Shifting Cars in Movies

Recently I watched Ford v Ferrari.  It's a pretty good movie about a true story. I don't know how historically accurate it is, but it's still enjoyable if you like cars and racing (and I do). 

However, there was one scene where accuracy took a tumble. During the race at Daytona, Carroll Shelby told driver Ken Miles to keep the engine on the Ford GT-40 below 6,000 RPM to protect the engine. They were in second place. Shelby had bet his whole car company on Miles winning so with just a few laps to go, he got a sign board, wrote "7,000" on it, and showed it to Miles as he drove by (this was before there were radios in the cars), giving Miles permission to go to 7,000 RPM.

What did Miles do in the movie? He upshifted (based on the RPMs dropping) twice. And then went to 7,000 RPM and won the race.

The GT-40 had a 5-speed transaxle so the film makers indicated he was running in third so he could upshift twice? No, he would have been in 5th gear all along and just mashed the throttle. But shifting is so much more dramatic in movies.

Movie makers use shifting dramatically all the time. In some movies (I'm looking at you "Fast and Furious" franchise) cars will seem to have endless gears as the drivers keep shifting and shifting.

The worst offense to me, however, is downshifting to pass in a race. Yes, when you're driving your car on a highway and it has a manual transmission, you likely cruise in the highest gear to get the best gas mileage. Then, if on a two-lane road when you want to pass, you downshift to put the engine into the power band (where the engine has the most power) because you need to accelerate quickly. Movie makers seem to think this translates to the racetrack. It doesn't.

On the racetrack, you downshift for corners because you have to slow down and then downshift to get the engine back in the power band. But for passing, you don't downshift. You press the throttle harder. If you're at maximum RPM, you might try passing on a corner. But you're not going to downshift on a straight to pass another car. You're already at maximum RPM. If you downshift you'll over-rev the engine (and maybe have pistons coming out of your hood) and possibly lock up the drive wheels (on a race car they are invariably the rear wheels) causing you to lose control. Downshifting to pass didn't seem to happen in Ford v Ferrari because I was watching for it. Maybe Rush was the movie where they downshifted to pass. I don't remember.

Have you noticed bad shifting in movies? Let me know in the comments below.

 

The Final Countdown Movie

I recently watched the 1980 movie The Final Countdown (no relation to the song by Europe).

This movie was a big production starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen and Katherine Ross. It was filmed mostly on the aircraft carrier the USS Nimitz and had aircraft such as the F-14 Tomcat flying on missions. For an airplane buff like me, it was enjoyable although there were some aircraft I didn't recognize which was frustrating. The script seemed to be written to showcase various carrier operations such as aerial refueling* and putting up an E-2 Hawkeye radar plane to see what's going on around them. I enjoyed that. 

And it was a science fiction movie. Really.

SPOILERS if you haven't seen the movie.

The Nimitz and its crew and aircraft and weapons and everything are sent back in time to December 6, 1941 due to a bizarre storm. There's no explanation of how or why the 1,000-foot long ship is suddenly taken back in time to a crucial spot in U.S. history other than the storm. It takes a while for the captain (Douglas) to figure it all out but then there's a dilemma. A single modern aircraft carrier could have stopped the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor easily. (Could have sank the whole Japanese fleet but they never discussed that possibility.) Should they stop the attack? Should they change history?

At the end, the captain decides to, yes, stop the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and launches F-14s and other planes to do that. I think the filmmakers wanted to show as many planes being launched as possible because some of the planes didn't look like combat aircraft.

But then, just before they are about to attack the Japanese planes, the bizarre storm comes back and they are all taken back to 1980, including the planes not on the carrier. Sort of a cop-out ending if you ask me.

They reused footage from the 1970 movie Tora Tora Tora for the attack on Pearl Harbor.

And, yes, the special effects were cheesy (lasers and smoke). 

For "let's make a movie on an aircraft carrier" it was great if you like airplanes and military stuff (and I do). For science fiction, it was dumb. They had this opportunity to film on a real aircraft carrier and they ruined it with a stupid science fiction plot. In 1980, it was the height of the Cold War (there was actually a Russian "trawler" spy boat in the movie). Couldn't they have come up with, oh, a plot about Soviet spies or the possibility of a shooting war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union? No, they did a dumb time travel story.

