I once experienced an episode of sleep paralysis with auditory hallucinations. I heard a deep masculine voice speaking in a guttural language that seemed just on the edge of being comprehensible to me. As if it were the primeval language from which all others sprang. The feel of the language in my ear was as familiar as my native tongue. I recognized the cadence, I could discern where one word ended and the next began, whether a sentence was a question, and so forth. But the words themselves were somehow alien.

I strained my senses trying to hear the voice more clearly. What horrible prophesy was I being given? What dreadful task have I been appointed? Am I the keymaster? The antichrist? Am I dying? Oh shit, that’s it, isn’t it? I’m dying and going to hell. Fuckfuckfuck. Um. I accept Jesus as my savior? …Buddha? …Joe Pesci?

Then I snapped out of it and the voice turned out to be the muffled sound of my neighbor’s TV. Praise be to Joe Pesci!

Yeah, but what about all the episodes where they didn’t detect any danger? That’s like half of TOS. By TNG it’d be hubris if they still believed they could know for sure.

It makes so much more sense to send a shuttlecraft in the first place, in every case, even if the mothership isn’t going anywhere and transporters are fully operational.

Is there air? You don’t know. But you’re going to beam me down in nothing but my pajamas? Hell no. I’ll take a shuttle with its shields and weapons and life support systems.

The one thing that bothers me about the metric system is how much of it is never actually used. No one says “1 megameter”, for example. They say “1,000 kilometers”. When you think about it, most metric prefixes are never used with most metric units.

Uh huh. So we’re in agreement. She won’t be allowed near the phone again.

They also put children on the ship, so maybe the admiralty isn’t so smart.

On the other hand, the few things they do know about him includes that he disobeyed orders cancelling the Farpoint mission, declared red alert in drydock, and that he has conversations with letters of the alphabet.

The thing that gets me about this episode is how it compares to All Good Things.

In AGT there’s a scene where Picard is in the past on the bridge and he’s ordering them into the anomaly, an act which seriously threatens to destroy the ship, and for which he gives no good reason. The crew reasonably objects, and Picard launches into an unpersuasive and platitudinal speech about how awesome the crew is. And the crew goes along with it.

Contrast this with the scene in Allegiance where “Picard” orders them into the anomaly, an act which seriously threatens to destroy the ship and for which he gives no good reason. “Picard” assures them with an unpersuasive and platitudinal speech. And the crew mutinies.

While it’s true that in Allegiance the crew were already suspicious, it’s also true that in the AGT scene the crew didn’t know Picard well enough to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Not all replicators are created equally.

Starfleet standard-issue food replicators won’t produce unhealthy foods, true alcohol, etc. If you ask for a hot fudge sundae you’ll get something that resembles a hot fudge sundae, but which has the nutritional value of a balanced meal. If you ask for whiskey, you’ll get synthehol. The psychological impact (sugar high, intoxication, tryptophan sleepiness, etc.) of replicated food is muted or absent compared to the real thing.

That’s why people go to places like Quark’s. His replicators produce real food and real booze, with all the psychological effects that come with them.

At first I thought this was an announcement from Microsoft.

Each decade of age took me half as long as the previous one did.

0-10 took forever

10-20 took 20 years

20-30 took 10 years

30-40 took 5 years

And I fear it only gets worse.

Let us, like Him, hold up one shoe and let the other be upon our foot, for this is His sign, that all who follow Him shall do likewise.

…are non-US peanut butters less viscous?

Reminds me of the old trick on HTML forms where you use CSS to make one of the form fields invisible to humans and reject any submission that filled in that field.

E099: PROGRAMMER IS OVERLY POLITE

For some reason fungal mycelial networks and tardigrades were all the rage in pop sci and internet memes circa 2015. The writers just hopped on the bandwagon when they were deciding how their non-warp propulsion plot point would work.

Man it sure is crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.

I got a contact sugar high just from clicking that link.

The problem is that an AI built to maximize paperclips might conclude that converting the planet to paperclips is an acceptable cost of maximizing paperclip production. It might understand why humans think it’s bad to convert the planet, but disagree. It would need to be explicitly programmed to prioritize human life over paperclips.

otherwise we would just switch it off

If it were super-intelligent, it could probably trick us into leaving it turned on.

A paperclip maximizer driven by self-preservation? What could possiblie go wrong?