Star Trek – Coffee Spoons

Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

Any science fiction fan—and likely many who are not—can identify the character who utters those words in that order: Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek’s captain of the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701-D. Ask your Amazon Alexa for it. Or your Google Home.

Thanks to the work of xkcd, we now know that Jean-Luc—may I call him Jean-Luc?—had a number of other options in the replicator from which to choose before he settled on “hot”.

Although Garak would still like to meet that Earl Grey and tell him a thing or two about tea leaves.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Boldly Going…

Those of my readers who know me well know that I’ve long been a fan of Star Trek. And so we’ve made it to the weekend. And over at Indexed earlier this month, well, we have a great science fiction comparison.

Here in the states we have a bank holiday Monday, so Star Trek is just a great way to start a holiday weekend.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one.

Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.

Back to the Future

We began the week with an infographic about Star Trek on account of Leonard Nimoy’s death. We end the week with an xkcd graphic about stories of the past and future and its mentions of Star Trek. Not just for Nimoy, but now also of Harve Bennett, who was a producer instrumental in the production of the movies that solidified Star Trek as a cultural phenomenon.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

He’s dead, Jim.

For those of you living beneath a Taurusan boulder, Leonard Nimoy died last week. He is perhaps best known—at least to me—for his role of Spock in Star Trek. Clearly your author is too young to have ever watched Star Trek during its original run. Instead, I belong to the next generation of Star Trek fans—the domain of Picard not Kirk. But, as I grew older, I could rent the original series films. And in the age of the Internet, I could watch the original series. And so I learned to appreciate the green-blooded, pointy-eared hobgoblin Spock. And through the new movie series, another generation can now enjoy Star Trek. But even then, we had Leonard Nimoy cameos to enjoy.

Well, as you can imagine, today’s piece is an infographic I found that looks at Star Trek the Original Series.

Credit for the piece goes to Olka Kirsanova and Natalya Platonova.

A (Time and) Space Race

First of all, I grew up a fan of Star Trek and not Star Wars. Star Trek is, after all, more science-y. Now, for today’s post, I could make references to the battlestar Galactica, the good ship Tardis, Planet Express deliveries, or avoiding the Alliance throughout the Verse. Instead I’ll just submit this interactive graphic from Slate.

It compares the times needed by various nerd-loved starships/spaceships/space vehicles to reach very distant (and real) stellar destinations. Don’t worry, there is a bar chart in the end with Voyager 1 thrown in for comparison to reality. (Though I suppose they could have just made it Voyager 6.)

Not accounting for differing technologies or laws of physics

See, a bar chart. It fits within the scope of this blog.

Credit for the piece goes to Chris Kirk, Andrew Morgan, and Natalie Matthews.