Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Star Trek got it right... kinda

Hi! I'm Sue. And when I was 13 and put those glow in the dark stars on my ceiling, I used a star chart for reference to make sure I got it right, and I am an Anomaly.

Just a quick minipost, as I'd like to share an observation made by a friend of mine (known as trexphile on teh interwebs), who is currently re-watching season 3 of TNG. She says:

This is how big a nerd I am.

During "Booby Trap," Data states that the Enterprise is moving at 135 meters per second. Riker has already said that the inertial dampeners are in manual mode, whatever that means, which tells me that it's possible that the crew will be subjected to the effects of sudden acceleration -- in other words, becoming "chunky salsa on the walls," as I've heard it said.

So, being a nerd, I wanted to know exactly how fast 135 meters per second is, and being American, I had to convert that 135 meters per second into terms that I could understand. So after visiting a conversion website and doing some rudimentary arithmetic, I concluded that the Enterprise was traveling at 288 miles per hour. Which means that the writers of the episode had probably paid attention to the math and hadn't just thrown an arbitrary number out there.

And I felt this self-satisfied contentment. Until I realized just how nerdy that really was.

Yep, she's an anomaly, too. I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog-reading.

Sue
Anomaly Staff Writer
Subscribe to Anomaly via iTunes

No comments: