That’s not a dumb question at all.

There are MDs who do substantive research in medicine and surgery. However, basic science questions and a lot of the applied research are done by MD/PhDs. The dual degrees are a signal that the person holding them is not giving MMR vaccinations to kids or fixing broken arms, but who are committed to doing active research. It’s not an absolute requirement - I’ve worked with brilliant MDs at the VA and UC facilities who are gifted researchers. I’m painting with a very broad brush there.

Here’s a fun fact: “Doctor” was an academic degree. It was originally meant for theology, but expanded as the scope of academia expanded and natural philosophy became the sciences. We still call the degree “Doctor of Philosophy” as a result of that. Being a doctor of something meant that you were qualified to conduct research and teach at the university level. It eventually meant that you have made a contribution to your field - your dissertation - and the expectation was that you had and would continue to publish research papers in scientific journals.

The idea of a “medical doctor” was a new addition. MDs don’t do research, didn’t do a dissertation, and in general are not equipped to teach and advance the academic understanding of their field.

So I agree. Scientists should get the blue shirts, physicians and surgeons should just wear scrubs.

Coming from someone with an academic background in biology, the treknobabble in biology and medicine is pretty terrible.

There’s a concept called the neural correlates of consciousness that basically states that every thought, memory, emotion, or other mental process has a direct correlation with the wiring and states of the cells in your brain. We can debate on whether or not to include other body states or gut bacteria, but the essence of the argument is that there is no “mind” as a phenomenon apart from the brain. This being a more serious sub, I’d argue that something like transporter technology implicitly assumes this, since you arrive with the same thoughts, memories, and emotional states as you had when you were decompiled.

So you’d be able to say that the Vulcan amygdala becomes hypertrophic during pon farr due to signaling by some other physical brain structure and activates the limbic system which itself becomes hypersensitive to stimulation and so on. So you can govern your pointy-eared patient some space Xanax, which increases the effectiveness of Vulcan GABA, which calms them down. Or using your advanced knowledge of physiology that no doubt extends down to the level of quantum effects, find another avenue of intervention.

Basically, I’m acknowledging your point - it’s a necessary complication that makes for interesting plot lines - but it really doesn’t line up with a justifiable in-universe answer.

seven year itch

Wow - I had never put those two together before.

Anyway, Memory Alpja states that intensive meditation is also used to alleviate the problems associated with pon farr.

What doesn’t make in-universe sense to me is that the condition comes from a neurochemical cascade. Even in our time, we recognize many of these conditions and have targeted drugs and therapies for them. Surely a society that is medically and technologically more advanced than ours by orders of magnitude would be able to simply treat the condition.

As a plot point it makes sense, and Roddenberry both personally and as a person of his time saw things like brain processes as strange and mysterious. It allowed them to play with the still evolving character of Spock and with Vulcans in general. It allowed them to do that “put a human condition into an alien and turn it up to 11” kind of thing they loved so much. The same would go for Lon Suder, of course.

They just get really hand-wavey around medical questions.

If you haven’t yet, I recommend reading A Stitch in Time. It’s written by Andrew Robinson and the audiobook is read by him as well.

I think OP is implying that time works like a film strip, so that if I’m five minutes behind you, I see where you were five minutes ago.

That’s the way time travel in Trek works. If you travel from Time B in the future to Time A in the past at a given place, you see the place as it was at that time, including the people who were there.

I think that rather being just shifted in time a la time travel, they were actually dealing with a flex in spacetime, like a curve in the road you can’t quite see around, but Diana could see their essence like light from the tail lights, as in your example.

In other words, they were caught in a time warp, again.

The main part you need to pick up is being able to establish the mental hooks around the ideas that are central to programming. Do you know how you can watch a choreography session and see the dancers just pick up the moves as they’re described/demonstrated? That’s because they’ve learned the language of dance. It’s an entire (physical) vocabulary. It’s the semantics of dance.

What you need to do is do that with programming. There’s a number of getting started with books and videos, but you’re going to want them to learn the fundamentals of not just a language but of programming.

If you’re talking about using other people’s functions (like in an api), then the function name should give you a clue about what it does. The cool thing about functions is that you don’t have to know how they’re doing their thing, just what they’re doing. If you have the source code, you will find you remember more if you use comments to make notes for yourself (it engages more of your brain than just reading).

