butterfly in the sky

Regardless whether or not Reading Rainbow or Star Trek: The Next Generation registers on your nostalgia spectrum, you should do yourself the favour of checking out the new podcast series called LeVar Burton Reads. Drawing from different authors and a variety of genres (but with an emphasis, I suspect, on sci-fi), Mister Burton reads short fiction to his audience in a very engaging fashion. But don’t take my word for it.

7x7

alpha quadrant: astronomers spy more terrestrial exoplanets in our corner of the Milky Way

glymphatic node: new anatomical system discovered charged with cleansing the brain and spinal cord

 twitterpated: applying artificial intelligence to group and identify bird song

sub-space: a helpful, accessible explanation of that Chinese satellite network’s quantum entanglement experiment, disabusing our expectations of instantaneous communication

kalkül: images from a vintage East Germany children’s maths text book—site tip from Everlasting Blört

lacquer: Australian researchers are making advances with “solar paint” that pulls hydrogen from the atmosphere like a photosynthesising plant

tame: in depth genetics study suggest cats self-domesticated—or maybe it’s their humans that are house-broken

apocrypha

Wil Wheaton, having engaged with a commenter expounding on the historical context regarding the origins of Christianity and the received tradition unmediated by political expediency, improved vastly on the slogan entreating God to save one from his followers, by remarking that “Canon Jesus is better than Fandom Jesus.” I much prefer the way Wheaton turned out to the way the series imagined he would, as well.

v’ger or codified likeness utility

Clever musician and filmmaker Patrick Collins has rescored Star Trek: The Motion Picture with Daft Punk’s soundscape for Tron: Legacy and the result is really satisfying. Thematically similar on some levels, I think both Star Trek’s premiere on the big screen—which was ultimately not the story first-pitched to the studios—and the original Tron (not even considered for an Academy Award since using computerised generated landscapes were considered cheating in 1982—1979’s release was also panned for its over-reliance on special effects) were both really ahead of their time but received lack-lustre acclaim from contemporaries.

/fɪʃ/ or inter-galactic phonetic alphabet

Upon learning that the Klingon word for love is bang (in the sense of a closing salutation as in with affection, whilst the act itself is muSh) whilst listening to back episodes of The Greatest Generation podcast reminded me of another linguistic Easter egg cobbled into the constructed alien language: ghoti.
I’m sure that the standard received Klingon pronunciation of ghotI’ holds but the term, which was also incarnated as a Christian punk band in the 1990s called Ghoti Hook, has its origins in an 1855 correspondence between a publisher and an essayist sharing the frustrations of the irregularities of the English language. Sounding out the gh as in enough, the o as in women and the ti as in motion, one gets fish. The Klingon word for fish has been used, rather unfairly it seems, to calibrate speech synthesisers, and we wonder how the Universal Translator would tackle this recursive case.

i am locutus of borg—resistance is futile

Via Gizmodo’s io9, we learn that a committed Star Trek fan’s vehicle insurance policy has been revoked after receiving complaints that his personalised vanity plates “ASIMIL8” is offensive to aboriginal peoples—despite the fact that it is clearly a reference to the cybernetic, Borg collective being framed by the other Borg catch-phrases “We are the Borg” and “Resistance is Futile.”
At first it might seem that people are being too sensitive, trigger-happy but Canada and the area of Manitoba in particular where the driver (also suspiciously named “Troller”) lives is particularly fraught with a history of indigenous people being forced to give up their culture and way of life and assimilate to the ways of European settlers and could despite the owner’s intent be interpreted as a political dog-whistle.  Canada is also embracing immigration, and those not familiar with the franchise might also be getting mixed messages.  It is better, I think, to err on the side of no offense given nor taken.  What do you think? I certainly hope there’s no broader movement afoot to misappropriate the Borg as a symbol of intolerance—I am confident that the Star Trek community wouldn’t allow that.

sickbay

A self-funded team in Philadelphia won the international X Prize Tricorder consumer medical competition, under the leadership of an innovator and emergency-room doctor whose only prior invention was a cotton candy machine that he made with his siblings during grade school. Like on the franchise, the hand-held scanner can diagnose and interpret multiple health conditions and monitor vital signs. The prototype could revolutionise home health care and bring treatment and prevention to places under-served by medical professionals. I still think there’s ample need for an Emergency Medical Hologram, however.

