"Phasers on stun." How many times have we heard that line? Lots, for sure,but...uh...have you ever concitered what a problim that could be? A stun beam is intened to interfear with the volentary nervious system of a living being, in such a way as to render them harmless to the shooter, without killing them. One problim....i don't buy it. Reason? Anistseologist have to carefully moniter a paticents breathing, blood pressure, and such, to prevent a seditive (Sed-agive?) from causing a paticent's death. And thats because of the fine line that must be reached to do the job. They don't do that with phasers. Differing biology,unfamilure nervious systems, or even humans with unexpected medical conditions, could turn a stun shot into a kill shot. In short, the unintened resault could be a death. Or, as in last nights "Enterprise", no resault on the tentacle thingy snatching the captain. In fact....what about Batman? Hits a thug with a thinner then average skull, and "Oops, sorry! My bad!". It could happen! So....what things that are accepted "Dogma" or "Technobabble" or whatever, have made you wonder...."That shoulden't work like that, because..."
Always thought those little laser (or whatever) hair trimmers and shavers that appeared a couple of times on TNG could do some serious damage if they weren't properly adjusted. Getting nicked by a blade is annoying, but slipping with an energy beam could cost you an ear.
Geek Mode On:
The Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual indicates that the stun setting is designed for an average humanoid of standard build. It could kill a weaker species or a sick individual. I'll have to look up the information as to the exact information, but according to the guys that wrote the Technical manual, a phase could kill on stun.
Geek Mode Off:
A modern Stun Gun could kill a individual as well. Hit a guy with a heart condition or a pacemaker with one of those and it could kill him. Even a rubber bullet could kill if it hits in the right place.
I never quite got why zombies have a craving for human flesh...
"I never quite got why zombies have a craving for human flesh..."
Cause it tastes great, that's why.
What?
Two great lines from some commercials for Sci-Fi Channel's "Prey Week"
"Humans, the other white meat"
"Humans are about to find out they taste like chicken"
Zombies crave brains because it's the only thing that alleviates the pain of being dead. At least according to RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD. Maybe they just need to replenish their neurotransmitters the ugly (but delicious) way.
As for UC:OOHT'aT, as I like to abbreviate it, I noticed it while watching the preview for CLOCKSTOPPERS. In the movie they have a device that "stops time" and allows them to move freely. Looked at another way, it just makes them move really, really fast. About halfway through the preview my brain spoke up.
"Wait a minute, wouldn't the friction involved burn them alive?" You know, like the space shuttle re-entering the atmosphere. Not to mention the energy levels required to get something moving that fast.
I guess that's why I don't make the big bucks.
"Humans are about to find out they taste like chicken"
Actually, they taste like pig.
At least, that's what I heard.
...
What?
____________________________________________________________________
I forgot which cannibal tribe it was, but one of them refers to people as the "long pig."
All this comes from a lifetime of horror movies/literature. I don't know whether to laugh or cry, some days.
Do chickens walk around saying stuff tastes like human?
Paul Theroux wrote in his book The Happy Isles of Oceania:
"It was a theory of mine that former cannibals of Oceania now feasted on Spam because Spam came the nearest to approximating the porky taste of human flesh. 'Long pig' as they called a cooked human in much of Melanesia. It was a fact that the people-eaters of the Pacific had all evolved, or perhaps degenerated, into Spam-eaters. And in the absence of Spam they settle for corned beef, which also had a corpsy flavor."
Cracked me up.
Actually, I've always had a morbid curiosity about cannibalism, and it's raised these conundrums:
Do cannibals describe various meats as tasting "like human,"?
Are young children considred akin to veal?
If a cannibal says he/she ate Chinese, does he/she mean it literally?
If you were in a desperate situation and had to eat someone, how weird would it be to have nothing left but the genitals?
Do infant cannibals eat strained or mushed flesh?
I always wondered about the radiation poisoning from the nuke explosions in "The Peacemaker" and "Broken Arrow". I know the second one was under ground, but if the heroes could get out of range that easily, and float downstream, couldn't the fallout seap into the water also.
J.R. Seek help.
Do chickens walk around saying stuff tastes like human?
What did the first person to eat chicken say it tasted like?
My head hurts.
My head hurts.
Show no sign of weakness or injury....or you're the next guest of honor* at the feast...
*entree
Mr. Wendigo says, "Good drink, good meat, good God let's eat!"
Star Trek is full of BS like that.
I hate ST with a vengeance and cut it absolutely NO slack.
Heh...theres a subject they never touched in ST/TNG! Would a Klingon Cannibal say that humans taste just like Romulin? And, if a Bajoran did eat a Cardassian, would that be cannabalisism, or what? They come from different worlds, but they are intelligant species, so would that change the definition? How would the Feds deal with a planet where they exchanged diplomats, and ate same as a sign of cultural acceptance? As per phasers, they'd be the perfect anti-zombie tool. Unless...as in return of the L.D., they became "Breathable", if you get my drift. Dang...now i'm hungey!