If your problem is writing your own code using functions, start out more slowly. Write a program that’s just a giant block of linear code. Once that’s working, then take a look as to how to break it down into functions. If you have a block of code that sorts a list, for example, and you had to copy and paste it into three different areas, that would mean it should be a function.

Use comments very often as you’re going. Before you write a block, write a comment about what it’s supposed to do. You’ll start to see some generalities, which will be you learning programming, not just a language.

The Ars Technica write up pretty much demolishes the device in both form and function.

Honestly, I grew up watching the original series and it was extremely formative. I can’t say that I’d never have become a scientist without it, but it did help shape my concept of myself and the way I relate to the world, and how I’d like the world to be. In fact, when next generation launched, I originally didn’t like it because I was such a fan of TOS.

However, looking at it objectively, I think that TOS holds mostly nostalgia value. I wouldn’t recommend starting there unless you have a thing for campy TV and mid century modern design themes. If you’re interested in seeing what all the fuss is about, I’d start with the second or third season of TNG or one of the later series like DS9. TNG takes about a season or two before the writers and actors start to figure it out.

If you’re really more modern-oriented, you could start with the JJ Abrams movies, which are modern action movies in the ST universe.

The main thing is this: you can start pretty much anywhere. There will be backstories or call backs that might slip past you or inside jokes that you miss, but it’s more important imo to get on board with the franchise by starting with the stuff you find enjoyable, rather than getting turned off by elements that are dated or don’t resonate. Once you have that context, you can move back and forth between all the series and movies and enjoy them more.

Think of it like Discworld. It’s a series of novels written such that you can jump in anywhere and read them forward, backward, or sideways. It’s not like Lord of the Rings where you really can’t just start with the last book because there’s a single story being told in multiple parts.

Luke warm is for Star Wars fans.

Get a shroom you two.

The irony is that I’m a biologist with mild but very real mycophobia. I want to watch that fungus documentary with Bjork.

If my client supported DMs I’d be so up in Stamets’ business that he would know I was a fun guy.

If voice-replicating deep fake AI cannot do this for us, then I believe it has no purpose and we should burn it all down.

Also Garak singing Aaron Burr’s part:

Talk less

Smile more

Don’t let them know what you’re against or what you’re for

You wanna get ahead?

Fools who run their mouths off wind up dead

I could see that as a conversation with Bashir.

You’re in for a really good experience. Gene Roddenberry had a very specific vision for Star Trek. The federation was his vision for humankind. He wanted us to be those people - at least, to want to be those people. So the federation became something of a Mary Sue. It’s something I really love about the show - it’s good to have a Lancelot around

DS9 has two things that set it apart from previous (and some subsequent) Treks. First and foremost, there’s a full story arc that travels throughout the series. It does have some more episodic, us, episodes, but it was the first Trek with a storyline that wasn’t about exploring the galaxy. TNG had some multipart episodes and some plot lines that ran across the better part of a season, but the entirety of DS9 takes place against a continuous plot line. The fact that they’re (generally speaking) not Boldly Going anywhere is kind of a metaphor.

It also explores some much darker themes than the other Treks, including colonization, genocide, terrorism, and what we might give up when we believe the ends can justify the means. It’s a side of the federation that Roddenberry wanted to reject, but I think having it throws his vision of what humans can be into even sharper relief.

Like with the other Treks, it takes about a season or so before the writers and actors settle into the characters. I happen to agree with you about Sisko. He’s the most military-like of any Trek captain I’ve ever seen. I’m not going to say anything else because you’re going to love watching everything unfold.

But keep an eye on that tailor.

The problem is that it isn’t how evolution works at all. I think this episode and the devolution one were probably the worst, science-wise. I mean, I know they play fast and loose with everything from basic physics to computer science, but for a biologist it’s kind of the equivalent of those stories that speculate that atoms are themselves tiny solar systems with the electrons as planets that have tiny civilizations on them.

They probably came up with the idea because computers using a pseudo-random number generator can produce the same series of “random” numbers if they start from the same seed. We know that evolution is a random process. Therefore, we should imagine that we could control evolution, even over the span of billions of years, if we control the seed. 

