Star Trek
esiegel | October 23, 2017"To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves." -Federico García Lorca
In an episode filled with Vulcan mindmelds, Klingon treachery, a spectacular nebula, themes of racial purity, and PTSD, you’d think all the ingredients were there for a spectacular episode of Star Trek: Discovery. Instead, describing it as a hot mess would be overly generous; this episode is just a disappointment as far as just about every avenue is concerned. Except for the Captain Lorca / Admiral Cornwell scenes, there’s really nothing to like about where this goes.…
esiegel | October 19, 2017"Designing a station with artificial gravity would undoubtedly be a daunting task. Space agencies would have to re-examine many reliable technologies under the light of the new forces these tools would have to endure. Space flight would have to take several steps back before moving forward again." -Andy Weir
Ever wonder, in those science fiction shows, how space travelers always stay “down” on their starship? Irrespective of acceleration, and despite the fact that the astronauts we have in orbit around Earth are weightless, they’re always depicted as having a floor and a ceiling that are well…
esiegel | October 15, 2017"You are... six years old. You are weak and helpless! You cannot... hurt me!" -Captain Picard, a badass, while being tortured
Star Trek has always been a way for us to look at the best and worst aspects of humanity, often through our confrontations with alien races. Different aspects of our fears, our personalities, and our sense of ethics play out on the stage of futuristic science fiction. Our frailties are exposed, and the crew is challenged to rise to the occasion, and to demonstrate the best of humanity, often in the worst situations. For the first time in five chances, Star Trek:…
esiegel | October 9, 2017"You were always a good officer. Until you weren't." -Saru, from Star Trek: Discovery
Science is full of great ideas and brilliant discoveries, and some of those more recent ones have made their way into the popular consciousness. TED talks, popular blogs and online magazines, and Facebook pages and internet memes have helped disseminate bits of knowledge to millions. But how much of what's come through is actually worth knowing, versus how much is simply science-sounding buzzwords that's content-free?
Outside the event horizon of a black hole, General Relativity and quantum field theory are…
esiegel | October 2, 2017"If I die trying but I’m inadequate to the task to make a course change in the evolution of this planet…okay I tried. The fact is I tried. How many people are not trying. If you knew that every breath you took could save hundreds of lives into the future had you walked down this path of knowledge, would you run down this path of knowledge as fast as you could." -Paul Stamets
When you look at the dark matter network of the Universe, what do you see? Do you see patterns similar to other networks, like neurons in your brain or the mycological mats found beneath the soil on Earth? Of course you…
esiegel | September 25, 2017"If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures." -Gene Roddenberry
The first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery are now behind us, and while I expected it to be darker and more of a continuous story than a series of self-contained episodes, I think this was full of a lot of surprises, not all of them good. Yes, the visuals were absolutely stunning, from the sleek uniforms to the sets to the ships to the Klingons to the battle effects. The binary protoplanetary system was breathtaking. And this was a suspense-filled…
oracknows | April 6, 2017It's a strange world after all, and I'll show you why.
Last night, as I deposited myself on my couch with my laptop sitting on my lap, there to churn out yet another installment of the insolence most of you love and a few of you love to hate read, I had a Dug the Dog moment. The squirrel in this case was Twitter. Normally, although I do have a Twitter feed, my enthusiasm for it very much waxes and wanes. Although I do regularly post stuff, I can sometimes go days without contributing an original Tweet, leaving my feed fallow, with only automatic Tweets based on RSS feeds of my blogs as the…
milhayser | August 30, 2016The centerpiece of the latest Star Trek film is a bright celestial bauble, a tremendous re-imagining of a Federation starbase, named Yorktown.
Yorktown is on the scale of a Death Star, but instead of incinerating worlds it is presumably dedicated to a lot of peace-mongering bureaucracy and some very nice apartment buildings. To quote Memory Alpha, "Yorktown's structure consisted of a matrix of city-sized interlocking rings and radiating arms enclosed in a spherical translucent surface; Enterprise doctor Leonard McCoy likened it to a giant 'snow globe' in space." At the center of it all the…
oracknows | February 15, 2016It really sucks when a celebrity you like and admire screws up. Before social media, you might never have known whether stars were prone to bouts of excessive credulity when it comes to medicine, conspiracy theories, the paranormal, or whatever. Twenty years ago, for instance, few might ever have known that Jenny McCarthy was into "indigo child woo" or rabidly antivaccine, falling hard for the scientifically discredited concept that vaccines cause autism. That's just one example.
Of course, some people, celebrity or not, are just prone to conspiracy belief. Unfortunately, sometimes people who…
milhayser | January 11, 2016It was high times for the Rebel Alliance at the end of Return of the Jedi (1983). Across the galaxy, crowds rejoiced at the destruction of the second Death Star and the apparent defeat of Emperor Palpatine. Princess Leia Organa, who two films earlier had seen her home planet exploded for sport, was re-united with a twin brother she never knew she had, becoming aware of her own Force sensitivity, and in love with a swashbuckling hero who would later father her son. It was a resounding victory, and deservedly so, even if Ewoks had to help.
The Force Awakens begins thirty years later, yet…
oracknows | September 22, 2014Regular readers know that I’ve been a big Star Trek geek (more or less) ever since I first discovered reruns of the original Star Trek episodes in the 1970s, having been too young (but not by much!) to have caught the show during its original 1966-1969 run. True, my interest waxed and waned through the years—for instance, I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation, while Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: Voyager pretty much left me cold—but even now I still find myself liking the rebooted movie series. In the original series, my favorite characters tended to alternate between Spock, the Vulcan…
hrynyshyn | March 2, 2011One of the things that keeps me from throwing in the blogging towel in an era when climate change denial seems to be a prerequisite for membership in the party of Abraham Lincoln is the quality of the comments I get. The praise is nice, the thoughtful exploration of the ideas I introduce is better, but what I really enjoy are the snarky swipes at my character by those who can't come up with anything more cogent to post than a dismissive reference to Star Trek. See here for a typical example,
The first thing that occurred to me when such comments began to appear -- almost immediately after I…
jstemwedel | July 16, 2010It's Friday, I'm still working on stuff that I was supposed to be done with by now, and the temperatures in the vicinity of Casa Free-Ride have climbed into the uncomfortable range that is more compatible with having a cold beer (or lying motionless) than with slogging through the stuff I'm working on.
This calls for some videotainment!
This video is making me think that classic Star Trek might be the medium through which the young kids nowadays can help their aging parents to appreciate the popular music.
Also, it makes me suspect that there was a lot more drinking and dancing in three…
gboustead | July 13, 2010
I got into this stuff because of science fiction. I was a huge nerd in high school. I remember there was a time that between UPN, TNN, and The SciFi Channel you could watch six straight hours of Star Trek on a Friday night. None of those networks exist anymore. I built a Stargate in my parents’ basement freshman year (see above)--though I never got it to send me anywhere. When my Junior English teacher told me to write a paper on John Steinbeck, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or another famous American author, I wrote it on Phillip K. Dick.
As I grew older, and my knowledge of science fact began to…
cevans | June 1, 2010As NASA's Space Shuttle program winds down -- Endeavour's final mission is slated for later this year, then that's it -- let us take a moment and remember the Shuttles. Sure, they had a tendency to explode into balls of fire. Sure, they were expensive, risky, and besieged by problems. But now is not the time for criticism: 25 years of American engineering, 132 missions, and over 20,000 orbits of this planet are nothing to shake a stick at. It is in this spirit of recognition that Universe presents a very subjective chronology of the Shuttle's greatest moments. Onward!
Gene Roddenberry, Star…
rallain | May 24, 2010While I am still fresh on the Space Jump topic, let me take it to the extreme. Star Trek extreme.
SPOILER ALERT
But really, is this a spoiler alert if it is from the trailer of a movie that has been out forever? Of course, I talking about the latest Star Trek movie where three guys jump out of a shuttle and into the atmosphere.
So, in light of the Red Bull Stratos jump, how would this jump compare? First, my assumptions:
This Star Trek jump is on the planet Vulcan. I am going to assume this is just like Earth in terms of gravity and density of air.
The jumpers in Star Trek have on stuff…
grrlscientist | March 20, 2010tags: Eduard Trololo Khil, Encounter over Planet Trololololo, Star Trek, parody, funny, humor, fucking hilarious, television, streaming video
If you watched this video, then you've already seen a little of the newest meme to take youtube by storm. But someone tracked down the real singer in that ancient video and talked with him on video .. and the amazing thing is that he has hardly aged at all; looking almost the same as he did 100 years ago! Oh, and even more notable: he's still smiling after all these years.
If you haven't seen and heard the original video yet, here it is (but don't…
grrlscientist | March 12, 2010tags: Captain Kirk Deals with a Strange Alien Culture, Encounter over Planet Trololololo, Star Trek, parody, funny, humor, fucking hilarious, television, streaming video
I've been watching the Trolololololo man video several times during the past week or two with a mixture of fascination, repulsion and horror -- sort of like being the first person to come upon a traffic accident late at night where you make the unsettling discovery that the driver has been decapitated. I am getting a head start on Saturday silliness videos by showing this video today, where Captain Kirk comes across an alien…
grrlscientist | March 6, 2010tags: Star Trek: How It Should Have Ended, Star Trek, Star Wars, comedy, humor, parody, satire, silly, fucking hilarious, streaming video
Space: the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, to seek out new worlds and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before ... this is how Star Trek should have ended!
