Before I begin looking at Star Trek TNG, I really have to mention some caveats about my treatment of these shows as I babble on about them.

1) I'm not a die-hard Trekkie, and am not a big fan of excessive silliness and pseudoscience in my sci-fi (Well, except for Farscape... or maybe Red Dwarf?  Should I mention... *shudder*... Lexx?  Naah, not that.)  By 'excessive', I mean the stuff that hits you like a fish upside the head when you really don't want a fish upside the head.  In saying that, if the technobabble sounds somewhat right, or is plausible given the wonders of future science, I'll let it pass, but things that obviously cannot work even by the standards of pitiful 21st century science will be smacked down.

2) Stupid is stupid, and if I see stupid, I'll call it stupid.  Implausible character behaviour, moronic statements from characters that really should know better, etc. etc. will be stabbed with the nearest fork.

3) DATA.  I'll say it right now: If I wanted to see the adventures of Pinnochio, Disney already did the story better justice than this show ever will, and their choice to portray Data as a Pinnochioesque monstrosity really is a slap in the face to any reasonable characterization of artificial intelligences in sci-fi.  I swear, even the shipboard computer is a better AI than Data is, and it's just a bloody speech-sensitive user shell!  His behaviour would make more sense if Data popped onto the bridge of the Enterprise fresh from activation, but it's stated that not only has he been activated for a while, but he's spent years in Starfleet Academy, and has obviously been in Starfleet long enough to achieve his current rank.  In that time, it seems pretty unreasonable that he wouldn't have made a reasonable speech heuristic to properly imitate human speech without running through annoying lists of vernacular that serve only to annoy his crewmates.  Whenever Data opens his mouth, suspension of disbelief gets a kick in the groin.
  In saying this, I'll only rant about Data if he does something incredibly outrageous, even though most of his dialogue is cringe-worthy.

4) Future Continuity.  As I grew up in the TNG years, it's obvious I saw a lot of these episodes already, and I can even remember many of them.  Given this, I basically know how things go throughout the series and how they can affect interpretations of earlier events.  HOWEVER, I will try to write as if I don't have a clue as to what happens later in the series.  As there will be points where I'll inevitably fail in this, I'll wrap the times I do [in blueness and square brackets] to indicate my own take on an event in the episode I'm talking about in the context of something that happens later on and that I can remember at the time I'm talking about it.

5) It's old, and you've seen it - or at least, I'm assuming that you've seen the series.  This means that there WILL probably be spoilers, and I won't go out of my way to summarize the episodes more than necessary outside of the points and issues I bring up.  You have been warned, and I'll repeat this at the start of each commentary just to show I'm not evil.

6) I don't care if this entire exercise is silly.  I'll say what I want to say about the series, and nitpick where I want to nitpick.  Sure it's a show intended for entertainment, but if it sticks it's proverbial butt out at me, I'll kick it - MST3k mantra be damned. ^^

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TNG, Episodes 1&2 - Encounter at Farpoint! (Stardate 41153.7)

Tongue-in-cheek Summary:

Q: "I will judge you all for the SINS OF YOUR SPECIES!"
Picard: "Really?"
Q: "Naah, I'm just messing with you for my own enjoyment."
Picard: "But..."
Q: "Bored now.  I'm leaving.  See you later on in the series!" *disappears in a starburst effect*
Picard: "... asshole."
Wesley: <insert Space Core dialogue, replacing 'SPACE' with 'BRIDGE'.>

The Episode:

This is it.  This is the point where the characters of TNG are introduced, lacking every drop of character development (if applicable) they achieve as the series progresses.  The Cap'n and (partial) crew are off to Farpoint Station to grab the rest of the crew, for some reason lounging away at the edge of the 'vast unexplored mass of the galaxy'.  Their mission: To check out the base while they pick up their people.

'Solve the mystery of Farpoint Station!', and as for Data... I resist the urge to complain about him other than to say again that he's a badly written wanna-be android designed for comic relief and the writers' Pinocchio fetish.

