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Bret Devereaux

3 Jan, 9 tweets, 2 min read

Today I've learned that if you tweet about Star Trek, one of the genre of replies you get are folks who maybe don't know their Star Trek so well, but are really convinced someone must have made the whole thing internally consistent and scientifically rigorous.

And...I have bad news for those folks: Star Trek can't keep basic, plot-essential things like beaming through shields or how many shuttles Voyager has straight.

The 'kill' setting on phasers was 1/4 and 3 and also 10, because they couldn't keep that straight either.

Consistency was *never* a priority on the classic Star Trek shows.

Also the science was more or less entirely made up. Like, the scarce warp fuel they use is 'Deuterium' - literally just a molecule of two atoms of the most common substance in the universe (it's H2).

This was a show where writers would literally leave notations in their dialogue just marked [tech] and then some poor science consultant would try to fill in the blanks with cool sounding words.

The plot was fixed already by guys who literally just wrote, "tech the tech to the warp drive." The plot was utterly unconnected to the 'science' (which was often just babble), with only rare exceptions.

That's a direct Ron Moore quote, by the by ( medium.com/getting-art-do… )

Don't get me wrong, I like Star Trek! I enjoy Star Trek (I'm partial to DS9, but TOS and TNG are both good and I currently love Lower Decks)!

But it never made much effort to be consistent, either internally or with the science. That wasn't the point.

Star Trek was always a show about people, who happened to be on a spaceship.

It was never about the spaceship.

(And yes I know there are technical guides for Star Trek. These both 1) aren't canon so 2) the writers don't feel bound by them and thus 3) they don't agree with the show half the time or 4) with each other. Honestly, I cannot imagine the despair of the writers for those guides)

Irony time - you know what major science fiction property used to actually have people in charge of managing the canon and ensuring cross-property continuity, including in technical details?

Star Wars.
starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Canon#Can…

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Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

2 Jan

One of my sci-fi pet peeves? Weapons that fire like a magic spell that either happens or it doesn't; Star Trek's phasers are a frequent offender.

What I mean is the sort where 'oh no, we fired our techtech beam, but they had their techtech shield up, so it did *nothing.*" 1/13

Actual weapons nearly all work by delivering some amount of energy to a target; there are some exceptions (chemical and biological weapons come to mind), but a sword, a javelin, a rifle and a nuclear bomb all work by delivering energy, either as kinetic energy or heat. 2/13

Even if those weapons fail to defeat a target's defensive systems (armor, whatever), they still delivered the energy, which, thermodynamics being what they are, had to go somewhere. It might degrade armor, or knock the target around a bit, or cause collateral damage. 3/13

Read 13 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

2 Jan

From foreignpolicy.com/2021/12/29/ukr…

I find myself more than a bit frustrated by this phrasing, "sovereign but deferential" and the degree it implicitly accepts the PRC's framing of the point rather than acknowledging that to many countries 'deferential' means 'not sovereign.' 1/6

I'm not saying journalists need to be as skeptical as we'd expect, say, US government officials to be, but China's record in all of this isn't great! The Xinjiang and Tibetan autonomous regions...aren't very autonomous. "One China, two systems" turned out to also be BS. 2/6

China's long list of territorial disputes, with India, Japan, Vietnam, Bhutan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei all seem to suggest that 'deference' would be understood to include territorial adjustments which wouldn't favor those countries. 3/6

Read 6 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

21 Oct 21

Ah, that most fun of emails, "Dear Museum, could you please supply me with the provenance of <thing> and <other thing>, ideally back to at least 1973?"

Taking all bets* on how hard they ghost me!

*Not actually taking any bets; you bet on things that are UNcertain!

For those unfamiliar with the rules here, a 1970 UNESCO Convention, to which the USA was a party, set 1970 as the grandfathering line for antiquities, after which for possession of cultural heritage objects to be legal, you need to be able to show that it was imported legally...

...with the consent of the country of origin. Generally, a museum ought to have either 1) a chain of possession to a point before 1970(ish) OR 2) a chain of possession that is legal at each step back to the original, post-1970 recovery of the object.

Read 5 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

19 Oct 21

Well, people seemed to like my little Julius Caesar chart, so why not tweet out some of my other lecture aids.

Here is a set of four charts I use to help students visualize ancient social classes, starting with Fifth century BC Athens (bibliographic discussion at the end): 1/23

And then we can compare very early fifth century Sparta: 2/23

And my latest addition to the block-charts, the same method but applied to the Roman Republic in 225 (it's a big chart, you may want to zoom in): 3/23

Read 24 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

12 Sep 21

Just finished playing an odd little computer wargame, "Highfleet" (it's on Steam because of course it is).

Pretty sure I'll end up talking about it on ACOUP because it is different from most commercial wargames in interesting ways.

Mostly, it forces you to play w/ uncertainty.

So the briefest background is that you play as the commander of a retro-futuristic fleet of air-battleships. Your ships can engage with cruise missiles and aircraft outside of visual range or with traditional artillery or short-range missiles in close combat.

Honestly, don't think real hard about the technology here; it isn't supposed to make hard-sci-fi sense.

The thing is, you generally both trying to find and defeat enemy groups but also avoid detection, because the enemy overall is much stronger than you.

Read 16 tweets

Bret Devereaux

@BretDevereaux

10 Sep 21

@DrMichaelJTayl1

This week on the blog @DrMichaelJTayl1 presents a Defense of the Classics, setting out a number of reasons why we need to work to save Classics (the study of the ancient world) as an academic discipline and the clear benefits for doing so.

acoup.blog/2021/09/10/mee…

This is a perspective I'm very eager to present. Classics has been under a lot of pressure for years now, with funding cuts and shrinking or even disbanded departments at major universities.

It is a discipline that needs to grapple with the real danger of fading away.

That pressure has prompted a lot of classicists to think and argue really hard about what Classics needs to be in a modern university. Those discussions are fair and good.

But debates about what Classics should be won't matter if we don't have a field by the time we decide.

Read 6 tweets

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