I had that same thought. Water bears are visible to the naked eye?! I had no idea.

How so? Perhaps I’m misremembering, but they were born on Earth and raised among humans, right? Does that not say something about the human culture of their time?

It was presented as exceptional in-universe, from Adira’s perspective. The fact that Adira felt weird about it at all paints the culture they grew up in as backwards.

The problem I had with that scene (and the whole series, really, especially season 3) was that it framed human culture of the future as being generally oppressive and backwards. Acceptance shouldn’t be portrayed as radical or exceptional. It should be normal and taken for granted among humans in the future. Like in TOS, Uhura’s role was a big deal for viewers specifically because it was not a big deal for the characters. They just showed us a better future, where a black woman in a respected professional position was normal.

Discovery didn’t show us a better future. It showed us a shitty future with a handful of decent people in it. This is just one example, but it’s one that stuck in my mind as well.

I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. Deflecting the blame to consumers is a misinformation tactic by corporations and governments. That doesn’t mean consumers can’t or shouldn’t take action on their own, of course – just that we also need to hold corporations and governments accountable. There are things that need to be done at a personal level and things that need to be done at an institutional level. Individual behavior influences institutional behavior, and vice-versa.

Take bottled water, for example. We ship fucking water across the country in plastic bottles when it is verifiably no better than the tap water in any reasonably-maintained system. Is it the consumers’ fault for buying it, the corporations’ fault for being completely amoral, or the government’s fault for allowing these ass-backwards incentives to exist and persist in the first place, and failing to provide sufficient alternatives? My choice to avoid bottled water whenever humanly possible in no way absolves these instutions of their failures and corruption that have made it a global problem.

Maybe the issue isn’t how people get to work but how they’re entirely reliant one getting the things they need to survive being supplied through unsustainable means.

That is unquestionably the bigger problem, yes.

We really do need to reduce car usage, but that’s not something that’s easily done by individuals when the cities they live in were designed to be unsustainably car-centric. We’ve spent about a century accumulating infrastructure debt and there’s no quick fix there. For me personally, I would not want to in a city that wasn’t walkable and bikeable, and I don’t ever want to drive if I can avoid it, but there aren’t enough cities like that in the world for everyone to do that. I do what I can in the hope that I will contribute to reaching critical mass. And this strategy is working to a degree – there’s a lot more attention given to city infrastructure today than there was even 10 years ago. There is political pressure locally to redesign cities to be more sustainable, driven by passionate grass-roots efforts. I always promote and vote for transportation alternatives in local elections, which is always a highly divisive topic because oil addiction is pervasive, deep-rooted, and in some places even lionized.

The same argument can be made for a lot of eco-friendly lifestyle choices, like vegetarianism. I’m not a strict vegetarian, but it’s really not hard to cut the vast majority of meat out of my diet. I understand that for some people that’s not viable, and we don’t have the infrastructure for everyone to go veg overnight anyway. So no judgment. It’s a drop in the bucket, to be sure, but hey, a drop is better than nothing.

On a larger scale, we have a huge problem with our economic structure. We’ve chased efficiency year after year, decade after decade, and now we’re so gosh-darned efficient that we have little redundancy or resiliency, wealth is hyper-concentrated, and local economies just bleed resources into the void. What would it take to feed a major city without importing food by truck and ship? It’s hard to imagine. It would require change at many levels of society, from the personal to the global.

This chart on Wikipedia sums it up neatly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consumption#/media/File:Global_Energy_Consumption.svg

You can see that from 2000 to 2021, renewable energy usage grew faster than any other type. However, coal, oil, and gas usage still grew, by a lot (with a couple recent dips that don’t appear to constitute a trend yet). Overall energy usage is increasing and that is unlikely to change. For now we’re merely slowing the growth of fossil fuel usage. Slowing down is not the same as reversing course.

So yeah, it’s true that “more is being done now than ever before”, but we’re operating from a baseline of nearly zero from 40 years ago. It’s easy to grow in proportional terms when you’re tiny to begin with.

Pulaski had interesting dynamics with almost every other character. I think she was written very well, especially for such a short tenure. Crusher was largely neglected by the writers.

LLM summary:

• Clear-air turbulence, which is invisible and unpredictable, is becoming more frequent and severe due to climate change.
• Studies have found a 55% increase in severe clear-air turbulence over the North Atlantic since 1979, with similar increases over the continental USA.
• The warming climate is strengthening wind shear in the jet streams, which is a major driver of increased clear-air turbulence.
• Convection caused by rising heat, particularly over oceans, is disrupting the fast-moving jet streams and leading to more turbulence.
• Climate models project a doubling or tripling of severe turbulence in the jet streams in the coming decades if climate change continues as expected.
• The increase in turbulence poses safety risks, as demonstrated by a 2024 Singapore Airlines incident that injured 83 passengers and resulted in one fatality.
• Passengers are advised to keep their seatbelts fastened even when the seatbelt sign is off, as turbulence can strike suddenly and unexpectedly.
• The FAA has documented 163 serious turbulence injuries to passengers and crew between 2009 and 2022.
• The jet streams, which commercial airliners fly through, can both help and hinder flights by pushing them across the Atlantic or slowing them down.
• Rising greenhouse gas levels, which are the highest in at least 800,000 years, are the primary driver behind the warming climate and resulting increase in turbulence.

