

Right. Like when I go upstairs and I forget my phone downstairs, it disconnects. usually. Can't handle that. Yeah. And yeah, because it's radio waves. It's not just the distance. It's also obstacles. Solid metal or wood or concrete or brick or water. You know, all of these things interfere with a radio signal. Right. Like when I'm trying to listen to music underwater, it gets really difficult. No joke, we bought somebody headphones that are built for when you're swimming. Oh, really? It's one of the five billion gadgets a year, I guess. But yeah, they love it. Wow.

They can swim their laps and listen to music. See, I can't really make jokes about Bluetooth stuff because everything is probably a Bluetooth somewhere. Same. Yeah, I immediately gave up in the research process on, like, listing, these are the weirdest Bluetooth items. It's an endless list. Go ahead and share them on Discord, but there's too many. Bluetooth fork, yes. Really?

Bluetooth Fork? Yeah. There's an article by Slate. Why you should buy a smartphone-enabled Bluetooth fork? It's called the Happy Fork, spelled H-A-P-I Fork. It's a connected smart fork, which lets you adopt healthy eating habits. Sorry, the smart fork really hit me. That's really great.

Unlike most forks, the Happy Fork vibrates and lights up when it senses that its user is eating too quickly. Oh. Oh, wow. This is a this is what it says slow down you cow and save some food for the rest of us. Is the message it sends if you attempt to take more than one bite every 10 seconds. I don't need my fork insulting me. Yeah. And I wonder if that's a dominant thing across Bluetooth products is like an engineer who does not like themselves.

Right. Said what's one of the other terrible things about me that a Bluetooth device could yell at me about? Yeah, can we make more things in our lives actively hostile towards ourselves? Right. Like, my brain already does a lot of that. But what if also my shoes were like, hey, lazy dingus? Yeah. Yeah.

It's like a hairbrush. It's like, oh, nice dandruff loser. Oh, you've got to get a smart brush. Oh, my gosh. It's so great. It tells me I'm balding and I should feel shame and resent every male in my family lineage. Yeah, it's very powerful.

Yeah, there's a smart hairbrush. There is. Really? I was just riffing. It's a Wi-Fi Bluetooth and equipped hairbrush. We'll never, yeah, we'll never riff around this. We'll never find out. No.

We'll throw out the episode. We'll try to find one thing that's not Bluetooth. I don't know that we'll be able to. And there's one last set of numbers here for the tech, which starts with 79 channels. 7-9-79 channels. That's the number of... I'm so close to being the funny number. Ten away.

So 79 channels is the number of different channels within a specific set of radio frequencies that a Bluetooth connection hops between to stay paired. And it's probably like the least upfront obvious element of Bluetooth. They don't just pick a frequency and connect. Two devices will rapidly hop around through a set. of 79 different channels. They're in the ultra-high-frequency part of the radio spectrum. So you don't deal with this as a user, but every time you pair Bluetooth devices, they

exchange security keys, and there's some ciphers and other security stuff for that. But once they do that, then they hop around between 2,402 megahertz and 2,480 megahertz. You don't need to understand why it's that part of the spectrum or anything, but engineers have just taken that set of radio wave frequencies and subdivided it into 79 different channels that are each about a megahertz apart. So that means that systems can hop into whatever is not occupied by other devices or also not being interfered with by some specific other machine. Rapid switching happening hundreds of times per second just to keep your two devices paired.

Okay. So it's like it's seeing if anything else is interfering in that channel. And if it is, it switches to another one. Again, not perfect technology. You and Brett will hear each other's phones and stuff from time to time. But usually it works well enough where everybody in the room can be doing different personal area networking. It's a technical name for it, personal area networking.

But like everybody can be doing different Bluetooth pairings with their own different gear. and the gear will be on different frequencies from each other in a way where nobody interferes with each other. So that's pretty cool. I think the problem with me and Brett's, the phone stuff, is not necessarily like an error in terms of these channels, but because like if when we like borrow each other's headphones on our devices, then like it connects seemingly somewhat randomly

or if like I move around. I'm not really, I haven't figured, I'm sure there's something that we're doing to displease the Bluetooth entity. I really liked when you joked about it being from aliens at a specific window of time. It feels like they wanted to come see a movie that was out then. Sure, yeah. So they came back and gave us this new extra thing. Well, I figured that it was probably invented around 35 years ago.

But I don't know. It came out in 1999, so that's like 26 years ago. Yeah, this November will be the 26th. anniversary of any Bluetooth things in the world. Oh, great. I'll do that as to my birthday party theme. I won't really have, I don't really, I'm not going to really have a birthday party, but I'm going to demand that Brett throw me a Bluetooth themed birthday party. Oh, and then this episode will teach him how to do it. Right. Exactly. That's very exciting. Yeah. And yeah, and that frequency hopping, that is similar to the tech that went into the creation.

of Wi-Fi. It's been useful across a lot of different technology. And that gets us into takeaway number one. Two famously beautiful actresses helped make Bluetooth a globally popular technology. This is a takeaway that will also kind of split in half, but it's about Hetty Lamar and about Angelina Jolie. Now, I would not have guessed Hetty Lamar. I would have guessed Hedy Lamar. I would have guessed Angelina Jolie given that she was more or less hot as in popular.

I'm not making any kind of declarative statement about her hot hotness then or now, but hot in terms of popular around Bluetooth times. Yeah, and honestly, I think it's fair to say hotness and objectification played into it.

