The ship flying out of the rift reminds me of the XCV-330 Enteprise from the 22nd Century, first seen as part of the Enterprise lineage of ships in a painting in TMP. The ring structure might be a coleopteric warp drive which the XCV-330 used, also used by Vulcan starships.

I think a similar ring design was also an early concept for the Enterprise, before they settled on the familiar saucer + nacelles look.

What’s the five-year failure rate for start-ups, again?

Totally agree with you. One of the things that I love about LDS is that it’s not just by and for fans of the show - that’s more or less a given with any longstanding franchise - but that it’s about fans of the show.

[Spoiler tag here because I’m talking about the most recent episode and I know some people won’t be caught up yet!]

Great notes, as always!

Freeman sends Purple Data back through the fissure in a photon torpedo tube, much like how Spock’s body was shot towards the Genesis Planet at the end of ST II.

Along with the use of the torpedo tube, I thought Mariner’s off-key flute playing in this scene was a homage to Scotty playing the bagpipes at Spock’s funeral.

This is also yet another reason SUVs are bad: bigger tyres, higher weight, more wear, more pollution.

It’s also another reason to have lower speed limits: less friction, less wear, less pollution.

Yes, particularly difficult with clipless pedals, such that strictly speaking I think it’s illegal to ride at night with them!

A classic party game!

So you get a puzzle piece with a photo that might be a bit of boob, and after six months you have enough pieces to see that it is, in fact, a very smooth man’s knee?

As others have said, this depends on the jurisdiction.

In the UK, you have to have lights on at night: white at the front, red at the back. They can either be steady or blinking.

Easy: live by the Venusian calendar. Each ‘day’ is 243 Earth days, so you only have to ‘write code and read book’ once every 243 days, and ‘lift weights and run’ once every Venusian ‘week’, i.e. every 1,701 Earth days. Your calendar is always open because no one understands it.

These interviews are really interesting! I’m going to have to go and read the book now.

Only three, huh? And people say he can’t change.

🖖

If us Star Trek nerds can’t get our facts straight, what hope for humanity?

Measure of a Man is season 2!

I’d start with Strange New Worlds. It’s very classic Trek in terms of its themes and stories, but as it’s still being made it has contemporary audiences in mind. If you like it, I would then go to TNG.

I’m not going to go through this point by point. Some of it I think is probably about right and some not. What I will say is that I don’t think it’s consistent to say people were crying wolf over Trump, who tried to overthrow one election and would have done the same with this one had he lost, and then in the same place to suggest that a Harris win would’ve resulted in the end of democracy based entirely on a loosely defined notion of elitism.

My point was that if the man is still ‘armed’, he hasn’t been ‘disarmed’, he just has one less (type of) gun. For example, if I told you that there was a man in my street with two guns, and then added that he’d now been disarmed (forcibly or otherwise), you would assume that he now had zero guns.

The fact that he didn’t call them trash is the salient point here.

I mean, apart from anything else, the word he used, whatever it was applied to, was ‘garbage’.

disarm

If a man had an assault rifle and a handgun, and he put down the assault rifle, would you describe him as ‘unarmed’? If so, I don’t think you can describe removing assault rifles as ‘disarming’ people.