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How do you mark, label, or otherwise identify the contents of your bottles? I'm currently using masking tape and a marker, but I'm curious what most other people use.
I started off just marking bottle caps with a sharpie. This worked well for my own purposes, but whenever I give it to someone they had no idea what it was. Last Christmas I gave beer as gifts, so I made a special label. I bought beer bottle label paper and was able to design any shape and print it out. Cutting out the labels was a pain, applying the labels was a pain, and after wards half of them came off.
Lately I have been using those mailing label sheets that are meant for your printer. They are adhesive so it is really easy to put them on. They are also really cheap. I usually just write the label by hand but you could print it. I think they give the bottles a "bootleg" feel, which I like.
I like to use custom bottle caps. They are really cheap and you can design whatever you want and have it printed on them. They also make for good stocking stuffers for any home brewing friend/family members.
I don't label the bottle itself, because I hate removing the labels later.
Instead, I mark the cap with a sharpie. I have a number/naming convention I use, typically something like
For example,
I design my labels in Pixelmator. They are pretty small at 2.25" x 1.25" but this way I don't use too much paper. Speaking of paper I like to take grocery bags and cut them into 8.5" x 11" sheets, then feed them into my inkjet printer just like standard letter sized paper. Grocery bag paper has a nice texture, thickness and brown color that isn't as blindingly bright as normal printer paper.
Just like Timone mentioned, I use twine to attach around the neck of the bottle. Much nicer than scraping an adhesive label off. Although the twine loop can slide off when putting the bottle into a six-pack sleeve.
A quick coat of polyurethane will give the labels a nice shine and keep them from getting wet in a cooler of ice. You can get a spray bottle of it at the hardware store.
I prepare my labels in inkscape/gimp and print them out onto card stock. I cut them a bit smaller than a business card, punch a hole in one side, and tie it around the bottle neck with a bit of twine. It gives a really classy effect without having to scrape stickers off the bottle.
I started writing on the bottle caps with a marker, but it could be hard to write on the cap. Lately I've been using circle shaped garage sale stickers on the caps. It's easy to use and I don't have to remove anything from the bottle itself. If you can find the multi-colored labels, it makes it much easier to identify the beer at a glance.
Head to your local home improvement store and pick up some "Chalk Board Paint" (spray paint). You can tape off a section of your bottle, paint, and label with chalk. You will want to paint a portion that doesn't get touched so much... perhaps the neck of the bottle.
If you don't need anything too custom, http://beerlabelizer.com/ is a great site for making easy labels. They claim to have good luck using milk as an adhesive, though I've yet to personally try it.
On the low-end of things -- similar to "sharpie on the cap" but more environmental friendly -- I use grease pencil. You can write right on the bottle, and it comes off easily with a "brillo" type scrubber.
The peelings from the grease pencil can go in the woodstove or compost, and there's no hunk of plastic to discard.
I've done some printing of labels and also some stickers from StickerMule.com, but for quick labels, I use one of those "DYMO" labelmaker machines where you type on it and it spits out a text label. It's pretty handy for labeling fermenters, kegs, etc. with contents and date. We bought it to label crap in the garage, but it turned out useful for bottles and the rest too.
I have no artistic skills. I use beerlabelizer.com to create a label. Print it on normal paper. Cut the labels out. Use regular glue sticks to apply glue to the back of the paper label and fix onto the bottle.
The disadvantage of this approach is that you can't put these in a cooler with ice as the label will come off. This is also an advantage because de-labeling is super easy. The labels seem to stay just fine in storage and in refrigerators.
I sharpie the cap for identification if I haven't applied labels yet.
Most of the time I get my labels from beerlabelcreator.com. They have some cool designs, and it takes just a couple of minutes to create a nice label and save it as a printable PDF with 2x3 or 3x4 labels per sheet, depending on bottle size. Use glue stick or milk to attach to bottles.
I print on Avery 5408 labels, which fit on bottle caps nicely.
I do label design in Photoshop Elements 2.0 (which is the "lite" Photoshop from like 2002, but later versions probably work also).
To make circular text that goes around the perimeter of the label in Photoshop Elements:
Copy image to the clipboard. Download the Avery 5408 template. Paste in logo repeatedly. Print, and stick on bottle caps.
I use Avery mailing labels. I have a background in graphic design so I like to make a professional looking label. I do the design in photoshop and print them out 10 to a sheet. They come off easy after soaking in warm soapy water for 30 seconds.
I know lots of people use masking tape and such. To me nothing says "drink at your own risk" like a masking tape label. Much rather a new drinker goes into my beer with a good feeling.
Checkout www.BeerClings.com. This is by far the easiest way to label, plus you can reuse the labels. They work great.
+1 for a sharpie on the caps.
I sometimes print labels out and wet the back of the paper with a sponge that has been soaked in milk - then slap the labels on. When the milk dries, the labels are stuck on pretty good...and are super easy to remove with a short soak.
Printer Paper and milk. that's right milk!
I print the labels on my ink jet (laser is better as the ink won't run) and then dip it in milk and attach to the bottle. Run the bottle under hot water for a few seconds and the label comes right off.
I have designed a label for myself in Inkscape and bought some Wheatpaste that I use to glue it on the bottle. Works quite nice, but is quite easy to remove again.
I discovered that sometimes the label comes partly off while drying, but if you just remove it then, resoak it in the past and apply it again, it normally sticks.
Good thread, I'll give my two cents. +++++ 1 for BeerClings. Easy, affordable, and most important reusable. I got tired of trying to do them myself and found these to work the best of all the ones I tried online. They will definitely last the longest. I think they have the best design studio as well, tons of clip art and templates to work with.
If you want an easy and inexpensive way to put the label on your bottle try milk. Make sure the bottles are dry, paint the back of the paper with milk, and press it on. It resists sweating, adheres well, and comes off completely after a few seconds soak in hot soapy water.
I design my labels in Inkscape and print them with a laser printer onto labels from Minilabels which have an enormous number of labels available in different materials/adhesive and printing methods.
When I'm going to be giving beer as a gift or will be cellaring my beer for a while I print my labels on mailing labels. Then I give them a light spray of lacquer to waterproof them (so the ink doesn't run from condensation).
If they're not for such a formal affair I mark the cap with a sharpie.
I design my labels in OOo Writer and print them on this label paper. I can't remember the brand name off the top of my head (I threw away the packaging), but it's great stuff. A lot cheaper than Minilabels and more versatile since you have the whole 8.5x11 to work with (I usually do 9 labels per sheet).
For wine bottles.. we use Wine Cellar Bottle Tags. It's nice to be able to read what you have shelved without pulling all your bottles out trying to find the one you are looking for. They sell cheap disposable paper ones & reusable dry-erase style ones.
I create a label in PaintShopPro (even Microsoft Paint would do).
The information that I usually put on the label: Beer name, type, bottling date and %alcohol, I also add a few lines/images to make it prettier.
Then I print on regular paper (6 labels per sheet). After cutting my label to size, I use a paper glue stick to attach my label to a bottle. They stick well, but they can be taken out very easily by soaking the bottle in water for a few seconds.
Here is my process in details : How to create a beer label
It has worked quite well for over a year. Here is my latest label:


text:
What is the difference between a defect and a bug?
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That is: A defect does not necessarily mean there is a bug in the code, it could be a function that was not implemented but defined in the requirements of the software.
From the Wikipedia page on software testing:
Quoting Ilene Burnstein from the book Practical Software Testing (recommended) who parts from the definition in the "IEEE Standards Collection for Software Engineering" (1994) and "IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology" (standard 610.12, 1990):
Faults (Defects)
You can read the full chapter in Google Books, here.
There some different terms related to software bugs. Excerpt from a course I took:
According to this, there is no difference between a defect and a bug. However, some people argue that bug is an error that is found before releasing the software, whereas defect is one found by the customer.
I couldn't resist posting the famous "first actual case of bug being found".
Oh dear.
Back in the old days - defective operation of a computer was caused by all sorts of things - including rats chewing the wiring and real bugs (critters) getting into the works.
The term BUG has stuck as a term that means something not working as expected.
BUG should be thought of as a jargon term meaning a defect.
A defect is a technically correct term meaning that the thing does not do as it should.
Wherever possible, using DEFECT instead of BUG actually carries with it a connotation that we acknowledge our failures (our defects, our lack of understanding of user requirements or the things we overlooked in implementation) instead of dressing it up as the more trivial sounding "bug".
Use DEFECT.
Try not to use the term BUG. Its silly, irrelevant, historical, and trivialising.
From the IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering Terminology, which is cited in the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge KA for Software Testing and Software Quality:
I think the definition of failure is the most relevant. Everything begins with a mistake, whether it's in the requirements, the design, the implementation, or the test case/procedure. If this mistake is manifested in software, it becomes a fault. A failure is caused by the existence of one or more faults in software.
I'm not to keen on the formal definition of error, though. I very much prefer the definition provided by dukeofgaming in his answer, however, the one in this answer is the IEEE standard definition of error.
Dan McGrath's answer nailed it right.
Maybe an example would make it clearer.
Example: Client wanted the web form to be able to save and close the window.
Scenario #1: Web form have a save button, and another close button. Result: Defect, because client wanted the 1 button to save and close the window. Developer misunderstood and created separately. Because both buttons performed their requirements, it is not a bug, but a defect because it didn't meet client's requirement.