Well, sure. Because each of these ladies in their era was arguably the hottest celebrity on Earth. To the guys who want to pick that. But, like, Hedy Lamar, I didn't think she was like, I didn't think our society respected aging celebrities enough to, like, have her be the face of Bluetooth. Yeah. So Hedy Lamar helped invent the frequency hopping tech.

Oh, yeah. Even though she was mostly a, like, 1940s Hollywood actress. Can she do a few inventions or am I thinking of someone else? This frequency hopping idea went into Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and GPS and other stuff. Nice. So it was kind of one influential idea that she like co-prototype with someone and then other people actually built it into stuff later. So you'll also find bloggy sources that say like Hetty Lamar invented Bluetooth. And that's not really true.

Right. But she played a role in the like shoulders of giants that other people could stand on. Yeah. Yeah. So that's cool. I mean, it makes sense. Her name's Hedy Lamar. It's like saying, my name is Brainy McInvento. Yeah, her given birth certificate first name is Hedwig.

Ah. And then she went by a Hedy. Yeah, that makes that, yeah. And yeah, and Hedy Lamar and Angelina Jolie were both also globally notorious in their, like, star image during their hot period, I would say. And Angelina Jolie, to a lesser extent, she was. was like kissing her brother and people were like oh she's outrageous she has tattoos in a very mild way you know was she kissing her brother on the mouth or on the cheek like what's yeah she kissed her brother on the lips well and also i don't know a lot of cultures there's like a brief

kiss on the lips between family members yeah as a thing it's fine people were like oh no in america usually not in the u.s but i don't know man i can't you know you know There's nothing more I can say about it. We've got to save it for our us piss, U.S. Postal Inspectors Service TV show watch party, where this is a more relevant topic, I think. Yeah, yeah. So these two celebrities, they're both ladies who became famous for being maybe the most beautiful woman in the world and a notorious woman in celebrity and also had to do with Bluetooth. Who did Hetty Lamar kiss? So Hetty Lamar actually made a movie that would still be outrageous today.

Oh. And it's part of why she adopted a stage name. She also, like, moved continents, basically to, like, get away from it. Was the movie called Kiss Your Brothers Square on the lips? My Hetty, My Heady, and me is the movie. Lots of kids. sources here. There's digital resources from the Smithsonian, also from the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and also a feature about Lamar from theforward.com by Beth Harpaz.

Hedy Lamar made a extremely sexually explicit movie that launched her to stardom. Nice. In 1933, a Czech filmmaker premiered a movie titled Ecstasy, and he won a Best Director Award for it at the Venice Film Festival. It was like a famous movie. movie in its time. But it was a massive scandal across Europe because of its star, a young Austrian actress named Hetty Kiesler, who will change her name to Lamar to partly get away from people knowing that she made the movie ecstasy.

Yeah. It's a movie about an unhappy young woman abandoning her new marriage to find a more sexually satisfying young lover. And Kiesler was fully nude in the film. She also performed facial close-ups of her character climax. We're almost 100 years later, and that's not really in movies still today. Yeah, I mean, like this was 1933, so when was the Hays Code introduced? It was introduced before that, and distributors struggled to, like, convince Hollywood to let this screen outside of the code.

And a lot of U.S. states banned it, a lot of European countries banned it, the Catholic Pope at the time personally denounced this movie specifically? That means he watched it. That means he watched it. I saw the pepperoni as of the lady in the water. Right. It was Pope Mario, brother. Well, you know, most of the poems at this time were, most were Italian, yes.

That's true. Yeah, yeah. The Vatican is in Italy. And this movie did things to express female sexuality that are still taboo in art today. Gross. And so Hedy Kiesler kind of made a few life changes at this time. One of them was that she married a much older man, which is kind of ironic with, in the movie Ecstasy, her character is escaping a marriage to a much older man.

Yeah. But she marries an older man. She also essentially flees to Europe to restart her career under the the new name Hetty Lamar. She does this with the help of a Hollywood mogul named Louis B. Mayer who meets her in London also sexually harasses her because that was how they did it. They never did it again after the 1930s never happened anymore. Yep, last time.

But she outnegotiated his lowball contract offer to become a star at MGM under the new name Hetty Lamar. And because people didn't have the internet. and stuff. A lot of people couldn't connect her to her previous European work. And then in Hollywood, she just builds a whole new image as an iconic, beautiful, seductress lady. Her biggest movie was a movie where she played Delilah from the Bible, who tries to seduce Samson. She was still a screen siren in a very Angelina Jolie kind of way. Right. Except this time she didn't have her pepperonies out. So that made it fine. Yes. That's it. Yeah.

Yeah, she just made, like, Hayes Code approved type movies or movies that were simply romantic rather than this, like, truly sexually explicit Czech movie. Right, you've got to use metaphors around sex. You can't, like, just show it. You got to have someone, like, pouring tea seductively or, like, eating grapes seductively or, like, doing stuff with a banana. But you can't just show the pepperonies or the Pope is going to get mad. Catholic teaching standard Pope dogma that you need to have a shot of a train going into a tunnel.