Have you seen The Final Countdown? What did you think of it. Let me know in the comments below. 

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

*The refueling in the movie was done by a variant of the A-6 Intruder. But since the Navy no longer flies the A-6 nor its variants, I wondered if there was a way to do aerial refueling now. According to Google, now the Navy uses "buddy refueling" where one F/A-18 Super Hornet with extra fuel tanks will refuel another F/A-18. And, according to Google, the Navy is developing the MQ-25 Stingray: This upcoming drone is designed to be the first dedicated carrier-based aerial refueling aircraft. It will allow F/A-18s to focus on combat missions rather than acting as tankers.

Reality Shows

When Who Wants to be a Millionaire first came out in 1999, my mother asked me how they could afford to give away a million dollars. The best answer I had was that they didn't do it very often.

Later, I heard that the five main voice actors for The Simpsons were making $400,000 per episode. So that's $2 million per episode without any production costs. 

So, I decided giving away a million dollars every now and then is probably pretty cheap on Hollywood's scale of economics. 

The other day I was scrolling through the guide on my Dish satellite system (I have yet to "cut the cord on TV) and I noted all the reality and game shows. And I'm thinking A) production costs are probably pretty low because they don't have to pay actors, maybe just a host or narrator, and B) people watch them. I don't watch them except Jeopardy (I think Wheel of Fortune gets higher ratings). I've never watched Survivor or The Greatest Race or any of those types of shows. Although the one about celebrities going through special forces training was tempting.

How do you feel about reality and game shows? Do you watch them? Do you enjoy them? Let me know in the comments below.

Am I Being Jammed?

 I think my wife's car is jamming my garage door opener. 

Seriously.

I bought my wife a PHEV Prius Prime. My thinking was she could drive around town on electricity (she can go about 35 miles on the battery) but has a gas engine if she wants to go to Seattle, for instance, to see her sister.

Lately when I want to open the garage door from my car (using HomeLink), most of the time I have to get within a few feet of the garage door before it opens.

Except one day recently it opened a fair distance away. My wife told me before we left that she forgot to plug in her car. And that got me wondering: does her charging her car somehow interfere with the signal from my car to open the door.

To jam a radio signal (which is what the garage door opener uses), you have to transmit a more powerful signal on the same frequency to overwhelm the signal you're trying to jam.

The next day we tried an experiment. She unplugged her car before we left for our daily Starbucks run. When we got back, the door again opened a good distance from the garage.

She uses a Level 1 charger (110 volts) and just plugs her charging cable into a 110 outlet. 

Electricity running though a cord does cause low-power radio frequency (RF) emissions. But at 110 volts, it shouldn't be much. Plus it would have to be the frequency of the HomeLink transmitter (which would be the same frequency as a garage door opener).

According to Google AI, modern garage door openers use rolling codes and multiple frequencies in the 310, 315, 390 MHz (megaHertz) range. But I'm thinking an RF emission from a 60 Hz power cord would be 60 Hz.

I'm also wondering if the fact the HomeLink (and garage door openers) hops frequencies is why somedays it works a few feet from the garage door and some days I need to be almost just a foot from the garage door. I don't know.

So my operating theory is there is something in the car when it's plugged in that is putting out an about 300 MHz signal. Maybe the AC (alternating current) to DC (direct current) rectifier (electric cars run on DC; what comes out of your wall plugs is AC)? Again, I don't know.

I admit, I don't know much about electricity, just what they taught us in 100-level physics which was basically Ohm's law (V=I x R).

Do you have any ideas what could be jamming my HomeLink signal while my wife's car is plugged in? Let me know in the comments below.

Hollywood Sounds

There are a couple of sound effects that the movies use over and over again. 

One is the famous Wilhelm Scream. According to Wikipedia, it was first used in a 1951 movie. It's used a lot in action movies when someone get shot, or falls, or is thrown a long distance by an explosion. It's so common that some types of movies seem incomplete without it.

Another is the scream of a red-tailed hawk that is often used in place of any bird of prey or at the beginning of a desert scene. That's because eagles, despite their size and power, have wimpy calls. 

I was watching Airport, a movie made in 1970, and there was a traffic jam outside the eponymous airport. And the sound effect used for the traffic jam sounded very familiar. But I haven't been able to locate it. Maybe they stopped using it after 1970. 

