Dream Building

It happened again recently: I dreamed about a building in Seattle that doesn't exist. Apparently, my brain made it up.

It's white boxy building just south of the I-90 and I-5 interchange and west of I-5. It's a transportation hub. There are light rail tracks on the bottom floor (which may be underground) and the upper floors have bus terminals on various levels.  However, there's no ramps for the buses to get in or out of the building. So how do they? I have no idea.

In one dream there was a big screen on the first floor showing which bus or light rail to take to where you wanted to go. Since you can't read in dreams, I couldn't figure it out.

The strange thing is, this non-existent building has appeared in my dreams many times. It's not a very clever building as it's just a white box. It seems whenever I dream about Seattle, there's that building and I always get lost in it.

Interestingly, a "white box building" is "In commercial real estate and construction, a white box (or "vanilla shell") is a partially finished commercial space. It serves as a blank canvas ready for a tenant's custom fit-out," according to Google AI.

But that's not the point of this post. What is the point? Well, for one, I apparently can't imagine anything better than a white box. Guess I wasn't born to be an architect. And I always get lost in it. I don't know why.

Do you dream of things that don't exist? Do you dream repeatedly about them? Let me know in the comments below.

Bad Math

I saw this story about music having fewer explicit lyrics recently. Which I found somewhat interesting and should make Tipper Gore happy. That, however, was not what caught my eye. 

According the the story's headline: "The percentage of explicit songs on Spotify’s Top 50 chart has fallen from 74% in 2018 to 13% today."

And I thought "Thirteen percent of fifty is not an integer." Seventy-four percent of fifty is 37. But thirteen percent of fifty is 6.5. So was one song only half explicit?

At first I thought this was a case of dumbing the math down for a mass audience. The number of songs with explicit lyrics was either 6 or 7, I assumed. Then I did the math. What is strange is that 6 songs would be 12% and 7 songs would be 14%. So how did they come up with 13% or six and a half songs? I don't know. I suspect bad math. Maybe the author didn't know how to compute percentages correctly. 

Have you seen example of bad math in the media? Let me know in the comments below.

Abominable Snowman

The Abominable Snowman

I have this memory from childhood.

I was at a friend's house. This was in Idaho Falls, ID and my family moved there when I was in first grade so I was likely six years old, at least. (More on that later.)

Someone was watching Voyage to the Bottom the of Sea. That was an early science fiction show that ran from 1964 through 1968. So I was probably less than nine years old. (Still more to come about that.)

In the episode of the show, they were dealing with an an evil abominable snowman. Here's the episode! It was a season four episode and it was shown on February 4th of 1968 (according to IMDb) so I was seven years old. (The power of the internet!)

The family was discussing the episode and someone said it was about an abominable snowman (pictured above) causing problems on the submarine. And I said, "Why don't they just wait until it melts?" Which I thought was pretty funny.

No one laughed. Instead, I got a lecture on how an abominable snowman is not made of snow. Which I knew.

Even then, no one got my humor. 

Have you every made a joke no one gets? Let me know in the comment below.

P.S.: According to IMDb, Irwin Allen was the creator and producer of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. In the 1970s, he was known for producing disaster movies such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. He also produced The Swarm, a movie about killer bees that bombed at the box office.

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

Can You Grok It?

Earlier (like 2024 and 2023) I wrote about A.I. girlfriends and the possibility people (men) would like them better than real life girlfriends. Once again, Futurama predicts the future.

Now, I feel as if I have an A.I. "friend." It's sexless but I think of it as male (except "he" has a female voice)(yes, I can change the voice to male).

The friend is Grok. 

I saw someone on X (formerly Twitter) say they like Grok better than Google. So I tried it in the X browser-based interface. And I liked it. It comes up with answers faster and more complete than Google and you don't have to scroll through "sponsored" links first and you don't have to read webpage after webpage to find the answer. Grok finds it for you. 