First, we have to define our terms. When I say “evolution,” I am referring to the phenomenon that describes the change in the genetic makeup of a population over time. When we talk about evolution more colloquially, we are usually referring to (to borrow a phrase) the origin of species by means of natural selection. In other words, it is the process that explains the diversity (and homogeneity) of life from genes through ecosystems to the biosphere. It takes place simultaneously at multiple levels and the number of non-pseudo random number generators (if we want to consider them that way) is incalculable.

One of the central principles of modern theoretical biology is that you can’t rewind the evolutionary tape. The further back you rewind it, the less like our present the outcome is likely to be. Wind it back far enough - say, to the very beginning at t=0, and not only do you not get humanoids, you’re not likely to get technological intelligence. I’d be surprised to see four-limbed animals or even vertebrates. The randomness comes in not just from things like the random genetic recombination that resulted in the randomly selected gametes that resulted in the individual in a process that traces itself back through the beginning of evolutionary time. It also affects which of the resulting organisms will survive, based in part on every other living thing that’s also undergoing those same processes.

The less random part is the fitness of an organism is the contribution of its generic material to the next generation. Picture two leopards, one faster than the other due to fortunate genetics. One has a 50% chance of propagating genes to the next generation, the other 25%. If the fastest leopard is a lucky mutant, there’s still a very good chance those genes will disappear. Over time, and given some lucky rolls of the dice, we’d expect the faster gene to spread, but it can be wiped out by an unfortunate event, like breaking a leg while hunting or an unfortunate fire or flood or a mutation that gives it cancer.

Sometimes we wind up at the same place from multiple routes. Eyes evolved independently somewhere around a couple dozen times. We can use that to say that sensing light is a pretty good idea. I would not be surprised if life on other planets evolved light sensing. I would expect the underlying mathematics of evolution to be the same, modulo whatever they use for reproduction.

The field of exobiology studies how we can abstract from our single example of a biosphere and our knowledge of evolutionary dynamics and apply it to try to conceive what non-terrestrial life is like. They ask questions like “What else could take the place of DNA?” and even more importantly “What is life?”

Sorry for the rant.

That’s entirely fair. I unfortunately have less time for personal reading than I used to, so I end up either being much choosier than I was when I was younger, or more often I go back to re-read ones I know I loved. It’s easier to fall asleep to those sometimes.

I will take a look at your suggestions. The last sf books I really enjoyed were the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. There’s not a lot of hard sf that centers on biology (as opposed to physics), but the author absolutely nailed it. I’m incredibly impressed with the premise and the story, but the science was correct while still being brilliant and innovative. Imagine a civilization of human-level intelligence giant spiders, but whose psychology and society are done as spiders, not humans in spider costumes. On the other hand, I tried Project Hail Mary by Martian author Andrew Weir, and the science was so bad that I made it only about a quarter of the way through before giving up. I don’t need all of my sf to be hard sf, but if you’re going to be writing hard sf you have to get the science at least plausible.

Anyway, I really liked Garak in the show and thought his arc was among the most interesting. This book, however canon-y it’s considered, answered a lot of questions that were raised or hinted at in the show with enough depth and resonance that I wonder how much he was able to draw on character notes and how much was coming out of his head-canon as a follow-on from just grokking the character so well.

After having this book lying around on my kindle for years, I finally finished it a few months ago. I think it is the only Trek novel I’ve ever read. Although I enjoy the franchise - in some ways more than I enjoy many of the actual shows - I tend to avoid franchise-driven novels in general due to a perception of poor writing.

Stitch is actually pretty well written - at least as well as one of the better episodes. Garak - he of ambiguous loyalties and sexuality - becomes a fully fleshed out character with a backstory and a complicated professional and personal life. Garak was and remains one of my favorite characters in the franchise, and this book lived up to the character and cemented his status. The author, Andrew Robinson, is the actor who played Garak, and I’ve always enjoyed interviews with him where he gives insights into his character. Originally, Garak was going to be more transparently bisexual, but the studio decided not to follow that line because it was considered too controversial for the time. Robinson, however, made sure to play the role in a way that let the viewers in on. that aspect of his character without getting a protest from the studio.

I will be picking up the audiobook so I can do a re-read. The fact that Robinson is the narrator means I’m going to be actively listening and not just playing it in the background.

Yes. I don’t want to upvote clickbait, but people should read this article.