Friday, January 14, 2011

A Very Silly Show

During a recent visit with my folks, my mother was watching a series called NCIS, which apparently was playing "follow the leader" with all the CSI series. I don't know how good the series as a whole is, since I only have a sample of two episodes to go by, and boy was this one a stinker. Funnily enough, it falls into a subject I have taken classes for: Remote Sensing.

So, story involves a guy who worked at radiology at the local hospital, and has security clearance for the radioactive materials involved. He gets shot, and the investigation team finds this odd residue on him. They dig in, and meet up with a US intelligence officer who tells them it's a chemical marker they use to track terrorists by satellite.

Really?

Somehow, these spy satellites can even identify which individual is being tracked.

Seriously?

And tracking is "spotty" indoors.

Only spotty?

And the satellites can track in real time on their monitors, which is how they track the guy (it turns out he wasn't a marked terrorist, just that a paranoid guy who designed the system was marking Americans he considered suspicious with a spray bottle.) when the terrorists who originally shot him steal his head to get past the retinal scanner to pick up the radioactive material.

Anyone who's paid the slightest bit of attention to middle school science should have some decent guesses with what's nonsense about this system.

1. The obvious one: Only geosynchronous satellites can "hover" over an area to monitor it, and outside of a certain zone, the view gets too tilted to be all that useful. Thus, you can't track something in real time by satellite unless you specifically put it in orbit in the general area ahead of time. That lack of mobility would severely limit the utility of a spy satellite.

2. How does the satellite sense the chemical? The chemical would need to generate or reflect some form of electromagnetic radiation. If it generated enough energy to be seen by satellite, it would eventually run out of chemical energy for doing so. And for a small spray of the stuff to be seen from orbit, it would need to generate a LOT of EMR. Additionally, it would have to emit this EMR at some frequency that stands out against all the background noise. Gamma/X-ray radiation? Would poison the terrorist and the people around him, and raise the chemical energy demands straight into nuclear reactions like radioactive decay. Ultraviolet? Would have trouble getting a clear signal out of the atmosphere, much less through the roof of a building. Visible light? Yeah, a glowing spot is going to be unnoticed. Near Infrared? How does the satellite tell the difference between that and plant life?
Middle infrared? Moisture. Far infrared? Would get lost in any heat source, not to mention it'd be a warm spot on the body. Microwaves or Radio waves? It would generate interference with other devices and be lost in the noise of those devices. You might as well start inventing Minovsky particles to explain it.

3. How does it tell one marked target from another, assuming you could get some magical signal? If it's just a chemical, I don't see how you could get it to emit a unique signature unless you tailor made each mixture for each target. Supposedly, you could get around that by telling the system "this spot is terrorist X, and this spot is terrorist Y." and it could track the spots as they change positions over time. But what if X and Y get close to each other? Then their "spots" would blend into one.

This nonsense goes off the deep end of "Big Brother" scenarios. They put a little token objection to the use of this sort of monitoring ability, but it comes across as half-hearted, even with the paranoid control freak, who decides to help them gain access to it to solve the case. This episode was just a wish fulfillment exercise, treating technology as if it were a magic tool that solves problems without any mental effort on the part of the humans. The computers do it all. The computers and satellites will catch the terrorists for us, and the only work we have to do is punch a few buttons instead of, you know, outsmart the people who avoid security for a living.

I'm glad my mother knew enough about science to be embarrassed by the show.

13 comments:

MWchase said...

Sounds like an enhanced version of all the technology that's got people on every part of the political spectrum accusing every other part of the political spectrum of violating their liberties at the airport.

I mean, the way to stop terrorists is to stop them before they get to the point where all you can do is scan people.

Helix said...

The British spy series 'Spooks' had a similar plot a few years back. Their marker was a bunch of nanoparticles transferred to the target during a handshake. I had to stop watching for a while after that.

Also, they had thermal imaging satellites that could detect people through roofs and several floors of a building.

Bronze Dog said...

Right. Because thermal imaging can see through solid objects. Really. Hollywood said so.

And yet, here in the real world, a thermal camera can't even see through a clear pane of glass.

Anonymous said...

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION - JAN 1, 2011

OMENS OF DEATH:


digitaljournal.com/article/302169


allvoices.com/contributed-news/7776949-5000-black-birds-fell-from-sky-due-to-flu


starseedshaman.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/redwing.jpg

the end of atheism - only the blind and deaf can deny it...


an example and warning of the fate of those who try to divide people....

randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1176-serves-em-right.html


At least we're on the same page...

Serves Em Right, eh, Randi....


forums.whyweprotest.net/threads/the-american-revolution-jan-1-2011.67777/

Dark Jaguar said...

Again I'm not sure I understand your message. Try to focus on a single point and clarify it at length, in your own words. I think that would help us understand what you're trying to tell us better.