Scenario #2: Web form have a save & close button, but only saves but does not close. Result: Bug. Because the button does not perform as required/expected. Developer knows it is suppose to produce that result but ultimately it didn't. (perhaps coding error)
Not sure if this makes it clearer.
p/s: from a developer stand point (I was once), both defects and bugs are just as important. We'll still fix it.
We even encountered weird anomalies, which we categorized under bugs and we continously try to figure out what is the cause and how to fix it. Terming it bugs doesn't make it trivial compared to defects.
The difference is that the term "bug" sound magical. As if a program can randomly have bugs in it after you're done programming. If it has random bugs then it means you didn't conform to the specifications and your program is in error.
A defect means an error where the program doesn't conform to the specifications. This is more severe and basically says, any error is a huge problem with the program and this means that the program is not fit to be released.
The difference is in the attitude of the programmers who use the terms. There are millions of programs that are released with bugs and people are fine with that because they accept for some reason that a bug is magical and random and that every program contains at least one bug. However, a programmer who uses the term "defect" may become uncomfortable with releasing a program with a defect because the term implies a greater severity.
The implications of preferring one term over the other affect us daily.
According to Dependability: basic concepts and terminology:
I understand defect as just another name for fault.
Bug is confusing and can represent a fault or a failure depending on the context.
Note that there is no mention of specification: even a spec can be faulty.
Here is one I did earlier for my employer Q-LEAP based on the ISTQB vocabulary and I also checked the IEEE vocabulary. Enjoy.
Bug and Defect? The same even though one can have endless discussion about this. We have really other things to worry about, life is complicated enough already, etc.
An example of how the term is used in the wild, from "How Google Tests Software" p. 113. Open an article of "IEEE Software" and it's used the same way. Indeed, one rarely encounters the word "defect" in real life.
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5 Insane File Sharing Panics from Before the Internet
Thanks to new technology and the modern lassiez-faire attitude towards intellectual property, people are bootlegging their entertainment at an unprecedented rate.
Or so the record companies would like you to believe.
The truth is that media piracy has been rampant through all of history... probably since the first guy to smear his feces on the wall in the shape of a buffalo turned around and immediately saw 50 more just like it being smeared on the walls behind him.
Here are five other historical piracy scares that make this one seem even less relevant:
#5. VCR's Will Kill Television!
Video sharing sites like YouTube represent a schism of users: To some they're a convenient way to share treasured memories and display and distribute the result of your new sketch comedy troupe featuring your ex-girlfriend, your roommate, your dog and absolutely no script-writing whatsoever. But the biggest controversy, of course, is the opening of the floodgates on bootleg television that may one day spell the ultimate demise of the entire broadcasting industry, if not all of life itself!
And they may well have a point: Theft is theft, and who's going to actually pay for the programming if they can get it for free? For the first time in history, people are capable of recording and sharing video ripped straight from the very bosom of Sweet Lady Television herself, like some sort of Video Recording Device that is hitherto unprecedented in the history of- waaait a second...
Home-use VCRs were available as far back as 1963, but didn't catch on until mass-production dropped the price in the late 1970s. In an almost unrelated note: Shortly afterwards Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, completely lost his shit.
Appearing before Congress--flecks of spittle presumably slinging from his red, swollen face and melting caustic holes into the floor--he proceeded to proclaim in all seriousness that "...the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." He then gave this stump speech that is either the most insane or the most awesome that ever happened in Congress:
"This is more than a tidal wave. It is more than an avalanche. It is here. Now, that is where the problem is...We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine."
At which point he and his men presumably led a noble but ultimately suicidal charge against the Terminator armies amassed before him. But luckily, just before Valenti set fire to a fax machine and started chanting "ATTICA!" a voice of reason spoke up, to calmly assert that not everyone who chose to own a VCR had the overthrow of America and the death of the entertainment industry in mind. A soft-spoken hero in a sweater who we like to imagine sat down to change from dress shoes to indoor sneakers before opening up a can of whoop ass.
That's right: "Mister" Fred Rogers, a long time advocate for the VCR, gave a testimony to the Supreme Court regarding the perceived dangers of "time-shifting." That sounds much more awesome than it actually was, bringing to mind images of Mr. Rogers displacing himself in time and fighting dinosaurs with a ray gun, but really it was just broadcasting jargon for the ability to record television shows and watch them later. Mr. Rogers's impassioned speech turned out to be so fundamental to the close ruling (5-4 in favor of home recording) that it was quoted word for word in the footnotes. So what brought Mr. Rogers down from the neighborhood of opulence that he ruled with an iron fist? He testified in support of Betamax.
Beta-what? Exactly.
#4. Phonographs and Player Pianos Will Kill Music!
Pirated music is hardly a new development. In fact, there have been Metallicas in every age of man, making loud and opinionated asses out of themselves every time somebody accidentally coughs a note they once thought of using in a song. In this case, we're referring to the "March King" himself, John Philip "Stars And Stripes Forever" Sousa.
"I am absolutely not prepared to take any of your shit."
-John Philip Sousa's Moustache
In this piece first published in Appleton's Magazine in 1906, Sousa argues that, "...I myself and every other popular composer are victims of a serious infringement on our clear moral rights to our own work..."
Ah, now there's some familiar language. "Serious infringement." What's he talking about? The phonograph machine and the player piano, infringing on his moral right to earn money playing music live. If they want to hear me, they should show up to the concert hall, damn it! They shouldn't be able to hear it from some cursed machine.
He wasn't done. He predicted these terrible machines would lead us down a slippery slope where talents like songwriting and even the ability to sing itself could be replaced by inhuman machines. Dang, what a drama queen.
After all the insane speculation about machines achieving sentience and leading some sort of musical apocalypse, he gets to the real meat of the subject: his concerns that these devices could replicate his compositions without compensating him. In the immortal words of Sousa himself:
"There is nary a mechanism built that can replace the heartsick beauty of a- fuck it, Sousa just gots to get paid, son!"
Although to be fair, Sousa really wasn't a fan of any aspect of the recording industry. He often had his bandleader/soloist Arthur Pryor conduct his band for recording sessions. So much so that many so-called "Sousa recordings" didn't actually feature The Sous. Say what you will about our modern blowhards, but hell, at least they actually showed up on their own albums once or twice... well, that is, if there's room in between the guest spots by Akon, the tracks featuring Niki Minaj or re-mixed by Swizz Beatz and whatever other up and coming producer that puts video game soundtracks in the background of rap songs. But at least they show up to the studio.
#3. Pirated BASIC Will Kill Software Development!
Up until the mid-70s, software wasn't really a business. Games and applications were typically coded out by hobbyists for their own entertainment or to be shared at meetings with like-minded individuals and their long, luxurious beards. Back then, the computer everyone had to have was the Altair 8800, which was basically just a big baffling hunk of metal which was operated more by astrology and black ritual than user input. You see, the Altair had no keyboard, no monitor, no disk drive - just four kilobytes of memory, a line of lights and some corresponding switches that turned the lights on and off.
It wasn't until some scrawny nobody named Bill Gates and his friend Paul developed a language program for it that its potential began to truly shine. And moments after they did so, suddenly every arrow-collared, bell-bottomed neckbeard seemed to have a copy. But virtually none of them paid for it.
The thieves argued that the program was written on a government-funded computer, so why should they pay for software that's basically just subsidized by their tax dollars?
Bill Gates voiced his dissatisfaction with this argument in his now legendary bitchfest "The Open Letter To Hobbyists." The pre-billionaire Gates pointed out that for some reason, everybody knew not to steal a computer, but considered software free for the taking (he complained that they earned less than $2 an hour for their work on the software, because so few people paid for it). If this continues, Gates argued, why will anybody write software?
Pirates were undeterred. It didn't take long for hackers to work out ways to trade warez electronically: Early transactions were made through bulletin board systems. These worked similar to the way the modern Internet works... if you had to directly call up each website with your modem and politely request every byte with a cordial handwritten note.
So, decades later, in an industry where piracy is still rampant and yet a fair amount of software still seems to get written, what became of the major anti-piracy advocates? Well, let's refer back to that earliest and most vocal detractor: Bill Gates.
He now admits that piracy of its biggest product has actually expanded its market in countries like China, going so far as to say: "As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours."
And, come on, look at the damage software piracy has done. If only everybody had paid for their copies, poor Bill Gates might still have a job today... instead of retiring to literally ski everywhere he goes on gigantic drifts of dollars.


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The Office of the Massachusetts Attorney General touches the lives of every resident of the commonwealth by enforcing and prosecuting the Massachusetts general laws. Maura Healey is the clear choice as attorney general, by her experience in serving as an assistant attorney general in that office for several years in leadership roles; and her background as a litigator in the private sector.
As a prosecutor and the architect in the landmark Defense of Marriage Act challenge, while serving as an assistant attorney general, Healey has defined the Office on a national level.
Please join me in supporting Maura Healey for attorney general in the Democratic primary.
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The writer is a former assistant attorney general and lecturer in law at Tufts University.
Location, ST | website.com


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The 6 Weirdest Things That Statistically Lower Crime
You might not have noticed this in the middle of all of the bad news that floods the daily headlines, but crime in the U.S. is at its lowest point in pretty much ... well, ever. It's been steadily falling since the early '90s. And nobody knows why.
