Here's a good way to rank Star Trek TV series — how many characters can you
name from each?
My theory is that what people like most about any TV show, including Star
Trek, are the characters. If they love the characters, they are willing to
forgive a lot, including the occasional really bad episode.
This is especially true of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It had some of the
best episodes in the history of Star Trek — but also some of the worst. Dr.
Crusher's Harlequin romance with a ghost is found at the bottom of many episode
rankings. But fans can overlook this because, well, we love Beverley.
There were also a lot of bad episodes in the original series, but we're OK
with pretty much all of these — even the Halloween episode with giant cats —
because they had Kirk and Spock in them.
Star Trek: Enterprise eventually managed string together a few good episodes,
but it didn't matter. The characters were boring and forgettable. To this day,
I can remember the name of just one them — Capt. Archer — and only because the
name is cross-referenced elsewhere.
How about the ranking?
1. Star Trek: TNG — I can name all the characters, including those who weren't
regulars. That would have to total at least a dozen.
2. Star Trek: TOS — I can name all these characters as well, but there were
fewer of them.
3. Star Trek: Discovery — I'm watching the current season, but can only come
up with five names, one of whom is new. Book is an easy-to-remember name and
he is a cool dude. In the third season, they should be doing better in the memorable character count.
4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — I can remember a lot of the faces, but only
four names come to mind. Worf doesn't count because he came over mid-series from TNG.
5. Star Trek: Voyager — I can remember four names, but one of them is The
Doctor, so that doesn't count.
6. Star Trek: Lower Decks — I can remember the names of three of the main
characters — more than I expected — after one season. This is why the show is
catching on with fans.
7. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — It hasn't come out yet, but I know three of
the characters from their appearances on Discovery. This could be a good
start.
8. Star Trek: Picard — The only names I can remember are the characters who
appeared in previous series. Two of them — Picard obviously and Seven of Nine
— are regulars. They need to make us love the newcomers.
9. Star Trek: Prodigy — Another one that isn't out yet, but already looks better than Enterprise because they signed up Kate Mulgrew. So that's Kate versus the guy who played Archer.
10. Star Trek: Enterprise — One. Poor, poor Enterprise.
There is almost no mention at all of the Spanish Flu in popular culture.
People of that era looking for entertainment likely found it in celebrations of the end of the First World War. They wouldn't have had the stomach for yet more misery in the form of portrayals of a devastating pandemic.
Also, it would have been just plain difficult to describe the worldwide calamity created by the Spanish Flu. Millions of people died, almost every community was affected. How do you weave something of that scale in to the plot of a book or movie?
If I were to try to describe to future generations what the COVID-19 pandemic is like, I would compare it to a bleak landscape extending to all horizons. It's a terrain you have to cross, and even though everyone else is in the same situation, you mostly have to do it in isolation.
It makes me think of Farley Mowat's description in People of the North of the Barrens — that massive section of the Canadian arctic inhabited by few and explored by fewer. He quotes a letter from a former RCMP constable who had gone into the Barrens to pursue a murder suspect. He barely made it out alive.
I guess it was the emptiness that bothered me most. That damn and bloody space — it just goes on and on until it makes you want to cry, or scream — or cut your own damn throat!
It's not just the coronavirus that's taking its toll. The fear, despair and isolation have eroded many people's mental health.
For some this is a fatigue that refuses to go away. For others it is anger at the world or even the year itself, knowing all the while that it is irrational. Some say to hell with the isolation, go out and party, and get sick — they just don't care any more. Others despair that these times will ever end, that even with a vaccine ready in record time, things will never be the same again. We may forever be trapped in the Barrens.
And so I predict there will be precious little mention of COVID-19 in the popular culture of these times. We want to be entertained, not depressed.
The thing about code is that computers don't care what it looks like. That's why you can get away with "minifying" it into a single grey line that extends to forever.
That doesn't work for the average human being. We have indentations, syntax colouring and a few other tricks to help us better understand what's going on.
What this formatting looks like is a matter of person preference, but certain conventions have become accepted. You could ignore them, but others would silently judge you as either a heretic or a newbie.
People working on the same team sometimes agree on using the same conventions, making it easier to understand one another's code. Because it can be hard to agree, a convention might even be imposed by management.
A neutrality has grown around a plug-in called Prettier that is available for many code editors. It is, as they say, opinionated — meaning that in the vast majority of cases it refuses to give an inch on how it decides code should be formatted.
That means almost zero customization, which was almost a deal breaker for me.
For example, Prettier forces you do use <br /> instead of the more modern <br>. This is meant to be a compromise for people coding XML, where <br /> is required. For HTML, it is recommended.
