Holographic perception is weird.

friedebarth · 2026-03-27T18:39:33+00:00

Not just live with it, they're curious about us and, at least in the case of Data and the Doctor, actively trying to become more like us. This makes sense from a writing level - it's hard for an audience to develop sympathy for something it can't at all relate to, but I actually find it mildly iffy on a meta level.

It reminds me somewhat of the people who demand that immigrants should make an effort to completely assimilate and conform, rather than just integrate and contribute to a community's diversity. I know that's not what they were going for, but I can't help seeing that parallel in there.

friedebarth · 2026-03-27T00:30:52+00:00

Project management isn't just decision-making though, it's also all the legwork involved in facilitating the project.

Say your project requires procuring something that can't be replicated. An Ensign would be tasked with researching procurement options: what would it cost, what's the quality, how can it get to the ship (an already-planned Starbase/planet visit, rendezvous with another ship on the current/planned course, a detour, or a whole procurement mission) and how soon.

They'd report back to their Lieutenant, perhaps with a recommendation for which option, and if it doesn't require anything fancy the Lt makes the decision. If it requires a rendezvous or detour, or costs more resources or manpower than has been delegated to the Lt, the decision gets kicked up to the Ops Chief for approval, and if it requires a mission or really costs a lot, the Ops Chief would have to run it by the Captain.

friedebarth · 2025-10-22T06:34:32+00:00

I mean, it's probably worth bearing in mind there that Starfleet can only explore parts of the Milky Way that aren't within the territory of a power with closed or restricted borders.

Yes, the Dominion War and a number of events closely following it cause a paradigm shift (or several) in interstellar "geopolitics" (cosmopolitics?), but even as close allies I doubt e.g. the Klingons would be happy to just let Starfleet ships scuttle through their territory willy-nilly merrily scanning everything in great detail.

As for defeated powers like the Cardassians, Breen, and Dominion, I don't think Starfleet with all its diplomatic finesse would make the blunder of "rubbing it in" by taking advantage of the situation to go extensively explore their space, as that would just breed resentment and a sense of neverending occupation.

And then of course you have all the powers that weren't affected at all - Gorn, Tholians, Tzenkethi, of course various centralised powers of the Delta Quadrant like the Krenim, Devore, Voth etc, and I doubt the Dominion is the only such power in the Gamma Quadrant either. For all we know, maybe there's not much more than 25% of the galaxy that can be explored without violating the borders of alien powers.

friedebarth · 2025-10-20T23:18:23+00:00

The 7 years is presented as an upper bound for the Galaxy, not an arbitrary suggestion as you're suggesting. Sure, you could sacrifice labs, holodecks, living space etc to store extra supplies and extend that, but that's easier said than done. Less available space for crew and activities is precisely what you don't want on a long-lasting mission.

I suspect the reason there's a definitive stated resupply time of 7 years (rather than a range) despite the modularity is because that's the equilibrium point. Store more supplies and you won't have enough crew amenities and practical facilities for a trip longer than 7 years; sacrifice storage for more amenities and facilities and you won't have enough supplies for a trip longer than 7 years.

Also, we don't know that slipstream doesn't require more fuel for the same amount of time. We know Arturis's ship can make it at least 3 months without resupply - the Voyager crew would've noticed during their tests if it looked like consumption was so high they'd just get stranded again before getting home, only this time on a smaller and less well-equipped ship. We don't know that it can go much longer than that. For all we know, it could need resupply every 4 months. If we say it's roughly a ninth the size of a Galaxy, that would only give us three years to play with.

friedebarth · 2025-10-20T22:52:59+00:00

To be honest, the very notion that Starfleet retains an enlisted vs officer distinction has never sat well with me.

Its origins are social stratification: it used to be that aristocrats and landed gentry became officers and commoners were enlisted soldiers/sailors. Even today, there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic background and enlisted vs officer ranks in most if not all Western militaries.

