Reusing Footage

Out of the blue my wife said she wanted to watch JAG. Maybe she thinks David James Elliot is cute. I found it on Paramount+. 

JAG is a television program that ran from 1995 to 2005 on NBC then CBS. The letters stand for "Judge Advocate General." Basically, the Navy's lawyer group. The show had a reputation of being popular with older viewers.

As of this writing we've watched four episodes including the pilot. That episode had to do with naval aviators on an aircraft carrier. At the beginning of the episode there is a dog fight between U.S. F-14 Tomcats and "Bosnian MiGs." And the footage was lifted 100% from the movie Top Gun. The "MIGs" were actually F-5s just like in Top Gun. Other footage used in the episode was also lifted from Top Gun (F-14s launching off the catapult, or in aerial maneuvers for example). I annoyed my wife by pointing this out... every time it happened. 

According the the Internet Movie Database, the show utilized "unused" footage from a lot of Paramount studios films. But since I recognized the footage, it wasn't all "unused."

I thought I caught them in a historical inaccuracy. They showed A-6 Intruders taking off from the carrier (perhaps using footage from the Flight of the Intruder movie). But JAG started in 1995 and the Navy was still flying both A-6 Intruders and EA-6B Prowlers electronic warfare planes at that time. They were both replaced by the F/A-18 Hornet/Super Hornet and the EA-18B Growler.

The second episode took place on a submarine. And guess which Paramount film they used footage from. The Hunt for Red October. 

The third episode took place at Twenty-Nine Palms marine base in the Mojave Desert (I've been to Twenty-Nine Palms... in August). I didn't recognize any reused footage. The fourth episode was set in Washington D.C. and, again, no reused footage.

During the opening credits (used from the second episode on) they re-reuse the footage from Top Gun and The Hunt for Red October and maybe other movies.

I remember when JAG first came out, I watched the first season and then lost interest. But it went on for ten seasons, apparently. 

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.

Robot Soldiers

We've all seen the Terminator movies, I assume. Basically robot warriors from the future battle in the time period the movies were made. And we all thought "that's decades away, if ever." (The time travel component is probably never.)

But the time for robot warriors is now. Humanoid robots called Mk-1 Phantom are being deployed to Ukraine for testing in a war zone. No, they don't look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or even Robert Patrick, but they are trying to develop a robot that can handle any weapon that humans use. Or drive vehicles.

Like all new technology, there are upsides and downsides. I'd rather have robots "dying" in war zones than humans. But what if robots are used in attacks on civilians? You don't have to promise a robot 72 virgins to get it to blow itself up around people. 

(Actually, this is already happening as drones, essentially dumb robots, are being used to attack civilians.)

I don't think robots on their own are going to rebel and turn on humans as in the Terminator movies. But once a tool is developed, it can be used against you. It depends on who is programing the robots. 

Isaac Asimov in the late 1940s wrote three laws of robotics (inventing the word "robotics").  Those laws were logical and I think would work for most robots:

1 A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm;

2 A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law; and 

3 A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

But a robot warrior would already violate the first law. 

What do you think of robots being used in war? Good idea or terrible idea? Let me know in the comments below.

The above photo is being used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act: fair usage.

Where are the Radio Signals?

I wrote about aliens visiting us earlier. 

But maybe they don't have to visit, they just have to call. The problem is, no one is calling. If there are millions of civilizations out there, why aren't we getting inundated with radio signals?

This is called the Fermi Paradox. We've only been listening for alien radio signals for about 60 years so we can only have heard signals from 60 light years away. And in a galaxy roughly 100,000 light-years across and about 1,000 light-years thick, that's a minuscule bit of space. If there are aliens sending radio signals, they might just be too far away.

I have another theory. They might be so advanced that they no longer use radio. Radio is slow comparatively. It takes is 100,000 years to cross the Milky Way. Aliens might have something better, such as quantum entanglement. Maybe something we can't imagine. Some have suggested artificial gravity waves but they, too, only move at the speed of light. 

We'll probably not know the answer anytime soon. 

What do you think? What explains the Fermi Paradox? Let me know in the comments below.

Also, this is my 1,400th post on this blog.

The Dark

When I go to bed at night in the winter, the room seems to be completely dark except for some faint light coming from a window with light-colored blinds. The illumination comes from the outdoor lights of people who live behind us. 

If I stay awake long enough, my eyes dilate and I see more and more light. But that first moment of mostly darkness made me think about how little people, especially in the industrialized world, spend in complete darkness. Even when we (or people who do because I don't) go camping we build fires, take flashlights and lanterns. My father had a Colman gas lantern that burned "white gas" and had two "mantels" that didn't burn despite looking like they were made of threads. You had to pump it up to get it started. Apparently, they still sell them.

In pre-industrial times, light was expensive to make. Candles were hand-made and firewood had to be sourced from nearby woods, if there were woods. Bedouin tribes in the Sahara Desert used olive oil or animal oils in lamps according to Google. That olive oil must have been expensive.

Humanity has long ached to expel the darkness. There could be something dangerous out in the dark. There's a science fiction/horror movie, Pitch Black, that uses the dark to enhance the terror. That's probably true for a lot of horror movies, I just watch so few of them.

I think about shepherds out on hillsides in ancient times. They may have built a fire for warmth and light but all they had to do was watch the sheep and the sky. Of course, the ancients watching the sky is where the constellations and a lot of star names come from. 