Can you think of any more sound effect that Hollywood uses over and over? Let me know in the comments below.

Where are the Radio Signals Part 2

Recently I talked about the Fermi Paradox. That is, why aren't we inundated with radio messages from other species in the universe? In that post I mostly talked about the technical reasons we may not be getting radio signals (e.g., we may not have the technology to detect them). 

But I forgot about the practical reasons. For example, we may be the first civilization to invent radio. I find that hard to believe since the universe is 13.8 billion years old. The Milky Way Galaxy is 13.6 billion years old. That no one came before us seems nearly impossible.

The early universe was metal-poor (because metals had yet to form in old stars and supernovae). Maybe we're the first since there was enough metal to build a civilization. Maybe.

The other consideration is maybe civilizations who reach high enough technology are wiped out by nuclear war, pandemics, climate changes, pollution, overpopulation, robot uprisings (AI), nanotechnology or other calamities. This is a rather pessimistic view and I'm always (well, mostly) the optimist. But it could be things out of that civilization's control like a large asteroid strike or a nearby gamma ray burst (and it doesn't need to be that close, like in the Milky Way). Us humans barely have protection from large asteroids and we have no protection from a nearby gamma ray burst. Or the alien civilization might be wiped out by a super volcano like Yellowstone erupting. 

Why do you think we haven't had any radio signals from alien civilizations? Let me know in the comments below.

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.

Lily's Day

 Lily is our cat. She's lived with us since September, 2017. In that time she's developed habits in her life here.

Her day (as far as we know) starts about 7am when she scratches on our bedroom door. Sometimes I hear her scratch as early as 5am but I ignore her and go back to sleep because if I let her in, she won't let me go back to sleep by lying on the bed where I sleep.

I get up and let her in the room. She makes this cute almost-purring sound as she comes through the door as if to say "It's about time." She used to jump up on the foot of the bed and curl up. But now she goes and lies down next to my wife's head and scratches the sheet. When my wife wakes up, Lily then goes to the foot of the bed and stays there as long as she wants, which usually ends before we're both out of the shower. Sometimes she hides under the bed where she knows we can't get her. Most the time she leaves on her own. 

She gets her morning meal once we get downstairs in the kitchen. 

She gets her afternoon meal later if she finishes her breakfast. Some days she doesn't seem very interested in eating. Some days she acts as if we starve her.

Then she usually sleeps most of the day. I know cats sleep a lot but I wonder what she does at night. Once recently I got up at 5am for a medical procedure and she was awake and acted surprised to see me.

She has a favorite chair with a blanket on it to sleep in and if not there, she like to sleep on her favorite blanket on the couch. She doesn't seem to like to sleep on leather and most of our furniture is leather. Also, on the couch, she likes to sleep on the crack between cushions on her blanket (see picture above).

Around 6pm she wanders into the family room where I'll be watching the news. She'll jump up beside me on the loveseat and curl up. I'm the only one in the family she'll do that with. 

If she's eaten her afternoon meal, she gets treats. But she has to earn them with nose boops. My finger touches her nose. She wants this and will grab my hand to pull it down to her nose. She probably wants it because she so desperately wants treats. 

She'll do that for a while and then maybe she gets bored. She'll jump down and move to the couch or her bed and sleep some more. 

The last thing in her day is "momma time." This is when, after I go to bed, she and momma sit on the loveseat and momma feeds her snacks. This is very important to Lily. In fact, if I don't go to bed on time (staying up to watch a late football game, perhaps), she'll glare at me.

When I do go to bed (late or not), she'll go upstairs to the bedroom. My wife will get ready for bed, too, even though she goes to bed after I do. Lily will hang around, sometimes wanting scritches on her back from me. But she always leaves with momma for their time. Momma time ends when one of them (usually Lily) falls asleep.

And that is Lily's day.

Do you have an animal that has a routine? Let me know in the comments below.

Simple Suspension Bridge

When I lived in Idaho Falls, Idaho in the 1960s (yes, I'm that old), I remember that there was a simple suspension bridge over the Snake River that led to an island. It looked a little like the one in the photo except there wasn't any netting. The bridge deck was wooden and I remember ropes or cables you could hang on to. There was very little to keep you from falling into the swift, cold river. Sometimes we tried to make it swing back and forth. My mother didn't like that.