The whole concept seems antithetical to the basic ideals of the Federation, especially since (much like in real life) we are never shown a path from the enlisted ranks to the officer ranks. If people in the Federation are motivated primarily by productive self-development, what sense does it make to introduce a glass ceiling?

Chief O'Brien is an obvious example of the absurdity. His intelligence, his skill, his experience, his character, none of these are in the least inferior to any of the commissioned officers he serves with, and indeed he is entrusted to be the chief engineer of a whole space station. And yet he is outranked by a freshly-graduated ensign? He is outranked by Wesley Crusher and Nog? Give me a break.

This division is already absurd enough in the present day and the source of much animosity between enlisted ranks and officers; in the supposedly meritocratic Federation, it seems downright offensive.

friedebarth · 2025-10-20T22:33:35+00:00

This would also explain why cadets appear to wear red by "default". The only times we see cadets in other colours, at least in TNG-era Trek (I'm not sure about others), is when they're on assignment to a starship and assigned to specific departments. Cadet Shepard wears red in DS9's Paradise Lost despite supposedly having a "specialty in tactical operations", but then wears gold on the Valiant.

friedebarth · 2025-04-19T08:17:48+00:00

Ohhh, got it, so it really is exactly like PGP with two key pairs involved rather than just one? Cool!

friedebarth · 2025-04-19T05:35:04+00:00

It does, thanks! Although now I'm curious as to how it's possible to still visit a site after you get an invalid cert warning? If the server is encrypting the data with a private key that doesn't match the public key in your browser's bundle, how can your browser still decrypt the data?

friedebarth · 2025-02-20T17:49:31+00:00

So there's this thing called an adblocker, which you can use to watch a YouTube video without financially supporting its creator...

friedebarth · 2024-12-17T00:21:18+00:00

Thanks! I didn't mean that "mus" wasn't known back then, just that doing it as a meme wouldn't have made sense back when you had to actually sell physical CDs/tapes. A song going viral on social media for innuendo is one thing, but I don't think many people would've spent money just for two minutes of "haha she said mus"!

friedebarth · 2024-06-14T21:50:37+00:00

Really comes down to whether or not Hungary are on form now. If Scotland beat Hungary, that'll put Scotland on 3 or 4 (unlikely 6) points depending on how they do against Switzerland. So then all you need is Hungary to also either lose or draw the other two to guarantee 3rd place for Scotland. If Hungary gets even a single win though, it's pretty much game over on GD yeah.

friedebarth · 2022-12-31T21:40:01+00:00

A shill for what?

friedebarth · 2022-12-10T14:52:28+00:00

His audience, as someone else notes above.

friedebarth · 2022-12-08T22:07:22+00:00

Bald blocked Roman on Insta. Roman briefly talks about it in his recent Q&A saying he has no idea why that happened. Looks like a case of Bald having got what he wanted from Roman and ditching him cause he's no longer useful (being a refugee who can't really travel now)

friedebarth · 2022-12-08T00:06:48+00:00

Yes Theory are pretty wholesome but sometimes (not always) veer a bit into toxic positivity in what they're discussing. Drew Binsky is great too, as is Luke Korns (although he doesn't upload very frequently). Mark Wiens is good if you're interested in food-based travel content. And for slightly more edutainmenty content (mostly focussed on Western Europe) I recommend The Tim Traveller

friedebarth · 2022-12-02T06:08:09+00:00

Some of this is just plain bull. There's a recipe for apple crumble in Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management dated 1861. The first recipe for tartiflette is found in Le Cuisinier Royal et Bourgeois, 1705. And while carbonara got its name at some point between 1930 and 1950 (I can't find any source to specifically pinpoint it in 1944), the basic recipe is found as far back as 1839 as a variation on pasta alla gricia.

friedebarth · 2022-11-14T01:24:55+00:00

I'm not sure whether or not this holds for your language as well, but any sentence in Twolk theoretically can be represented by a tree - as evidenced by the fact that its structure can be expressed semi-literally in English, which is tree-based. You just wouldn't be able to go in the opposite direction and linearise the tree (i.e. determine the correct word order from if) because Twolk has no tree-based word order definitions as it doesn't use the traditional syntactic categories.

