November 14, 2005

The Ultimate Star Trek Collection

This is one of those over-the-top, for-the-person-who-has-everything, I-have-too-much-disposable-income type of things: The Ultimate Star Trek Collection on Amazon. It's insane:

  • 212 discs
  • All 5 TV series
  • All 10 movies
  • Commentary, interviews, documentaries, featurettes, deleted scenes, trailers, and more
  • All for the whopping-low price of $2,499.99!

What a deal! Especially since you save $1,409.

Posted by jon at 4:37 PM


May 14, 2005

Treknobabble on Slashdot

In the science fiction world, "technobabble" refers to the use of technical or scientific jargon strung together so that to listeners unfamiliar with the language, it sounds like made-up nonsense. When relating to Star Trek, a derivative and more derogatory concept shows up: "treknobabble," which, in the words of Wikipedia, "is used humorously by fans of the various Star Trek television series, and disparagingly by its critics, to describe the infamous amount of pseudoscientific gibberish inserted seemingly at random into many episodes of these television series."

Well, on Slashdot tonight this article contains the most ridiculous real-world treknobabble I've ever seen:

A one-dimensional [Bose-Einstein condensation] in an optical lattice is rapidly rotated, causing a quantized vortex to form. The bosonic part of the superstring consists of this vortex line. Inside the vortex, they would trap an ultracold cloud of fermionic atoms. Hopefully this will allow observation of the supersymmetry between bosons and fermions, thus providing the first experimental evidence to support superstring theory.

That makes no sense to me whatsoever, and yet it's the funniest thing I've read all day.

Posted by jon at 11:46 PM