Well, huh. When I think of “profoundly British television,” one of the first things to come to my mind is “Dr. Who.” Well, I guess the BBC has decided to end that nonsense… they’ve selected the next actor to play Dr. Who. He’s Rwandan. How long before Dr. Who is filmed in Mandarin? Why does the BBC persist in English-language supremacy?
The future is here! Ncuti Gatwa is the Doctor. ❤️❤️➕🟦 #DoctorWho
The headline should come as no surprise, since it follows the events of Star Trek Discovery. However, there was always the possibility that the producers would make some effort to rectify the many, many mistakes and oversights of STD, but… nope. While it is too early to judge whether or not the show is any good, given the people behind it are largely those responsible for STD and STP, skepticism about it emerging as anything but lamentable trash is warranted. That said, several details about the show make it perfectly clear that it is not set in the same continuity as “Star Trek:”
1: The Gorn are discussed. Given that this show is set more than a decade before TOS, and the Gorn weren’t known to the Federation until Kirk & Co. ran into them…
2: Some history of Earth was dropped: the January 6 2021 Capitol hijinks are shown, and described as a prelude to “the second Civil War,” which led to the Eugenics Wars, which led to World War III. Since the Eugenics wars occurred in the 1990s, it would be tricky for events from 2021 to cause them.
3: A star chart lists the planet “Sarpeidon,” a world that won’t be encountered until Kirk & Co. get there more than a decade later. Given that the planet has a fully functional time machine program that winds up sending the *entire* planetary population elsewhen, the existence of Sarpeidon would have been either one of the biggest military centers of the Federation, or one of the biggest secrets; all the time travel monekymotions of STD Season 2 could have been dispensed with.
On more subjective fronts, none of the characters that carry through from TOS seem to be at all the same characters, just people with the same names. Nurse Chapel, in particular, seems a completely different person. Spock and T’Pring are shown together… and T’Pring proposing marriage to Spock is shown, an odd thing given that theirs was a marriage arranged by their families when they were children, and then they didn’t really have much to do with each other. T’Pring seems quite un-Vulcan as well. The Enterprise itself is an entirely different ship, far more generic sci-fi-flashy and far less character-filled than the classic. The bridge is unrecognizable… much bigger, with a *huge* window up front rather than the somewhat dinky viewscreen from the original.
YouTube has for several months kept suggesting videos on “nuclear diamond batteries.” Most of the videos I’ve glanced at looked like clickbaity rubbish about fraudulent pseudoscience… and ever now and then I briefly watch one of the videos, and they kinda don’t disappoint.
The Nuclear Diamond Battery itself seems a reasonable enough idea. Small quantities of some radioactive substance such as Carbon 14 or Nickel 63 are formed into thin films and sandwiched between thin films of diamond semiconductors. The radioactive element emits beta radiation – high energy electrons. The electrons are captured and converted to electricity by something akin to a photoelectic cell. The radiation is captured and prevented from escaping, and in the process converted to electricity… sounds like a winner, right? And apparently prototypes have been built that work. And thus we get videos like this:
The video promises batteries that are safe and last for thousands of years. And while this seems to be true, there is one problem that these sort of videos tend to not mention. From the Wikipedia article on the subject:
In 2018, researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT), the Technological Institute for Superhard and Novel Carbon Materials (TISNCM), and the National University of Science and Technology (MISIS) announced a prototype using 2-micron thick layers of 63Ni foil sandwiched between 200 10-micron diamond converters. It produced a power output of about 1 μW at for power density of 10 μW/cm3.
That’s ten *micro* Watts per cubic centimeter. A battery one meter on a side (which, using the density of diamond of 3.5 g/cm3, would mass 3,500 kilograms) would produce a power output of… ten Watts. Granted, it would do so for thousands of years but… ten fricken Watts. The Tesla Model S has a total motor output of 615,000 Watts. Such a car would require a Nuclear Diamond Battery with a volume of 61,500 cubic meters, massing somewhere in the vicinity of two hundred thousand *tons.* The Seawise Giant, the largest supertanker in history, could carry two of these batteries.
A month or so back I and a group of friends sat down to watch the premiere episode of “Our Flag Means Death,” the “pirate comedy” show from Taika Waititi. The trailers had made it look like it could be a blast, and given its “What We Do In The Shadows” heritage, that seemed a good bet. We shut it off about 2/3 of the way through that first episode, none of us having so much as even considered chuckling at any of it. It was painfully unfunny. We never went back to it, and largely forgot about it. Then I read this today, passed the link along, and we were agreed that we chose correctly in not proceeding. It sounds like it went from “unfunny” to “ummm, no thanks.”
The “fandom” here are not the kind who might be Star Trek, Star Wars or Dr. Who fans who are annoyed at what recent iterations of those franchises have done. No, the “fandom” here would be those who *like* what has become of those formerly great intellectual properties. You know… not fans of the worldbuilding, but of The Message.