Think about before fire was discovered. humans and proto-humans had no light at night. It must have been so dark. So dark we today can hardly comprehend it. And that would be scary.

The dark makes some people uncomfortable; I can understand why. 

Does the dark make you uncomfortable? Or do you enjoy the dark? Let me know in the comments below.

Hollywood Inacuracies

SPOILERS for Die Hard and Raiders of the Lost Ark ahead.

Over the holidays I watched my favorite Christmas movie: Die Hard. There's a scene in that movie where the limousine driver, Argyle, punches one of the terrorists/robbers once and the guy is knocked unconscious. 

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, during the bar shoot-out scene, Marion hits a Nazi stooge with a big stick on the head and he's knocked unconscious despite wearing thick headgear. 

A lot of times in movies, people are knocked out too easily. And then they get up and are fine (if they are the hero). Knocking someone out requires a lot more violence than movies portray and getting knocked unconscious can do lasting perhaps permanent damage. 

Another Hollywood invention is the one-shot drop. The hero will shoot a bad guy once (sometimes with a small-caliber pistol) and the bad guy will drop dead. This rarely happens unless you get lucky and hit the brain. I once read about a police woman who was off duty and getting out of her car. A bad guy shot her in the heart. She lived long enough to draw her weapon and return fire, killing him. Unfortunately, she died. 

Yes, if you shoot someone in the brain with a sniper rifle, you will kill them with one shot. But if you aren't shooting a sniper rifle, you're odds of dropping someone with one shot are slim.

Can you think of more Hollywood inaccuracies, especially about violence? Let me know in the comments below.

Daylight Saving Time Needs to Go Away

This weekend, the U.S. and Canada (and maybe other countries) "spring ahead" to go into Daylight Saving Time (DST). (I know Europe and the UK are on a different schedule than the U.S.)

There have been numerous studies that show on the Monday after the change to DST there are more accidents and heart attacks. There is not a corresponding decrease in accidents and heart attacks after going off DST in the autumn. 

Then there's the bi-annual ritual of changing the time on your clocks. Which is annoying. At least our phones change automatically. There's parts of Arizona that don't observe DST and none of Hawaii. Since 2006, Indiana has observed DST statewide. Before that, there was a patch quilt of counties that did and did not follow DST. Also part of Indiana is in the Central Time Zone and part in the Eastern Time Zone so that made it especially confusing.

I think we should go on permanent DST. The only downside is it'll still be dark awfully late in the morning in the winter. I know this from experience. Congress enacted year-round DST from Jan 6, 1974, to April 27, 1975, to "conserve energy." It probably didn't conserve any energy and, boy, those winter mornings were dark.

British Columbia is going on permanent DST starting this weekend. One last time changing clocks.

Being permanently off DST would work, too, but a lot of people like those late daylight hours in the summer. I don't really care as long as I don't have to change a clock again for DST.

How do you feel about DST? Hate it or love it? Want to go permanently on DST or standard time? Let me know in the comments below.

Meeting Aliens

Recently, former president Barack Obama said on a podcast he believes there are aliens but he's never met them.

And that got me thinking about what might happen if we ever meet aliens.

In a universe as big as ours (the observable universe is at least 93 billion light-years in diameter, likely bigger, and maybe infinite), with about 2 trillion galaxies (at least), there almost has to be aliens somewhere. The problem is distance and traveling between star systems or even galaxies. The energy requirements to get a ship up to close to the speed of light are huge. To accelerate a small ship to 99% the speed of light would require all the remaining fossil fuels on Earth (4x10^22 or 40 sextillion joules or 40 zettajoules). And at 99% the speed of light, it would still take a little more than four years (Earth time) to get to the nearest star. Plus you'd have to slow down using the same amount of energy it took you to accelerate. And where is that energy going to come from at the back end of the trip?

If you accelerated your ship at one g (9.2 m/s/s; the acceleration of gravity on Earth), accelerated halfway to the nearest star, then decelerated the rest of the way to have no velocity relative to the star, it would take 5 years and 7 months Earth time to get to the nearest star but only 3 years and 5 and a half months ship time due to time dilation. But more energy than we have to spare.

And, as far as we know, nothing can go faster than the speed of light. As you get closer to the speed of light, the energy requirements asymptotically approaches infinity. 

Why would aliens use all that energy to come to Earth and not say "hello" but kidnap rednecks to probe.

Now maybe the aliens have a warp core or hyperspace shunt or can manipulate wormholes or something we can't even imagine to travel faster than light and the energy requirements aren't brutal or they have technology to produce the energy needed. So maybe they will drop by someday.

Humans (modern humans) have been around on this planet maybe 300,000 years. The earliest human civilizations started just about 6,000 years ago. But the universe is 3.8 billion years old. It would be no trick (and surprising if not) for an alien species to be millions years ahead of us technologically. We might be a bug on the windshield of the universe to them. 

And in human history, when a more technological society meets a less advance society,  the outcome is almost invariably catastrophic for the less advanced group, often resulting in rapid societal collapse, mass mortality, and the destruction of cultural knowledge. And we'd be the less advanced group in this case.

So meeting aliens may not be good for us. Likely they wouldn't be malevolent (likely) and maybe they know how not to destroy other civilizations. Maybe.

But the odds of meeting them at all are vanishingly slim.

What do you think? Have we met aliens already? Or are we likely not to meet them. Let me know in the comments below.