Thursday, December 20, 2018

Happy Holidays!

I hope everyone enjoys their winter holidays this year. It looks like I'll be taking next week off from posting, as usually happens this time of year, but you never know when the muse will strike.

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Thursday, December 13, 2018

Just A Bad Plan

One of the family viewing projects we have is watching an episode of Star Trek on the 50th anniversary of it's broadcast. So a couple of weeks ago, right on schedule, we watched "Wink of an Eye". The overall concept, people moving so fast as to be invisible to the naked eye, is a good one to explore. However, there is one major flaw that we found in the Scalosians' plan.

Here's the set-up: The planet Scalos underwent a dramatic upheaval that fundamentally changed the inhabitants. Everyone was accelerated to the point that the rest of the humanoids in the galaxy couldn't see them or interact with them. On top of that, all of the males were made sterile, so they couldn't reproduce on their own. Since the accident, they had taken a page from the Sirens and lured ships with a distress call, accelerating their crews, and using them to reproduce. It didn't work so well, though, as an original population of 900,000 is now down to 5. Still, they want to continue their plan with the Enterprise crew.

Now, let's take a look at the make-up of those last five. Take a look at this picture and see if you can spot the problem:

That's right, there are 3 sterile males and 2 (presumably) fertile females. That means that none of the women on the Enterprise can be used, since they would have to reproduce with non-Scalosians. Therefore, the plan is for the two female Scalosians to reproduce with the male crew to repopulate the entire planet. Sorry, but that doesn't work on multiple levels.

Let's look at the most obvious problem first - time*. Assuming the humanoid Scalosians have a gestation rate similar to humans, right around 9 months, and a similar recover time, 18 months is generally accepted, then time is a BIG issue. That means that each female would have to wait at least 27 months between impregnations, and that assuming that each fetus is fully viable. So a child would be born, on average, of once ever 13.5 months, and about half of them would be male, which does the population growth no good. That's never going to solve the problem.

The less obvious problem, but probably more serious one, is genetics. Even if you have about 200 possible fathers, you still will only have 2 mothers for over a decade, and any new mothers would be descendants of the original two. That's a pretty shallow gene-pool and it wouldn't take very long for genetic mutations to start showing up.

Then there's the issue that I didn't notice until sitting down to write this post - Where are the children? If this is such a successful program (that nearly whipped out the population in the first place) that Deela flat out refused the help of the entire Federation that Kirk offered, then where are the kids they previously had? Either she was so indoctrinated by previous generations to think that this was the only way or there were way more than 5 people left on the planet. Unfortunately, we are only shown and told about the 5, so I have to assume that they are it.

Like I said, I think this is a good concept for an episode, I just think there are too many holes in it for it to be considered a successful attempt.

* All time periods are relative to the Scalosian "normal".

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Thursday, December 6, 2018

Anime Recommendation: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions

Kira's favorite part of the opening to Season 1. "It's so cuuute!"
Recently, we finished watching the first season and the two OVA's set after same of the anime Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions. Michelle and I previewed this, since it's labeled as "Mature", but after a few episodes we thought that this was something we should view as a family.

The main thrust of the plot is people who are dealing with, or have in the recent past dealt with, having Chunibyo. The main character is Yūta Togashi, who used to call himself the "Dark Flame Master", but who is now thoroughly embarrassed by it. So much so that he chose to go to a high school where no one from his middle school could be, letting him start over.

This is all thrown off the rails when Rikka Takanashi moves into the apartment above him. You see, Rikka is still in full on Chunibyo and claims to have the "Eye of the Wicked Lord", which is her right eye with a yellow contact in it. We find out that this is partially a defense mechanism due to some tragedy in her recent past (which I'm not going to spoil for you as it's a great reveal). Yūta comes to accept Rikka for who she is, even as he tries to curb her more outrageous behavior.

The reason that we thought this should be family viewing that that Kira does role-plays with her friends at school. Nothing as serious as having the lines of reality and fantasy blur, but it is still pretty involved. We thought that she would enjoy seeing this and, while she got some ideas from it for her own stuff, she was able to understand why going too far can be an issue. There's also the lesson of accepting people for who they are rather than trying to force them into what society has decreed they should be.

Now on to Season 2, where a whole new set of complications show up.

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Like what I'm doing here on the blog and podcast? Why not check out my Patreon Page to see how you can help me do more? http://www.patreon.com/TheHammerStrikes