Of course, such a giant, sweeping trend doesn't have just one simple cause, but studies have shown that it might have a few shithouse-crazy ones. So if you're feeling safer these days, science says it could be thanks to things like ...
#6. Getting the Lead Out of the Environment
Lead poisoning is one of those things our ancestors dealt with so thoroughly that we have trouble today realizing what a problem it was. But when our grandparents and great-grandparents were young, lead was in every-damn-thing from gasoline to paint to baby formula (OK, so maybe not that last one). And since lead exposure causes all sorts of fun things, like schizophrenia and low IQ, leaded-up babies were more likely to drop out of school and end up with prison records and regrettable tattoos.
"I shanked a kid for his Lunchables the other day."
How deeply did lead's toxicity affect society? Well, economist Rick Nevin believes it might just be a major underlying cause of the recent global crime decline.
Nevin studied the criminal histories of nine countries and found that in each case he could link significant crime drops with that country's campaign to eliminate childhood lead poisoning. In his own words, "65 to 90 percent or more of the substantial variation in violent crime in all these countries was explained by lead." You could say that the timing was just coincidence, but each country Nevin studied conducted those campaigns at different points in time, and in every case, 20 years after lead poisoning rates fell, crime started to fall. Another study in 1990 showed that U.S. counties with high lead levels had four times the murder rate of counties with low lead exposure.
Shotgun victims are also very likely to have high lead exposure.
Now, as with every entry on this list, we'll never know for sure how true this was -- you could just as easily say that the type of country or era that is advanced enough to successfully deal with environmental problems is also capable of fighting crime. Still, it makes us wonder what stuff we're all being exposed to right now that will turn out to have been making us crazy. We're imagining a future earth in chaos, roving bands of savages driven mad by a decade of iPhone fumes.
If not the iPhones themselves.
#5. Crack Cocaine Scaring Everyone Straight
Did you ever sneak a cigarette while under age and get caught by your mom or dad? And if so, did said parent attempt to steer you away from smoking by forcing you to go into the closet and smoke a whole pack? Probably not, but we keep hearing people in movies say it happened to them (if it happened to you, holy shit, you should probably have called Child Protective Services -- that shit's almost certainly illegal). The point is, it's supposed to scare kids off smoking by making them smoke so much, so fast, that they get violently sick from it. From then on, they supposedly won't even want to look at a cigarette.
It sounds like something that surely has never worked on anyone, but researchers think this principle actually does apply to crack cocaine.
"And if you want any more blow, well ... then I suppose I've failed terribly as a parent."
You have to keep in mind that plummeting crime rates are falling off from highs reached thanks to the crack epidemic -- this sudden invasion of an impossibly addictive yet dirt cheap drug caused homicide, robbery and drug arrests to explode in the mid-'80s. But then the rates suddenly started plummeting in 1991, and kept going down. While that's good news for everyone, it's also kind of baffling. Crack is as addictive as ... well, crack. Wouldn't it just keep spreading like a disease until every inner city neighborhood is full of addicts? What stopped it?
Apparently, crackheads did. That is, the fear of becoming one. A pair of researchers in New York say that crack fell out of popularity because its effects on people are freaking terrifying, even to other drug users. Pot brings up the pleasant image of comfy couches and junk food. Alcohol calls up crowded bars and raucous house parties. You can even convince yourself that heroin and powder cocaine are glamorous, thanks to their use among rich rock stars and actors. But crack? It pretty much just makes you think of constantly broke, malnourished junkies offering oral sex to their dealer in exchange for one more hit.
So, the idea is that a lot of the potential market for the drug saw how rapidly it turned people into shrunken zombies, and backed slowly away in horror. They then switched back to pot, which in addition to not turning you into a crackhead also doesn't spawn the same kind of brutal turf wars and desperate, violent users. When the crack left, so did the attendant handguns and robberies that served to feed all those crack habits. Inner city crime plunged and snack food industry profits soared.
"But wait," you say. "What about meth? I've seen Breaking Bad, there are more people doing drugs now than ever! And killing each other for it!"
"And it's freaking awesome!"
Well, the thing is ...
#4. There Is Suddenly Plenty of Drugs for Everyone
It's perfectly natural to think "More drugs = more crime." Illegal drugs are, by definition, sold by criminals. More drugs equals more criminals, which equals more crime, right? But it's not that simple.
People kill each other over drugs for the same reason they kill each other over oil, or diamonds: because they're worth a huge amount of money. In 1988, the cocaine trade was worth an estimated $140 billion. If that doesn't drive home how blow-crazy America was during the late '80s, we'll put it another way: Cocaine was worth 2 percent of the entire U.S. GDP. And only, like, a third of that can be pinned on Robin Williams. At around the same time, America's murder rate reached its highest level in recorded history -- and almost none of that can be blamed on Robin Williams.
Fashion is always the first victim.
But when the mid-'90s rolled around, coke dropped in value faster than hammer pants. By 1994, the price of blow was at its lowest point ever and, holy shit would you look at that, the murder rate dropped by 50 percent as well.
This baffled the DEA, who'd been busting coke dealers left and right in the hopes of making the drug less accessible (and thus more expensive). But it appears that all they actually succeeded in doing was forcing drug lords to smuggle smarter and diversify. Then in came meth, which anybody can make in their garage for a few bucks, and a new jump in popularity for pain pills. And, if high school economics taught us anything besides how to sleep with our eyes open, it's that introducing more choice into a market lowers prices.
"Keep three degrees of separation between you and the product, and never carry more than you can swallow."
That means that, suddenly, the profit margins for street-level dealers really started to ... blow. So-called "minimum wage dealers" made as little as 50 bucks a month, which probably isn't enough to shoot someone over, and sure as hell isn't worth taking a bullet over. Turf wars disappeared, violent crime rates dropped, poor cocaine found itself relegated to the bargain bin and addicts suddenly had extra cash to spend on ... well, probably more drugs.
"My long term goals involve finding somewhere to sleep without being peed on."
This does not, obviously, mean that the key to utopia is to create a world where the very streets are paved with meth. It just appears that such a world would feature fewer drive-by shootings.


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Watching Stack Overflow over the past few days I see questions often being closed rather overzealously. There are definitely some questions that deserve to be closed (e.g. "Do my homework", etc) but it's a shame that other questions get closed despite being marked as community wiki; e.g.
My view is that this type of slightly off-topic-but-still-interesting question enriches the SO community (you only have to view the number of people who responded to this), and I wondered what other people thought?
Also, have people noticed a change in attitudes towards closing questions? For example, I see that no one has closed this SO "classic": http://stackoverflow.com/questions/84556/whats-your-favorite-programmer-cartoon.


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I had always thought that Mongo had excellent performance with it's mapreduce functionality, but am now reading that it is a slow implementation of it. So if I had to pick an alternative to benchmark against, what should it be?
My software will be such that users will often have millions of records, and often be sorting and crunching through unpredictable subsets that are 10s or 100s of thousands. Most of the analysis of data that uses the full millions of records can be done in summary tables and the like. I'd originally thought Hypertable was a viable alternative, but in doing research I saw in their documents their mention that Mongo would be a more performant option, while Hypertable had other benefits. But for my application speed is my number one initial priority.


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Formerly Homeless Families Find New Hope in New Houses
Thursday, July 22, 2010
This summer in Glendale, California, one family made a seemingly ordinary move into a new 2 bedroom, 2 bath apartment within a small complex pleasantly named Chester Village.
However, for this mother, this was an extraordinary event as it was the first time in several years that she and her young children were finally all living together under one roof. For her, this new home represented a world of fresh beginnings and opportunities after overcoming substance abuse and homelessness, struggles that contributed to the state at one point removing her children from her care. But now, after showing her commitment to stay clean, she's found a chance to turn her life around and offer her family stability in their new home at Chester Village.
In fact, all the families living in the 4 unit complex of Chester Village share something in common with this experience of hardship. That's because the apartments are a unique development by The Salvation Army of Glendale meant to house formerly homeless families in order to help them transition into a stable and self-sufficient lifestyle. To qualify for housing at least one parent must have a disability stemming from substance abuse, but in order to reside in the apartment they must also have completed a substance abuse program and commit to sobriety, as well as stay for 3-5 years and show a pursuit of more education or job skills training.
The Salvation Army, with the support of the city of Glendale, overcame many obstacles over several years before finally seeing Chester Village open to accept its first occupants, but just the impact it has had already in inspiring and transforming families once devoid of hope has made the pursuit worth it.
Read more details about Chester Village's official opening and resident testimonies in an article featured by Glendale News-Press: An army of support
Additional information about how The Salvation Army's Glendale Corps is doing the most good in their community can be found on their website at www.glendalecorps.org.


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expert advice MORE
Q: How do I deal with my daughter's sexual activity? She's only 15. I'm not able to accept or condone her relationship with a 19-year-old. I must find a way of convincing her to stop.
A: I don't know what sexual activity of your daughter's is troubling you, but I will respond as if it is intercourse. We all have a very difficult time thinking of our teenagers as sexual beings but they are indeed in the midst of extraordinary sexual awakenings and are facing external pressures to become sexually experienced. We must be guided by that knowledge so as not to treat their sexual thoughts and feelings as unusual or bad.