There are a few other things that grated on me, such as putting paragraph tags on their own line if the paragraph's content goes over one line. Also, it puts classes and attributed within a tag on their own lines if they get to be long.
As with a lot of things in life, if you use something long enough you get used to it. That means when Prettier doesn't work — which can happen if you make an error — the code looks downright ugly.
It makes me wish Prettier were more forgiving of my mistakes.
In this story, Captain Gallivant travels to a planet where the aliens are humanoid and have a society similar to ours on Earth — but everyone is old. Some of them are hundreds of years old.
Gallivant makes friends with one of the inhabitants, and learns about how this situation came to be.
He is told that at one time they had babies, children and young people, but realized that 90 per cent of their problems were caused by them. Plus, 90 per cent of contributions to society were being made by people over 50.
Scientific advances meant everyone could become immortal, so there was no longer any need for replenishing the population. Medicine had advanced to the point where people could stay in good health for as long as they lived, so growing old was nothing to fear.
With the decision to stop having babies, the population gradually started aging to the point where there was no longer anyone who even appeared to be young. In fact, people stopped having birthdays because after untold years of living, counting the years became meaningless.
Gallivant is outraged, but there is nothing he can do. They can never go back to the way things were, even if he were able to convince them to do so.
He instead goes back to Earth and brings back a dozen babies from an orphanage, believing that if they saw children again it would remind them of how precious they are. And they might be open to boosting their population with young blood from other planets.
The inhabitants are taken with the babies, and insist they be allowed to adopt them. But they don't want to have to care for them. Instead, they hold Gallivant captive and force him to raise the children over the next 20 years.
On the youngest child's 20th birthday, Gallivant blasts off — never to return.
HTML has a lot more tags than it used to, but you would never know it from looking at typical source code riddled with divs, each with its own class.
Why is it rare to see sections, articles and asides? Wouldn’t it be easier to style tags that exist than to create classes for a bunch of divs? Classes whose names you will undoubtedly forget and have to look up?
On a complex website, there may not be enough tags to cover all the styles you need. But don’t let that stop you from trying. There is a lot you can do.
CSS Bed has proof, with a lost list of classless themes you can click to see how they look. And the looks vary a lot.
More proof comes from Basic.css. It starts off with two responsive rows of three nice looking cards, in a layout typical of Bootstrap. It’s done with flexbox applied to articles in a section. This allows for an infinity grid — any number of elements.
Basic.css doesn’t appear to allow for a main/sidebar layout, but it should be possible if you stick with flexbox — or even grid.
There are apps that can make you feel nostalgic. Take Free Ruler, for example.
I puts horizontal and vertical rulers on your screen so you can measure things on it in pixels. It’s been around for about 25 years, maybe longer.
It gets the occasional update, and it can be found on the Mac App Store — remaining absolutely free after all these years.
You have to wonder who would create a free app and keep it going for so long. The developer doesn’t say much about himself, except that his name is Pascal.
His website, pascal.com, must be one of the first on the web because he managed to nab a high-value domain name before such things became impossible without getting into a bidding war.
Why high value? Pascal is the name of a computer language. A website about it should have a name like pascal.com, but instead goes with pascal-programming.info.
We know Pascal, the developer, has a sense of humour about this situation because he has a “featured email” from 2017 looking to buy pascal.com.
There are links on his site, but they don’t give many clues: a diary with one post from 2013, a band (called Balthrop, Alabama) that appears to be active, a list of movies last updated in 2001, and page of software that includes Free Ruler.
Also on the software page is AppSwitcher Control, whose version history ends in 1998. And there’s “Closed Caption: A Growl style for your HD TV.” It looks like it was last updated in 2011.
According to an al.com article from 2010, the band is led by “Alabama-born songwriter-siblings Pascal and Lauren Balthrop.” Aha! Pascal’s last name.
A music video linked from Pascal’s website called Pretty Little Birds features a female singer, who is likely Lauren. A man makes an appearance in the video. Could it be Pascal?
If you’re reading this, Pascal, a little advice. Update the music links on pascal.com. Who knows how many Free Ruler fans could be turned into Balthrop, Alabama fans.
A couple of years ago, a study came out supporting the idea that two spaces after a period makes sentences easier to read. A great cheer went up from two-space supporters.
But it makes you wonder — where are these people even seeing two spaces?
Looking around the house, two spaces are nowhere to be found. Not in a letter from the bank that arrived this week, not in a textbook published in 2004, not in a novel published in 1983.
They are also nowhere to be found on the internet. Anything more than one space is stripped out by the web browser when it renders the code.