I came here with exactly this episode in mind. I think it is representative in a few ways:

1. It involves an alien of the week.
2. The alien species is culturally similar to human societies we, as viewers, are familiar with.
3. It demonstrates what the Federation is all about, including the Prime Directive, respectfully dealing with less developed civilizations, and solving problems without violence (especially when the problems are your own fault).
4. It’s more or less self-contained. Whether this is “representative” is debatable, I guess. I think it’s a big part of Star Trek even though there’s a larger focus on season-long storylines in later series.

I love her channel. She’s a fun combination of exasperated and chill. Her videos are quite long so you might like 1.25x speed.

I’ve seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the “Empty Trash” command before I stepped in.

It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I’m not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn’t cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.

$17.99 for a 12 oz bag.

Not crazy expensive for premium coffee (if it is indeed that). But most will probably remain unopened as collector’s items anyway.

“Experts Exchange” is like the opposite of “cellar door” — the two most rage-inducing words in the English language.

This is true for pretty much any franchise. If you’re going to watch it all, you can’t go wrong with release order. That way you have the same context that original viewers did, and what the writers likely had in mind.

That doesn’t mean TOS the best starting point for newcomers, though, since they’re probably not committed to thousands of hours of Trek right out of the gate. They’re gonna bail if they don’t like the first few episodes they watch.

And regarding the Jurati Borg…I don’t know, I never found that confusing in the slightest. I think their intent came through just fine.

Yes, I was surprised to read that there was any misconception. It seemed pretty clear to me that nothing they did in the past would have altered the history of TNG/Voyager/etc.

As I recall, the order of events played out like this:

• Picard and crew entered an alternate timeline in the Picard era (25th century, ~20 years after TNG era).
• Picard took that timeline’s Borg Queen into the shared past of the two timelines.
• Jurati merged with that Borg Queen.
• They fixed the timeline and returned to the standard Star Trek timeline. Queen Jurati remained in the past. At this time, “Borg Queen Prime” (the one we know from First Contact) was still in the Delta Quadrant, unaffected by any of this.
• In the 25th century, Queen Jurati re-appears with her own collective, entirely separate from the Prime Collective we’ve known throughout TNG, Voyager, etc. From the 21st century up the 25th, Queen Jurati just stayed out of history’s way to avoid a time paradox, ensuring that the chain of events that led to her creation would still happen.

I really enjoyed Jurati’s story in season 2, and was a bit disappointed that we didn’t see her at all in season 3, since she and her collective should no longer be required to stay out of history’s way. But at the same time, they set that up at the end of season 2 pretty explicitly. I just felt like if they were going to bring the Borg back again, they ought to least mention that there’s a whole other collective of friendly Borg who are possibly much more technologically advanced than the Prime Borg and are kinda-sorta part of the Federation.

Good stuff! I’m bookmarking this for future reference.

I particularly liked this point:

Thus, impulsivity can be understood as an adaptive response to the contingencies present in an unstable environment rather than a moral failure in which animalistic drives overwhelm human rationality.

I hate the false dichotomy of “animalistic” vs “rational”, because animals are highly rational. They are even better than humans at some high-level tasks! For example: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/surprising-results-game-theory-studies-42926

That said, I don’t think the lack of a physical basis should dissuade anyone from thinking of psychology in terms of evolution. Regardless of the physical structure of the brain, I think it is reasonable to consider that high-level human behavior has origins going far back in our evolutionary chain, and that we share much of that with our animal cousins. In any case, this idea should be supported by behavioral research, not by an appeal to neurology — and particularly not by an appeal to fake neurology.

Turbulence might be enough bring it up and everywhere regardless. The movement of your own body would cycle air every which way right after you flush, plus many bathrooms have ventilation fans near the ceiling, drawing air upward.

IIRC the control in the kitchen also showed contamination. I wasn’t convinced by their methodology with this one. They demonstrated that flushing DID create aerosols, but they did not isolate that effect. “Poop is everywhere” isn’t really an answer to the question.

I’ve seen previous studies about the flavoring used, as well. Something about how it’s a food flavoring only approved for eating, not for inhaling.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of nicotine itself being a major contributor.