We can't literally prevent our kids from having sex, doing drugs, or acting irresponsibly in any number of ways. We can, however, communicate our beliefs and values regarding sex in a way that is caring and not condemning or judgmental. Kids at this age are faced with attempting to create an identity that will be accepted by their peers; their sexual identity is a big part of that process.
Don't just give your daughter rules and limits about sex, tell her what you believe. Discussing how you feel sex can be part of a healthy relationship. Let her have her say and don't condemn her for having different ideas on this subject. Shaming her or grounding her will only shut off your connection. Lots of teens are woefully ignorant about sex, even though they want you to believe they know it all. You need to communicate sexual facts to your daughter so she has the knowledge to prevent disease and pregnancy.
These are the toughest conversations for parents to have with their kids but they must take place. Remember, your daughter may currently be making unwise decisions regarding sex, but that doesn't make her a bad kid. She needs you more than ever now, even though she will tell you to leave her alone about this. Don't be afraid to enlist the help of any family or friends whom she respects to help you with this situation.
More on: Expert Advice
Carleton Kendrick has been in private practice as a family therapist and has worked as a consultant for more than 20 years. He has conducted parenting seminars on topics ranging from how to discipline toddlers to how to stay connected with teenagers. Kendrick has appeared as an expert on national broadcast media such as CBS, Fox Television Network, Cable News Network, CNBC, PBS, and National Public Radio. In addition, he's been quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, USA Today, Reader's Digest, BusinessWeek, Good Housekeeping, Woman's Day, and many other publications.


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Can anyone tell me how useful they find the tripods with pivoting center columns? I occasionally do some full spherical panos and something like that looks like it would be particularly useful for shooting nadir shots, especially in confined areas. I've never had the opportunity to test one of these out in person, however, so I can't say if the concept is workable or gimicky. Is a horizontal column even all that stable? Do you have to counterweight it to keep the whole thing from falling over? Are the center columns long enough to get out past the support legs and make a usable nadir shot? Some insight from the people who use them would be most welcome!
I'm currently looking at several tripods, including the Manfrotto 055CXPRO4 and Induro CX 214 that have pivoting center columns and the Feisol 3442 or 3441 without. In any case I need something light that packs small and will support 7 - 8 kg. I intend to put on it an R-D16, NN3.1, 40D and Tokina 10-17. (It will also get the much heavier Canon 17-55 f/2.8, but that doesn't get used for nadir shots often if at all).
Also, when you start getting into 200mm and longer do you find the need to have a leveling base increase? I am wanting to attach the NN3 directly to the legs but wonder if an EZ-Leveler or Q3 would be necessary for those long focal lengths.
- Eric


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Random Musings
Contents :
|Shield Shapes :
|Keeping Track of the Timeline :
|What to do about the Daedalus :
|Why are Klingons and Romulans mono-species empires?
|Starfleet's Not So Finest :
|End of an Era :
|Planet Distribution in Our Galaxy :
|My Guess for the Titan :
|Kira and the Chain of Command :
|Telepathic Issues :
|The Transporter :
|The Tkon :
|Armus - Silliest Idea Ever?
|The Borg, Personified :
|The Q and Omnipotence :
|The Records of Trek :
|The Idiot Trap :
|Is the Federation a Democracy?
|The Computer - Enemy or Friend?
|Breaking the Mirror :
|Law and Order in the Federation :
Trek has historically tended to depict shields as a large ellipsoid bubble around the ship. We see this clearly on the Enterprise-D in episodes such as 'Silicon Avatar', 'The Arsenal of Freedom', etc. We see it on DS9 in 'Emissary'. We see it on the Sovereign class Enterprise-E in 'First Contact' - see my Sector 001 Battles page for a good image of this.
However, sometimes the shields seem to change shape radically. For instance, in 'Call to Arms', DS9 suddenly seems to have a shield bubble around the central core but skin-hugging conformal shields around the rest of it. In 'Nemesis' the Enterprise-E has conformal shielding. Why the change?
It's possible that the switch represents a major change in shield technology, but this seems unlikely. DS9 used both types of shield at the same time - if conformal shields were better, why keep using bubble shields? It seems to me more likely that ships and stations can alternate between bubble and conformal shields more or less at will, much as you can extend shields around nearby objects at will.
We know from those times when ships have extended their shields that the shields grow weaker as they grow larger. So for a given shield system, conformal shields should be stronger than bubble shields.
However, we also know that ships can take damage through their shields. At a guess, some small fraction of the weapon impact tends to "leak through" to the hull underneath. With a bubble shield, such leaks would happen far from the hull, and so might disperse before reaching it. With conformal shields leaks would be directly onto the hull.
So there is a tradeoff at work here. Bubble shields are weaker and so allow more enemy fire to leak through, but that fire that does leak through does less damage. Conformal shields are stronger and so allow less fire to leak through, but what does get through does more damage.
Keeping Track of the Timeline :
Some of the major points in the future and their related points in the past :
|Who / What
|The Guardian of Forever.
|50,000,000th Century bc
|"The City on the Edge of Forever"
|Tox'Utat was left here. This is also where Rasmussen stole his time pod, and where at least part of the Temporal Cold War is being fought out on Enterprise.
|22nd Century
|"Captain's Holiday", "A Matter of Time", Various Enterprise episodes.
|Federation discovers time travel.
|23rd Century
|"The Naked Time"
|Rasmussen Time Pod.
The Xindi component was from this century, in the year 2573 if the quantum dating was correct. This was also the century in which the Xindi homeworld was reported to have been destroyed by Humanity.
|26th Century
|"A Matter of Time"
"The Expanse"
|Tox'Utat / Vorgons was from here.
|27th Century
|"Captain's Holiday"
|Daniels says his enemies are from here. This is the period "Future Guy" is from, and it seems likely that Future Guy is one of Daniels' chief enemies, though this is never stated directly.
|28th Century
|Timeship Aeon.
|29th Century
|"Future's End, Part I & II"
|Timeship Relativity.
|29th Century
|Crewman Daniels.
|31st century
|"Cold Front"
|The Pod Timeship came from here - possibly part of Daniels's group?
|31st century
|"Future Tense"
What to do About the Daedalus?
We have all long assumed that the Daedalus class was a prominent fixture of the early Federation - that it was in fact the main predecessor to the Constitution class Enterprise that kirk used. This is not just a fan assumption - the Daedalus design is featured in model form on sets in various episodes, appears in official books like the Chronology and Encyclopedia, etc. Many of the ship names mentioned as early Federation vessels - the likes of the Archon and the Horizon - have been assumed to be Daedalus class in these sources. In fact the only ship canonically established as a Daedalus class vessel is the USS Essex, in service at least 2167 or before.
But now that Enterprise is making a big deal of the NX class, what can we do about the Daedalus? The Horizon was mentioned as being operational in 2167, some 16 years after Enterprise was launched. The Essex was in service at least this early. So the Daedalus has to be a contemporary or successor to the NX. That rather messes up the progression in design - instead of the previous transition from sphere to circular saucer to elliptical saucer, we would go from circular saucer to sphere back to circular saucer and then elliptical saucer. We could live with this by suggesting that this design represents some sort of low-speed ship, something like a cargo carrier or colonist ship that needs lots of internal space rather than sleek lines for high warp speed. But this doesn't jibe too well with the Essex being out so deep in space that the Enterprise-D was exploring the same area two hundred years later.
So you have to ask... do we really need to keep the sphere hulled design at all now? Our only canonical proof of the existence of the design comes from models seen in the background. Those could just as easily represent ships that never existed - proposed designs that never made it, perhaps.
In my humble opinion, the sphere-hulled design cannot represent a cutting-edge explorer Starship any more. So the logical conclusion is that the spherical hulled ship is not in fact the Daedalus class. Either the sphere-hulled ship represents some other class name, probably a cargo or colonist ship of some sort, or it represents a fictional ship that never existed at all. There was a Daedalus class, but it looked more like a successor to the NX class. Ships like the Horizon and Archon may have belonged to the NX class, or may be part of this new-look Daedalus class.
For now I'm waiting - I want to see if other NX class ships turn up and what their names might be, and if we get to see other Starship designs anytime soon on Enterprise. Perhaps the creators will throw a little canonical light onto the issue.
Why are Klingons and Romulans mono-species empires?
In TOS "Errand of Mercy" we see that the Klingons are not averse to invading other species. In fact Kirk makes it sound like this is a very common thing.
Yet we have never seen a single non-Klingon living on a Klingon planet or serving on a Klingon ship. Okay in Kirk's time the populations were kept under tight control - so it is unlikely that they get to serve in the military, and possibly illegal for them to leave their planets. Fair enough.
But what about in TNG times? The Empire is now a much more "moral" place. What's happened to all those slave species? Did the Klingons withdraw from those planets? Surely not all of them - IIRC, the planet Krios where Kamala came from in 'The Perfect Mate' was later said to be a Klingon world. Yet we still never see any non-Klingons.
Similar thing with the Romulans. We now have the Remans, who apparently do serve in the military, yet we have never seen a single non-Romulan in the empire. Do they have slave races like the Klingons do? In TOS their attitude was that they should invade anybody who was weaker than they were.
Okay, here is a list of some Starfleet officers and their activities :
|Admiral Kennelly
|Betrayed Federation principles to work with the Cardassians against the bajoran resistence
|"Ensign Ro"
|Admiral Leyton
|Tried to stage a military coup on Earth.
|"Homefront" / "Paradise Lost"
|Admiral Pressman
|Illegally developed a phase cloak device.
|"The Pegasus"
|Admiral Ross
|Co-operated with Section 31 (boo! hiss!) during the war
|"Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges"
|Admiral Satie
|Started accusing and condeming people falsely and without due process.
|"The Drumhead"
|Captain Garth
|Went insane, tried to wipe out an alien species. Tried to kill Kirk.
|"Whom Gods Destroy"
|Captain Janeway
|Murdered Tuvix. Multiple Prime Directive breaches. Multiple Temporal Directive breaches.
|"Tuvix" / Various
|Captain Kirk
|Multiple Prime Directive breaches. Stole and subsequently destroyed the USS Enterprise.
|"The Apple", etc.
|Captain Picard
|At least nine violations of the Prime Directive, including one committed only so that a Starfleet officer's life could be spared, despite repeated statements that Starfleet personnel vow to uphold the Prime Directive even if it means their lives.
|Captain Sisko
|Betrayed the Federation Council to reveal information to the Cardassians, thus causing the Federation-Klingon war.
|"Way of the Warrior"
|Captain Tracey
|Broke the Prime Directive to live forever, tried to kill Kirk.
|"The Omega Glory"
|Admiral Mark Jameson
|Broke the Prime Directive to give weapons to a primitive planet in exchange for hostages; justified it by arming the other side as well, causing a massive civil war.
|"Too Short a Season"
|Admiral Cartwright
|Conspired to assassinate the Klingon Chancellor and the Federation President.
|Star Trek VI : The Undiscovered Country
Methinks Starfleet needs to improve its personnel selection methods a little...
Two of the more interesting episodes of Enterprise have been "Fortunate Son" and "Horizon". In many ways the latter is almost a remake of the former, something that Enterprise is doing a lot of in its second season. Both involve Earth cargo ships, old vessels which are only capable of warp 1 or 2. Since journies therefore take years or more, the ships are largely crewed by extended families.
Both episodes focus on family difficulties, but for me the subtext beneath these conflicts is much more interesting. Because Star Trek usually depicts scientific and technological advances as Good Things, most especially bigger, better and faster Starships. But in these episodes, we see that Enterprise is destroying an entire culture just by virtue of its existence.
Having a crew which lives and works together for year after year, with only relatively short breaks to drop off or pick up cargo, must surely breed a very insular and self contained community. Each cargo ship is a world in itself, almost totally contained and isolated. Now the warp five engine has arrived, and suddenly you can go to another star ten or a hundred times faster than before. In "Horizon", the captain bemoans the fact that it is becoming very difficult to find new crewmembers because everybody wants to join Starfleet. Crewmembers like Travis have already left to go the same way.
Perhaps worse than this is a more subtle effect. New cargo ships with high warp engines are surely rolling off the production lines. No old ship is going to be able to compete with these - the Captain of the Fortunate admitted as much. And as the new ships proliferate, the very nature of cargo hauling is going to change. Less and less will there be multi-year missions interspersed with a short stops. Cargo ship crews are going to be open to a far greater and wider range of outside influences, which can do nothing but help to break down their insular nature.
In short, their whole culture is dying. You get the feeling from these two episodes that some of them can see it coming, and resent it. You can't really blame them for that.
What can be done about this? Well, nothing. Time marches on, and all that. Something similar has probably happened as the multi-year sea journies of a couple of centuries ago shrank down to weeks and months - and now with air travel, down to hours and days.
I hope that we see this aspect of Enterprise developed further over the next few years. It would also be nice to see eventually that, yes, although one way of life is being destroyed, it is being replaced by something better. Perhaps as much as Starfleet's mighty ships, the future of Earth and the Federation is going to be carved out by the cargo ships and their crews. For them the birth might be a painful one, but they are building a future that is worth having.
Planet Distribution in Our Galaxy :
In "Balance of Terror", McCoy declared that there is a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type worlds in our galaxy.
In "Strange New World", T'Pol declares that Minshara class (M class) planets account for only one in every 42,000 of the total planets.
So putting this together, we get that there are 126,000,000,000 planets in our galaxy. This actually seems a little low; our galaxy contains at least a hundred billion stars, so this is an average of only 1.26 planets for every star system. Since we often hear planets numbered after their star (Nimbus III, Rigel XII, etc), and since those numbers tend to be in the three to ten range quite often, it seems that most solar systems have quite a few planets. So the only conclusion is that most stars have no planets at all. If the average system had ten planets, for instance, then only one in eight stars would have planets.
The (deleted) "She's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen" line from Nemesis indicates that the Titan is a new class, IMHO. The name indicates that she is a large ship - Starfleet doesn't necessarily always give ships names that are fitting, but can you really imagine a new Nova class ship being called the Titan?
I would guess that the Titan is a Galaxy successor. Sovereign-generation technology, perhaps a little more advanced, and scaled up to be slightly larger than a Galaxy class in volume.
I wonder if the Titan might appear in future books/games/comics/etc? A novel series set on the Titan would not surprise me at all... I hope they give us some nice cover art of the ship.(Some years on.... And now we know, we did indeed get a Titan book series. And they did make quite a deal out of coming up with a Titan design - they ran a competition to let fans submit designs, and the winning one was the design they went with! Pretty cool. But the ship didn't turn out to be a big Galaxy-class replacement, though, but rather something around the size of Voyager. Shame.)
Kira and the Chain of Command :
Sisko and the other Federation types are in command on DS9 purely because the Bajoran provisional government asked them to do the job. Kira was put there because the provisional government wanted a presence in the command staff. She was an official part of the chain of command, with a clearly defined place. All of which is fine.
What puzzles me is why Kira would have any place aboard the Defiant. The Defiant is not a Bajoran ship, it has nothing to do with Bajor. Although it forms part of DS9's defences, it frequently conducts missions that are purely for the Federation, nothing to do with Bajor or that area. So why the hell is Kira apparently second in command of the ship? Any time Sisko is injured or out of touch, Kira instantly assumes command as a matter of course - no questions asked.
Kira is not a part of Starfleet - at least until she was given a commission before she went to Cardassia in the final stages of the war, by which time she had been taking charge on the Defiant for several years already. She has shown several times that she doesn't take orders from Starfleet - most notably in "Shadows and Symbols". And nor should she take their orders, since she is not one of their officers and has never sworn any oath to them. So Starfleet is effectively putting one of its most powerful warships under the command of somebody who can do anything she likes with it?
This may seem minor, but if you talk to a military person they will tell you that having an unclear chain of command is a MAJOR problem. Suppose Kira decided to go take the ship off on a joyride one day. What could Starfleet do about it? They can't court martial her, after all!
Of course, this hints at a deeper problem; Defiant really should have its own dedicated crew and captain. In fact, this might have been an ideal position to give to Worf instead of the bogus "Strategic Operations Officer" desk job that they landed him with. The only reason that it doesn't is, of course, that the producers didn't want scenes or even whole episodes where the stars of the show would be away from all the action.
The Computer - Enemy or Friend?
Star Trek's treatment of computers really showcases society's attitudes towards these gadgets. Back when TOS was being made in the 60s, computers were very primitive affairs - the military and the space program were pushing for smaller computers, but a typical model would still be at least as big as a wardrobe if not a room. Still, they were just starting to get their first toe-holds in business. A lot of people were very worried about computers back then - it seemed that computers were threatening jobs (which indeed they were), and might even one day begin to replace Humans since they could "think" so quickly and accurately.
These fears were often played up in TOS. The Enterprise had "good" computers, of course, but we often saw "evil" computers - in "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" and "The Ultimate Computer" the threat was that computers would literally replace us, while in many other episodes computers were depicted as godlike beings exerting control over their biological minions. Rarely if ever did powerful computers contribute much that was positive. Even the godlike V'Ger didn't recognise "Carbon Units" as true lifeforms worthy of existence.
By the time TNG rolled around, computers were far more common. Half the population was using them at work or at home, and the internet explosion was on the horizon. They were less threatening to us - computer controlled mechanisation had destroyed jobs, but computers themselves had created whole new sections of the economy. So - after one or two early episodes like "The Arsenal of Freedom" - computers were somewhat more passive, more friendly affairs. Look what happened in "Emergence", when the main computer of the Enterprise-D "comes alive". In TOS the computer would surely have tried to kill all the crew, and probably a passing planet or two as well. But in TNG, all the computer wanted was to create a new child. The message is that computers can be people, too.
Of course this attitude is personified in the form of Data - the ultimate friendly, helpful, non-threatening computer. Data sums up the TNG attitude to computers more than any other element, and it is telling that a machine could become one of the most beloved characters in the show.
Voyager took all this to yet another level - with the EMH we are shown that as well as having a computer for a friend, we can even be pals with the software!
Where next for the computer in Trek? I have no idea. Perhaps some sort of internet-equivalent, a galactic super-information-highway. Watch this space...
Law and Order in the Federation :
One thing that I have always wondered about is how the Federation conducts its law and order policies. The biggest, most staggering potnetial aspect of this was revealed in "Wolf in the Fold". When Scotty was suspected of murder and had memory problems, the psycho-tricorder was introduced. Along with the ship's computer, this handy device could read a person's memory of an event and detect whether he or she was telling the truth even if they didn't know themselves. They could work through any block, any amnesia.