Right. And that's okay. The Bible says that's fine. Yeah, fooling around with a banana. Kurt Cameron loves to do it. So we know it's okay to do in Christianity. And then Hedy Lamar, the other reason she fled Europe besides her own reputation, which also she argued about for the rest of her life, like she and, the director and production people of that movie ecstasy would for the rest of her life say

either she had no idea the movie was going to be so explicit or she totally knew and was lying later, you know, it was a big fight. But besides fleeing this reputation, she also fled to fascism. Because again, she was making movies in Europe in the 1930s. Also, she came from a Jewish family in Austria. Yeah, the Nazis were not big on seeing pepperoni's or Jewish people at the time. So that would be pretty tricky. Yeah, like, this movie from 1933 was accidentally anti-fascist in a bunch of ways. Right. Yeah. Heddy's other trouble was this much older husband in real life. He was Italian and he rapidly revealed himself to be a fascist collaborator. Oops. Uh-oh. He was fully an arms dealer supplying the Italian

fascists and the German Nazis once those got going. Ah, man. And that, There's also, it might be apocryphal, but there's a claim that he also tried to use that arm-stealing fortune to buy up and destroy prints of the movie ecstasy. To prevent anyone from seeing his wife do any of this stuff? I'm going to say that's a little bit of a red flag when your older Italian husband is a fascist who is an arm stealer and tries to destroy your old movies. Yeah, it's a red flag and a brown shirt, you know what I mean? It's not great. And so she divorces him in 1937 in the process of her move to America. And by the start of the...

Weird how fascists want to get rid of divorce. Anyways, continue. Yeah. And so by 1940, she's in the United States working under a new name. She times it pretty well and gets out. And then at a dinner party in 1940, she meets a writer and artist named George Antheil. And they don't become a couple, but Antheil, on top of being a writer and artist, was an amateur inventor. And Hetty was also a thoughtful, interesting person who liked science and technology and stuff.

Your name's Hetty? I should mention the movie Blazing Saddles is kind of the main reference to Hetty Lamar in later popular culture. I've been really disciplined in not making the Headley Lamar jokes. But there's a villain in the movie called Headley Lamar, and everyone calls them Hetty Lamar. I did not under I watched that movie when I was a kid and I understood a lot of the sort of jokes about racism but the Hetty Lamar jokes went right over my Hetty same like I had never heard of Hetty Lamar and then I heard this Bluetooth factoid but I still didn't hear the notoriously sexual actress part either like there's a lot of layers that you gradually uncover here right yeah like my parents just

said like she's the famous actress And so she is meeting this guy and they both want to help the allies defeat the fascists and the Nazis. And both of them are just talking about tech ideas. And together they come up with an idea of, hey, would it be harder for the enemy to intercept allied radio transmissions if the radio transmission hops between different frequencies automatically? Yeah. It's a good idea. It's a very good idea. And no one else had, like, written down that idea yet.

And so Hedy Lamar and George Amthiel co-author a patent for it in 1941. There you go. Which is really cool. I don't know if we ever learned this lesson, but women can be, you know, sirens, but also invent cool things. Yeah, and a couple weeks ago, the bonus show of Glow in the Dark, we talked about a young girl getting a patent and how people were mostly amazed that she was a girl. Yeah. Like, not even that she's young. Like, just girls still do not get a lot of patents in the United States.

And Hetty Lamar got a very early one. It's really cool. I think there's also kind of just like this idea that if you're like a sex icon, then you're probably ditsy and not very brandy, right? Like, the idea is that you're using your looks because you don't have anything else, but that's just not the case. Yes. Yeah, like, Hetty Lamar should have been more famous for this kind of thing. Right. For being a complete person.

And all beautiful women should have that opportunity. It's very satisfying to see Dolly Parton interviews because, like, she's a very smart woman. And, like, there's, like, a lot of interviews where the interviewer's trying to kind of, like, degrade her because of her sexuality. And she's really hands them their reproductive organs of your choice on a platter. Yeah, it's very cool. And so Hedy Lamar was capable of this. kind of thing. And also did it in a way that, like, fights the worst villains of the 1900s, you know? Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And then, like I said, like bloggy sites, like defunct crack.com

type websites will tell you that Hetty Lamar invented Bluetooth, but her patent expired and was mostly forgotten when engineers started parallel inventing and redeveloping this idea a few decades later. Right. So she didn't invent it, invented, but she had a great idea that deserves more attention and honoring. Yeah. And yeah, and then it's a relatively quick story about Angelina Jolie. All right. She, in a pretty accidental way, also promoted this item because, again, Erickson puts out

the first ever Bluetooth product in late 1999. And almost immediately after that hits the market, Hollywood starts filming a first Tomb Raider movie based on the Tomb Raider video games. They're filming summer of 2000. And somebody involved in the production brought in this Erickson product as like a headset for her to wear her to talk to her computer guy while she's in tombs and on adventures. Right. It probably wouldn't work, though, because we already learned that Bluetooth can't go through thick barriers. So if you're in a tomb, it probably wouldn't work. Even her just giant British mansion in the movie, she wouldn't have a Bluetooth connection across the whole mansion.

You know, like, it's great. Yeah. It's just, but it was something to look like high tech. Yeah. And also, if anybody can find the chicken and egg of whether it was paid product placement or just they wanted the coolest thing, please let us know. I was really curious, couldn't find it. But either way, this became a thing that blew audience's minds because they could purchase it. Right. You know, like when James Bond has a laser watch, you can buy the watch that looks like it because it's a cool Rolex or whatever. but you can't usually buy spy gear. And I'm thrilled to link a defunct GeoCities fan website. It's called Lara Croft's Mansion. And it devotes a whole section to the astounding Bluetooth tech in the 2001 movie.

