Tom Slick, Hedy Lamarr the Normandy and Other Things: Lab Book for 2026-06-28/29

I haven't mentioned my portfolio site here before, but I did manage to fix page view tracking on it today, so that's kind of nice. It was the final project for a class I took at City College San Francisco and highly recommend.

The Hedy Lamarr Mystery

I'm starting work on the mystery of Hedy Lamarr aboard the Normandy today. I've researched all the passengers aboard the ship, and Hedy Lamarr, whose name at birth was Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, is not listed as a passenger. There's a ham radio bent to this as well. Hedy invented and patented frequency hopping spread spectrum radio.

Hedy Lamarr

We know that she was a passenger based on several first hand accounts, including her own, that it was while on ship that she negotiated her hollywood deal with Louis B. Mayer. The lore has it that she was posing as the governess of Grisha Goluboff, a 14 year-old violin virtuoso from San Francisco at the suggestion of Goluboff's manager Isadore Nobel. Although, according to this article, we may not be able to find her because she didn't have a ticket at all.

Grisha on the Normandie

The first step was to pull all the travel manifest data into a database. There were 1690 passengers on the ship, not counting the remaining crew pages I haven't analyzed yet. I didn't want to spend token assembling analysis results into a database, so I was careful to ask the agent I was working with in Gas Town to

first create a schema for the database that we agreed on
then read the column headings for every table on every manifest analysis page for this particular ship passage. The agents doing OCR and passenger investigations didn't have to stick to column names, so I asked for a json structure mapping varied column names to their corresponding solumn names in the db schema
armed with this information, I asked the agent to write a pythong script to scan all 51 pages of findings and assemble the database.

This paid off as I used very few of my Claude tokens on this step.

I installed the llm agent plugin for datasette. I had a bit of a time figuring out the command line to pass in the model I wanted to use. What finally worked was

datasette --root normandie_1937_1688.db --plugins-dir=plugins -s plugins.datasette-llm.default_model gpt-5.5

I then, went to the address http://127.0.0.1:8001/-/agent/ to use the agent plugin with my newly created data.

Usage

datasette-agent was handy to have. I know the SQL to do the queries, but didn't have to think about it. Unfortunately, for me, I accidentallly set the model to GPT-5.5 which led to a lot of summaries and subsequently, me asking where the rows I'd seen whiz by on the screen went. I'll be using an older model next time. GPT-5.5 also leaned towards only selecting, or highlighting, passengers from Austria when I started the session. Again with using a 'less' capable model next time.

Results

Not much of any use has turned up yet. Using the database, I narrowed down the field to single women who boarded the ship in England who were younger than 32.

Possible Hedy Lamarr aliases: single women age 16 - 31

Removing the single filter expands the pool of possible passengers and crew a little bit.

Adding married women in the same range

Usage

I had datasette-agent set up to use my API token rather than my codex subscription. The prompt was fairly lengthy, and I made a mistake of setting the default model to gpt-5.5 when it should have been 5.4 mini. Still, the cost was manageable by keeping track of my expenses as I went.

Cool Math Tricks: Deriving the Divergence, (Del or Nabla) into New (Cylindrical) Coordinate Systems

Now available as a Kindle ebook for 99 cents ! Get a spiffy ebook, and fund more physics The following is a pretty lengthy procedure, but converting the divergence, (nabla, del) operator between coordinate systems comes up pretty often. While there are tables for converting between common coordinate systems , there seem to be fewer explanations of the procedure for deriving the conversion, so here goes! What do we actually want? To convert the Cartesian nabla to the nabla for another coordinate system, say… cylindrical coordinates. What we’ll need: 1. The Cartesian Nabla: 2. A set of equations relating the Cartesian coordinates to cylindrical coordinates: 3. A set of equations relating the Cartesian basis vectors to the basis vectors of the new coordinate system: How to do it: Use the chain rule for differentiation to convert the derivatives with respect to the Cartesian variables to derivatives with respect to the cylindrical variables. The chain ...

The Alcubierre Warp Drive Tophat Function and Open Science with Sage

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The Valentine's Day Magnetic Monopole

There's an assymetry to the form of the two Maxwell's equations shown in picture 1. While the divergence of the electric field is proportional to the electric charge density at a given point, the divergence of the magnetic field is equal to zero. This is typically explained in the following way. While we know that electrons, the fundamental electric charge carriers exist, evidence seems to indicate that magnetic monopoles, the particles that would carry magnetic 'charge', either don't exist, or, the energies required to create them are so high that they are exceedingly rare. That doesn't stop us from looking for them though! Keeping with the theme of Fairbank[1] and his academic progeny over the semester break, today's post is about the discovery of a magnetic monopole candidate event by one of the Fairbank's graduate students, Blas Cabrera[2]. Cabrera was utilizing a loop type of magnetic monopole detector. Its operation is in...

Copasetic Flow

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