The implications of this are pretty amazing. We have polygraph machines today - "lie detectors" - but there's a big, poorly kept secret about these machines. They don't work! Whatever you may have seen in the movies, the polygraph is so unreliable that the whole thing is basically a con, designed to make people nervous enough to confess. It is for a very good reason that these machines are not allowed in courtrooms.
A truly reliable, accurate lie detector would be a revelation. We (by which I mean most western countries) have laws that mean you don't have to implicate yourself and have all sorts of other protections. But the only reason for having these is to protect the innocent person from wrongful conviction. With Trek lie detectors and psycho-tricorders, wrongful conviction would be impossible. No reason to fear trials, no innocent people in prison. You would need to set up some sort of independant body to administer the test procedure in court to make sure that the government did not rig the system, but that should be quite easy.
So why don't they do this? Look at "The Drumhead." Much is made of people's right to avoid self incrimination. Much is made of people being wrongly branded as traitors. Both of these things could be completely avoided by using the technology to tell who is a traitor and who is not. So could Riker's trial in "A Matter of Perspective", and numerous other such instances.
In fact, this technology would re-write the whole way in which criminal investigation was done. You would barely need investigation - just a minute or two meeting with anybody who is a suspect in which you ask them if they are guilty or not. You would barely need trials either.
In my humble opinion, one of the most interesting TOS episodes is "Mirror Mirror". When Kirk and some of his officers beam up during an ion storm, they are swapped with their counterparts from an alternate dimension. This world is a mirror of the one we know - a moral inversion. All the Federation folk are utterly evil in this universe, travelling the galaxy in an Enterprise which they use to subjagate - or annhilate - those they come across.
In DS9 we revisit the same universe, several times. Unfortunately, the writers blow it bigtime.
DS9 is still there, though it is called Terok Nor. We learn that the Terran Empire fell after the mirror Spock tried to implement some changes to it, spurred on by Kirk during his visit. The area is now ruled by the Alliance, a combination of the Klingons and Cardassians. Terrans are a slave race. As the episodes progress we see the Terrans rebel and fight for their freedom from the evil alliance.
What's missing here is the whole point of the mirror universe - that it is a mirror. The most interesting aspect of the TOS episode is seeing the good become evil and the evil good. But in the DS9 version, most people are pretty much the same as before, or at least similar. The Cardassians are virtually identical to the real-universe version. Klingons are a little less restrained than they are here, but that's about it. Meanwhile the Terrans... well, they are a pretty rowdy and undisciplined bunch. But they are fighting for freedom and justice and a better life for themselves, just as Humans in the real universe would be.
There are two exceptions to this failing. One is Quark, who in the mirror universe is a philanthropic guy who helps the Terrans to escape whenever he can. The second in Intendant Kira.
The Intendant is a throughouly nasty, evil character who is pretty much obsessed with sex, power and death in that order. In short, she is exactly what everybody in the mirror universe should be. Nana Visitor plays the role amazingly well, and the character stands head and shoulders above everybody else in these episodes. Why didn't they apply this principle to everybody?
One rather bizzare aspect of the mirror universe as seen on DS9 is that most of the female characters seem to be gay or bisexual for some reason. Leeta is gay, Ezri is gay, Intendant Kira is bisexual - and in a memorable scene, mirror-Kira even tries to seduce herself! And of course all of the gay characters are extremely promiscuous. Gee, I wonder why none of the men are gay?
In the TOS version, incidentally, we see that the mirror Kirk is in an ongoing heterosexual relationship of some kind. True there's no actual affection there, and Kirk seems to be ready to ditch "the captain's woman" any time he thinks he can get something better. Nor do we have any idea if there is any notion of fidelity - it's a morally repugnant relationship, but then that is the whole point of the mirror universe. And for all that, it is an actual relationship.
Here's how I would have played it : The Terran Empire continued to grow after Kirk's visit. They conquered the Klingons. The Cardassians conquered Bajor, and Kira is a collaborator who helped to destroy the Bajoran resistence and was rewarded with second in command of Terok Nor, under Sisko. The Empire and the Cardassians are close allies. The good guys are the Klingons. This way, the power structures are more or less preserved the way it is in DS9 - everybody is in much the same place in both universes. But the moral inversion remains.
There is actually a vision of the mirror universe that treads this path, although it is done from a TNG point of view rather than a DS9 one. Diane Duane's "Dark Mirror" features the Enterprise-D being pulled into the mirror universe and encountering their version of itself. Troi and Geordi - and utimately Picard - must go aboard the enemy ship and play the role of their counterparts in order to work out what is going on. Because it sticks to the moral inversion, because it explores a dark version of the way things could have gone - and in parts this novel is very dark indeed - "Dark Mirror" is far more interesting than anything that DS9 ever did with the mirror universe. Of course it also helps that the novel is (as usual) superbly written by Ms. Duane and has an utterly gripping story from beginning to end.
I really wish I could have seen this book make it onto the screen in some form. It would have made a great TV miniseries, for instance (and as a fan of both Troi and marina Sirtis, I am eternally sadenned that I will never get to see her in that outfit. Sorry Diane, but even your words couldn't make up for missing that image!) That we will never see it is a great shame...
Is the Federation a Democracy?
One rather strange element of Star trek writing that I've noticed is that they almost never mention the word "democracy". We have never once heard of an election being held in the Federation. Indeed, characters often talk of such things in strangely roundabout ways. A government leader might talk of being "selected" to hold his office as Chancellor Durkem did to Picard. Selected by whom - the electorate? The king? A roll of the dice?
Nor does there seem to be any great level of debate in the Federation. For instance it is always assumed - often stated with certainty - that the Federation will fight if morality indicates that it should do so. But democracies are rarely so clear-cut about these things. Dictatorships on the other hand...
Of course, at no point have we ever been told that the Federation is not a democracy. Remember that we concentrate almost exclusively on what serves as the military arm of the society - and how democratic would the USA look if all you ever saw of it was the decision making process that go on inside a navy ship or army base?
Remember the Salt Monster from TOS "The Man Trap"? This thing was the last of its kind, sharing a deserted planet with a Federation scientist called Professor Crater. It lived quite peacefully with Crater for some time; the monster could use some type of hypnoitic suggestion or telepathy to assume whatever appearence it wanted - it could even look like different things to different people simultaneously. It fed by draining the salt from people's bodies, killing them quickly and painfully.
In the course of the episode, it becomes clear that the Salt Monster is quite intelligent. It attends a conference disguised as Dr. McCoy, where it holds a conversation with the other officers. It doesn't seem to be the brightest tool in the box, but this is no wild beast we are talking about.
All of which begs the question - why didn't the monster just ask for salt in the first place??????
I mean, if somebody walked up to Kirk and said "Hi, I look Human but I'm actually a shape shifting alien. I desperately need salt to survive, and we're almost out here. Can I have some?" And then proved it by changing shape a few times, what would happen? Kirk would give it the salt, of course! He'd give it tons of the stuff if needed! Then he'd go on his way and leave it in peace. He's not on a mission to collect specimens, after all, and even if he was he wouldn't be collecting intelligent ones.
Crater is a Federation citizen, he must know that the creature is in no danger from a Starship crew. Surely they must have talked about it before the ship arrived! And this would have completely removed any need for the murders, as well as the creature's own death.
So why not? Because it would have made a short episode, that's why not.
Once upon a time I started a thread on RAST to come up with a "Guiness Book of Star Trek". I wanted to find some records - the biggest, fastest, most powerful, that kind of thing. I don't have too many, but here they are. Many of these come directly from the newsgroup, but after various computer crashes I've lost the emails I saved. If you recognise one of these as yours, let me know and I'll add a credit if you wish.
Highest Speed :
The episode 'Where no one has Gone Before' features the Enterprise-D travelling from a point 2.7 million light years from our galaxy to a point 1 billion light years away. The trip takes 20 seconds.
So they covered a minimum of 997,300,000 light years in 20 seconds. ThatÌs 49,865,000 light years per second - 179,514,000,000 light years per hour - which equates to a staggering 1,573,619,724,000,000 x c. One and a half quadrillion times the speed of light. To put this in perspective, at this speed you could cross the Milky Way galaxy in something like two milliseconds.
The Voyager episode 'Threshold' features Tom Paris travelling at literally infinitie speed in the shuttle Cochrane. This, surely, is the ultimate unbeatable speed record!
Largest Structure :
The Dyson sphere shown in the episode 'Relics' is 200 million kilometres in diameter. This is the only depiction of a Dyson sphere in TV or film that I know of, though there are plenty of books with such structures, and some with larger. This is the largest physical structure that we have ever seen in Trek.
The V'Ger cloud from Star Trek : The Motion Picture was "over 82 AU in diameter". An AU is an Astronomical Unit, equal to the average distance between the Earth and the sun. 82 AU is approximately 12.3 billion kilometres. However, the recent special edition director's cut changed this size to 2 AU, which is 'only' 300 million kilometres or so. This is the biggest artificial object in Trek, most especially as there is structure all the way through to the middle rather than the hollow shell of a Dyson sphere. If you generously assume that the "Relics" sphere is 5 km thick, then the small version of the V'Ger cloud still has more than 20 million times the sphere's total structured volume.