Because, quote, you don't have to be Lara Croft to own one. Yeah, I got a message that says your connection is not private. Attackers might be trying to steal your information, Alex. So you're just going to just going to have to describe this website too. me. I could open it. That's so weird. Maybe I'm already heavily attacked. But there's like, it's like a big whole write-up of how thrilling it is that this Erickson HBH10 headset can be purchased by the public. They talk about how Lara is supported by Bryce, who's based back at Croft Manor, you know, and like all this thrilling stuff where you'll basically be Lara Croft if you use the brand new thing

called Bluetooth. Right. And it helps sell the products and get the entire talk out there. Yeah, I can think of other reasons why the Tomb Raider movie was popular versus just the Bluetooth being it. But yeah, you know, hey. Yeah, it's this enormously beautiful actress and then people care what she's wearing is the thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then that also put that kind of headset into the games. It wasn't in the games when they made the movie and will link 2005 coverage of the next Tomb Raider game called Tomb Raider Legends, where they say that the new feature of a com link headset for Lara Croft

appears to be influenced by the movies. If Hollywood's going to sexualize women like this, there needs to be more sort of like communication about what bras are being worn by the actresses in these movies, because it's like, okay, so you're like, you've got all this great support while you're like crawling around a cave, like, why aren't, you're telling me about the Bluetooth device, but you're not telling me about what Underwire she's got. So, you know, it's very frustrating. We could do 100 podcasts about the sexual and bodily politics of the two-bated

franchise. It's truly an icon of ladies' chests and what is allowed and expected and encouraged. But look, if we're going to sexualize women in movies, I want a smart bra as well. Give me a Bluetooth-enabled bra. Okay, I'm looking it up. Hang on. Bluetooth. I mean, a lot of Bluetooth tech is wearable, you know?

Yeah, they've got one. Of course. Like, of course. Yeah. Yeah, I don't think they should. But, you know, of course. Like, I'm unsuprax. Smart bra.

So ma inofit is a smart bra. I almost put it in the numbers, but it's a little too technical. There's what's called classic Bluetooth, and then there's low energy Bluetooth. And low energy Bluetooth uses only part of the radio spectrum. for it and uses less power. So it's better for like smart watches and smart bras, I guess, and the other wearable stuff. Like they've really catered this tech to being wireless and low power and amazing way to

short range power stuff on your body. Bad news. It might share your data, the smart bra. So if you, if you were concerned about privacy of a Bluetooth device that it seems like measures your chest is what one of the. the smart features is. Yeah. Certainly I would like to know that the company does not, it says that it won't sell customer data,

but the company may in some cases share data. So that's, you know. Yeah. Right. Apparently the smart bra doesn't work very good, so it's more of a dumb bra. Um, unfortunately. We're not there. We're not there yet.

Uh, everyone who's got boobs, we got to wait for a smarter bra. Got to wait someday. Yeah, someday. Folks, that's a ton of numbers and beautiful actresses and so on. We're going to take a quick break and then do two more takeaways about all things Bluetooth, including why it's named that. We're back, and we're back with why Bluetooth is called Bluetooth. Right, I already said aliens. It's even more random to me.

Yeah, takeaway number two. Bluetooth is named for the fictionalized reputation of the historical founder of Denmark. I, of course, obviously. There's a real Danish ruler in the Viking era named Harald Bluetooth. Ah. And then someone who read historical fiction about him, was a key engineer in the process of developing Bluetooth technology. Now I'm looking at this, and it looks like his name is actually Harald Blattand.

Yeah, the anglicized version is a translation of Blatand, which is Bluetooth or dark tooth. Okay, so he had bad oral hygiene, this king. Legitimately, we aren't totally sure, but we think he might have had like an old, decaying, weird tooth or set of teeth. Because also if folks have heard the passive about surnames and family names, it's just called surnames, we talk about how especially in Europe there was an era where people started switching from giving people like a first name and then a name that describes them to a first name and a family name. And so like this guy was just before the era when people tended to go by family names and it tended to be more of a nickname situation in Denmark.

And oof. Like, his father was Gorm the old, because he lived a long time, and that's it. I mean, gosh, Gorm, Gorm the old is a lot better than Harald Bad Teeth. Right. Like, he had colleagues like Eric Blood Axe, you know, like, those are cool names. And Harald was known for at least one weird tooth is almost definitely why he is called that and why the tech is now called that. Yeah. It's amazing.

Like, it's named after a Danish guy with a dental problem, probably. Right. Okay. The only part that's probably is whether that's why he was called Bluetooth. It's definitely named after this guy. And key sources here are a piece for E. Times by engineer Jim Cardack, who was also a key person here. Also a piece for Smithsonian magazine by Rachel Newer. A piece for mental floss by Shauna C. Farrow. And then a book, it's called Vikings A History of the Northmen.

by a nonfiction writer, WB. Bartlett. I just turned to that for a lot of information about Harald Bluetooth. I went to a Viking Museum in Denmark. It was pretty cool. Yeah, so I know you've been to Copenhagen, right? Copenhagen. Yeah. Have you been to a town called Yelling?

