Persistent, Niggling Questions

[Nate the Great]

So you don't want money to magically appear because you can't think of anything to buy with it at the moment? I myself have often done cost/benefit analysis' based on the premise of "okay, if it's MY money I'd spend X for that, if my dad's buying it I'd let him if the cost was Y or lower (Y>X, of course), if it's coming from a gift certificate I'd buy it at Z (Z>Y), and so on.

The beauty of money as the basis of a bartering system is that (putting aside inflation issues), it will ALWAYS have value. One reason why I prefer gift cards to undesirable gifts OR cash, I'd feel obligated to use cash on boring stuff like food and gas.

[catalina_marina]

Originally Posted by Nate the Great

Okay, the O's are the dots. Both of the imaginary Braille letters are two dots with a third below it to the left. The difference is that the first has the triangle at the top of the grid, and the second has the triangle at the bottom of the grid. Therefore, different symbols. A blind person would have no idea which is which without knowing where the top of the line is.

Okay, my bad. In that case I have nothing to add to KJ's reasoning.

Have you checked that these things actually exist though? I'm pretty sure not all possible symbols are actually used...

[Nate the Great]

It was simply an example to bring up my niggling question. Strictly speaking, the purpose was simply to get these things off our chests, not try to answer them, so I suppose it's time to move on to something else.

Why do we still broadcast radio on FM and AM on different scales? Don't we have enough stations on one or the other to say "we're only going to broadcast in FM from now on, no more AM?" We'd probably have to build in a transition period so all the AM guys could swap over, but still...

Why do we (in the USA, at least) HAVE to swap over to digital tuners in a few years? Couldn't they just duplicate the broadcast stations in HD on cable channels?

How come some restaurant actually got the rights to use "Kentucky" in their name, thus forcing KFC to go by initials? Seems pretty wonky, it's the name of an entire STATE, after all.

How is George Lucas going to pull off transforming the Star Wars saga into HD, much less 3D? All I can think of is using the existing voice tracks to dub over photorealistic CG characters a la Final Fantasy (only better... )

Along similar lines, what's so wrong with Han shooting first? He's a mercenary (of sorts) for hire, right? Discretion the better part of valor and all that. In that situation I'd have shot first.

[catalina_marina]

But I like trying to answer them!

They still broadcast on AM?

I don't know. Cheaper, maybe? (I'm not entirely sure what you're talking about, by the way.)

I don't see why anybody would not have that right. Though you'll have to explain to me why this forces KFC to go by initials. Was the full name already taken or something?

[Nate the Great]

I'm confused by the whole KFC thing, actually. Their Wikipedia page doesn't mention it. You'll probably have to look for the answer on one of the urban legend pages. PM for links if you want to look for yourself.

Yeah, they still broadcast in AM. "Radio Disney AM 1440, Golden Valley, Minneapolis, St. Paul."

[catalina_marina]

Well if they still use it, there's probably a reason. I never turn my radio to AM, and I'm not even sure there's nothing there, but most of it is FM here, anyway. They do have some trouble with other countries, near the borders, by the way. They change frequency there, because of those nasty foreign channels.

[PointyHairedJedi]

As to why the US government might want to switch off analogue radio signals (which I wasn't aware they wanted to do), it'd be for the same reason they want to switch off analogue TV signals - digital signals as I understand it require less bandwidth per channel, and they are sent at different frequencies than analogue signals, meaning that the government could then flog off the resulting frequencies for fabulous sums of money, probably to mobile telephone network companies for wireless internet and such.

[DrWho42]

okay, but what happened to the Avenues 1-4 in the television series Avenue 5?

[Nate the Great]

So someone beat the OOT demo within Smash Brothers Brawl in under five minutes, and someone on Twitter complained that speedrunners don't know how to have fun.



PNQ: Isn't this sort of thinking rather short-sighted?