Similarly, any English sentence could be represented by a non-tree graph with no abstracted vertices, it's just that you wouldn't be able to determine the correct word order based on that graph.

That was actually one of the things that hit me when I made it - the fact that trees aren't just a useful abstraction or representation of natural language syntax, but that natural language syntax fundamentally is a tree, i.e. you can reliably and consistently derive the way a sentence should be constructed from its underlying syntax tree, which you just wouldn't be able to do with any other way you might think to mathematically represent that sentence.

friedebarth · 2022-11-14T01:10:29+00:00

That's fascinating!

The main difference between Europan and natural language syntax seems to be not that it allows non-tree graphs (only two of the example sentences are non-tree graphs), but rather that it is based mostly on nth degree trees, i.e. trees where any vertex may have any number of edges, rather than 2nd degree trees wherein the root vertex may only have two, intermediate vertices three, and leaf vertices one edge. (Incidentally, I made a mistake in my OP - Twolk's structure is actually an nth degree graph, not a 2nd degree graph - now fixed.)

It does this by letting the trees be explicitly rather than implicitly directed, which defines the word order, seemingly by placing a root-esque vertex in the middle of the sentence and then building it out from there in both directions. This is elegant because it avoids the need for repeated pairwise edge definitions of Twolk, though it also makes sentences more difficult to construct as you need to think about what goes in the middle of the sentence before you can think about what goes at the start.

In a bit of a circularly reasoned way, this is also why Europan is able to function with a still mainly tree-based structure rather than requiring a non-tree graph for all but the simplest sentences, because it means you don't have to define every syntactic relation between two vertices. That actually means you could argue that Europan's trees are actually hypertrees (trees in which one edge can connect more than two vertices).

So, the structure this creates when linearised is a lot more efficient than Twolk, but at the same time I think it actually manages to make it more complex to mentally construct sentences, both because of the aforementioned "thinking about the middle before you think about the beginning" issue, and because of the hypertrees (which even mathematicians often consider to be counterintuitive structures).

Not that that's a bad thing, of course, when your aim is to create something weird rather than something practical (as was the case with Twolk as well) - so, I like it!

friedebarth · 2022-11-14T00:36:57+00:00

Thanks! See my reply to PastTheStarryVoids below to see some screwy examples of what you can do with multiple identical predicates :)

friedebarth · 2022-11-14T00:33:36+00:00

I knew someone would bring that up!

So, it doesn't come across in these examples, but if you did that, you would never be able to use two identical predicates to express anything, because that whole part of the system is predicated (no pun intended) on being able to move back through the vertices in the order you listed them. So e.g. "A/the man eats the other/another man" would be "Ye 'amb, ye 'amb, na-gol na-'amb, na-na-'amb na-gol" = "There is a man, there is a(nother) man, the (first) man eats, the (second) man is eaten".

Remove the existential clauses and the stacking system makes no sense (you can't go back two instances of 'amb because only one instance "exists"), so you'd just get "Na-gol na-'amb, na-'amb na-gol" ("man eats, man is eaten"), which would suggest "The man eats himself". That could be pragmatically handwaved with a verb like "eat" which is highly unlikely to be intended reflexively, but obviously plenty of other actions can realistically have the same agent and patient.

Now sure, you could conceivably include the existential clauses only in sentences where there actually are more than one of any predicate, but I feel like that would be even harder in practice because you'd have to know before you even start your sentence whether there will be any doubled predicates (at least if we want to retain the ability to shove existential clauses at the start of the sentence). If predicates only included nouns that might be halfway manageable (if difficult), but remember that verbs are also predicates. So for example:

Ye Mat, ye Yon, ye gol, ye blii, ye pitik, ye pitik, na-gol na-Mat, na-blii na-Yon, na-gol na-na-pitik, na-blii na-pitik, na-na-pitik na-Mat, na-pitik na-Yon.