The nemesis: Q.  He shows up as an archaic sea captain, freezes the first redshirt casualty of the series, and demands they 'return to their solar system'.  It's perfectly clear that he neither keeps his promises or is really out to judge humanity.  I mean, didn't the USS Hood fly by earlier to drop Riker and co. at Farpoint already?  If he were really out to judge humanity, wouldn't he have snagged the first Federation to fly by?  No, he zapped the Enterprise intentionally[, probably because of all the fun he foresaw on it later on due to his omniscience?].  Even without referring to later Q appearances, it seems pretty obvious he's there just to have fun messing with Picard and the crew, even if that doesn't become explicit until near the end of part 2.

[Forward reference!  ... it's obvious this is one of the cases of Q's meddling with lesser races, and he was probably acting independently.  It's probably one of the reasons why they punished him later on in the series by stripping his powers.]

Riker (to Wesley, with a rather creepy smile on his face): "See you on board!"  Also, I'm glad they didn't show clip footage in Riker's 'review' of the court room and totally break suspension of disbelief.

No automation on docking the saucer section, and yet Data helps out.  Does that count, I wonder?

Cameo from Bones!  You'd think he'd have retired sometime before his 137th birthday.  What a worker.

Data: "I would give it all up to be human."  *suppresses gag reflex*  Seriously... Pinocchio fetish.  Is it strange that I find him more annoying than Wesley?

Ah, the holodeck.  Why would things in the holodeck, if produced from the patterns of real objects and manifested in a similar way to transporter assembly, be temporary?  Obviously, some things in the holodeck are real, given Wesley was still wet when he stepped out.  There doesn't seem to be any obvious rules as to what is real or not in the holodeck... [and in later episodes it's implied that ALL of it is holographic!  And yet... wet Wesley.  Different writers, different rules.  Gotta love multiwriteritis - the plague of TV sci-fi.]

"Savage lifeforms don't even follow their own rules!" Q exclaims as he breaks his own repeatedly.  Again, it's pretty obvious he doesn't really care about rules, and is enjoying the whole process immensely.

["Force fields on full," eh?  I guess the term 'shields' wasn't standard yet.]

Picard finally calls Q on his real purpose there, and he puffs off in a silly CGI flashy light of boredom.

Rating:
As Soft Sci-Fi: ★★★★☆
As Hard Sci-Fi: ★★★☆☆

From soft standards, it was a pretty good episode, although at times the science was a little too squishy and arbitrary for hard standards, imo.  Only Data's nature seems blatantly unreasonable and silly to me, and it's a pretty strong first episode.

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TNG Episode 3 - The Naked Now (Stardate 41209.2)

Tongue-in-cheek Summary:

It's got water that makes you DRUNK, plus ensuing hijinks.  What more needs to be said? That's pretty much it.

The Episode:

Oh, great.  They looked at the old series, saw the episode with the loopy infectious water, and said, "Hey, why don't we redo THIS episode in the new series!"  Queue facepalm now.

They communicate with a ship where everyone sounds drunk, and which subsequently cuts off with the sound of an explosion.  They investigate, crew get infected with water that magically makes you drunk, and wacky things happen until they finally solve the problem before getting eaten by a black hole.

It can be safely said I have issues with the funky water.  If this water was in the databases, wouldn't its signs be on record?  Besides, how the hell can simple water molecules create psychoactive drugs in the system without either themselves or the psychoactive materials being detectable?  It's THREE BLOODY ATOMS, with two being the same element... no room for wacky drug production there.  This episode fails at chemistry, not to mention neurobiology.  It was bull when the story was first done, and it's still bull now that it's been redone.

Seriously... Data the Sexbot?  That is stupid on so many levels, and obviously another case of Data as comic relief.  Besides... DATA INFECTED?  He's a f'n ANDROID.  Putting aside the totally different brain design (machine vs. organic), any substance that would mess around with human neural biology couldn't possibly work against other neural biologies, much less one that isn't biological AT ALL. [They open his head later on, and I sure as hell don't see any water in there.  Idiot writers.]

Rating:
Soft sci-fi: ★★☆☆☆
Hard sci-fi: ★☆☆☆☆

You can get away with silly water in soft sci-fi, but by hard sci-fi standards it's idiotic, and Data being infected by something that intoxicates organic things is idiotic by either standard, and only for the sake of one sex joke!  Biology doesn't work that way, electronics doesn't work that way, chemistry doesn't work that way, and WATER doesn't work that way, black hole or no black hole.  Again, it was silly then, and it's silly now.  This was a weak episode, imho, especially as a follow up to the not-so-bad Farpoint.