I find it amazing how blind some people can be about other people's hobbies. People are different, and their hobbies are different. Just because I wouldn't find fantasy football fun doesn't mean that I bash people who enjoy that. I obsess about the minutiae of Treknology, but I don't bash people who don't.



Besides, when it comes to speedruns the fun doesn't just come from the final video, it's knowing HOW that final video happened. Where did this or that glitch come from? How can we apply it to this or that route? Could we combine it with a strategy that was eclipsed years ago, giving it new life?

[Nate the Great]

I found myself pondering Scotty's statement in The Voyage Home that the time travel "drained" the Klingon dilithium crystals.


PNQ: Opinions?


In TOS they were all over the map regarding what dilithium actually was or did in the engines. I don't think the modern concept of matter/antimatter reaction transformed by dilithium into warp plasma existed in final form until TNG.



It's true that in STIV the crystals weren't explicitly called "dilithium", but for the sake of argument let's say that they are, as all Alpha/Beta quadrant powers other than the Romulans operate on the traditional matter/antimatter technology.


Spock speaks of recrystallization. Scotty was concerned about fracture in the E-D crystals.



As an aside, the novel How Much For Just The Planet (which I highly recommend) goes into a bit of depth about how dilithium works. Dilithium crystals extend past the standard three dimensions into the higher realms, which is essential for matter/antimatter reaction. Presumably the portion of crystals lying in the higher dimensions can't interact with matter OR antimatter and in fact deflects the streams away from the portion in standard space. Thus if matter is "twisted" in one way and antimatter in another, perhaps regulated matter/antimatter collisions are even more powerful than the ordinary kind because they've been focused. Like how ordinary crystals disperse a light-beam into a full spectrum or condense a spectrum into a single white light beam.



Furthermore, let's consider how in TOS they're always looking for dilithium. The tech isn't good enough for a full match on the focused streams, you end up with a lot of excess energy that must be contained and then expelled as "exhaust". Furthermore, it could be that the extra unfocused energy is the part that decrystallizes the dilithium.



Think of it like a filter that gets gunked up. In TOS the gunk eventually makes the crystals unusable. In TNG we know how to prefilter the fuel AND create "backwash" to remove the gunk.



Furthermore, suppose that Klingon crystal tech is less advanced than the Federation. They need raw dilithium even more than our heroes because the gunk builds up faster. Furthermore, suppose that their supply is smaller than ours, so they have to build their ships to handle lower-quality dilithium. Plus, y'now, you have to imagine that they run their engines hotter than our heroes because of the need to be battle-ready 24/7 (or whatever the Klingon version of that expression is).

[DrWho42]

when will MST3K riff Plan 9 from Outer Space?

[Nate the Great]

A boy's mother has very strict rules about acceptable books for her son.


1. No princes or princesses.
2. No knights.
3. No dragons or other fantasy animals.
4. No talking animals.
5. No men that have to save women.


PNQ: How many books can you think of that meet these criteria?


One thing that springs to mind immediately about these criteria is the assumption of fantasy only. There are children's book genres other than fantasy, lady!


Let's get real, the big sticking point here is Point 5.



And since it's the Christmas season, I have to be reminded of Miracle on 34th Street here. Poor Doris...

[Nate the Great]

Today's Star Trek entry for Ashens' Advent Calendar is a set of coasters with TOS-style computer graphics (pre-LCARS) on them.


PNQ: What era of computer graphics do you like the best?


The TOS-style of computer interface never got a name. Since the later movies used TNG sets you'll see a bit of LCARS in them, but we'll chalk that up to real-world events, not proof that LCARS existed in the 23rd century.



The Amazing Thing I Learned Today is that Wikipedia has an article on LCARS. Weird.


Of course the Kelvinverse totally ignores canon and includes touchscreen tech called PCAP-SYS. Abrams himself felt that they should be full-blown holograms.


The 29th century timeships used TCARS instead of LCARS. Temporal computer instead of library computer. I do wonder what a "temporal computer is".