Largest Fleet :
The largest genuine fleet we have seen are the Federation-Dominion forces which joined in battle in DS9 "Favor the bold" and "Sacrifice of Angels". The Dominion forces numbered some 1200 vessels, the Federation forces 600. Larger fleets may have been involved in the final battles of the war, but this is one of the few occasions in which we have solid numbers given on screen.
The fleet of alternate-Enterprises seen in "Parallels" comprised at least 285,000 Galaxy class Starships, since this is how many hailed our own Enterprise-D. Data projected that the fleet was growing at a rate which would entirely fill the sector within three days. Since a sector is (officially but non-canonically) a cube 20 light years on a side, if you were to place Galaxy class starships nose to tail, nacelle to nacelle, and standing on top of one another, filling a sector would be quite a job!
20 light years is about 189,345,600,000,000,000 metres. Since the Galaxy class measures 641 metres long by 470 metres across and 145 metres high, we can do a simple calculation and work out that you would have 295,390,951,638,065 by 402,862,978,723,404 by 1,305,831,724,137,931 ships - a staggering total of 155,396,689,558,921,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ships!
We are told by Data that the numbers are increasing exponentially. So if we take 285,000 ships as the starting point, we will need at least 128 doublings to reach this number. Given the time projected, that would mean that the number of ships was doubling at least every 33 minutes. So if it took Worf about one hour to get back to his own ship, we would reasonably expect the fleet to have reached in excess of 1,000,000 ships by that point. Bet they wish they'd had those on hand in the Dominion war!
Oldest Living Thing :
It's hard to judge the age of a Q, but the female in "The Q and the Grey" indicated that she had been dating Q for several billion years. Q himself has insisted that the Q have "always existed", but Quinn said that the Q achieved their amazing abilities at some unspecified time in the past, indicating that they had a more mundane existence prior to this - and, by extension, possibly an origin similar to more conventional species. Then again, since the Q can travel through time at will there is no reason that they couldn't live out the whole life of the universe, then go back and live it over again ad infinitum.
In summary then, there are Q individuals at least billions of years old. They are possibly much older than this, with no upper limit.
Largest Living Thing :
The V'Ger entity was considered to be a "living machine". My estimate of its length is approximately 100 kilometres.
The interstellar animal seen in Voyager "Bliss" measures about 2,000 km across.
The single celled organism seen in TOS "The Immunity Syndrome" had a length of approximately eleven thousand miles (17,700 km), and it's width varied from two thousand to three thousand miles (3,200 to 4,800 km). Put another way, it was more than twice the size of Africa and about a third as thick as the planet Earth.
However, the undisputed winner is the cloud entity encountered by Voyager in "The Cloud". This beastie was 7 AUs in diameter, equal to about one billion kilometres. If the cloud was spherical (I don't know if it was), you could fit the world into it more than five hundred trillion times over.
Most Destructive Weapon :
Without a doubt, the most physically destructive weapon was the trilithium solar probe built by Dr. Soran. One probe measuring about seven feet long (actually a photon torpedo casing) was capable of destroying a star, which produced a level twelve shockwave that could destroy all the planets in a solar system. There's no reason at all why any starship could not carry hundreds, even thousands of these casings - though storage of trilithium might possibly be more problematic. I once calculated the energy release required for the event seen in Generations (at Amargosa) as more than 4x1046 Joules; to get that you would need to convert about a fifth of the total mass of the star into energy.
In terms of the most widespread effect, the most destructive substance is the Omega molecule seen in Voyager "The Omega Directive". When Omega became unstable - which it tended to do very often - it disrupted subspace, making warp drive unuseable within the vicinity. Even small amounts of Omega - a few hundreds of millions of molecules, which sounds a lot but would be far too small to see even with a good optical microscope - were sufficient to disrupt subspace over at least an entire quarter of our galaxy.
The most destructive event would probably be the time/antitime anomaly in "All Good Things". In the distant past this covered an entire quadrant of the galaxy according to Q; since it disrupted cellular activity it probably destroyed all life in that region. According to Dr McCoy's numbers from "Balance of Terror", this would comprise some 750,000 Earth type worlds.
Most Densely Inhabited Planet :
In TOS "The Mark of Gideon", the population was unrevealed but was so dense that even right outside the most important project on the planet, the people were literally standing shoulder to shoulder. Normally you would have to have large areas of farmland no matter how crowded your cities were, but Kirk makes clear in "Errand of Mercy" that the Federation can increase crop yields at least 1,000-fold over primitive production methods; if replicators existed at this time no farmland would be needed at all.
If the planet was literally shoulder to shoulder throughout, an Earth-sized world would hold 500 trillion people. With tall buildings, you might increase this anything up to thousandfold or more. As a practical matter I would be reluctant to go this far though - but the population of Gideon was likely in the trillions to tens of trillions at least.
In the episode Gideon's leaders plan to use a disease to cull much of the population. They apparently are successful in this, or at least they seem to be about to do it at the end of the episode. If they went ahead this probably counts as one of the biggest genocides in history.
Biggest Fall :
Kirk was to have a scene in "Generations" in which he made a parachute jump all the way from Earth orbit! Although it was cut, we did see Torres make an orbital skydive on the holodeck in "Extreme Risk".
Longest Range Transport :
Normal transporter range for a Starship transporter is about 40,000 km, as per 'Lower decks'. In "The First Duty", transporters on Mimas beamed the cadets of Nova team out of their crashing ships as they flew around Titan. Mimas and Titan never come within half a million kilometres of one another, so the transport range must have been about that as a minimum. As a maximum the range would increase to around 700,000 kilometres.
In TNG "Tin Man", Data was beamed by Tin Man across a distance that the Enterprise-D was said to be able to cross in about a quarter hour at full impulse. Taking that as 1/4 lightspeed per the TNG TM, we're looking at something like 67,000,000 kilometres.
The Dominion long range transporter seen DS9 "Covenant" snatched Kira from three light years away - about 28 trillion kilometres. A subspace transporter used in "Bloodlines" crossed roughly similar distances.
However, far better than this is the transporter that moved Gary Seven around in TOS "Assignment : Earth". Gary was transported to Earth - and intercepted by the Enterprise - from at least one thousand light years away!
However, by far the record is held by the Sikarian Trajector technology encountered by Voyager in "Prime Factors". Using this device, the Sikarians were able to transport across distances of at least 40,000 light years - that's almost half way across the entire galaxy!
Oldest Human Being :
Flint from 'Requiem for Methuselah' was 5,000 years old, though he was expected to die shortly after the episode. Some non-canon sources indicate that there are others like flint around who are of similar age.
Smallest Sentient Being :
The crystal from TNG "Home Soil" was microscopic in size. However, the record holders have to be the nanites from "Evolution". Their name implies that these would be about one millionth of a millimetre in length.
Q frequently claims that the Q are omnipotent. In fact this cannot possibly be so, and the show itself makes it fairly clear that they are not.
As far as actual evidence goes, the fact that Q was continually outwitted by Picard and company goes to show that Q is not omnipotent. For instance, if Q knows everything then why didn't he know that Picard would solve the riddle of the Farpoint station? Why didn't he know that Riker would eventually turn down the power of Q?
Of course, we could assume that he DID know this. We could assume that he has been playing the E-D crew along all the time, deliberately losing for reasons of his own. But it doesn't seem likely.
Quinn settles the matter in "Death Wish". When somebody asks if the Q are omnipotent, he specifically states that they are not.
But more than the evidence, there are the logical contradictions. It is impossible to be omnipotent. It simply cannot be done.
There are a number of classic insolvable tasks to demonstrate this. The most famous of all is - could Q make a rock so heavy that Q himself could not lift it? If he cannot, then there is something he cannot do - he cannot make the rock heavy enough. But if he can, then there is still something he cannot do - he cannot lift the rock. Either way he fails.
Another - can Q make a genuine £10 note? Of course not - because by definition, a note is only genuine if it is printed by the Royal Mint. Q might be able to make a copy that is atom-by-atom perfect, but so long as it is him that is making it, it is just a perfect fake.
The pithiest one I have ever come across is this : can Q make a mistake? If he can then he is not perfect. If he cannot, then there is something he cannot do.
All these arguments were created to apply to religion, by the way. Specifically to prove that the Christian god is a logical impossibility.
One of the interesting aspects of the Borg is that they lack character. By which I don't mean that they have a bad character, but that they have no character at all. At least in theory. One insider compared the Borg to a hurricane - there's nothing personal in it, you just have to get out of the way.
Unfortunately, writers have a very hard time dealing with an enemy that has no character. So since day one they have ignored their own rule about the Borg. Many people complain that the Borg queen seen in First Contact and Voyager trivialised the Borg, which she did, made them just another "evil" bunch of baddies rather than impersonal machines. It's true that the Queen is the ultimate in personification of the Borg, but in fact she is merely the end of a trend that started as early as "Q Who?"
In that episode, the Borg opened a comm channel to the Enterprise-D and demanded that it remain where it was. Why? Do the Borg care if the Enterprise-D runs from them or not?
In "Best of Both Worlds" they jumped a big step further, and gave us Locutus. Locutus was there to act an an intermediary, to ease the Federation's assimilation. Well, wasn't that nice of the Borg? They want to make things easy for us. Locutus went around spouting threats, arguing the case for assimilation, etc - all the things a classic baddie does.