Next Time: Racism... in... SPAAAAAAAACE!

Tags: caveats, data sucks, farpoint, naked now, star trek, wacky water
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: relaxed
Current Music: The Sound of Fans

Two things on the plate now, one mostly nerdy and one HIGHLY, STEREOTYPICALLY NERDY!

First thing... Star Ocean: The Playthrough!  I'm embarking on playing all four ... in as long as it takes, starting with the remakes on PSP.  Well... technically I started this a week ago with Star Ocean: First Departure, but frankly I messed up with Phia, and thus need to restart my game. -_-'  Forgot that she won't join if you have only one open slot vs. two, and I stupidly got the cat girl (that I could have gotten at any point) before visiting Astral again.  At least I know better than to grind Writing for the meagre handful of skill points I would get that way this time around, and that alone should save a few hours. ^^

Second thing... Star Trek: The Next Generation!  I'm gonna watch through it... the whole lot of it, and as a fan of hard sci-fi, I'm going to see how it stands up to harsher criteria for science fiction.  Keep in mind I'm not a Trekker / whatever they call Trek fans, so don't expect any flowery, nice-nice hand waving of crappy science or stupid logic.  Also, if I hear ANYONE even THINKING of humming the MST3k mantra... boot upside the head time.  No kidding.  I want to see how this series holds up to hard sci-fi criteria, and fully expect to nitpick it a LOT.  I find that fun, so I'm doin' it.  Sure, it's pointless. Sure, a billion people have already done it.  I'm doing it anyways.

... well, that's it.  Off I go.

Tags: annoyance, silliness, star ocean, star trek tng
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: frustrated

Hmmm... haven't touched LiveJournal in half a year, pretty much. ^^'... Not a good habit to get into.

Anyways...

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Harper got in with a majority, thanks to people voting for the NDP in Liberal strong ridings and vice versa.  This, well... sucks.  Badly.  Harper's Conservatives were trying to rape the populace even with a minority, and now that they have unchecked power... well, with any luck there'll still be a Canada in four years when we throw the bastards out and replace them with (probably) the NDP to try and fix the damage done.

Here's to four years of Rapey the Clown having his way with this country of mine!

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A coworker gave me a cold for the umpteenth time.  I swear... this year the colds are ten times as numerous and a hundred times as annoying. -_-'

Tags: colds, harper majority, politics
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: grumpy

*sigh*... thanks to a certain webcomic, I have discovered that most of the works by Emily Dickinson, one of my favourite poets, can be sung to the music of Gilligan's Island with no more modification than the repeat of an occasional line.

... damn it.

Tags: brain cleaning required, gilligan's island, poetry
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Guess. :p

YAY!  It's been consistently under 20 degrees for the first time in MONTHS!  I can sleep without a fan in my face!  My juices AREN'T boiling me inside my skin!  YAY!

... of course, that means that summer's almost over, but given it started here in f'n APRIL more or less, it's overstayed it's welcome, imho.

Well... now starts another happy work week.  Off I go to shower!

...

... heh.  The cat definitely didn't like sticking his head in the shower.  Head came out from behind the curtain, glanced up and around frantically as he got misted by the spray, and retreated with an annoyed meow. Well... teaches HIM to follow me into the bathroom when I'm getting ready for work. ^^

Must run, gotta dash, etc. etc.

Tags: cat, comfort zone, summer
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: happy

The Jenny McCarthy Body Count is now at 63,484 vaccine preventable illnesses, 617 vaccine preventable deaths, and 0 vaccine-induced autism cases.  That's pretty impressive given the count started a mere 3 years ago.  It's a pity she can't be zapped with criminal negligence by convincing so many people to not get vaccinated or not have their children vaccinated! -_-'

*sigh*... ah, well.  It wouldn't be so bad if not getting vaccinated got rid of the idiots who did that, but more often than not they kill old people, people who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons, or people with weakened immune systems (big e.g. CANCER PATIENTS!)... all from diseases that were mostly eliminated before this stupid anti-vaccination thing happened.  The miracle of the elimination of smallpox will never be repeatable with other diseases thanks to morons like them.