drunk shimoda

Recently, at the recommendation (or rather a shared-affinity for pebble ice amongst the hosts, having now heard both episodes where the shows intersect) of another fine podcast in the Maximum Fun network, I found myself tuning on to a show called The Greatest Generation—a review, critique of the series Star Trek: The Next Generation that’s smart and paralysingly funny. I think one could pick up at any point and work one’s way back and acquaint oneself with the running gags and regular segments but a good episode to begin with would be You Don’t Name the Cow on the episode I-Borg (series five, episode twenty-three).

grußwort, ghaH ’ej Duvan mu’

Though Verboten during its first years of airing due to German regulation prohibiting television directed at audiences under the age of six years, Die Sendung mit der Maus (the Show with the Mouse) brought about a change to the law and has been educating young people and receiving critical acclaim as the nation’s classroom since the early 1970s.
The creators recognised how well children responded to commercials and advertising mascots and decided to try to harness that commodity of attentiveness and put it to good use, featuring short instructional programming illustrating how things work, interspersed with cartoons. Each episode has a standard magazine format and from the onset had a message of inclusion, introducing each segment once in German and then in a foreign language—first in Turkish, Italian and Spanish to acknowledge the children of foreign guest-workers. That tradition continues with the language changing weekly and has expanded significantly to reflect refugee families and most recently Klingon.

m-class or goldilocks

Amongst the thousands of confirmed exoplanets in the firmament and the untold trillions of worlds estimated, NASA just held a colossal press-conference that served to the public the very exciting news of a solar system discovered in orbit around a cool (ultra-cool, Red Giants are m-class stars but Star Trek’s planetary classification system is unfortunately made up) dwarf star in the constellation of Aquarius, some thirty nine light years distance from us.
Astronomers are giving the discovery the designation of TRAPPIST-1 as it was the first solar system to be observed directly using transit photometry.  The acronym for the programme and one of the telescopes used spells out Trappist, like the monastic order and brew-masters of Liège, where the search method was first conceived. Seven rocky (terrestrial) worlds orbit the star and at least three are thought to be in the habitable-zone, conducive to life as we know it thriving. After compiling and analysing telemetry for a year and half, researchers are very confident in their results. Finding no life in that entire star system would be, I’d wager, far more stranger than discovering extraterrestrial life. As we said above, this ensemble joins an already crowded Cosmos, but I think it’s brilliant that there’s already an artist’s conception to captivate and stoke the imagination—it reminds me of Mongo of Ming the Merciless and the other floating kingdoms in that overcast empire. Here’s to science, NASA and the monks. Flash jump, everybody!

tldr; or subspace, subtext

Though my faith in the robust and impeccable nature of Vulcan logic remains unshaken—Mister Spock was after all half human and thus prone to human hysterics—I do appreciate this analysis of such qualifiers of interesting or even fascinating and what they convey in modern parlance through the lens of the formative cultural impact his sober and supposedly dispassionate assessment of situations has had on generations.
Even the search for more sovereign synonyms probably do not distance us really from the subtext that what’s meant by calling something interesting means infotainment—something to hold one’s attention. It wasn’t always so and perhaps I might have presented the same argument but via the conduit of Goethe’s Faust, whose eponymous doctor dares to ask what force in creation could be more compelling than love. Interest, the demon Mephistopheles answers straightaway and without hesitation. The doomed Faust is of course cursed with a universal knowledge whose trivia and recall one could of course look up in his or hers Funk & Wagnalls but in those times conferred exclusive advantages. What do you think? Has the meaning of interesting been relaxed so as to signify nothing at all, making its opposites a grave transgression? No one wants to be uninteresting or boring, even if the judgment means little. In relative terms, I suppose there were fewer contenders for our undivided attention back then but the latter also illustrates how our perspective can make us all regret the bargain.