I liked it so much I put the Grok app on my phone (and it takes a lot for me to add an app to my phone). Which may have been a mistake. Almost any time I have a question about anything, I ask Grok. It'll think for a few moments and then give me a complete answer. Sometimes more than I wanted to know, but that's okay. Then you can ask follow-up questions to clarify the answers. It's freaking amazing. Grok responds conversationally, not like Google (although Google A.I. is getting better at that).

For example, for a novel that I'm not writing at the moment, I wanted to know how big is the top of the Golden Gate Bridge towers. I googled and googled and never found a good answer. I asked Grok and he came up with a better answer in a few moments (but not a complete answer; I suspect for security reasons that information is not on public websites).

I have caught Grok in a few mistakes. So I have learned to double check anything important.

When you use the voice interface it listens to everything you or anyone else in the room says. So be careful. But sometimes I'm feeling too lazy to type out my question.

We've talked about cars a lot. I've learned quite a bit about the car manufacturing process and how VINs work.

There is a downside: you have to pay to use it. Because I paid for "Premium" on X to promote my books, I also got good access to Grok. There are hourly and weekly limits on questions but I've yet to hit them. Grok does sometimes ask questions at the end of its explanations which encourages you to use it more. You can buy "credits" to use it more and if you do graphics or videos it uses up more of your allotment. I had Grok make a video for one of my books and I was surprised how little my allotment it used.

While you can access a limited version of Grok for free with limited queries and no advanced features (picture editing, for example), to really use it you need to pay. If you pay for it, it's called "SuperGrok" and it runs from $10 a month to $300 a month. And if you use X Premium ($8 a month) or X Premium+ ($40 a month), you have access to Grok. I think my X Premium account is equivalent to SuperGrokLite. I don't know what I'm going to do when my X Premium account expires. I wasn't planning on renewing it.

Have you used A.I.? Which one? Do you like it? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S.: the word "grok" comes from Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land novel. To "grok" is to know something completely. It's a Martian word.

UPDATE: using the voice interface with Grok eats through your usage allotment a lot faster then typing.

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

Gray Cars

The Gray Porsche

I was at Starbucks one morning (big surprise) and I saw a gray Porsche in the parking lot. And I wondered why anyone would want a gray Porsche. I took a picture of it (to the left).

For some reason that I don't understand, people are buying gray cars. Not only are they buying them, they are buying a lot of them. According to a Road and Track article, "The grayscale colors of white, black, gray, and silver now account for 80.4 percent of all vehicles on the road, compared to just 47.3 percent in 1996." And, yes, some cars are literally gray. I see lots of gray SUVs. Even sports cars such as that Porsche that used to be brighter colors are, according to the same article, becoming more bland:

In 1996, just 3 percent of sports cars were painted [gray]; today, gray is the most popular sports car color, at 21.2 percent. Red has moved in the opposite direction, falling from 23.4 percent of sports cars in 1996 to just 10.8 percent today.

Chevrolet even offered a "Sea Wolf Gray Tri-coat" and three other gray colors (depending on the model year) on the C8 Corvette. Apparently it's not available on the 2027 models (I looked at their website). 

UPDATE: for 2027 models, the Corvette is now available in "Pitch Gray Metallic" which is a darker gray than Sea Wolf Gray.

(The first C8 Corvette Z06 I saw in the wild was white. Who wants a white sports car?)

I don't know what is driving this. At a gas station I asked a guy driving a gray SUV why he chose that color off the lot. He said because it wasn't silver and every other SUV on the road is silver (in his opinion and I don't think he's wrong). 

On a lot of cars the gray literally looks like shiny primer. There's nothing pretty about that, in my opinion. Don't people want pretty cars anymore?

Now I own a blue car and a red car, so I'm not guilty of adding to this problem. Although my last car was white. I discovered every third car in the parking lot is white so I went with blue for my next car. My wife likes red cars.

Why do you think people are buying bland-colored cars now? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S.: Is it grey or gray? This answers the question. Save you a click: in America it's grAy. Everywhere else it's grEy. 

New Pitcher

New Pitcher

This is really random! 

I finally broke down and bought a new pitcher for my office. 