Other times, if the river was running high (such as in the spring), the bridge deck would be covered in water. I don't remember if that stopped us. Maybe depending on the depth of the water. 

The last time I was in Idaho Falls (don't ask me when that was; I don't remember), the bridge was replaced by a concrete structure. And I was kind of disappointed because that was denying the children of the city that fun suspension bridge. 

There probably isn't any bridges such as that one anywhere in the United States anymore. I'd be surprised if there were. 

Do you know of any simple suspension bridges in the U.S.? Have you ever been over one? Let me know in the comments below.

Accountants versus Engineers

2006 Chrysler 300C

 The reason for a private company to exist is to create value/wealth for its owners. Those owners might be a mom and pop owning a small store or a huge company with millions of shareholders/owners. 

Car companies are no exception. They want to make as much money as possible to increase shareholder value. They have to do that by making cars people want to buy. But they have to make the cars cheaply enough to make a profit. And there's all sorts of regulations requiring more expense which is passed on to the buyer. 

So the company wants to make the car as cheaply as possible. With cars you get what you pay for. The cheaper the car the less amenities it will have.

I had a 2006 Chrysler 300C. It had the 5.7 liter HEMI V8 making 340 horsepower and 390 pound-feet of torque (looked a lot like the one pictured). It was also a big, heavy car. With that engine I could get going fast very quickly for a car its size. I really enjoyed that car. Except one thing. I think the accountants won over the engineers who designed it on the matter of brakes. For a big, heavy car you need really good brakes and the 300C had barely adequate brakes. Scared myself sometimes trying to stop that car. 

At the time, Chrysler was owned by Mercedes. The 300 was built with some Mercedes components but I doubt even Mercedes engineers would have put such bad brakes on that car. 

Other examples of accountants winning include the latest Corvette. While mechanically it is apparently brilliant, I've read complaints about a "Malibu interior" on a car that can cost close to $200,000 for the top models (base models are still about $70,000). Also, I've seen videos of people showing the dash bubbling on relatively new Corvettes. Not good!

Do you know of any instances where the accountants won over the engineers? It doesn't have to be in cars. Let me know in the comments below.

Time Zones Again

No, not the Time Warp Again. Time zones again.

Just over four years ago I posted a blog about time zones. I mistakenly said that there were 34 times zones in the world. 

Recently I found a list of all time zones. Turns out there are 38.

The earliest time zone (where the day starts) is UTC +14 (14 hours earlier than Universal Coordinated Time or UTC, also called Greenwich Mean Time or GMT). That is Kiritimati, Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. I don't understand why it's the earliest time zone. But Australia (which it is part of) has some weird time zones.

The latest time zone is UTC -12 which is Baker Island. According to Wikipedia, it's uninhabited and in the Pacific Ocean.

I live in the Pacific Time Zone of the US which is eight hours behind of UTC (UTC -8) except during daylight saving time with it's seven hours behind (UTC -7). I would love to go on permanent daylight saving time but that's another subject.

There are some weird time zones. For example, there is an Australian time zone that is UTC +8.75. There are a lot of time zones that are a half hour off everyone else. For example two in Australia (Australia has six time zones if I counted correctly), parts of India, at least parts of Afghanistan, and Iran, and Newfoundland and Labrador in Canada. 

There is a border you can walk across and get jet lag because the time zones are 4.5 hours apart (that's China and Afghanistan)(Assuming you could walk across that border). China has one time zone for the entire country, which must be convenient in some ways yet weird in the western parts of the country.

Why is "Universal Coordinated Time" abbreviated "UTC"? That's explained here.

Do you have to deal with time zones? Or are they just boring to you? Or do they confuse you? Let me know in the comments below.

Two Scoops

Here's an example of how my brain works.

For years we had an ice maker in our freezer/fridge combination. I loved it, ice through the door, crushed or "cubed" (they were half-crescents). The guy who repaired my appliances kept telling me he wouldn't have one because of the "liability." I was wondering what he meant by that.

Then one day not long ago, I was sitting in my basement office and I heard water running. I looked in the furnace room and water was coming from the ceiling. I assumed a pipe broke. I ran upstairs to get a bucket and noticed the kitchen floor was flooded. It looked like it was coming from the fridge. I pulled it out but the back was dry. Then I noticed the front of the freezer section was wet. I opened the freezer and water was pouring out of the ice maker. I hit it with my fist and it stopped. I'm assuming a valve was stuck open. I turned off the water to the ice maker and turned it off.