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Stupid calendar.  It's still supposed to be June, not halfway through August, dammit!  Gaar.  If this keeps up, November will be here in no time, and I had things to do before having to write a novel for Novel Writing Month!

I say it again... Gaar!  Gaar!  Gaaaar!  Garar!

Tags: novel writing month, stupidity, time, vaccines
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Rattle of Outdoor Wind Chimes

"Kiss space goodbye", huh?

Well... lets see if opinions change when our ability to look out into space becomes good enough to see Earth-sized planets around distant solar systems so we can get a good count of possible life-bearing planets.

Will lifeboats be so improbable if we see five fully inhabitable planets out there?  Ten?  Dozens? Hundreds?

We can't see what's out there in enough detail yet to be able to pick out destinations.  Once we can... the story may change.

IMHO, we really should be looking into the following if we want to survive long enough as a species to get to space:
1) population control that won't get citizens angry,
2) better education to increase the number of good ideas being produced by the human race, and stronger encouragement of intelligence and scientific achievement,
3) focus on fully enclosed biohabitat research to live in severely inhospitable places on THIS planet, as well as space,
4) life suspension technologies... or at least the ability to transfer consciousness to some sort of backup medium that eats less resources than a fully living human being while not becoming an unliving hell,
5) genetic engineering to optimize digestive ability and energy usage in individuals to maximize current food resources,
6) making better foods that are more nutritionally useful, less resource intensive to make, and not likely to make people sick,
7) genetic engineering to make people / livestock / plants function in harsh environments to turn normally useless land into cropland / living space without excessive energy use,
8) more efficient energy supplies / lower energy technology (which we're already doing anyway, so not much of a point 8 there),
9) design of better social structures that are less amenable to special interest / corporate interference and hijacking,
10) elimination of war, so we can focus our efforts on getting off this mudball,
11) elimination of religion, because most religions would actively fight most of the above on general principle as 'playing God' or some such nonsense.

Yes some of these options sound nasty (and probably are), but survival trumps extinction, imho... besides, we're clever.  I'm sure we'll figure out a way to do all the above without turning the world into some sort of horrible dystopia (or at least have some limit on the 'horrible dystopia' phase).

I can guarantee that humanity won't be what we thought of as humanity by the time it's all over.  Maybe that's a good thing, though.

Tags: religion, space, the future
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: hopeful

One week 'til vacation time!  Yay!  ... whereby I'll spend 10 days (more or less) perched behind a computer cranking out (hopefully) mass volumes of game engine code.

Yeah, right.  I'm probably gonna game and read all week. -_-'  So much for productivity.

Work is the money-generating hamster wheel, while free time is work time?  How the hell does THAT work? -_-'

Tags: boo, hamster wheel, misplaced vacation
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: resigned
Current Music: Tranquil Scenery

Heh... can't help but notice some defensiveness from the BBC about BP, as it's stocks plummet and it gets ripped to shreds in the media.

1. BP deserves every inch of it's abuse right now.  I have no sympathy for the evasions, the nonsense clean-up plans (I mean, measures to save the walruses in the Gulf?  Come on!), and all the other crap they're spewing right now, not to mention the... well, unwise comments from it's CEO.  Their rapeage in the stock market is only natural when a company is VERY stupid for a VERY long time.
2. Britain != British Petroleum.  Just because British Petroleum caused one of the greatest disasters in history doesn't mean there's something wrong with British people in general, or that the people of Great Britain are somehow evil, monstrous beings out to rape the world.  The two things are unrelated, so anyone who DOES relate them is a moron.
3. When a company does something like British Petroleum did, it doesn't matter that so much is riding on their backs.  The idiots who invested in BP should have done some research, and should have noticed that BP skimped on safety checks, big time, over quite a long time.  A disaster was just waiting to happen... and instead of pressuring them to fix their record, people just invested and shovelled money into their pockets.

