10. Noisy doors.
You can’t walk three feet in a starship without some door whooshing or screeching at you. My office building has automatic sliding doors. They’re dead silent. If those doors went “wheet!” every time a person walked through them, about once a month some guy in accounting would snap and go on a shooting rampage. Sorry Scotty, the IEEE has revoked your membership until you learn to master WD-40
Read the rest here.
[off topic]
#20, Lauren, wish your old comment link had actually led somewhere (Re: Skeptic). The other link was fine and a good read.
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=12708#comment-717345
I still miss Gene Roddenberry. Thank goodness D.C. Fontana is still around. For the real ST fans, I’ll bet you’ve been here (with me and Alix):
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/index.html
CAUTION — If you’re not a Star Trek fan, don’t bother to click the above links.
“4. A Star Trek quiz:
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and ‘Ensign Gomez’ beam down to a planet. Which one isn’t coming back?”
LAWL!
Thats the truest statement in that whole list. Is it just me or did it seem like at least 400 crewmembers would die per episode? Like, almost every episode they would get hit by a photon torpedo, and Riker would say “Sir theres a breach on decks 16, 24, and 32!” and La Forge would say “REVERSING POLARITY!” and then at the end of the episode you would find out that at least 400 crew members were shunted out into space.
Gotta love Star Trek
#3 Then, you haven’t made any experimentation with audio. Phase reversal (phase invertion or polarity reversal, whatever) is a must sometimes, depending on what you want to do. Noise reduction is one of them. Psychoacoustics is another. M-S encoding another.
Then, in digital medical imaging, phase reversal is a technique often needed to avoid banding artifacts in signal sampling.
I could go on and on.
Star Trek has never really been “science fiction”. I’ve always termed it “futuristic adventure”. If you’re looking for scientific accuracy or consistency, this was never the show. That’s part of what makes it so fun to poke holes in it.
My favorite is related to the lack of fuses mentioned in the list. The other half of that problem is that they seem to fun to full power of the reactors directly through the bridge controls, which is why they explode all the time. I know they don’t use “old fashioned electricity” but they must have the equivalent of transformers available.
Real SF doesn’t sell well. Audiences want deathmatches with the creature of the week or shoot ‘em ups.
That’s my #1 objection… I mean, I watched the original religiously as a young’un (even though I was already deeply into real SF), and in later years found that TNG >/i> was a pretty good show (enough so to make the original a camp joke), although I’ve never had the opportunity to get into DS9, Voyager or Enterprise.
So I say this as someone not predisposed to dis the show, but as iGW sez, it’s never really been science fiction, having virtually no science in it. Same for Star Wars.
And that would be small beer, indeed for those of us who enjoy it anyway, except that it has had a pernicious effect on a couple generations who now studiously avoid anything labeled ‘science fiction’ because that’s what they thought ST & SW was, and if they didn’t like them, they decided that all science fiction is crap…
So between Roddenberry and Lucas, millions of people who could’ve had their minds and imaginations stimulated by real SF have been completely turned off to it, and are duller, drabber people for it, with all the subtle consequences for Western society that that entails.
Man, whats with all the dated posts? This is at least 4 years old, just like the captain Picard song; I remember seeing that ages ago.
Maybe Star Trek is cheesy in some ways, ok, a lot of ways. But for those of us that actually sat and watched the original episodes it was as high-frigging-tech as you could get at the time, for no other reason than it was one of the first shows, IN COLOR. You just didn’t notice the flatulant doors. You were too busy being awe-struck by seeing hot space chicks with beehives in velour bodysuits. Again, these were the early days when color tv options were limited to Bonaza, that Sunday night Disney thing and Bob Barker opening doors. I will always believe that only because of those bodysuits, our best minds were inspired to produce really valuable technology, like Spandex.
Lauren – Have you read Snow Crash by Neil Stephensen?
#26 ST was never about science fiction and Rodenberry made that quite clear many a time. He did use some real science & science fiction to embellish his accounts, but that’s as far as it goes.
#18
I’m just pointing out that in the Star wars universe even a boner is a nono for Jedis whereas in the Star Trek universe if it responds to your insinuations you might as well f*ck it.
#31 – Right on!
Star Trek Rules – Haters Drool!
#31 – Angel
Yes, yes, quite so – but the fact remains: Angel, you horny bastard!
#29 – Da Hoppa
In fact, no, never heard of it. But taking just a cursory look, it’s obviously worth checking out, which I intend to do, thx.
I’m generally sour on what’s been happening in SF for the last couple of decades, lotsa cookie-cutter cribbing from the masters and no shortage of formulaic pseudo-intellectual S&S derivatives; no thank you. I’m amply rewarded by exploring the obscure backcatalogs of the likes of Sturgeon, Silverberg, Vance, Aldiss, &c… The only true major, consistent talent I’ve found since the ’80s is Connie Willis, whom I happened upon by purest dumb luck.
I don’t deny that I’m certainly missing out on some nontrivial amount of quality contemporary SF, but OTOH, the Golden Age really is over. Literature and music both have not generally done well since the ’80s.
TOS is the best!
#23 – Dauragon88
“…then at the end of the episode you would find out that at least 400 crew members were shunted out into space.”
It occurred to me that even if the Enterprise had a cloaking device, you could still follow it around the Galaxy just by the trail of Federation-uniformed corpses left in it’s wake, like bread crumbs…
“Live Long and Prosper!”
Now that’s right out of the Bible!
Star trek is shit because it is… anyone who like it is gay
I find it immensely amusing you’re all sat at your PCs typing endless dross about Star Trek – statistically, 30% of you will have high-end autism – the rest?… Well, when you start to get sexually aroused over theoretical starship schematics, and still live with your parents, it’s time to assess your life, or lack thereof.