Link Thread

[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.