Starts with a J? No. There are stones there that are inscribed with information about Harald Bluetooth. And the nickname for these stones, is Denmark's birth certificates, because in the process of creating a modern Denmark, people decided that Harald is the founder of the country. Yeah, why not? In like an institutional way.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I think it's popular to have a founder who is bad teeth, like George Washington. It seems like it was so dang busy leading the country, they can't be bothered to floss. that is i was reading about how mouse at tongue had like terrible teeth from drinking too much tea and just like kind of not taking care of them like it is kind of a thing it's a thing a lot of leaders have bad teeth yeah uh yeah the stones say haraldor won all denmark is the translation and he and his father especially did a lot of turning various kingdoms and what's now denmark into one nation. And then the people who like looked back and sort of backwards wrote a story

of Denmark celebrated Harald for two things that they said are like truly Danish to a modern Danish person. One of them is he converted to Christianity. His father was pagan. And modern Danish people said, we're Christian too. This fits. And then the other one is that there's a somewhat true, somewhat false reputation where Harald united people without violence. Like, it's not just that he conquered everybody in Denmark. It's that he used diplomacy and Christ and words to, like, bring people together. Right. And so that, but that worked, right? He, like, did that and also there were some wars. Like, it's somewhat true. Right. Yeah. Well. So it's, it's, like, all right as a legend, you know. It's okay. Yeah. You just don't want to say he, like,

never picked up a sword ever, because he did, yeah. So he was like the Garibaldi of Denmark, and Garibaldi... Garibaldi's a pretty good comp, yeah, yeah. Is like the Thomas Jefferson of Italy? No, that's not right. He's just not an American, I don't think, yeah. No. But Garibaldi's a pretty good comp, yeah.

Yeah, Garibaldi, he made Italy. Yeah, and Harold partly might have had bad teeth because he lived in the 900's age. Right. So more than a thousand years ago, he was the son of Gorm the old and Thira Danebaud. Possibly the falsest part of his reputation is he was allegedly also the king of Norway. Hmm. And that he united Denmark and Norway. And in Danish history, this gained some cachet because in later centuries there were unions between Denmark and Norway, also sometimes Sweden.

Like for the whole 1400s, there was a personal union through a queen called Margaret I first. So, like, that claim that Harald also ruled Norway and united it with Denmark, people promoted it as propaganda or a nice story. Right, right. But apparently in Harald's time, a lot of kings of Denmark just claimed to be the king of Norway because they wanted to. Oh, yeah. And, like, maybe fought some battles there. Right.

There's no Wikipedia back then. So you could just say you're the king of Norway and then suddenly you're picking up a bunch of people at the ancient bar, even though your teeth got a lot of gingivitis. Yeah. Yeah, you can just put it in your hinge profile, but the word hinge is all ruins, you know? Yeah. Hinge. And it's a big stone you carry around.

Yeah, it's tough. Yeah. You know, it's called Stone Hinge because H-E-N-G-E is. No, no, it's true. It is about it being like a hinge. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. So it's, yeah.

I laughed hard because I thought you were going to say Stonehenge was made of hinge profiles. But there is something there yet. Right. So then the story gets told and retold and retold. And one popular version in the early 1900s is in a work of historical fiction. It's called The Long Ships. And it was written for like young readers, like teenagers. And one reader of this was a Swedish engineer named Sven.

Matheson. And he's reading about, like, and then Harold Bluetooth, like, did a sick flip kick on his ancient skateboard. And it was like, I'm going to unite people, yo. He's poochy, essentially. He was needed back on his home planet of Blue's Youth World. Yeah. So, yeah, so Sven had read this. And then as an adult, Sven works for Erickson, which is a tech company, mostly based in Sweden. And then in the 19th, 1990s, Erickson and also Nokia in Finland and then also Intel in the United States. Those three companies, Erickson, Nokia, Intel, form a thing called a special interest group. And that's just a name for a research team that's trying to make one tech standard.

Okay. That they'll all agree to use and, like, not try to own themselves and make proprietary. Right. So it's kind of because if you start to unleash a technology and everyone has their own very specific proprietary thing, then it's harder to get more people to adopt it. Yeah, yeah, it reminds me of the recent episode about HTP and WWW. Like, that's so dominant because it's at least partly been given away. And because tech companies said it's not profitable if we wall this off. Right.

And then those companies came together to build what they wanted to call personal area networking, which is a name that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, Pan. That's the thing. Like, they especially wanted to call it, Pan. And according to Jim Cardac, who was on the Intel team involved in this, they made a very silly to me error where they got pretty much all the way to the finish line of starting to sell and promote this technology. And then they did like a trademark search and looked into

whether anything is called pan. There's a lot of things called pan. Tens of thousands of brands use pan in some way. There's also just the word pan. I bet there's a Bluetooth enabled pan. Hang on. Let me look it up. Yeah, I'm sure. Like at this point, what that? Yeah, there's smart pans. Bluetooth-enabled frying pan takes the gist work out of cooking.

This is the best topic ever. It's called Panteligent. All right, that's it. That's all I have to say about this pan. Yeah, it's called Panteligent. It's impossible to satirize. It's just like we can't riff it away. Yeah.

Everything is Bluetooth. Everything has been. turned into a Bluetooth product? Yeah, and since 1999, it did not exist before. No. No. So this group, they come up with this very successful idea, but they're extremely late in the game and Erickson's about to put out a headset. And they say, we don't have a name. We don't have time to do other trademark searches on our backup ideas. So we're just going to have to use the name that we were passing around amongst ourselves as a working title, but almost as kind of a joke. And that name was Bluetooth. And they picked that name because right away their group was disagreeing about what to call

it. Apparently Intel called this business RF. Nokia called it low power RF. Erickson called it MCLink. All those names involve radio frequencies or mobile devices. And they said, well, we need to think of something. And one of their meetings was in Toronto in the winter. After the meeting and arguing, Jim Cardack went out for drinks with Sven Matheson. And as they talked about their lives and their love of history, Matheson brought up the legend of Harald Bluetooth peacefully uniting Denmark and Norway. And they said like, oh, he was able to like unite these people despite different Danish and Norwegian Norse languages. I guess our standard is sort of like that, right? Like, we'll unite the world. Right. And I'm thrilled to link old slide decks of blurry

clip art where they talk about how Harald Bluetooth wants to unite Norway and Denmark, just like we want to unite the world's tech with low power frequencies. That's so beautiful. When I think about unity, first of all, I think Bluetooth, and then secondly, I think Harald Blatland, the original Bluetooth. It's such a random and borderline joke connection. And they truly never thought they would ship this named Bluetooth. I love it, though.