6x6

but they always land on their feet: gallery of brides tossing cats instead of bouquets

quantum of solace: an accessible primer on the starlit experiment that seems to suggest that we do not live in a predestined Cosmos

white monkey gig: a documentary about how foreigners were recruited to help market the Chinese building boom and subsequent bust

dii consentes: organic compounds discovered on asteroid belt dwarf planet Ceres

felis cattus: Mister Data’s sonnet to his pet cat, Spot

さくら: the cherry trees are in full blossom in the eastern Japanese town of Kawazu

mmxvi: annus horribilis, annus mirabilis

december: Pioneering US astronaut John Glenn passed away, as did America’s TV Dad, Alan Thicke. Doctor Henry Heimlich also left us, as did Zsa Zsa Gabor. Over a billion user accounts are compromised by a once pioneering search engine. Carnage and destruction continue in Aleppo as Syria, all the global powers’ proxy-war, is poised to fall to the entrenched government.  A truck ploughed through a crowded Christmas Market in Berlin.  Sadly, singer George Michael passed away as well as icon Carrie Fisher with her mother, Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds, joining her the next day.

november: Donald J Trump defeated Hillary Rodham Clinton as the forty-fifth presumptive to the office of President of the United States of America. We had to say farewell to America’s TV Mom, Florence Henderson. Janet Reno died, and we had to say good-bye to Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel on Fawlty Towers. Retro funk and soul performer Sharon Jones passed away as did Leon Russell though not of precisely the same genre. Poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen left us. Fidel Castro expired aged ninety, on Black Friday and cause of death was declared as America’s return to greatness.

october: It was announced that Bob Dylan will be awarded the Nobel prize for literature. Hopefully prematurely, obituaries for the Great Barrier Reef circulated, the cause of its demise being coral-bleaching.  A craze of dressing as scary clowns and frightening people has spread globally.

september: Meaningful global climate accords held in Paris are put into force, although later in the month carbon dioxide levels surpass anything experienced in the course of human events. NASA launches a probe to study and return with samples from an asteroid with a high potential to impact the Earth—in the twenty-third century, possibly either nudging it closer or pushing it further out of bounds.

august: Gene Wilder left us. Brazil hosted the Olympic Games. The actor that portrayed R2-D2 Kenny Baker sadly departed, as did host and political discussion moderator John McLaughlin. Costa Rica powered itself with renewable energy for one hundred days and hopes to wean itself off of fossil fuels completely.

july: A wholly solar-powered aircraft becomes the first to circumnavigate the globe. We had to say good-bye to Elie Wiesel. During Bastille Day celebrations, an atrocious terror attack occurred on promenade of Nice, setting off a summer of terror across Europe. An abortive coup d’état rocked Turkey and a political purge followed, exacerbating an already tense situation. The African Union’s fifty-four member nations issue a single passport that allows holders to travel visa-free within the bloc.

june: After two decades of construction, the Gotthard Base Tunnel under the Alps in opened. The UK voted to leave the European Union. The promising actor Anton Yelchin who played the new Chekov was struck down far too early. Boxer Muhammad Ali departed.

may: Presidential elections in Austria are too close to call, and the contenders a member of the Green party and a far-right candidate will hold a run-off later in the year. Nationalism is on the rise throughout the world. Super Tuesday’s delegates are awarded to Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump.

april: The pop megastar Prince passed on. Der Süddeutsche Zeitung along with a consortium of other news outlets publish millions of leaked documents implicating many heads of state and prominent figures in the Panama Papers scandal. For the first time in history, capital punishment is outlawed by more than half the countries in the world.

march: Coordinated bomb attacks take over a hundred lives in Lahore and Brussels, and ISIS claims responsibility. Sadly, comedian and show-master Garry Shandling passed away. World-renowned architect Zaha Hadid also left us. Myanmar sworn in its first democratically elected president in half a century.

february: For the first time since the Great Schism of 1054, the leaders of the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches met and committed to an Ecumenical Declaration. Writers Umberto Eco and Harper Lee passed away on the same day. Heretofore theoretical gravitational waves were observed for the first time.  A huge swath of Canadian temperate rain-forest will be protected forever and called Spirit Bear. Bolivia and Peru also reached a deal to protect Lake Titicaca.

january: Davie Bowie tragically passed away, as did musicians Glenn Frey and Natalie Cole. There’s an outbreak of the Zika virus, causing panic in the sub-tropics and prompting many couples to postpone having children, due to the risk of birth-defects. Brutal and powerful Mexican drug-trafficker Joaquín Guzmán is re-captured after his escape from a high-security detention facility. The International Atomic Energy Agency declared that Iran has complied and dismantled its nuclear weapons programme and instructed the UN to lift sanctions. 

