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Old Type 40

@old-type-40 / old-type-40.tumblr.com

Whovian, Sherlockian, and just a geek in general.

Given all of the excitement regarding Trek of late, for those of you in the Trek fandom here in the Tumblrverse who know of those in the fandom in the Twitterverse, this might be a good time to entice them to come join us.

With Miles Bron Elon Musk continuing to f- up twitter with limits on viewing tweets and doing away with the chronological order of twitter feeds, it's got to be a fairly crappy place for fandoms to geek out together. So if you have fandom friends or acquaintances there, you may be able to encourage them to come here!

Just to be clear I fully enjoyed the latest SNW episode Lost in Translation. But that did not stop me from wincing every time the phrase "deuterium poisoning" came up. I may not be a scientist but as a science geek I know that deuterium is a stable isotope of hydrogen and therefor it should not be doing anything at a biological level that hydrogen wouldn't do.

What would've worked better is that the Bussard collectors use powerful electromagnetic fields to collect the deuterium. And even though there are systems to direct those fields away from the ship so they don't affect the crew, there is some leakage which can lead to neurological effects.

Sure, Trek like most science fiction pushes at the edges where technologies do not yet exist and where science is still answering unresolved questions or finding new questions. But ideally it shouldn't flub well established science. I checked the credits and there is a technical consultant. I suspect the writers conferred with her about the Bussard collectors but never asked her about "deuterium poisoning" and made it up on their own.

A note about episode 2.5 of Strange New Worlds.

Also, for those who think he should be resisting bacon even being human because Vulcans are vegetarians, in the TOS episode "All Our Yesterdays" Spock ate some meat because it was the only source of food. But he was surprised to find he enjoyed it. Plus, his loss of contemporary Vulcan attributes caused him to lose impulse control.

Many (human) vegetarians say the one thing they cannot resist eating is bacon. There was that time when Anthony Bourdain visited a cafe in SF that catered to a vegetarian/vegan clientele. But it had a maple bacon latte that it served.

So I had no problem with human Spock enjoying bacon. And it was in keeping with the one time we saw Spock lose some of his "Vulcan-ness" in TOS.