I mean, like, it's so nice when there's just a weird, funny name for something with a weird story behind it. Because now I feel like all we get is like panteligent. We don't get cool historical references in our tech names anymore. It's truly wild that it's panteligent. Yeah. Yeah, it has a lot of personality to it. And it has a vibe. And also, it was an immediate hit product even with this kind of goofy branding. So then they never changed it similar to the reasons they wanted all the devices to be compatible. Like if they ever tried to rename this down the line, it would be confusing. So they just stuck to it. Right. Right. And then also that explains the little logo of Bluetooth, which is kind of a weird and runic symbol. And it's a mashing together of the runes that match the English letters H and B. Harald Bluetooth.

Hmm. Whoa. The B run is basically a B, and then the H run is sort of an asterisk, and now it's like kind of mashed into the middle of the B. I'd never really thought about that logo, except it looked like angry little eyes. Yeah. Like, gur. Yeah, it's like 900s A.D. Viking stuff. Huh.

Globally, forever. It'll probably never change. Right. I'd never questioned it or thought about it, ever. This plays into my conspiracy theory that there's a shadowy cabal of space Vikings who have been trying to operate behind the scenes. And they're behind the misinformation that Vikings wore helmets with horns on it. Because it's the space Vikings who had the horns on their helmets, but Earth Vikings never did that. They never had horns on their helmet.

Where does that myth come from? Aliens, thank you. Alien. Look it up. Read a book. Right. And that's why Harald Bluetooth is a poochie figure who goes to his home planet. Aliens.

Space. Right. Exactly. He's an alien who introduced Bluetooth really early on. His teeth were blue not because of gingivitis, but because of being an alien. Yeah. Yeah. And I also like the technology is most named after the least true part of Harald Bluetooth's story.

Like he didn't really unite. Norway with Denmark, but he did a bunch of other interesting things. It's great. Oh, detail, schmeetails. So it might as well be Clavey as an alien. It's great. They did an illustration on the slide of like a ruin or like an old drawing of Bluetooth holding like a little tiny computer and a phone. They were truly joking around. Like, they used real illustrations attributed to being illustrations of Harald, but then the slide says real stuff about him that he's the son of Gorham the old and Thyra Danebod. But then also the end of the slide says, quote, Harald thinks mobile PCs and cellular phones should seamlessly communicate, which is like goofy, corny, engineer having fun stuff that I love. It's great.

Yeah. They never thought they would call the product this. It's so silly to do that. I would much rather engineers have a fun time with historical figures than killing loads of chimps or monkeys so that they can make smart, smart in our brain. Elon Musk is bad times. He should have just liked some kind of thing from history, like a normal engineer. It'd be a different timeline. We're in the bad timeline where Elon Musk never got into model trains.

I loved model trains growing. up and I never turned into a fascist. So that's, I think, you know, that's my rubric. Exactly. And also your model trains, you can create a appropriate metaphor for sex in a movie, right? Exactly. Yeah. None of this Hetty Lamar Bluetooth business. Yeah, if you didn't think I was, I was making sex jokes with my model trains. I mean, I wasn't. I was like 12. So. Yeah, that makes sense. I didn't know. And off of this, we have one last takeaway for the main show.

Takeaway number three. There's a U.S. town and giant state-sized area that at least partly banned Bluetooth. Whoa. Because they know it's being used by the aliens to slowly incubate alien babies that. go in the ear with the 4Gs, and then they hatch when you expose them to Bluetooth. And thank you for coming to my TEDx talk. Right, because the sensors at TED couldn't handle it. The TED guys didn't want me, so I had to pay TEDx to tell you my story.

And you know what? I'm glad I came to TEDx Katie's Living Room. That was a great conference. Right. Where a lot of big ideas that the world's not ready for. A big ideas. We're shared. I had to stop to go deal with my dog barking, but, you know, that's why you paid 30 bucks to come see it.

All right. So why did this area ban Bluetooth? I love that we've been joking about aliens because it's in support of a giant radio telescope for researching space. And essentially maybe finding aliens if things work out. So not surprised. Again, Bluetooth runs on radio frequencies. and this is a radio telescope that's extraordinarily sensitive to other radio stuff. So if you're in a couple of miles around it, you can't use Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or any other

sorts of radio tech. Yeah. I guess you could like start accidentally broadcasting Sabrina Carpenter to aliens. But is that such a bad thing? Yeah. I mean, aliens have physical needs, you know? Sure. And she sings about physical needs.

So they'll appreciate it, planet. Yeah, man. They land, they're still like, That's that me espresso. And we're like, there's a whole other album you got to catch up on. Like, you got to get that. That's last year's song of the summer. Way behind.