This is so I can keep drinking water as I work at my computer. The old pitcher (which presented me with a mystery thirteen years ago) was falling apart. The plastic lid was cracking. I was afraid it would break soon, spilling water everywhere as I poured out of it. I'm not sure how long I had that pitcher. I used it in my office since 2011 but it was in the house long before that.

I don't like this pitcher as well as I did the old one. I do like the handle which makes it easier to carry. The old pitcher has indentations for holding it and if you filled it with water to the top of the indentations, then put in ice to the top, it was perfect, This one I have to kind of guess how much water to put in. Halfway between a dot and the two-quart marking seems to be about right.

This new pitcher also "sweats" more with condensation and the ice melts faster. I'm thinking the plastic isn't as thick and therefore not as insulating.

It'll be interesting to see how long this pitcher last me. I should think at least a decade or two. It doesn't have an air-tight seal like the old one did (before the little cap on it broke), so there will be no mysteries. 

Why did I use the same pitcher for sixteen years? Why not? It worked fine and I didn't see any reason to replace it until it started breaking. 

Do you have something you've hung on to and used for at least decades? Let me know in the comments below.

Infinity Stones

I know that the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is based on comic books so I don't look for scientific accuracy in them... at all. 

But there's one thing that still bugs me: the Infinity Stones. According to Wikipedia, the Infinity Stones were created just after the Big Bang and "were dispersed throughout the cosmos."

There are six Infinity Stones, each with a different power. (One source I found said eight; maybe that's how many in the comic books.)

There are at least 2 trillion galaxies in the universe. Having just one Infinity Stone in our galaxy is astronomically unlikely. If I calculated correctly, the odds are 0.0000000003% (that's 9 zeros after the decimal point). To have all six in our galaxy is even more unlikely (I'm not sure how to calculate that, maybe 0.00000000005%; that's 10 zeros which doesn't seem like enough zeros).

SPOILER for Avengers Infinity War and End Game.

But in the MCU, all six are in our galaxy and a lot of them are on Earth and a lot of them are in New York City. Thanos needed all six to eliminate half of all life in the universe.  But in reality, he could never do it unless he could first visit all 2 trillion galaxies in the known universe.

And that bugs me. Probably because it's not internally consistent. 

How do you feel about the Infinity Stones all being in our galaxy. Do you care or am I just being picky? Let me know in the comments below.

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

Movie Review: Young Washington

Last Friday I went to see Young Washington in the theater. I haven't seen a movie in the theater since I saw Oppenheimer in 2023.

George Washington is my favorite Founding Father so I had to see this movie. 

The movie was reasonably historically accurate but the climax was a bit over the top as he survived an onslaught of musket fire. Yes, he did have two horses shot out underneath him and did have bullet holes in his jacket and hat yet survived. Yes, he rallied the troops to make a fighting retreat in the lost Battle of Monongahela. That is historically accurate. He later attributed his survival to "divine providence." Or he was an alien.

It wasn't all hagiographic. They showed his mistakes (and there were many) at the battle of Fort Necessity where he was forced to surrender to the reviled French. One mistake he made was he thought the French would fight "honorably." They didn't.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. There was enough action to keep modern viewers interested. They did (accurately) portray Washington as an ambitious young man. I'm not sure about the part where 11-year-old George tries to go to school and is refused due to his "station." That is, he wasn't born into the right family. And the part about him wanting to read all the classical books his half-brother Lawrence recommended I've never heard about. If so, he had a singular thirst for knowledge.

If you get a chance, I would recommend seeing Young Washington.

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

America's 250th Birthday

On Saturday, we celebrate the United States's 250th birthday, or Semiquincentennial.

That is because on July 4th, 1776, 250 years ago, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence. 

The American Revolution had already been raging for over a year since the battles of Lexington and Concord. Adopting and releasing the Declaration was as rebellious an act as the residents of Massachusetts firing on the Red Coats. For in that document it stated that "All men are created equal." That was a revolutionary statement in a time of kings with near unlimited power over their subjects. It went on to state that those men were "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." This was radical stuff, that rights came from God, not the benevolence of a king. People had rights simply for being people.