roger ramjet

Though a healthy dose of skepticism lingers, NASA’s propulsion labs are concluding their experimental electromagnetic drive will work—efficiently transporting payloads to the Martian surface in a little over three months instead of a year—despite the small matter of the impulse engine’s apparent violation of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, the classical mechanics assertion that all actions have an equal and opposite reaction.
The demonstration that the engine does work came easier than the compelling reasons it ought not work for going against thermo- dynamics. Like how Quantum Mechanics explained observed anomalies without invoking deus ex machina needed for the Classical model by destroying the Planet Vulcan or the baffling kaon that watching a nuclear pot hinders its boiling, hypothetical pilot-waves may offer an solution, a strange one. The theory suggests that particles have precise space-time coordinates at all times, regardless of whether they’re observed or measured (against the accepted view that they do not) and may mean that in the vacuum of space, nothing is needed to push back.

synthehol

Vice Magazine interviews neuropharmacologist and addiction expert David Nutt who has spent the past two years developing a “chaperone” drug to introduce to the public that will replace alcohol, by imparting the good effects of drinking without the most delirious ones.
Dr Nutt had been pondering the idea for some time previously but did not have the medicinal tools at his disposal until a recreational chemist accidentally created what’s being called alcosynth and subsequently donated the formula to science. Dr Nutt predicts the demise of traditional booze within decades and will have his first field trials in Germany soon—due to the UK’s drug protection laws stymie research and distort social harms.  What do you think?  Will this catch on or become the disdain of purists?

press, depress, mash, hit, punch

With a sense of nostalgia that really is resonant, Messy Nessy Chic curates a vintage gallery that pays tribute to the disappearing push-button—those real, physical knobs and switches that arrayed dashboards, control panels and cockpits as well as gadgets and household items that felt so satisfying to push, and highly tempting to do so despite what catastrophic results might ensue. It’s certainly worth scrolling through all the images, especially the concept cars of future-past, and worth it as well sticking around and exploring more of her website.

memory alpha

To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of the debut of the Star Trek franchise in 1996, NBC concocted a special cross-over with the then top rated television programme and the present incarnation of the space-western, with sheriff CPT Janeway and the cast of the series Fraiser (without Kelsey Grammer being unfortunately already engaged in being CPT Morgan Bateman of the USS Bozeman stuck in a time-loop for nine decades). Though not as epic as a true cross-over episode like Phyllis Diller hailing on Gilligan’s Island with the Harlem Globetrotters on the Love Boat meet the Scooby Gang nor quite as cringe-worthy as a Very Star Wars Christmas, watching this is nonetheless pretty fantastically awkward.

star date 1312.4

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the premier of Star Trek and the launch of an amazing franchise—the Next Generation itself already having passed the half-way mark towards that milestone. Though NBC aired the pilot episode on 8 September 1966, it was actually screened by a Canadian broadcaster two days prior. Here and here are some fun commemorations from earlier in the year. Although it only ran for three seasons before being canceled (two years shy of its stated mission)—having been kept aloft by a tremendous fan-base, the cultural impact and endurance (not to mention the predictive aspect) of the show are immeasurable.

6x6

purdah: in defiance of statute and accepted cultural norms, an online campaign invites Iranian women to share images of themselves with their heads exposed, and in solidarity, men appear in hijabs

final frontier: the monumental park outside of Moscow honouring the pioneers of space exploration

red dwarf: the hinted at existence of exoplanet Proxima Centauri β is confirmed

goodwill ambassadors: Messy Nessy Chic digs up some vintage pocket guides issued to American service-members fighting overseas

at the third stroke: British Telecom is seeking out the speaking clock’s new voice, via the Presurfer

beyond antares: ladies and gentlemen, presenting the musical stylings of Miss Nichelle Nichols

5x5

post-mortem estate planning: last wills, Old Testament and ghosts make for an intriguing unexplained mystery

same as it ever was: Kermit the Frog, with accompaniment from Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, perform Talking Heads

mothra: a profile of the incredible Humming Bird Hawk Moth—I’ve spied these things in the garden and no one believed me

gesticulate: a glossary of essential hand gestures—especially useful for debates, via the brilliant Blört Everlasting 

expletive attributive: “Swear Trek” provides the profanity that ought to accompany interstellar exploration