Oh, waah.  The Mayor of London is whining about how BP is getting smashed in the 'international airwaves'.  I grant his talking about anti-British sentiment hits, given points 1 and 2 above I have to support him that people shouldn't beat up Britain over this... but no matter how big a British company it is, if it does something this bad, it deserves everything it gets.  It's not as if it's getting beaten up on 'international airwaves' without reason, after all... the company only caused a HUGE DISASTER that will result in enormous environmental and economic damage.  No big deal, if you believe Mr. Johnson.

"Endlessly buck passing and name calling?"  There's only one real name that I see being called, and it's trying frantically to pass on the buck that's sitting rightfully on it's lap.

If China gobbles up large numbers of BP shares after this, the only ones to blame would be... BP.  Blaming the media and the US for BP's possible fall is like blaming the victim for the actions of the criminal.  BP chose to skimp on safeties, and this is what happened.

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From the article, on BP's crappy stock rates: "This is despite the company continuing to enjoy high "investment grade" ratings from all three major ratings agencies."

... don't get me started on those rating agencies.  They're like the big brothers of credit agencies, with their whims having more impact on stock value than actual performance on the part of businesses.  It's disgusting.

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PS. What a topic for a birthday entry! Bwahaha! *sigh*

Tags: bbc, british petroleum
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: irritated

More of a 'keep alive' entry than anything.  I'm having a hard time writing entries even monthly in my real life, paper-and-pencil journal, much less this thing...  gotta step it up!

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Firstly... ANOTHER blogging teacher gets fired for having the nerve to speak their own mind when off the clock.  It's insane...  why is the rest of humanity free to hold their own opinions on their own time, but not teachers?  I can see the problems with saying any old thing to a class, but she was doing it on her own time, leaving out names, etc.  It's stupid, and it's costing her a livelihood.  It doesn't matter what the hell she says on her own time, as long as she doesn't 'corrupt the youth' on the clock, as if her opinions were really that horrible... then again, it was a private school, and I suppose they have the right to hire and fire for whatever reasons they see fit.  Still, it would be nice for them to

The moral of the story? Teachers: avoid working at private schools if you ever want to have the right to speak your mind without Big Principal spanking your ass!

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Darned split utility vanished somehow... had to replace it while updating so that Qt didn't hang forever on emerge.  Whee!

Easy to replace, but I still would love to know how that command vanished in the first place...

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I can't f'n wait until I finish catching up with the Wheel of Time.  It started out so well, zooming through three of the books in the first few weeks sometime last December, but time passed, and eventually it took me over a month to end Book 9, and now, after three weeks, I'm still a third of the way into Book 10... and there's two more to go.

I wanna read the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant to catch up with the new ones spit up by Donaldson, dammit! T_T  When did reading WoT become a f'n chore? It's not as if the books are boring... I just find myself doing other things instead of finishing it off.  And then there's all those religious texts that I want to go through like a cat going through toilet paper...

So much to do, so much to do... and so much time wasted not doing it.

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Well, there goes my bandwidth for the month.  Cogeco parcels it out like gold, and charges just about as much for it...  Sixty gigs, BOTH WAYS, costing well over forty.  That's... fucking... insane, and with bittorrent's both-wayism that means the sixty gigs is actually closer to thirty or forty five.  Unfortunately, due to the current circumstances of my lodgings that's what I'm stuck with.  Methinks I'll be shelling out extra cash at the end of this month...

Just for reference, every other internet package I've seen in this area gives at least 200 Gb for similar prices, both ways.  COGECO SUCKS DONKEY GONADS, but I can't really get around that without a big initial expenditure putting infrastructure in what is someone else's house, and would thus cost me even more money if and when I leave.  Gaah.

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Pro: Found an amazing combination of deinterlace filters!
Con: They don't thread well at all, meaning that I have to do several videos at once to properly use all four cores of my computer, and they all take forever to finish.  Baah.  Good thing it can do this stuff while I'm at work assuming my goddamned nVidia xserver doesn't poop out as it's wont to do.  I literally have to turn off SLI just to keep it from going into an endless loop condition...

I hate proprietary drivers.  I really do... or the worse case: my uber video card is going bust only a year down the road.

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Well, that's about all I can write that's Safe For Intarweb... so off I go, to read something that isn't Crossroads of Twilight.  *sigh*...  Still, pretty long for a keep alive entry...