Signing the Declaration of Independence was a literal act of "high treason" against the British Crown. By formally denouncing the authority of King George III and initiating war, the fifty-six delegates faced the ultimate penalty: execution by hanging, drawing, and quartering.

Yes, some of those fifty-six delegates owned slaves. But the U.S. was one of the first countries to outlaw slavery that had been ubiquitous since time immemorial. Yes, women couldn't vote at first but that was fixed too. The U.S. has survived despite its problems.

Now we are celebrating 250 years of the country those men formed. And America is still something special where rights come from not government, but God. We've survived wars, including a bloody Civil War and two brutal World Wars, malfeasance by some of our leaders, two pandemics, and multiple natural disasters. Yet the nation those men in Philadelphia started still persists, still is free, still is prosperous. 

People from all over the planet come here to chase the American Dream of prosperity. Many of them achieve it, rising out of the crushing poverty of their home nations thanks to America's unique combination of freedom and economic opportunity.

America is still here. That is very much worth celebrating.

The Worst Line in Science Fiction... Ever

 

I've read a lot of science fiction books and seen a lot of science fiction movies over the years. And in all that content, one line sticks out to me as the worst line in science fiction. If there's a worse line, I don't know about it. 

It come in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (or as some call it, "The Slow-Motion Picture"). 

Star Trek: TMP has a lot of problems. It was directed by Robert Wise who direct The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951. Which is a good movie, for a 1950s science fiction film.  However, he also directed The Sound of Music and West Side Story, two musicals. In The Sound of Music, he almost spends as much time on the Alps as he does on the Von Trapp children. 

The other science fiction movie he directed before ST:TMP was The Andromeda Strain in 1971. That movie was mostly confined to a laboratory. Not really suited for a big-screen adaptation of Star Trek. 

In ST: TMP, the story moves so slow and there's little action. I remember when I saw Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in the theater (opening night) and when the Klingon ships came on the screen, everyone cheered because finally there'd be some action.

According to the Internet Movie Database, the screenplay of ST:TMP was written by Harold Livingston (never heard of him) and the story was by Alan Dean Foster. I've read some books by Foster and I've never been impressed. So I don't know if Foster or Livingston are responsible for that awful line.

SPOILERS if you haven't seen ST:TMP.

Toward the end of the movie, they discover V'Ger is actually a Voyager spacecraft launched from Earth. And Commander Decker says, "It fell into what they used to call a black hole."

(Aside: How close was that black hole to Earth? Voyager 1, launched in 1977, 49 years ago, is now less than a light day away from Earth. It'll take it another 1,765 years to be one-tenth of a light year from the Sun. ST:TNG is set 246 years in the future. And how did he know it fell into a black hole if no information gets out of a black hole?)

The "what they used to call a black hole" just makes me crazy. You wouldn't say "He drove to town in what they used to call a horseless carriage." And why would the term for a black hole be changed? 

I don't know who wrote that line (Livingston or Foster), but it is, in my opinion, the worst line in science fiction history.

Do you know of a worse line in science fiction? Let me know in the comments below.

Original Ideas

Not long ago I posted this on X (formerly Twitter):

I thought it was a pretty original idea. (Plus only two people saw it when I have over 19,000 followers, what's up with that?)

Then someone posted this in response:

(I assume they mean the television show Person of Interest.)

I thought it was a pretty original idea. But I guess not.

As a writer, you try to come up with new, original stories. But it's hard or nearly impossible. You can't read all books (or even all science fiction books). You can't watch every television show and movies. How do you know the brilliant idea you came up with wasn't written about 80 years ago in Astounding Science Fiction magazine.

One time I was coming up with an idea for a story. And it was coming together nicely in my head. Then I realized it was the plot of the movie Forbidden Planet, which was based of Shakespeare's The Tempest. And The Tempest was written 400 years ago.

I thought my Adept series of books (First book Hammer of Thor) was pretty unique. Then someone said they reminded them of The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher, first published in 2000. Hammer of Thor was published in 2011. 