There are ways to ensure two spaces after a period, but they are laborious, and no one is going to pay a web developer to waste the time. A special bit of code would have to be inserted wherever you wanted the extra space.
Automated solutions would take a lot of time and effort to devise because of the difficulty in determining what constitutes the end of a sentence. Take this example:
Our hours are Monday to Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
There are four places that might be a period ending the sentence. You could write a program that made exceptions for a.m and p.m., but then you’re stuck with an infinitude of other abbreviations to account for.
The best solution would be for web browsers to have a built-in way of adding extra space after a period, although not necessarily two spaces. The amount of space would have to be balanced with all the other spacing in the context of the article.
Why is this best? Because not only does it recognizes that extra space indeed makes it easier to tell where one sentence ends and another begins. But it also because it recognizes that the concept of “spaces” that we learned from typewriter days is long gone.
Spacing has become a more subtle art, and should be measured that way.
1. Repetitive: You’ve filled in the same information on a gazillion other forms.
2. Unnecessary: The form is a sneaky way of generating sales leads. “You want this ‘free’ thing? You have to give me your email.”
3. Privacy: The form asks for personal information that is none of their business.
4. Long: Not just long, but all the fields are required so you can’t skip them.
5. Security: The form asks you to give up your email for the bazillionth time. Eventually something will go wrong and you’ll wind up the victim of ransomware, or who knows what.
6. Password: The form asks you to create a password, but you’ve created a zillion passwords in other forms, so you have to think of a new one because you’ve been told they should all be unique. And then you have to have a system for remembering all the passwords.
7. Unclear questions: The form asks you to do something, but you’re not sure what it means, so you have to search their site for an answer, or find a way of getting in touch with support.
8. Dishonest: The form tries to trick you into buying stuff you don’t want or subscribing to an email newsletter you don’t want.
9. Doesn’t work: After filling it in, the form doesn’t do anything, so you’ve wasted your time.
10. Unnatural: When you buy something from a bricks-and-mortar store you don’t have to fill in a form. Why should you have to do this when buying something online?
Here are some of the best sources of crosswords if you like them challenging. Many publications offer quick and easy crosswords — these can’t be aimed at true crossword lovers.
On mobile it’s tough to beat New York Times Crossword. They start you off with free packs ranging from mini to midi to full size.
When you run out of those, and are hooked, they ask for a subscription: monthly $9.99 or annual $54.99.
Is that a lot? It depends on how you look at it. If you’re dropping $5 or $6 a week on crossword books from the local newsstand, it’s a good deal.
The best crossword app for the Mac is Black Ink from Red Sweater. It links to the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Premium, American Values Club and The Inkubator.
The app itself costs $29.95, but the good news is that some of the crossword sources are free — you get a lot of bang for your buck.
In the magazine section of your local store there are many publications to choose from, but few for puzzlers who enjoy a good challenge.
Two of the best are Dell Sunday Crosswords at $4.99 and The National Observer Book of Crosswords at $6.50.
Dell says its puzzles “are edited with clever, challenging clues that will make you think, smile and solve.” It should be noted that sometimes the smile is accompanied by a groan — but that’s OK.
National Observer promises “these puzzles are, and will continue to be, tough but fair.”
Unresponsive buttons in the Save As Template dialogue.
Every once in awhile I get my hopes up that Microsoft will put out a product that I like. So I was cautiously optimistic when I learned there was a new version of Outlook for Mac.
As the saying goes among English football fans: “It’s the hope that kills you.”
It’s slow to launch, which wasn’t a surprise, but at least the new interface cleans up the clutter. At least it does at first.
If you click “New Message”, you can, of course, create a new email. But try clicking on the button that opens the message in its own window — you’re right back to the clutter of the old Outlook. It’s like they forgot to do this part, right down to the ugly icons. It’s the same thing with the preferences pane.
There are couple of things I like about Spark that keep me coming back, so I thought I’d see if they exist in Outlook. One of them — quick reply — does not. In Spark, you can click a button at the bottom of the message, choose your reply, and off it goes.
The other is templates. Since I find myself saying the same thing over and over, I’ve set up a couple of templates that save me from tedious typing. Outlook has something called “Save As Template …” I opened a new email in its own window (won’t work otherwise), put in a message and did the save-as.
This did not result in a template. Instead I got a dialogue box that wouldn’t go away unless I force quit Outlook. Both the Cancel and Save buttons were unresponsive.
At this point, it was no longer worth the stress. Spark, despite being new-ish, is as comfortable as an old shoe. The only thing I miss is the ability to set up rules. This used to be an advantage for Outlook, but the function appears to have gone missing, which is strike three. At least I can still set them up in Apple Mail.
