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.