We're only seeing K-Pak Demon Hunters now. Too late. So, yeah, this is a takeaway about Green Bank, West Virginia, which is a town that is also the center of what's called the National Radio Quiet Zone, which is about 13,000. square miles. It covers parts of three states, West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland. If it were a U.S. state, it would be bigger than several entire states, the national radio quiet zone. Okay. So it's like there is a zone that potentially interferes with, it looks like you've got two

major potentially sensitive radio areas. Yeah. And there's basically two levels of anti-tech stuff going on in order to protect this telescope's operations. Because it's a radio telescope. We're not looking with our eyes. We're looking through radio waves sent from a big dish. And they're only banning Bluetooth in the immediate couple miles around this. And then in the giant quiet zone around it, it interferes with the operations of like giant infrastructure and companies and airlines and stuff. You have to check with the government if you want to build cell towers. Apparently some commercial flights turn off their radio while they're in this zone in order to not interfere with the telescope.

But it's, we'll link a map, it's 13,000 square miles. It's a very large area. Like, it's bigger than any of the New England states or, you know, it's huge. So it's using radio frequencies to build, like, what, to look at distant stars or planetary bodies. Yeah. Oh, okay. It's essentially trying to build a map of the entire universe.

Okay, well, that'll take a little bit of time. Yeah. And it's enormous. The Green Bank telescope, it's almost 500 feet tall. It weighs 17 million pounds. And it might be the largest thing that is man-made and can be steered. Because the whole thing's on a big circular track. The entire thing moves and rotates.

Whoa. I want to drive it. Yeah, me too. And it's used by hundreds of different scientists every year. It can detect changes in astronomical data on a nanosecond scale. They're trying to map every visible galaxy. It's just really cool. There's so many truly extraordinary scientific projects in the world and in the United States.

It's cool to know this exists. It really is enormous. It looks like it's like just this massive dish supported by a giant steel structure with a lot of struts, which makes, if I know anything about structural engineering that having a lot of struts is probably a good thing. That's incredible. Again, a Bluetooth device, if it's not using the classic Bluetooth connection, it's powered at 2.5 milliwats. A milliwatt is only a thousand of a watt that's not very much power. But this Green Bank telescope is so sensitive that its instruments can detect radio waves at a power of one billionth of one billionth of one millionth of a watt.

I couldn't even figure out the amount of zeros on the decimal, but the BBC tries to compare it to something. They say that that amount of energy is similar to the energy given off by a single snowflake hitting the ground. Oh, boy. That's pretty small. So if you just fire up your Bluetooth AirPods, it throws off the telescope. These scientists like carefully listening for radio waves, which is, I know that's not how that works, but then like you, it just starts blasting their ear drums with Sabrina Carpenter because it's picking up your Bluetooth. Right.

And they're like, I have tears now. And somebody else is like, that's not what the song is about. It's a metaphor for stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I brought up Sabrina Carpenter and Alex knows much more about her song. than I do, which is really, really fun. I like to bring up things that I know very little about. The new album's even more explicit than the previous one.

There's a lot there. So the aliens are going to party. She's the heady Lamar of our times. Yeah. Yeah, this is an episode about sexual ladies, the blue tooth episode. Sexual ladies and one old king with a tooth problem. Right. Ladies, don't let the Pope tell you to keep your pepperoni's hidden.

And fellas, don't practice. good dental hygiene, because then you could be king of both Norway and Denmark. Yeah. Now I want the Norwegians to be like, our king has good teeth, so, like, that's their dig at Denmark. Right. Sure. Like King Olaf Perfect Smile was the ruler at the time. I'll believe it when you guys stop pickling fish.

Got them. Got them. No joke, the scientists have teams of investigators who drive around Greenbank, West Virginia, in special trucks to sweep for and detect illicit radio waves that would interfere with the telescope. Trying to stop the signal, man. Drivers cannot drive electric vehicles or hybrids within 1.5 miles of the telescope because if it's not a totally analog gas powered vehicle, it could interfere with the signal. This town, there's no Bluetooth, there's no smartwatches, wireless doorbells, baby monitors, microwave ovens. Not even Pan-Teligent? Exactly.

Apparently there's only one super low-power radio station for music, and it was by a guy who went way out of his way to try to find a way to make that work. And otherwise, you just can't listen to the radio. Like, from goofy Bluetooth tech to pretty basic radio tech, it can't be done in the couple of miles around this. telescope. What about a Bluetooth toilet paper holder? I'm going to see if that exists. Yeah, you can't do that. And so there's less extreme rules once you're a couple miles away from the scope. For example, multiple highways go through the National Radio Quiet Zone, Interstates 81, 79, 64. If you're driving on that, you can still make calls and stuff. But on a large scale, people trying to build cell towers or set up commercial airline routes or do other giant

tasks have to work around this one telescope. That's really interesting. Do you know what else is interesting, Alex? The toilet paper holder exists? Yeah, yeah. There's a Bluetooth stereo with bath tissue holder called Icarter 2. Icarta 2. Yeah, it's got an iPod dock.

I think they mean iPhone. It's got bathroom accessories. It's got a stereo and it holds toilet paper. Okay. That angle, okay, I see where they're getting at. They're like, this will do multiple functions. Fine, I admit it. I own several of them.

I have 10 bathrooms and each one has an I card to. Right. They're just like, they're basically selling you a music player and saying I can go in the toilet paper holder spot. That's like it. Yeah. Okay. And then they, as a goof set, will also detect when you're out of toilet paper.

