On the EU and Tech Concerns

As I've noted previously, the EU's official continuity policy (OCP) was a creation intended to keep the storylines of individual licensed products continuous and uniform . . . and as we've seen, this care and concern did not necessarily extend into the technological arenas. (That's not a denigration, mind you . . . merely an observation.)

This is how we've ended up with A-Wings with titanium hulls (not unlike the old US spyplane the SR-71 Blackbird) on the one hand, and an uber-advanced neutronium-hulled culture in the other. This is how we ended up with EU fighter weapons that over the years have managed to leap from kilojoules to kilotons and starship weapons that have leapt from terajoules to teratons. In both cases we're looking at an increase of, oh, only about four-hundred twenty billion percent.

Of similar interest is the meandering history of cloaks in the EU. Just check out how many times the author, a writer of SW EU reference books, mentions retcons (retroactive continuity fixes . . . i.e. rationalizations of past continuity glitches and absent info), and how many of the ideas still make only sporadic sense even when repaired.

And yet this is what the EU Completist Vs. Debaters would prefer to use for tech info over the films . . . provided, that is, that they get to choose only the highest possible figures.

(I mean, really . . . how many times did you see Imperial admirals order weapons set to 0.000000000002% yield?)

"Smart Mass Thinking Putty" Armor

Ever since I bought some "Smart Mass Thinking Putty" way back when, I've wondered whether a similar compound might be usable as body armor. To be sure, this wasn't the most obvious idea . . . in general the material acts like somewhat gooey silly putty, and when it doesn't act like silly putty it's because it's been torn or shattered.

However, the basic idea was to have a material that would bend and flow but, in the event of impact, would act like Kevlar plating.

Well, we're not quite there yet, but we're close.

Add this to the list of things that would look goofy on televised sci-fi ("Behold my impenetrable jello armor!") but are actually workable.

Long Chains of Water

I've previously commented on reading about carbon nanotubes managing to create long chains of water in a polymer-like configuration (see link). This amused me, since it would provide a plausible path toward a mechanism for the otherwise-unlikely 'complex strings of water molecules' that were involved in creating the quasi-drunkenness from "Naked Now"[TNG1].

However, it now appears that the 'complex strings of water molecules' might not have been all that unlikely to begin with. According to some reports, long chains of water might actually be water in its normal state (see link). I'm not sure of all the implications of this idea (that is to say, I feel sure this sort of thing would have some sort of verifiable effect on biochemistry, water-as-a-solvent, and so on), but if true I find it even more amusing on a Trek-geek level than the nanotube idea.

Berman on Canon

A hat tip to Wayne Poe, who managed to only slightly misquote Star Trek Communicator #154 . . . a vast improvement over his normal misquotations!

Check out the quote here. (Wayne's version was only different for its artificial paragraph breaking.)

Threshold Cancelled

Hehehehe . . . I love it. I mean, I feel bad that decent folks like Mike Sussman and hottie-mchothots like Carla Gugino are out of work, but the sheer gut-punch to Braga is well-deserved. The guy stomped Trek into the ground, and I freely admit that I'm bitter. I'm quite pleased to see that his utter crappiness has been confirmed in the form of a show that didn't even make it a full season.

The funny part was that I was doing a write-up around the time it premiered, intending to be a little prescient because I knew . . . knew, I say! . . . that Braga the No-Talent Hack was going to kick a particular bit of technology in the balls just as he does with all other technology and science. As soon as I heard that he was going to do a show based on a sound that altered DNA, I knew it was only a matter of time before he utterly failed to consult a science advisor and had it happen over the phone.

"Hello?"
"(weird dumbass alien noise)"
"Blearghmmyxyllplk!"

The funny part is that Braga's hackery got himself cancelled so fast I never got a chance to finish the write-up!

Anyway, here it is, unfinished, its unfinishedness yet another proof of Braga's suck factor.

(Kickass link that sounds like a Trek fan bitching about Braga's bad writing (but is in fact some other guy bitching about Braga's bad writing) follows.)

It's not even a DNA-mutating disease per se, from what I read before the premiere . . . it's a *magic sound* that, even if it comes through a TV playing a camcorder's recording of the sound, can *alter your DNA*.

Note also that Braga has recently stated that Threshold is based on and grounded in real science.

So, if that's the case, then we ought to be able to ascertain something of this sound, should we not? After all, how long is it until Braga will have one of the Big Bad Aliens calling someone and playing the Sound of Doom, hmm?

The human voice occupies a certain sound frequency range, and ears hear another. Telecomm engineers took advantage of this and discovered that speech could be compressed into a 64kbps data stream with no loss in audible quality. Of course various errors occur, but on a phone call you'll hardly notice.

So, as soon as the aliens pick up the phone, we'll know that the Magic Sound has, at best, the ability to transmit information at 64kbps. That's 64,000 bits per second, or 8 kilobytes per second . . . or ever so slightly faster than a 56k modem.

Human DNA consists of about 3 billion base pairs, with the bases commonly represented as A, C, G, or T. Even if you just number them as 1, 2, 3, 4 and transmit that in binary (say, like 0, 1, 10, 11) you're going to need at least two bits per base pair, and realistically you'll need at least four (i.e. 00, 01, 10, 11 . . . otherwise how would you know that 1011 was 3,4 (i.e. G,T) versus 2,1,2,2 (C,A,C,C) or even 2,1,4 (C,A,T)?). But let's assume two bits for kicks . . . that gives us six billion bits for the human genome . . . or 715 megabytes.

Just try downloading that at 56k!

But this genetic-mutation-Magic-Sound-disease-thing probably wouldn't need to send that many . . . it might only need, say, half a million base pairs, or a million bits. That brings us down to 122 kilobytes, which at 64 kilobits per second (8 kilobytes per second) would only take 15.25 seconds.

"Aha!" you could say . . . "Braga was right! Half a million base pairs is all that a densely-coded virus like Herpes has, so indeed that data could be transmitted!"

You could say that, but you would be stupid. The sound would have to be activating pre-existing DNA in the human genome in the best case . . . otherwise how in the world would simply playing a sound make people have this genetic freakout? There's no mechanism, just magic.

Of course Braga doesn't realize that will be necessary, though he might eventually include that if someone tells him. I say this because in the premiere the sound was capable of making a funny fractal pattern for no apparent reason, and bloodstains would spontaneously reorganize into this pattern. Because, you know, blood cells are mobile little bastards.

"Oh, but Braga's smarter than you. He knew that the alien virus thingy was creating flagella on the red blood cells so they could move and make the pattern. Oh, and some sort of autolocation thingy so they'd know how to orient themselves into the pattern and if they'd done so correctly."

"Riiiiiight."

In fact, let's just go ahead and do a complete runthrough of all the bad science (along with the crappy writing) in just the premiere.

=====

1. The smokin'-hot Carla Gugino has almost no hesitation whatsoever in that one of her many doomsday scenarios is coming to pass. I sure wouldn't have minded seeing her bite her lip pensively . . .

. . .

Oh yeah, hi. What I was saying, though, was that Braga doesn't write human beings. He just sort of skips over humanity. Can you imagine if a chopper landed in front of Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens and said "hey, that book Icefire that you wrote about nukes causing a megawave from Antarctica? Yeah, that's happening, so could you maybe hook us up with some of the research you did?" I'd bet hard-earned cash that one or both of them would shit.

2.

See also: Kickass Link

Must Be Getting Senile

I've always had a certain aversion to the Star Trek vs. Star Wars fanfics. Sure, it's a quite popular genre among Vs. Debaters, but I guess I always felt it was a waste of time when there were still facts to be discovered. Or perhaps I didn't like how most of them are so crappy, biased, or both. Or maybe it was just the fact that once you've read one or two you've pretty much read them all. (I mean, how many variations of "Q decided to have a little fun" or "what's that odd spatial anomaly sending us far, far away and across time?" can you really have?) Or, maybe I was still ticked off because the one I started to write about ten years ago got lost in a disk failure. (It featured a spatial anomaly, BTW.)

Whatever the case, much of my weekend was spent working on crafting some preliminary notes for a potential fanfic . . . the ships, the overall plot, dramatis personae, and so on. (At the moment, it features a spatial anomaly, too.) It's probably going to suck given my complete inexperience, but I'm thinking it might be a fun exercise all the same. I'll let you know how it goes.

ST Canon Updates

Wow . . . Star Trek novel authors get really pissed off about canon. It's amusing, really. Whereas Karen Traviss and other SW authors have been polite (if strained) even in the face of SD.Net flamefests and blog comment invasions against them, Trek authors seemingly aren't so well-behaved.

I started asking the proverbial 'too many questions' in the Star Trek Lit forum at TrekBBS in response to a claim that those two of Taylor's novels said to be canon in fact weren't, and that furthermore StarTrek.com wasn't a valid source of Trek information. Specifically, I asked for sources, and pointed out links to my sources so as to explain the reason I was asking.

And then I was surprised to find myself set upon, being flamed like a newbie Trekkie after his first SD.Net post. (They were slightly more well-behaved, but only insofar as language was concerned. Check it out here.)

In any case, as a result of the exchanges I've thus gotten some material for my Trek canon page, and have updated it a bit and added new quotes to the quotes page. The main update to the Trek canon page appears here.

UPDATE: Not all of them in that thread are bad. One of them PM'ed me and we had a manly-hug sort of moment, so don't think too harshly of the whole lot.