The way I’ve been looking at it, if you want a chance at the starships, start with the spandex.

If we want a good and honest chance of being able to do interstellar travel of any sort, we’re not going to get there by building an Enterprise and then hope that someone cooks up a warp drive for it before we finish ruining our only planet.

Maybe physics is all wrong and there really is a warp drive to be had. If there is one, it’s not the sort of thing you can count on. We have to survive as a species until it happens.

Conversely, there’s a real easy bet to be had. In 1.29 million years, Gliese 710 will be 0.17 light years away. The GAIA mission has identified some other candidate stars that are going to get fairly close sooner. So there’s a solarpunk space travel bet of simply providing a stable society over the long term such that we can surf the stars.

Solarpunk is kinda the version that starts with the spandex. I’m at the point in my life where I kinda hate the whole Eugenics-wars/World-War-III thread to Trek because it kinda mutated away from the hopeful idea that we can survive a downturn into the idea that the collapse will create a new world which is … risky.

The last time the fires hit my area I was watching the fire progress via Purple Air sensors. If this one sensor was still sending, then my friend’s place up in the mountains was probably OK. Seems … kinda obvious almost?

The hard-to-solve problem with the news is that reporting on suicides causes suicide (as in: more people commit suicide, not just people who were on the ledge decided to go) yet people also want to know things.

I’m unclear if the usual disclaimers added to the article actually help or just are the only sounds-like-it-might-help thing that comes to mind so at least the publisher can feel better about the added deaths that, statistically speaking, they might be causing. I just remember it being covered in one of my college gened classes and the way it was presented was that everybody threw up their hands in frustration and gave up.

An acquaintance who screwed up her leg really bad and went through a whole process of getting bolted back together et al decided that she wasn’t going to tell people what happened. Because everybody always asks “how’d you do it?” as if it was some curse that she had personally triggered that they could avoid. And I thought about how the first question in my mind was “how’d you do it?” and I guess it made me think about the inanity of making sure to check for flying herring while traveling backwards hanging out the window of a train going between Albuquerque and Phoenix after having signed up for a triple indemnity life insurance plan… or something like that.

The only exception, of course, is you are doing something that the news orgs consider “wrong” like doing drugs or being certain categories of mentally ill or riding a bicycle for transportation.

I feel like Starfleet in Trek accidentally but directly led to the modern US Space Force.

Trek always had to soft-sell some of the socialist ideals (e.g. “we don’t need cash” without really explaining how things really do work) and then also a lot of science fiction that was popular in the more literary side of things during the 80s was actually frighteningly right-wing.

There’s not really a good version of conservatism that works in this modern era, especially when you come to where the parties are staked in the US, but even in general. You can’t have a modern society with all of the complexities and interrelations and cost and then have it be entirely hands-off conservative capitalism. This is why even when you talk to people who are nominally part of the right wing and actually go through the checkboxes of things that they must necessarily adhere to, you see a lot of people who are so-called RINO people … and then a bunch of weirdos who nobody likes.

The brain’s got a bunch of structures probably to prevent us from spiraling into depression when we were hunting the African savanna when our buddy got eaten by a tiger and there wasn’t anything we could have maybe done about that that cause today’s cognitive dissonance.

So basically the only way you can get a frighteningly actually unpopular platform through the electorate is by taking advantage of cognitive dissonance. Because you have to project this idea that a fundamentally backwards idea is going to move us forwards somehow.

If Copyright hadn’t been extended for so many centuries, Trek characters would already be in the public domain and we’d see them fictionally used much in the way that we use all of the characters from actual public domain works. Shakespearean heroes, for example. But, even as things are now, the characters of Trek have had such a presence in the media scene that they do kinda take that aspect on. Thus, basically repeating the plot of part of the Babylon 5 episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” where you have the crew of Babylon 5 being used by a new fascist empire being holographically simulated to say 1984-esque things… one of the weapons to maintain a state of cognitive dissonance is to go back and kinda put fascist words into leftist mouths.

So it’s a bit of an accident on the part of the person, who is being dragged along politically, but it’s very much part of the conservative movement to “reclaim” old media and the relatively milquetoast treatment of alternatives to capitalism and a complete abandonment of queer issues in middle-era Trek makes that kinda easy, which I guess is why NuTrek does go through some pains to state things a bit more forcefully.

I hope that, at some point in the series, they reference his prized bottle of Chateau Picard that he’s been saving for a special occasion.

It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

(I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)

It’s never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today’s problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.

More to the point, the company using shady means to collect the data does not need to care if the data is useful, just that it’s marketable.

You need to control the current going through the LED, either by wasting it as heat (resistor or linear controller) or via switching power supply mechanisms.

Non-intelligent LED strips (where the whole strip is the same color, as opposed to the intelligent kind where each LED can be a different color) are generally not using a resistor per LED because you can use a row of LEDs in series with a single resistor. Generally there’s a marking to designate where you can cut such that they’ve got several LEDs per resistor because each LED is going to be somewhere in the 2-3V range, depending on color.

Strips are a design compromise built around convenience, of course. But there’s a lot of engineering compromises here because the switching power supply is going to burn up some energy running things as well.

Manufacturers of finished LED products do make bright LEDs frequently by making a series-parallel array of LED chips on a single substrate such that they’ve pre-selected similar LEDs. But if you are building your own strips, you can use a constant-current switching supply to run a series of LEDs off of a relatively high voltage, somewhere in the 24v to 48v range, where you’d want to select for a relatively bright individual LED so you don’t need to make a bunch of the constant-current switching power supplies.