Well, not *exactly* the one we always wanted. Starfleet vs Star Destroyers? Nah. But the Federation being taken over by the Dark Side? Yup, we’re there, thanks to the season 4 finale of STD which saw the President of Earth portrayed by current political villain Stacey Abrams. Her claim to fame is working for “voter rights,” which in the current usage is a euphemism for getting rid of any ability to maintain election integrity. Because she apparently believes that black people cannot be bothered to get and hold onto state IDs such as drivers licenses, her platform boils down to voting should be open to anybody, no matter who, where they’re from, whether they’re alive or not, citizens of the country or even if they are cross-dimensional multiversal copies of themselves. In a Star Trek context, when it comes down to a clash between the Federation fighting for survival against the Borg, her position would be that the Borg would get to vote on whether or not the Federation citizens should be marched off to assimilation.
At this stage, STD has been such a tragic parody of Star Trek for so long that this sort of nonsense is largely being met with shrugs of “well, what, am I supposed to be surprised?” from actual Star Trek fans. Of course the fake fans who think that STD is actually good are having a field day thinking that casting Abrams is some sort of historical coup. Witness, for example, the top comment at that wretched hive of scum and villainy, gizmodo, in an article on the cameo:
“I like my Trek finales the way I like my elections — garnished with conservative tears.”
There are two takeaways from that:
The commenter actually thinks conservatives are crying about this
The commenter is happy to see cultural icons being trashed as a way to hurt the feelings of those who disagree politically with him/her/it.
That latter point is hardly something new. Fellow travelers of this sort have spent several years committing acts of cultural and *actual* vandalism as a way not to improve society, but just to hurt people they don’t like. That’s a very Dark Side philosophy.
Anyway, here’s the scene. Having not actually seen the episode, I have the sneaking suspicion that the audio here might not be precisely what was broadcast, but, hey, it works.
There are those who argue that STD is canonical with actual Star Trek, that it’s in the same universe/timeline as TOS and TNG. This despite all the tonal differences, the fundamentally different Klingorks, the technology a century in advance of what was shown before, the different *history* on display. The season 4 finale, however, provides a final nail in the coffin to the idea that STD is set in the canonical Star Trek timeline. That detail is this: Earth is geographically, geologically a different *planet* than the Earth of reality or of actual Star Trek. In STD-verse, Africa is something like 50% bigger than elsewhere, stretching from nearly the arctic to nearly the antarctic. You can’t have continents being vastly larger and not have that make major changes to the timeline, going back millions of years. One might argue that this is due to lenses and the distance at which one films a sphere; if you photograph the Earth from the ISS, Nebraska about fills the view of Earth from horizon to horizon. But as you can see here, the “camera” has pulled back to several planetary diameters away, at which point the distortions become minimal. Earth in STD is a *very* different place.
One can argue whether VP Harris is a moron or not. But it’s pretty clear that she thinks that the people listening to her are at the very least monstrously ignorant. Of course, the possibility exists that she may be right: the interviewers seem thrilled to have her, and thus the listeners stand a fair chance of being like-minded; to be thrilled to be graced with the presence or “wisdom” of anyone from this Administration would be indicative of ignorance at the very least.
The full interview, if you want to subject yourself to it:
…the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion.
…$2.2 billion to build a single SLS rocket, $568 million for ground systems, $1 billion for an Orion spacecraft, and $300 million to the European Space Agency for Orion’s Service Module.
…NASA will spend $93 billion from 2012 to 2025 on the Artemis program.
Gosh, If Only there was some alternative launch vehicle program that we could turn to that could potentially launch at a rate higher than once a year and at vastly lower cost…
When a racist who advocates for the enslavement of other races and the destruction of her own society is grievously and permanently wounded by one of “her own people,” how should other people feel about it? Especially when “her own people” refuse to help the police investigate the attack, leading to those who did it getting off scot-free? Before you answer… consider an alternate case where a Klansman or a neo-Nazi gets almost-whacked by one of their fellows. Who would be too upset about that?
As a reminder, this is who she was and what she advocated for:
The linked article starts off with a photo of her in her hospital bed. I’m no brainologist but I can say with some fair certainty that her days of rabble-rousing have definitely come to a serious slowdown.
Moral of the story: get your priorities straight. Shrieking about a kind of violence so rare that it makes international news when it happens, when get capped in the head by your own associates is an everyday possibility, seems an unwise expenditure of effort.
Ever since the Commie Cough hit, I’ve noticed a lot of quality control issues in common products. Today I broke open a box with a new tube of toothpaste (purchased some months ago; expiration date is sometime in 2023) to find that something ain’t quite right with the tube.
I’m uncertain if the tube was *ever* actually sealed. The toothpaste itself has dried to a largely solid state. I’ve never actually wondered about what happens to toothpaste if allowed to dry out, but I’ve had that nugget of knowledge kinda thrust upon me. Woo.
