Greatplay.net

Today’s Post is Delayed.

This is why:

I’m just one man. You’ll get over it.

Happy 4th of July.

Star Trek is a good show. But some of its technology just don’t make any sense whatsoever when you really start to think about them. Of course they’re from the future and regularly go faster than the speed of light, so they’re not new to breaking laws of physics with their left hand and breaking common sense with the other.

One of the problem areas are hand phasers, which are very seemingly contradictory to not only the laws of physics, but the show in itself.

After thoroughly processing numerous kiloquads of information peddled to us by a stray Ferengi vessal, we’ve found that:

1. Phaser disintegration takes a visibly slow amount of time.
2. The target disappears in a flash of light with no debris, no gas clouds, and no effect on the surroundings or surrounding people.
3. Phasers on the maximum setting disintegrate a human body regardless of mass with no excess energy noticeably spilling into the environment.
4. Phasers can heat rocks at one setting, and shatter rocks at another setting.
5. Different lifeforms and materials are affected by phasers differently.
6. Captain Kirk can fire a phaser shot that picks up an enemy and hurls them through the air upon impact and experience no recoil from the gun.

In a continuing unintentional series on manipulating Google Images, I have what I was unable to get when I lasted posted.

First, a recap:

• First, I created a post that contained this awesome picture of Daleky goodness.
• Then, I noticed that the image wasn’t appearing on Google Image search, and I decided to do something about it.
• Later, I revisited the issue and found out that my image of Daleks had successfully invaded Google Images.
• After that, I tried to notice that I had created a feedback loop, but when I went to look for the screenshot to include it, it was no longer there.

Of course, it won’t be too long until the above image is also in Google Images under Daleks on Skis, in which case I create an evil Google recursive loop, as long as I keep blogging about the screenshot.

And I had to quickly throw up something and switched to this equally awesome image:

So we’ve got this Ask Peter thing, where you ask me a question, and I get to answer it in a blog post. It’s pretty awesome stuff.

In this case, I get to answer three questions. What a lucky person I am.

Let’s get right on with it. Here’s the first question, from Luke:

Luke

What is your opinion on using “they” as a third person singular gender-neutral pronoun?

Personally, I’ve always felt the need for a third person singular gender-neutral pronoun, but not for the reason you’d think. I don’t often run into situations where I need to refer to someone of unknown gender or someone sentient of no gender (think robots), but I do run into situations where I want to describe someone of a gender without giving away his or her gender.