PS. British Petroleum should be VIVISECTED and the bastards within responsible for the crap going down in the Gulf VIVISECTED TOO!  WITH RUSTY KNIVES!  Instead, they'll probably get juicy buyout packages and retire to their newly-bought castles while the world burns...

P.P.S. Tommorrow's mah birfday!  Whee!  Time to check another one off the limited number I've got yet.  Yeah.  Yay.

Tags: annoyances, british dumbasseum, cogeco sucks, linux, teacher troubles
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: annoyed

Damn coworker gave me the bubonic plague (or the cold virus equivalent of it, anyways).  In the last five days, I've suffered more than I ever have any time in my life.

Seriously... when I was a teenager, I broke my pinky and then tried to flex it.  That... hurt, needless to say.  From Sunday night to Tuesday, every single swallow was at least three times that painful.  Every swallow.  Now, you may or may not notice it, but the average person swallows quite a lot during the course of a day naturally and autonomously... which, in my case, lead to an excruciating amount of sheer agony every few minutes.  If it weren't for the wonder twin combo of Tylenol and Advil (which do work together, btw) every four hours, I would have spent the whole time curled up in foetal position, probably screaming as loudly as my defunct larynx would let me instead of simply being in barely-tolerable agony.

Oh, yeah... this cold also killed my voice.  Couldn't speak without experiencing something akin to what a human arm must feel like when hewn off with a hacksaw... and that's with the one-two combo of Tylevil.

Thankfully, that's all over now, and I'm croaking like a frog, at least.  No sore throat, just a nasty, phlemy cough and plugged ears that should disappear shortly... the Cold From Hell downgraded to a fraction of it's normal strength into a mere Normal Annoying Cold.

*sigh*... pity I lost a lot of work during this time, and am probably going to have to claim my vacation pay months before I intended to do so.  Either that, or cross my fingers for the gov't to give me my tax return money in a timely fashion.

Yeah, right.  Vacation pay it is.

Tags: agony, annoyance, cold, hell, tylevil
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: bleah
Current Music: King of Pain, the Police

"Animal rights thugs: Researchers' children are not off limits".  ... -_-'

A little more of a timely issue this time, but still in the same family of arseholery. Harassing the poor guy and his family while he was working on primates is one (bad! Very BAD!) thing, but harassing him and his family when he stopped doing what they're harassing him about just because he spoke out in support of what those arsewipes disagree with is not only crossing a line (which they already crossed, but anyways...), but going way out into the netherlands of indecency.  Harassing children for things their parents do is horrible enough, but doing it when the parents don't do it anymore as if they were still doing it is just straight out evil.

So... these activists are definitely evil in many senses of the term, imho.

Negotiationisover.com - site of idiocy, anti-science, and thuggery, dedicated to making the lives of those who make our lives better living hells while ignoring the truly nasty 'experimenters' that, ironically, are ignored because they are trying (and failing) to prove vaccines are bad and medicine kills you.

Gaah...

Tags: anti-science, idiocy, terrorists
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: disappointed

"Teachers' Virtual Lives Conflict With Classroom"?  This, among other cases like it, makes me sick.  It really does.  When a person is off the clock, on their own time, it shouldn't fucking matter what they do for their own personal enjoyment if it doesn't directly affect their performance in class.  Apparently, it's not okay for teachers to be normal human beings when not in class, and teachers have lost their jobs and careers because they post silly pictures on Facebook and do things that a huge portion of normal human beings do (i.e. drink, dress up in silly costumes, complain about people they run into and don't like, etc.).

Normal people drink, assholes.  Normal people vent about people that peeve them, and normal people talk about being drunk.  It's what being a normal person is all about.  What you idiots demand of teachers is that they give up their ability to do whatever the hell they want on their own time in favour of being YOUR idea of 'prim and proper', and that looks to me like a serious smackdown to personal liberties and freedom of expression... and these board idiots get away with it!

... when a person is barred from expression or being themselves because another person or persons who are NOT directly affected by the first person's actions, something is very, very wrong.  This is wrong, and I seriously hope some of the teachers that are being affected by idiots like those can get first amendment violations to stick on those bastards.

To put the cherry on the top of the cake, this stuff is happening in the same country that deemed corporate dollars 'protected free speech', while actual free speech is squashed in certain careers or fields.  Yay.

