Link Thread

[Nate the Great]

50 mistakes you might have missed in the best TV shows of all time


The Star Trek entry is ridiculous...


In the science fiction realm, writers are often forced to find a balance between the fantastical and the realistic, melding real science with wild concepts to make the worlds created as believable as possible. In the instance of "Next Generation," however, one of the main data points was the ship's computer having an odd need to breathe in the middle of sentences. Considering it was supposed to be all function and not a human form, a breathing computer seemed a little too far-fetched for fans.


People actually lose sleep about this? They do realize that in the '80s automated voices were horrifically primitive and grating, right? Did they expect Majel Barrett to record one sentence at a time so the staff could splice them together without breathing noises?

[Nate the Great]

A Christmas Carol like you've never seen before.


As in a stage musical in the form of an '80s prog rock album.


It must be seen to be disbelieved.

[Nate the Great]

A Not Always Right Story with a painful Star Trek joke in the comments


Seriously, I groaned at this so all of you have to groan at it too.

[Nate the Great]

Element14 makes a tribble that will react positively to Mr. Spock and negatively to a Klingon.

[NAHTMMM]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ikqU6G6Xgs

The bad or dubious choices that went into the music of the Les Mis movie.

[Nate the Great]

Sesame Street once did a Power Rangers spoof


Well, that's surreal.

[Nate the Great]

Today is my 42nd birthday, so it's time for some links...


Of course 6X9=42 in Base 13, but as Douglas Adams himself said, "I may be a sorry case, but I don't write jokes in Base 13."


Numberphile tackles the number


And again. It took a long time to find how to get 42 by summing three cubes


Miscellaneous mathematical properties from Wikipedia


Star Trek events in years that end with 42 (Memory Alpha and Beta):
2342: Picard refuses to meet Jenice in Paris, Ishara Yar is born, Bevery Howard starts her medical training
2242: Gary Mitchell and Janice Rand are born, construction begins on the 1701 under the command of Robert April
2142: Wendy Raymond (great great granddaughter of Clare Raymond) dies
2042: Final World Series (won by Buck Bokai)
1942: The Nexus ribbon passed through the galaxy this year, Chekov is transported to this year by an omnipotent being in a novel and meets one of Kirk's ancestors

[Nate the Great]

Teaser Trailer for STTMP featuring Orson Welles narration


I wasn't expecting to encounter this today!

[Nate the Great]

A LEGO stop-motion film retelling The Princess Bride using Star Wars characters and references.


It's...something else.

[Nate the Great]

Collage of scifi characters from Facebook


Trek is well represented.

[Nate the Great]

Matt Parker has drafted hundreds of volunteers to attempt to break the record of most digits of pi calculated by hand.



While I'm all for mathematical enthusiasm, this one seems a little ridiculous.

[Nate the Great]

Certifiably Ingame tackles the warp speed limit.


I still have trouble with the idea that the entire fleet could be replaced with ships of a less damaging profile that fast. Furthermore, it's clear that the variable nacelle geometry of Voyager was in the design before the fortunate side effect was discovered.


Then again, I'm more than willing to go with "Voyager still damages subspace, but the point is that it's the most powerful ship in the quadrant (within reason, of course) and the Delta Quadrant lacks the monolithic governments and well-trod "warp highways" that the Alpha Quadrant has."


I mean, think about it. What race (other than the Borg, who use a completely different propulsion technology) has enough high-warp ships to cause the kind of damage seen in "Cause and Effect"? None.

[Nate the Great]

Possum Rob


A new Trek review show that I just discovered. He's covering the TOS episodes one by one in a very different way. Treknology and continuity issues are secondary to the character work and ideas presented by the story. A very relaxed approach.

[Nate the Great]

A Princess Bride/Trek meme from Facebook

[NAHTMMM]

https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.20268

In the seven years that the starship Voyager spent in the Delta Quadrant, it used many questionable techniques to engage with alien civilizations and ultimately find its way home. From detailed studies of their logs and opening credits, we simulate Voyager's practice of orbiting a planet, to examine the effect on planetary rings. We outline a feasible planetary system and simulate the extent to which its rings would be disrupted. We find that Voyager's orbit could inflate the height of the rings in the vicinity of the spacecraft by a factor of 2, as well as increase the relative speeds of neighboring planetesimals within the rings. This increase in ring thickness has the potential to alter shadows on any moons of this planet, impacting ring-shadow based religions. Additionally, the acceleration of these planetesimals could rival their gravity, bucking any alien inhabitants and their tiny civilizations off of their planetesimal homeworlds. Finally, we posit that due to increased collisions amongst the planetesimals (which may harbor tiny intelligent life) the trajectory of these civilizations may be forever altered, violating the prime directive.

[Nate the Great]

Today is Jane Goodall's 100th birthday.


I first heard of her through the infamous The Far Side cartoon, the one that her lawyers hated but she loved.


Then I found the article that Erma Bombeck wrote about her in her book When You Look Like Your Passport Photo, It's Time to Go Home.


Then the joke that Ape made in the George of the Jungle movie.


Here's a random assortment of single-panel Jane Goodall gags.


And some more factoids that I found today...


* The Jane Goodall Institute's Center for Primate Studies was at my alma mater the University of Minnesota (which had the amusing email address of chimp@umn.edu)
* LEGO made a Jane Goodall set to celebrate International Women's Day 2022.

[Nate the Great]

The Gaming Historian made a documentary about the history of Oregon Trail


I attended a Minnesota elementary school during the Apple IIe era, so the MECC games have a special place in my heart.

[Nate the Great]

A guy sculpts a sculpture of Cookie Monster eating/terrorizing a bunch of Shrek-style gingerbread men.


Crafts like these impress me because I don't have that kind of artistic talent myself.

[NAHTMMM]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBnVL1Y2src

The first attempt to "animate" The Hobbit. Condenses the whole thing into 11 minutes, and uhh . . . yeah. Cute art but not the same story, or even some of the same words.

[Nate the Great]

Resurrected Starships tackles inconsistencies in the usage of "transwarp" between STIII, the Borg, etc.


I'm all for assuming that "The Great Experiment" of the Excelsior wasn't "transwarp" as understood later on, i.e. not Warp 10 or special warp paths like the Borg and other species use, but merely a major upgrade to conventional warp that would allow for far superior speeds than the TOS warp scale. Once the kinks were ironed out I'm willing to believe that "transwarp" became the new TNG warp scale, far faster than anything in TOS (except for Kelvin intervention or the like, of course).



He also hypothesizes that when Kirk said "let's see what she's got" of the Enterprise-A, he really meant the new warp drive design that was a refinement of the Excelsior.



I'm not a fan of the notion that the Excelsior's transwarp drive was completely abandoned when Scotty "stopped up the drain" and replaced with a standard warp drive. All Scotty did was remove some key components that couldn't be replaced in time to stop the Enterprise (along with some minor hacking to give Captain Stiles a message, of course). In fact, I shudder to think of the amount of work that would have to be done to rip out half of the stardrive section and replace it, even if a spare Constitution warp core was available immediately.