BD, I'll play devil's advocate on that show. It MAY be that instead of the substance emitting anything particularly strong, it was just being measured via spectrography, simply measuring the differences in the wavelengths of light it emits compared to it's surroundings.

Yes it's still pretty stupid, as even if you assumed that a satellite could resolve infrared light and spectrograph it independent of the light reflected off of it, at that distance, you're still assuming it could do that kind of processing to an entire massive chunk of the ground that it's observing, all at once, in real time. At the very least though, it'd be a little bit better than it emitting gamma rays or being "smelled" by the satellite...

Bronze Dog said...

Yeah, I need to get back into practice.

Anonymous said...

Have anyone of you thought about PROVING that there is no God? Making you the most famous, and most likely one of the richest, people on the planet?

With that you could make the world better, you know, as you want it, an Atheist Communist world controlled by the Atheist Leader(s?, or is that singular?).

But you don't, neither of you, STRANGE, if it is so easy to prove that this "silly" God belief is just that, a "belief" and not real, it should be easy to show it is so, just as with Santa Claus.

YET, you do not.

QED, proves my point, you know nothing and you simple bitching because you want to be able to do whatever you want without having to care about Gods laws and order, respecting Gods world.

Gabriel - Spreading Truth since 1965

MWchase said...

Which god should we go about proving doesn't exist? YHWH, Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, Allah, Elohim, Vishnu, Shiva, Loki, Amaterasu, Quetzalcoatl, Anubis, Osiris, Horus, Set, Hathor, Caelus (huh, finally hit one spellcheck didn't recognize, and he's Roman, of all things), I could go on but I don't feel like dredging up or looking up more names.

If any of those gods and goddesses aren't worthy of exactly the same consideration you're demanding for yours, please explain why not.

In other words, Gabe, prove there is no Isis, or no Aphrodite, or no Brahma, or no Thor, or I'm afraid we'll have to severely doubt your commitment to your positions. More than we already do, I mean.

Bronze Dog said...

Gabriel proves himself incapable of speaking on-topic.

Have anyone of you thought about PROVING that there is no God? Making you the most famous, and most likely one of the richest, people on the planet?

Shifting the burden of proof. You're the one making the claim that something exists. Why don't you prove God exists?

With that you could make the world better, you know, as you want it, an Atheist Communist world controlled by the Atheist Leader(s?, or is that singular?).

HA! Gabe actually thinks we're one of those New World Order conspiracies. No, Gabe, we'd keep the democracy because democracy is good for science. So is capitalism.

But you don't, neither of you, STRANGE, if it is so easy to prove that this "silly" God belief is just that, a "belief" and not real, it should be easy to show it is so, just as with Santa Claus.

Because they keep making new ad hoc hypotheses. "How does Santa fit down a chimney with a grate over it?" "Oh, well, now I define Santa so that can magically shrink down to fit through the holes."

You keep changing the definition until it's useless.

QED, proves my point, you know nothing and you simple bitching because you want to be able to do whatever you want without having to care about Gods laws and order, respecting Gods world.

Gabriel - Spreading Truth since 1965


Says the guy who worshiped Hitler right up until he thought he could have Dennis Markuze supporting him in a thread.

Fondle any altar boys recently, Gabe?

MWchase said...

Says the guy who worshiped Hitler right up until he thought he could have Dennis Markuze supporting him in a thread.

DM sounds like a terrible ally. Call for help, and he'd start scrambling around looking for the internet's fire alarm. Then, I guess he'd find some kind of novelty noisy site, and keep on triggering the sounds in the hopes of deafening us. When that proved ineffectual, he would attempt to copy the sound out of the air and incorporate it into his screeds.

I guess my point is, no matter how you rank them on tiresome or stupidity, no sane man should throw in with DM. (In any case, I harbor severe doubts that he's actually read anything in the past decade.)

(By the by, Gabe, that question I asked elsewhere, about whether you can tell what race people are by sight, is still open, feel free to accept if you think you can do it.)

Bronze Dog said...

I'm remembering a nutty guy who showed up on the JREF forums, trying to convince us skeptics that Bigfoot exists.

"Why are the photographs fuzzy?"
"Because Bigfeet shapeshift 10,000 times per second!"

"Why don't we ever find anything like bones or pieces of tissue we could get DNA samples from?"
"There is no proof that Bigfeet are natural animals, therefore they are supernatural aliens!"

Gods are just like Bigfoot, only taken to crazier extremes.

Bronze Dog said...

Oh, and Gabe, in case you think about trying to pull Pascal's Wager, watch this first.

Bronze Dog said...

Oh, and another thing, Gabe: Get a free blogspot account or maybe one of those OpenID things so that you can comment without the chance someone would imitate you.

Of course, needless to say, anything you post under that ID will be held against you when you inevitably flip-flop.