TL;DR: We bought a GE Solo nugget ice maker. If it springs a leak, the worst it could do is spill the three quarts that the side tank holds. It makes a good amount of nugget ice. One problem with it is that it wants to be cleaned about every 12 days which is a twenty-hour process (seriously). The other problem is it likes to howl at times. Or hammer. Not sure what causes that.

The ice maker came with a little scoop to get the ice out of the bin. It takes just over two scoops to fill a 16-ounce glass. And that reminded me of an old marketing campaign for cereal. My mind doing what it does (making weird connections). 

In the 1980s, Kellogg's Raisin Bran was advertised as having "two scoops of raisin in every box." Here's a typical commercial. And it got me thinking, how did they get away with that? Why didn't the FTC call them on it? But "scoop" isn't exactly an SI unit of measure. Those scoops could be whatever size Kellogg's wanted them to be. 

Now, I assume Kellogg's probably precisely measured out the raisins in each box in order to control costs and I'm sure they didn't use "scoops." I think raisins are more expensive than the cereal they put them in.

And that's an example of how my brain works.

Does your brain make weird connections like that? Let me know in the comments below.

Yellow Headlights

A while back I saw a car in the U.S. with yellow headlights. I thought "that's weird." Probably some after-market addition. I wondered if they were legal. I see a lot of illegal after-market changes to cars, mostly LED lights that show red or blue at the front of the car.

In one country in Europe, yellow headlights were not only legal, but required.

Have you ever noticed maybe in old movies set in Europe or maybe you've traveled to Europe and seen it: some older cars in Europe have yellow headlights.

If you do see that, you immediately should know the car is from France. 

In 1937, France mandated yellow headlights to, "filter out violet, blue, and indigo light, which cause glare and dazzle for oncoming motorists" according to Google AI. Also, during World War II, it helped distinguish civilian cars from those of the Germans.

The French required yellow headlights on civilian cars until 1993, when European Union laws superseded French law. And EU law does not allow yellow headlights. If you're French and you want to put yellow headlights on your car, it has to predate 1993. Otherwise, it's illegal.

It would be interesting to see if the yellow headlights achieved their goal of making the road safer in France. Did anyone do a study on that? I don't know. 

I frankly think the yellow headlights are ugly. But that's just me.

What do you think of yellow headlights. Let me know in the comments below.

Spielberg's Machete

There's a concept in fiction (movies, books, television, etc.) that if you introduce an element in the story, it must be used later. That is, if you introduce a gun in the first act of the play, someone needs to fire it before the play is over. It's called "Chekhov's gun." Google AI says:

"This principle, popularized by [Russian playwright] Anton Chekhov, emphasizes that authors should avoid including unnecessary details or making false promises to the audience. It's a way to ensure that every element serves a purpose and contributes to the overall narrative."

WARNING: SPOILERS (if you somehow haven't seen Jaws in the past 50 years), 

I recently watched the movie Jaws because last year it was 50 years old and I hadn't seen it for a long time. There's a moment in that movie that I think violates Chekhov's gun. And I thought that when I saw the movie when I was 15 years old (although I didn't call it "Chekhov's gun").

At one point, the shark hunter Quint rams a machete into the gunwale of their boat, the Orca. The camera lingers on it for just a moment (see the picture above). Even when I was 15 I thought "that's going to come into play in the future, probably in the climax." And guess what? It didn't. We never see the machete again. 

My current opinion is that Quint should have grabbed it when the shark was eating him and tried to use it on the fish. But he doesn't.

Therefore, I think Spielberg violated the principle of Chekhov's gun. Quod erat demonstrandum.

What do you think? Am I crazy to critique one of the best directors ever? Let me know in the comments below.

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

We Are a Quarter of a Century into the 21 Century

Happy New Year!

Now we actually are a quarter of a century into the 21st century.

Why now and not last year?

Because there was no year zero. We went from 1 BC (BCE) to 1 AD (CE).

So the first century was 1 to 101.

The second century was 101 to 201.

The third century was 201 to 301.

And so on until the 21st century will be 2001 to 2101.

So 25 years into the 21st century is 2026. Which starts today.

But dang, a quarter of a century into the 21st century. That's amazing.