Motion Detector

Johnny, with newly upgraded memory, goes straight to the hotel room where he meets the client’s scientists. Before the data upload, he quickly installs a motion detector on the hotel suite door. This is a black box that he carries clipped to his belt. He uses his thumb to activate it as he takes hold and two glowing red status lights appear.

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Once placed on the door, there is just one glowing light. We don’t see exactly how Johnny controls the device, but for something this simple just one touch button would be sufficient.

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A little later, after the brain upload (discussed in the next post), the motion detector goes off when four heavily armed Yakuza arrive outside the door. The single light starts blinking, and there’s a high pitched beep similar to a smoke alarm, but quieter. Continue reading

Damage Control

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After the Galactica takes a nuclear missile hit to its port launch bay, part of the CIC goes into Damage Control mode.  Chief Tyrol and another officer take up a position next to a large board with a top-down schematic of the Galactica.  The board has various lights in major sections of the ship representing various air-tight modules in the ship.  

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After the nuclear hit, the port launch bay is venting to space, bulkheads are collapsing in due to the damage, and there are uncontrolled fires.  In those blocks, the lights blink red.

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Colonel Tigh orders the red sections sealed off and vented to space.  When Tigh turns his special damage control key in the “Master Vent” control, the lights disappear until the areas are sealed off again.  When the fires go out and the master vents are closed, the lights return to a green state.

On the board then, the lights have three states:

  • Green: air-tight, healthy
  • Blinking Red: Fire
  • Off: Intentional Venting

There does not appear to be any indications of the following states:

  • Damage Control Teams in the area
  • Open to space/not air-tight

We also do not see how sections are chosen to be vented.

Why it works

The most effective pieces here are the red lights and the “vent” key.  Chief Tyrol has a phone to talk to local officers managing the direct crisis, and can keep a basic overview of the problems on the ship (with fire being the most dangerous) with the light board.  The “vent” key is likewise straightforward, and has a very clear “I’m about to do something dangerous” interaction.

What is confusing are the following items:

  • How does Chief Tyrol determine which phone/which officer he’s calling?
  • Who is the highest ranking officer in the area?
  • How does the crew determine which sections they’re going to vent?
  • How do they view more complex statuses besides “this section is on fire”?

As with other systems on the Galactica, the board could be improved with the use of more integrated systems like automatic sensors, display screens to cycle through local cameras, and tracking systems for damage control crew.  Also as with other systems on the Galactica, these were deliberate omissions to prevent the Cylons from being able to control the Galactica.

One benefit of the simplified system is that it keeps Chief Tyrol thinking of the high-level problem instead of trying to micromanage his local damage control teams.  With proper training, local teams with effective leadership and independent initiative are more effective than a large micro-managed organization.  Chief Tyrol can focus on the goals he needs his teams to accomplish:

  • Putting out fires
  • Evacuating local crew
  • Protecting the ship from secondary explosions

and allow his local teams to focus on the tactics of each major goal.

What it’s missing

A glaring omission here is the lack of further statuses.  In the middle of a crisis, Chief Tyrol could easily lose track of individual teams on his ship.  He knows the crews that are in the Port Hangar Bay, but we never hear about the other damage control teams and where they are.  Small reminders or other status indicators would keep the Chief from needing to remember everything that was happening across the ship.  Even a box of easily-grabbed sticky notes or a grease-pen board would help here and be very low-tech.

Possible indicators include:

  • Secondary lights in each section when a damage control crew was in the area
  • A third color indicator (less optimal, but would take up less space on the board)
  • A secondary board with local reports of damage crew location and progress
  • Radiation alarms
  • Extreme temperatures
  • Low oxygen states
  • High oxygen states (higher fire risk)
  • Structural damage

It is also possible that Colonel Tigh would have taken the local crews into consideration when making his decision if he could have seen where they were for himself on the board, instead of simply hearing Chief Tyrol’s protests about their existence. Reducing feedback loops can make decision making less error prone and faster, but can admittedly introduce single points of failure.

Colonel Tigh and Chief Tyrol are able to get control of the situation with the tools at hand, but minor upgrades could have lessened the stress of the situation and allowed both of them to think clearer before jumping to decisions.  Better systems would have given them all the information they needed, but the Galactica’s purpose limited them for the benefit of the entire ship.

Lifeclock: The central conceit

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The central technological conceit of the movie is the lifeclock, a rosette crystal that is implanted in each citizen’s left palm at birth. This clock changes color in stages over the course of the individual’s lifetime.

Though the information in the movie is somewhat contradictory as to the actual stages, the DVD has an easter egg that explains the stages as follows.

White white Birth to 8 years
Yellow yellow 9 to 15 years
Green green 16 to 23 years
Red red 24 years to 10 days before Lastday (30 years)
Blinking Red red_blink from 10 days before Lastday to Lastday
Black black End of Lastday (Carousel/death)

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Lifeclocks derive their signal and possibly power from a local-area broadcast in the city. When Logan and Jessica leave the city their lifeclocks turn clear.

The signal of the lifeclock is so central to life that most citizens dress exclusively in colors that match their lifeclock color. Only certain professions, such as Sandmen and the New You doctor, are seen to wear clothing that lacks clear reference to a lifeclock color, even though the individuals in these professions have lifeclocks and are still subject to carousel at Lastday. We can presume, though are not shown explicitly, that certain rights and responsibilities are conferred on citizens in different stages, such as legal age of sexual consent and access to intoxicants, so the clothing acts as a social signal of status.

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As an interface the lifeclock is largely passive, and can be discussed for its usability in two main ways.

Color

The first is the color. Are the stages easily discernable by people? The main problem would be between the red and green stages since the forms of red-green color blindness affects around 4% of the population. To accommodate for this, reds are made more discernable with a brighter glow than the green. As a wavelength, red carries the farthest, and blinking is of course a highly visible and attention-getting signal, which makes it difficult for an individual to socially hide that his or her time for carousel has come.

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Black is a questionable signal since this indicates actual violation of the law but does not draw any attention to itself. Casual observation of a relaxed hand with a black lifeclock might even be mistaken for a colored lifeclock in shadow, but as the citizenry has complete faith in the system and a number of countermeasures in place to ensure that everyone either attends carousel or is terminated, perhaps this is not a concern.

But if we’re just going on human signal processing, the red should be reserved for LastWeek, and a blinking red for after LastDay. That leaves a color gap between 24 and 30. I’d make this phase blue, since it looks so clearly different from red. The new colors would be as follows.

White white Birth to 8 years
Yellow yellow 9 to 15 years
Green green 16 to 23 years
Blue blue 24 years to 10 days before Lastday (30 years)
Red red from 10 days before Lastday to Lastday
Blinking Red red_blink End of Lastday (Carousel/death)

Location on the body

The second question is the location of the lifeclock. Where should it be placed? It is a social signal, and as such needs to be visible. The parts of the body that are most often seen uncovered in the film are the hand, the neck, and the head. The neck and head are problematic since these are not visible to the citizen himself, useful for reinforcing compliance with the system. This leaves the hand.

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Given the hand, the palm seems an odd choice since in a relaxed position or when the hand is in use, the palm is often hidden from view of other people. The colored clothing seen in the film show that a citizen’s life stage is not really considered a private matter, so a location on the back of the hand would have made more sense. To keep it in view of its owner, a location on the fleshy pad between the thumb and the forefinger would have made a better, if less cinematic, choice.