If I hear about crap like this happening in Canada, I swear I'll start writing the offending boards and newspapers.  I mean it.  This stuff can't be allowed.

Tags: fired for being normal, normal people, teachers
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: annoyed

*cue orchestral music*

Just was looking over at Pharyngula this morning, and saw the wonderful 'God Equation'.

(Hl x π)÷ Ω = c (Hl = the radio frequency of the hydrogen fine transition in space, Ω = 0.123456789 to represent the digits in the decimal number system, and c = speed of light)

Apparently, this amazing discovery was made by an engineer from Oxford and independently verified by a couple of other apparently equally genius people with an incredible list of credentials.

Apparently, the real fact of this ratio balancing out proves that the universe was created by an intelligent being!

Apparently, the theists are right and the atheists are totally wrong.

Apparently, even though we used to think the speed of light was about 1,079 million kilometers an hour, according to this formula scientists have been utterly wrong and light really travels at... 361,448.9 MHz!

*cue sound of needle scraping across record as it's rapidly pulled off of a phonograph*

Yay. Apparently, this formula was made by people who have no idea about the principle of unit conservation and the requirement that units balance out in physics equations, or that cycles per second is ONLY a measure of speed when you're talking about timepieces and CPUs.

Even better, they throw in a magical extra conversion to convert it away from 'megalithic yards' (which are apparently also measured in cycles per second too *rolls eyes*) using the factor 0.82966 seconds per meter divided by cycles per second which, other than being mathematically necessary to make this stupid formula spit out a number even close to the speed of light, is as fake as that omega factor in the equation.

*snip*


PS. Urgh... time to go to work after 4 hours of sleep. This... bites.

Late PPS. That last paragraph there was a bit of a non-sequitur, so I snipped it out.

Tags: bad math, god equation, mornings suck
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Fan Hum.

Apparently, virtually (if not literally) every living (vertebrate) eye is messed up. Big time.

Firstly, vertebrate (i.e. things like us, with spines and stuff) eyes have nifty lens systems in many cases, but... the retinas are backwards. The cones and rods point backwards, with blood vessels and nerves closest to the light coming in and covering up all those nice light receiving cells. To make things even worse, there's a nice dark light-absorbing pigment layer right in the back, right next to these cones and rods, that keeps light from reflecting back and messing up the image. That in itself, of course, isn't so bad... but absorbing that light makes that tissue really warm up and those nice rods and cones that are pressed right up to the pigmented layer happen to be VERY heat sensitive. This means that tons more blood needs to be cycled by the eyes to just keep those pigmented layers cool so as to not blind us when we actually look at light.

To make matters even worse, those nerves on the outside of the retina have to get back into the body and to the brain somehow, and so they dive in THROUGH the retina... hence, why we have blind spots.

Invertebrates have a better layout - their retinas face the right way around. Less blood flow is needed because, being outward faced, they don't get warmed up by that pigment layer at the back. Light receptors can be more tightly packed, there's no veins or nerves blocking the view. There's no blind spot, because the nerves don't have to dive in through the retina. The light receiving cells get more efficiently fed because there's less distance for the blood vessels to travel before getting to the cells.

Problem? Many of the invertebrates work using pinhole camera type vision... they have no (or partial) lenses, and thus they're stuck with a set focus point. They have more efficient eyes that require less blood flow that our eyes have, but things blur out if they're too far away or too near.

*sigh*... anyone looking for imperfection in nature has a prime example sitting between their foreheads and noses. Too bad we can't figure out how to give humans the nice, independent focus capability of a lens with a nice, non-blind-spotted, forward facing retina. Tripling the normal, healthy lifespan would be nice while we're at it, too. ^^


PS. Borrowed and finally saw the new Star Trek movie on DVD, and was... mildly impressed. It's not bad, even if it was a little bit gimmicky. I wouldn't buy it, but I wouldn't go out of my way to not watch it again.

PPS. This is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. :D (composite image of a Saturn solar eclipse made by the Cassini probe last year as it went by.) If you look at the bright dot around the second-in ring on the left side... that's Earth.

Tags: evolution, eyes, imperfection, transhumanism
Current Location: Acheron's Shore
Current Mood: amused