Yeah. So this town has become a place that two very different groups of people seek out to live in because there's no radio waves essentially because this telescope needs to operate in radio silence. One group is unfortunate because there's a. pseudo-scientific belief about electromagnetic sensitivities. Yeah. And we think this is a nocebo effect where if people do think they feel better once

they move to Green Bank, it's like a placebo, but a lack of something. Yeah. Modern technology is generally built to not mess with your head and give you headaches, but people think it does. Generally speaking, yeah, I mean, it's tough because if you have a negative association with like you think that Bluetooth is going to cause you a headache, and then you think you're next to Bluetooth, you're going to get more stressed,

maybe you're going to grind your teeth more, and then you might get a headache. Yeah, like you can do it to yourself, and it makes sense. The other group that has been, like, drawn to Green Bank, which is still a very rural town other than the telescope, some people like going there to live without the pressure of mobile access to the internet. Hmm, okay. Because, like, the town has wired internet, broadband internet.

According to Green Bank Telescope site director, Karen O'Neill, quote, we do have broadband internet. The difference is that when I leave my desk, the internet doesn't follow me. When I watch a soccer game, every parent on that field is watching the kids play soccer. Nobody is looking at their cell phone. No one is worrying about that, end quote. That's actually pretty neat. Yeah, like the mid-90s internet.

Yeah, that's cool. It's like a vacation from being constantly connected via your phone or your pan or your toilet paper holder. Bluetooth may be more than anything else is putting the internet everywhere and only this radio telescope is shielding you from that trend. You know, it's wild. Right. Now, I mean, I sympathize with that for sure because I put some like child blockers, not child blockers, but just person blockers. on my phone for like social media apps, we have a phone jail, things because I was realizing like, hey, actually staring at my phone and looking at Twitter all the time makes me feel bad.

So, yeah, no, I get it. When we're taping this, it's the day after a bunch of gun violence in the United States. And I was like glued to my phone in a doom scroll way all day yesterday. And if I lived next to the Green Bank telescope, I might not have been, you know? Oh, I avoided social media because I was like, I was working because, yeah, it's, it's a, be nice. Yeah, it's not great. It's not good, not good for your brain to be constantly exposed to violence and vitriol all the time. Yeah.

That's what gives me a headache. Not, fine out the Bluetooth. Right, right. Yeah, it's, it's just too bad about electromagnetic sensitivity folks. So they're just talking themselves into a problem. So it's too bad. I think so. And it doesn't necessarily mean their symptoms aren't real, but it does not seem like there's evidence that it is caused by Bluetooth. And I guess the plus side is, if they like

living in West Virginia, they're just lucking into a nice thing. It's a beautiful state. Sure, yeah. And we've been doing that bim-bam bits all episode. They're from West Virginia. Fun. I didn't even put that together, and I planned this. Great. It's all connecting. I think the, I think the brothers are behind. Are behind all of it. The Bluetooth aliens, all of it. It all makes sense. Angelina Jolie.

Brother kissing. Yeah. What else? Sometimes it rains in Trav Nation. Rain is blue because water's blue. It's not. Yeah, I ruined it. Rain isn't blue, Alex.

I messed it up. Oh, my God. Alex is, Alex, The real world as a child draws like a picture with crayons. Right. Our next episode is about the sun and I'm like, the sun is a quarter circle at a corner and it's over one house, my house. Yeah.

What color is a small amount of water, Alex? Blue, definitely blue. Okay. All right. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through The Big Takeaways. Takeaway number one, Hedy Lambar and Angelina Jolie, two famously beautiful and notorious actresses

from different eras, each helped make Bluetooth a globally popular technology. Takeaway number two, Bluetooth got its name in kind of an accidental way from the fictionalized reputation of Harald Bluetooth, the historical founder of Denmark. Takeaway number three, Green Bank, West Virginia banned Bluetooth use to support its telescope, and they at least partly limit Bluetooth use on setup in three states. And then before and during those numbers, a ton of takeaways, especially because this is technology using the radio spectrum and so on. We also got into when Bluetooth was created, how much Bluetooth tech there is in the world,

and a surprising amount of endless Bluetooth devices, no matter how much we joked. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show. at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one

obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is four nicknames and one sniper rifle for hacking into a Bluetooth connection. Visit sifpod.fod.fund for that hacker bonus show for a library of almost 22 dozen other

secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. We often lovingly reference the mackleroy's in this episode. If you like Mbim-Bam, Sawbones, Schmanners, wonderful, still buffering, probably something else I'm forgetting. They have a ton of bonus audio for members too. It's special audio.

It's just for you for making us a thing. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation and gets that and does that. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at Maximumfun.org. Key sources this week include a lot of Norse history for Harald Bluetooth that includes a book called Vikings, A History of the Northmen by non-fiction writer W.B. Bartlett. Also, in addition to archaeology and history and stuff, there's an amazing piece for E.E. Times by engineer Jim Cardac, who worked with Sven Matheson to pick the Bluetooth

name. He has amazing personal stories of that process. We're also linking all about film history, from the Smithsonian, from the Gene Siskel Film Center, from the wonderful independent publication, theforward.com, and then a lot of tech resources from popular science, mental floss, ours, technica, and more. That page also features resources

such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie Lenape people, and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigone people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge

that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people in life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 163 that's about the topic of fire hydrants. Fun fact there, fire hydrants are built and designed two totally different ways

depending on how warm or cold the climate is where you live, and how much your city or town budgeted to build the fire hydrants. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is unbroken, unshaven by the Budoz band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode.

Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week, with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network

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