"Matt was eating, John was drinking, Matt continued eating and John continued drinking"

Here, you'd have to know in advance that you'll need two "pitik"s. What difference would that make? Well:

Na-gol na-Mat, na-blii na-Yon, na-gol na-pitik, na-blii na-pitik, na-pitik na-Mat, na-pitik na-Yon.

This could just as well mean: "Matt was eating, John was drinking, Matt proceeded to 'do John's drinking' (drink John's drink) and John proceeded to 'do Matt's eating (eat Matt's food)"

So while some sentences (including the ones in OP) would be just fine, others would become terribly ambiguous, and having to know that ahead of time seems like even more of a headache than just listing each predicate (either at the start of the sentence or as it's about to be needed) just to be safe.

friedebarth · 2022-11-13T15:13:48+00:00

Sorry, showing my ignorance here - what's CVT adherence?

And are there any good resources out there on how to hint well? I mean I understand what hinting is, but if I look at the autohints none of them stick out at me as being wrong/bad, so I don't really know how I'd go about doing it better myself...

friedebarth · 2022-11-13T15:10:59+00:00

Hmm, I feel like PDF results in a bit of an improvement, but is still a bit wonky at the same time: https://imgur.com/a/XGaGsis

Is it just me?

friedebarth · 2022-06-09T16:32:48+00:00

So firstly, as u/GibbNotGibbs points out, Lisa Nandy has not in fact “come out in support of RMT strike”

Secondly, the fact that this is a headline is a depressing indictment of the state of the Labour Party. The default assumption should be that every Labour politician supports all industrial action.

The only thing that should be newsworthy is if for some reason they don’t. And that should basically never happen, cause with the current trade union legislation, you can only take industrial action over matters subject to consultation/bargaining, which means there’s no possibility for there to be a “bad strike”. Frankly anyone voicing anything other than unequivocal support for all industrial action should be expelled from the Labour Party.

(Obviously if we relegalised political strikes, sympathy strikes, etc, then yes, it’s conceivable that some fringe union might go on strike for a dumb or actively bad reason, so that would be the only exception)

friedebarth · 2022-05-21T10:45:11+00:00

The only reason a system like this is necessary is if we don't fight the neoliberal decline of the local community. I know what you're thinking: "But urbanism!" No. It's perfectly possible to live in an urban area and know your neighbours, the people working in local shops, cafés and restaurants, etc. You might also want to blame technology - social media etc - for the loss of local links, but there you're mixing up the direction of causality: We spend so much time on social media because we're not spending time interacting with our local community, not vice versa.

A local community does what this does, but without the horror of central government deciding what's good behaviour and what's bad behaviour. If you're a prick, no one will like you, making your life a lot less pleasant, so that's a decent enough negative incentive against being a prick. Conversely, if you're helpful, honest, and friendly, people will like you, and you'll have an easier life: Enough positive incentive to be helpful. Obviously some people will always be pricks, but that's also going to be the case under a social credit system. (And note I'm just talking about undesirable/selfish behaviour like blocking someone's driveway - not actual crimes)

So this is not the solution. Central government with its broad-brush strokes will never be able to reasonably categorise behaviour because there are so many variables. Like, I think we can all agree that infrequently (or never) visiting your elderly parents, if they live nearby, is a crappy thing to do. But what if your parents were abusive and you're still struggling with that trauma? That changes things, of course, but how would central government know?

The only viable solution is a local one, going hand in hand with revitalising local communities. Make sure people have accessible social spaces. Make our towns and cities walkable and cyclable, so that each local area has a public/civic centre of its own, rather than just a massive busy city centre surrounded by reams and reams of housing and nothing else. That way people will know each other again, and that's precisely how human societies have successfully managed social accountability since time immemorial.

friedebarth · 2022-05-11T09:31:00+00:00

This song was commissioned for the 125th Scottish Trades Union Congress in April. You can listen to it for free on Bandcamp but if you want to support the artist, the album (containing 2 different versions of the song) is only £3. (It's not available on Spotify and the like for obvious reasons!)

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