Then of course we get the Borg queen. Why do the Borg need Picard as an intermediary when the Queen seems perfectly able to speak for herself? We're never told. The Queen is even more the classic baddie - by the end of Voyager, the Borg were assimilating or not on the basis of a whim, and their battle with the Federation had been reduced to a personal grudge match between the Queen and Janeway.
It's a great shame. The Borg were much more menacing as a hurricane than when they were twirling their mustaches and cackling evilly.
The episode "Skin of Evil" makes no sense at all. Here we have Armus, a sort of living oil slick, who claims that he was created when a race of near-perfect beings decided to shed all of their remaining negativity as a physical skin. This negativity then became alive as Armus.
This has to be one of the most bizzare ideas in all of Trek history. But not only do the characters in the episode accept it totally without question or doubt, even the audience don't seem to think it's all that odd. I don't think I've ever seen a single person question the existence of Armus or the feasibility of shedding the "evil" parts of yourself as a living, thinking being.
Strange, isn't it?
According to "The Last Outpost", the Tkon were capable of actually moving stars around. This is pretty impressive!
Our sun is a pretty typical star. It masses 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 metric tons. If you were to accelerate our sun to just 1 metre per second, you would need to input 1x1030 Joules. That's a whole load of energy!
But what point is there to moving a star around within a system? I mean, if you want the sun to be closer to a planet or something then moving the planet is a far simpler and more energy-efficient way of doing it than moving the sun - in fact you would pretty much have to alter the planet's orbit no matter what you did to the sun. On an interstellar scale, moving a star by a few million km would make no difference at all.
It only really makes sense to move stars around if you can do it over interstellar distances... at warp speed.
So how much does that take? Well according to the TNG TM graph, moving the nearly 5 million ton Enterprise-D at warp 1 takes about 200 MegaWatts (the graph actually says MegaJoules, but this seems to be a mistake). Since a star is about 400,000,000,000,000,000,000 times heavier than the E-D, engines with that level of efficiency would take about 8x1022 MegaWatts. That's pretty amazing! The chart shows how the power increases with increasing speed :
per Cochrane
|Power for E-D
|Power for Star
The obvious way to power all this is not some huge powerplant, but rather to just use the output of the star itself. Since our star kicks out around 3x1026 MW, if you could harness all that then you could kick the speed up to about warp 3.
Of course, I'm just speculating. In reality we don't really know what the hell the Tkon used to do. Maybe they moved stars around strictly within their own solar system, just for fun or to mess aorund with the seasons or something. Maybe the legend Data reported isn't true and the Tkon never moved stars at all. But isn't the idea of stars running around at warp speed a deeply cool one?
In "The Savage Curtain", Kirk describes the transporter thusly :
|Kirk :
|"A energy matter scrambler sir. The molecules in your body are converted into energy, then beamed into this chamber and reconverted back into their original pattern."
Note that the transporter does not squirt your molecules through space - it converts you to energy and sends that through space. So this seems to mean that when a 70 kg man is transporter, the transporter emits 6.3x1018Joules! That would make the transporter one hell of a weapon!
In TNG the transporters seem to work differently. The TM describes a process where your body is torn apart atom by atom (or even smaller). As this is done a template is created which describes where all the atoms go and what state they are in. The stream of particles is then sent through space the template is used to re-assemble them at the other end.
Many questions offer themselves, for one, are you conscious during transport? It is very difficult to say. You are certainly conscious during part of the transport - Saavik and Kirk talk during their transport up to the ship in ST II. Barclay was conscious inside the transport process during the worm episode. But the whole point of the transporter is that you are re-assembled exactly as you were. So if you were halfway through a conversation when you disintergrated, you would pick it up from the same point during the rematerialisation process without even knowning there had been an interruption. And Barclay was not beaming properly, he was suspended partway through the process.
It's very hard to see how a person could remain conscious when his brain is a trillion trillion unconnected freefloating particles.
But if you are not conscious... then technically you could argue that you have died, and that what re-appears is not in fact you but a duplicate of you. Personally I don't see this as a problem - if the "duplicate" is a perfect copy of you then it is you, by definition. A difference that makes no difference is no difference, in my humble opinion.
Another thing - Kirk's splitting. One Kirk beams up, two Kirks emerge. So where did all the extra mass come from? Surely each Kirk should have been like a "mini-me", half the size! Well, maybe not. I tend to think it worked this way :
In TOS, presume there was a safety system in the transporter. What it did was this... if the matter stream was lost during transport but the pattern template made it through, the system could supply matter from an emergency stock within the transporter and use the pattern to recreate the lost matter stream. So, when Kirk beamed up the mystery rock stuff scrambled the transporter controls and we can assume it did two things - firstly, it duplicated and distorted the template pattern so that there were two versions of it in the system, each a distorted version of Kirk. For some reason the transporter operator didn't realise this had happened; so he picked one of the patterns, the "good" Kirk, and he rematerialised it using Kirk's original matter stream. As far as he's concerned something went wrong, but they got Kirk through okay. The console, thinking it now had a second person in transport, would presumably flash some sort of alert, but I think we have to assume that the transporter guy missed it - after all, he was thinking the transport had been completed. So the console is waiting for somebody to tell it what to do... but everybody just left. We know patterns in the transporter will degrade after a little while, so now the computer is faced with a degrading pattern and no instructions as to what to do with it. So it went to emergency measures to save the transportee before the pattern degraded - it accessed the stock of spare matter and used it to complete the beaming process. Hey presto, two Kirks.The re-integration of the two halves would then consist of reversing this process. Both men are dematerialised to create new patterns. These are then combined to create one whole, normal pattern. Half the matter is used to rematerialise a whole Kirk, and the rest goes back into the emergency storage system. Hey presto, one Kirk. It's actually kind of plausible given the technology, no?
Does the Federation have laws about mental privacy? It sure doesn't seem to. Deanna goes around sensing people's emotional states as a matter of course. Lwaxana reads - or claims to read - people's minds in great detail whenever she talks to them. Nobody so much as objects to this, let alone suggests that it is against the law.
So if I am telepathic, do I have freedom to read anybody I like? What if I'm in a business meeting?
|Yellow text = Canon source
|Green text = Backstage source
|Cyan text = Novel
|White text = DITL speculation
|Copyright Graham Kennedy
|Page views : 13,600
|Last updated : 1 Jan 1970


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Get Watch Dogs for free when you purchase a Nvidia graphics cardWritten by: / / No Comments
If you're planning to upgrade your PC's graphics card in order to run Watch Dogs then be sure to take advantage of a new promotion stemming from a partnership between Ubisoft and Nvidia.
If you buy any one of ten recent Nvidia graphics card including the GeForce GTX Titan, 780 Ti, 780, 770, 760, 690, 680, 670, 660 Ti and 660 from participating retailers such as Dabs, Novatech, ebuyer.com, Overclockers and SCAN you'll score a free download of Watch Dogs valued at $60/€60.
Earlier this month Ubisoft released a trailer showing how the PC version of Watch Dogs incorporates Nvidia technologies such as HBAO+ (Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion Plus) to create realistic shadowing around objects and TXAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) to remove jaggies thus creating a smoother and clearer image.
Here's the trailer in case you didn't see it the first time around:
Watch Dogs will be released on May 27th across PS4, PS3, Xbox One, Xbox 360 and PC. Head over here for El33tonline's previous coverage of this ambitious new IP from Ubisoft.
Soource: Eurogamer


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I came across this idea- to only have Two-Tabs open at once when using an Internet browser.
I'm always swimming in dozens of tabs. How would I get a Two-Tab discipline?
I came across this idea- to only have Two-Tabs open at once when using an Internet browser.
I'm always swimming in dozens of tabs. How would I get a Two-Tab discipline?
Not sure if that technique works, but I might give it a whirl too.
well that last word helps: discipline... just hold yourself to your goal of not having more then one open.
if that is too hard, there are extensions.
firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/window-and-tab-limiter/
chrome: http://www.tothepc.com/archives/limit-maximum-number-of-tabs-in-chrome/
I don't know if there are any objective measurements on the issue, but this seems to be an awful blunt instrument to use in the name of productivity.
I use my tabs as a makeshift queue, which seems to increase my productivity, as I can keep things on the back burner that are lower priority.
Two Tab might not literally mean keeping only Two Tabs open. Just the way Inbox Zero doesn't mean having absolutely nothing in your inbox.
It might mean simply keeping your focus on just two tabs. You'll probably have a primary focus tab, a secondary focus tab, and the others are references. In other words, don't have a tab open to monitor new emails. Don't have tabs open to chat. Don't respond to two people at once. Don't research two different things. Don't have your Facebook and Email open at the same time - just check one at a time.
That way, you prioritize, instead of focusing on a dozen different things at once and not accomplishing anything.
Multiple tabs are very useful tools for research and references. I often have a dozen wikipedia links open at the same time. Sometimes I'm searching for something and open multiple tabs simultaneously to wait for them to load. You become rather inefficient if you have to search something all over again or wait for tabs to load one at a time. But the idea is that you shouldn't be multitasking more than two tasks at a time.
I use tabs as a "Todo" list of sorts :) I first open a series of main websites (news, various Stack Exchange sites, etc). Then I middleclick any interesting bits from one site and close the main tab, then I do the same for the next site. All this until I only have the interesting tabs open, and then I go through them one by one until none remain.
Then later I will start again from the main websites and do the same.
I call this the Productive Procrastinator!