Another big gap in Trek's science is that they call divisions of space quadrants. A quadrant is a division of four, yet I've heard them refer to way more than delta.
The first four letters of the greek alphabet are: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta. I don't recall them ever mentioning any others.
Still, space is infinite, and Trek never claimed to have explored all of space, so how could they divide infinity into four pieces?
I don't think it was the universe in quadrants, just the galaxy.
With a few notable exceptions, they didn't have much dealing with things outside the Milky Way; not in any sense where they had mapped it out and divided it into sections
Just remembered something else that struck me as funny on Star Trek - the transporter.
It would seem to me that converting a human body into energy would result in a pretty damn big explosion. Look at what the incomplete conversion of a few ounces of matter did to Hiroshima. Six crewmen, weighing an average of, say, 170 pounds would seem like a hell of a lot of energy to contain, much less transmit. The transporter beam itself should be enough to make the phasers look like a tickle ray.
The other thing about the transporters that always bugged me - how do they know they're getting the same people on the other end? How do they know it's not killing the original person and assembling a duplicate somewhere else? I suppose there were a couple of episodes that suggested people could remain conscious while converted to energy, and even talk to one another, but how is that supposed to work?
One thing to keep in mind in Star Trek is that the science doesn't matter. It's kinda like "ok here are the general rules for the technology, take it at face value and let's move on to the story" Most of the stories are about the people in the situations; not the science involved.
Contrast this to a story like "The Stars Like Dust" by Asimov, (or many of his) where the science is central to the the story and the plot and is usually as accuarate as was known at the tim eof the writing.
I think we're all aware of that. I think the whole point of this thread is to more closely examine the things we take at face value....or to discuss cannibalism.
AndyC wrote:
>
> I think we're all aware of that. I think the whole
> point of this thread is to more closely examine the things we
> take at face value....or to discuss cannibalism.
I know. Far too many of us take cannibalism at it's face value.
I mean a delicacy like long pig cheeks is currenlty going for almost $25/lb. (Rimshot.)
>long pig cheeks
Is that 'rump roast' ?
Or..something else?
Dag, how am i to take this......i wanted to see if anyone else had been thinkin' bout contridictions and connundrums that the producers/writers hadden' concitered....how did we all (Mie culpa) get off on the long pig thing? Should i be flattered at the lingth of the response list? ( Size does matter). Or, is it just lunch time where you freaks are posting? (Glad i keep Kosher). Doth i speak freak geek? Ah, so, but not in Greek, for to seek in Greek a freak geek is reach a peak...of which i dare not speak. I'm sorry....time to dine while reading the Tech manual agine........
Flangepart, that was frickin beutiful!
That's gotta be one of the coolest posts I've ever read! AWESOME!!!
Here's one I've always wondered about; how does an invisible man see? You can't see him, meaning the light passes right through him, so that means that it also passes right through his eyes rather than being focussed onto his retinas. The SFC series always said that the light was going around him and that he saw in a different spectrum than visible light, but most movies just assume that you can see while invisible.
Or when someone becomes a ghost, they can't pick up anything (at least at first) or touch anything, so how do they climb stairs or stand on floors?
Star Trek TNG made this same mistake in the episode where Geordy and someone else were 'phased' and couldn't touch anything, but yet they didn't fall through the deck. Then there's the question of how they were able to breath since they'd be out of phase with the air too.
Even going by the rules of the show, they screwed up bigtime in a couple episodes. One episode showed them using the transporter to cure a fatal virus in the doctor. They used a sample of her DNA from before she contracted the virus as a guide for re-assembling her, so that she came out healthy (and with her memory up to the time the DNA sample was from, intact!). This means that they could use the transporter to cure pretty much anything. Lose an arm? No problem, just toss it into the transporter and put the person back together using a DNA sample from before he got hurt.
Then there was the episode where Picard and 3 others were turned into children when the transporter left something out of their bodies. Congratulations, you've just discovered the secret of eternal youth! Nobody ever has to die of old age or disease in the Star Trek universe again.
I always wondered why the holographic docter on Voyager would need to use real instruments to examine a patient, can't he just instantly made holographic instruments? Or why he'd need to actually talk to the computer, since he's a creation OF the computer.
What about the holodeck, how does it simulate an enviroment much bigger than the room it's in? I could see if it used forcefields for the ground and moved people back when they got close to a wall, sort of like a treadmill, but what does it do when two crewmembers walk away from one another?
I actually read in a Star Trek book that the holodecks have a treadmill-like thing on the ground that takes relativity into account or something. Another is when there's an explosion in a film and someone runs down a hall from it or escapes it in an elevator shaft, and the filmmakers neglect to notice that not only would the sheer heat burn your skin clean off, but the fire would eat all the oxygen and you'd suffocate.
Noticed something similar in the Spider Man movie, when Spidey and Gobby were fighting in the burning building. The temperature would have been hundreds of degrees in there. There should have been a lot more smoke as well.
Volcano has people standing on the other side of a concrete barrier from molten lava. Not to mention how they were able to create a solid, curving wall out of barriers that are wider on the bottom than on the top.