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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The Universal Translator is basically magic. TOS came closest to describing how it works, and it boiled down to, “IDK man it does some brain scans to detect your language structure”. There’s no satisfying answer as to why it knows the “Washington State Bridge” is a combination of a proper noun, a geopolitical concept, and a general noun.

    In Enterprise, the Universal Translator is generally depicted as a modern miracle of technology, but one without useful internal intelligence. If it hears a few snippets of Romanian, it’s just going to start brute forcing a translation matrix with every technique it has at its disposal. More speech gives it more data to work with, but it’s still just cycling through its options.

    Sato’s familiarity with xenolinguistics allows her to aid the Universal Translator by narrowing the system’s options or directing it down specific paths. She doesn’t know or learn the alien languages in the traditional sense, but she’s shown for having a knack for picking up on patterns and syntax. Again with the Romanian example, she’s doing the alien equivalent of saying, “This sounds European, skip trying to translate this as an Asian language for now”. The Universal Translator has fewer options to run through and gets to a successful translation matrix faster.

    But again, it’s plot contrivance space magic.





  • This is pretty typical for universities. They don’t want the airwaves clogged, doubling up NAT can lead to networking wonkiness, and they don’t want you giving university network access to unauthorized folks with an open AP.

    When you say VR streaming, you just mean wireless from your PC to the headset, right? There’s a chance you could do that with an offline wireless router if the VR experiences you’re looking to play are single player.




  • FlatFootFox@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzVoyager 1
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    6 months ago

    I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

    That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

    It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.





  • FlatFootFox@lemmy.worldtoRisa@startrek.websiteTea Mom
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    11 months ago

    ”We have blueberry, raspberry, ginseng, sleepy time, green tea, green tea with lemon, green tea with lemon and honey, liver disaster, ginger with honey, ginger without honey, vanilla almond, white truffel, blueberry chamomile, vanilla walnut, constant comment and… earl grey.”


  • There’s some honest to goodness swearing on the new streaming Star Trek shows. Their highest concentration is probably on Discovery. The dialog’s written a little differently on the show, and their go-to scene establishing shot on the bridge is three scientists giving very Star Trek comments, and a fourth person earnestly going, “Holy shit this is so cool / extremely dangerous.”

    The other shows have a slightly more classic tone, but even Patrick Stewart got an f-bomb off in the third season of Picard. The shows mostly limit it to one-off expletives during firefights. They’re rare enough that you typically don’t even catch them when they come up. They definitely don’t have extended colorful metaphors like “cock-sucker” though. At that point they’ll reach for a sci-fi comment like the Trek film’s “pointy-eared bastard”.

    Personally I like the joke someone made a while back about how swearing on Star Trek is a setting the captain gets to make on the universal translator. Picard’s a narc, and Pike’s the cool boss.








  • The story goes that Chief Engineer Argyle’s actor Biff Yeager was eager for a full time role on the show. It had been hinted at that he could become part of the main cast if fan response was positive. Yeager was apparently a bit too zealous asking friends and family to write in to the studio. They received a wave of support for the character before an episode featuring Argyle had ever aired, and his role was subsequently quietly written off of the show.