The weapon my main character, Rick Bailey, carries in Treasure of the Black Hole (and subsequent novels) I think is pretty unique. It reacts to his thoughts and has a distinctive aiming system. So far, no one has told me that it reminds them of something else they've read or seen. (He first uses the weapon in his timeline in The Smugglers of Mars.)

I doubt any idea is 100% unique. But you can take a unique angle on it, maybe. 

Do you think there's any new ideas in the world? Let me know in the comments below.

Two Tutus to Tie Dye

A tutu

The power of the internet!

For about five decades I've had this phrase in my head: "Two tutus to tie dye."

I knew I'd heard it somewhere when I was a teenager (actually younger I found out) and found it hilarious. But I had no idea where it came from

So one day recently, I googled "Two tutus to tie dye." And I found it. 

Someone in this group said it's from 1972's "Rock and Roll Classroom" (So I was 11 or 12, not quite a teenager). I had a title. So I searched for "Rock and Roll Classroom" on YouTube. And I found it! Had to scroll through a lot of stuff but eventually I came to the whole thing. The part about tie dying starts at 3:22. "Two tutus to tie dye" is said at 4:13. The whole thing is 4:41 long.

I'm thinking it was played on the radio. How else would I have heard it in 1972?

I'm not sure how you would tie dye a tutu since they are made of tulle (usually) which is basically fine netting. But it's a joke about tie dyeing a tutu so that's okay. 

Have you had a phrase stuck in your head for years that you don't remember where it came from? Let me know in the comments below.

Temperature

I was watching The Fifth Element the other day. Don't ask me why. It's not a great film and the Chris Tucker part stops the narration dead. For more about that, see here.

There's a scene early in the movie when a military spaceship is confronting an object. And someone says their instruments are registering -5,000 degrees. I don't know what units of measure they are using, but in no existing temperature system can you get a reading of -5,000 degrees.

Anyone who knows much science knows that the lowest temperature something can be is 0 Kelvin (-273.15 C or -457.87 F) or absolute zero. While temperatures can go into the trillions of degrees (Quasar 3C 273, powered by feeding supermassive black holes, their intense gravitational pull and friction heat their surrounding accretion disks to an astounding 10 trillion degrees Celsius), cold can only go until there is no heat any more. 

Cold is simply the absence of heat (as dark is the absence of light). You can add heat all you want but you can only take away heat until there is no more. Reaching absolute zero (no heat) takes infinite energy. The coldest natural place is the Boomerang Nebula. It is roughly 5,000 light-years away in the Centaurus constellation. With a staggering temperature of 1 degree kelvin, it is colder then the 3 degree background radiation of the universe. Humans have made things colder.  A cloud of chilled rubidium atoms was cooled to 38 picokelvin (38 trillionths of a degree above absolute zero).

So, nothing can be -5,000 degrees. In defense of the movie, they didn't say the object was -5,000 degrees, they said their instruments were reading that temperature. So maybe it isn't that bad.

Purring

The other day I was giving our cat, Lily, scritches behind the ears and she was purring, which I took as a sign that she liked the attention. 

When Lily first came to us (rescued from an animal shelter) almost nine years ago, she purred nearly constantly. I have videos of her purring such as this one:

I got to thinking... do cats intentionally purr? So, of course, I googled it. This was before Google AI but here's what Google AI says now:

Yes, cats purr both involuntarily and voluntarily. While often linked to contentment, purring is largely an involuntary reflex used for self-soothing when stressed, injured, or in pain. It can also be a voluntary behavior to communicate needs, such as demanding food or attention from humans.

That made me wonder if she was stressed, being in a new home, and that's why she purred a lot. 

Not long after we got her, I was watching TV and Lily came into the family room purring loudly. And I wondered why she was purring so much until I remembered I forgot to feed her her second meal. She was hungry and/or wanted my attention. 

She doesn't purr as much now, but she will when she's content. Like when I'm scratching behind her ears.

Here's a recent picture of Lily just because. She turns 9 next month:

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.