LoAmi

Nah... in what I used to study (physics), 5% error was generally considered bad. In what I study now (biophysics), 20% error is considered just good enough. In what I don't study (economics), 100% error is considered right-on. :)

The Tale of the Missing Crew Lo'Ami knocked on the door of the clapboard house with the broken window. The house had been located as the nearest source of lifesigns on the class M planet where the Chocolate Moose crashed after it was ejected from the void. He said to the slightly out-of-time and out-of-mind Ziggy, "I hope we have a damn good cover story." In fact, considering this planet's obviously primitive technology, being the "Bob Jones" Ziggy wanted him to be might be less polluting to the backwater's culture than "Lt. Arphazad Lo'Ami of the Federation starship Arcadia." The door opened, and a woman opened the door. She was old, overweight, and grandmotherly. Her grey hair was tied on top of her head. "Hi, I'm Bob Jones, and this is ... David Bowie. We're lost in this area, and were wondering if you could help us." It seemed like a good enough story. Lo'Ami didn't even know how they could have gotten lost in that area, nor their ultimate destination. He merely hoped that winging it would give him some information. The woman laughed, possibly at the pair's names: "You're not from around here, are you?. For a moment there I thought you were those darned kids who broke my window this morning, come to apologize... I'm sorry..." She introduced herself: "I'm Lover-of-Goats, please, come in from the cold," she said, despite the fact that the day was quite warm and sunny. Clearly the UT was having some problems with these people's names. Lover-of-Goats seated the men around her dining room table. The kitchen/dining area was cluttered with papers, pots, pans and years of acquired junk. The room smelled like cooking. A stew pot was on the flame, and Lover walked over to the pot and stirred it. After that, she offered to show them a map, an offer Lo'Ami gladly accepted. They were at least 10 km from the next town. Capital City was 50 km away, but on their route. While Lover was stirring the pot, he scanned the map into his tricorder. The tricorder detected something unusual in the room, but, Lo'Ami did not have enough time to scan it in detail before Lover returned her attention to them. She had poured a slimy green concoction from the pot into three bowls, put spoons into them, and brought two of them over to Ziggy and Lo'Ami. Then she took a seat at the table as well, with her own bowl of ... green stuff. "Eat... it's good for you." Lo'Ami picked through the green porridge with the spoon. Noticing that Lover was staring at him, he took a sip of it, hoping it wasn't poisonous to his physiology. Surprisingly, it tasted better than a Starfleet MRE. Even if it were poisonous, it certainly was a worthier last meal. "Would you like to watch some teevee?," she asked, "The news is on. Strange things have been happening lately. Yes, strange things" Before either could respond, a television box was turned on. Lover turned the dial until an LED on the device read "2." An announcer talked on the television screen: "It's 17 o'clock and this is PBC News. I'm Wiper-of-Behinds, from the studio in Capital City. Now, our top stories. Today, scientists continued to track the mysterious new satellite in our solar system . NatSpace has decided to push the launch of the warp project ahead of schedule in light of the recent events." The announcer continued to talk about what was clearly going to be this planet's first warp flight! This planet was not quite as primitive as Lover-of-Goats' shack might have one believe. "PBC has has also obtained exclusive pictures of the new satellite from the NatSpace telescope..." Lo'Ami fully expected - and hoped - to see Arcadia, despite the Prime-Directive implications. But, to no avail. What he saw was a blurred image of a large ship he knew he had seen once before. He whispered to Ziggy under his breath: "Vogarts."

Actually, I was kind of glad it was like that. The end explained why none of the technobabble during the episode made any sense.

This is quite true. It is especially puzzling how the Federation would trade with other species who use money (like the Ferengi). Money is used for exchange -basically a placeholder for things that haven't yet been acquired. And, money has to be acceptable for exchange everywhere. (What if one group likes latinum and another only likes leaves?) One important point has not yet been brought up -- the replicator. On a rich planet like Earth, where energy is plentiful and can (presumably) be distributed to everyone in copious amounts, any thing could, in theory, be replicated. The division of things that cannot be replicated (like dilithium and latinum, presumably, real duct tape in our sims, and land everywhere) and how to recompense those who give them to you then becomes the major issue. On a replicator-aware planet, the difference between a rich planet and a poor planet is the capacity to generate energy. If the planet had a monetary system, the difference between a rich person and a poor person would be his capacity to buy energy or generate his own. A monetary system works well when you're dividing limited resources. If the primary resource (energy) is no longer limited (thanks to matter-antimatter reactors), why artificially limit its use? If there is some kind of monetary instrument in the Federation, its distribution - and the power it brings - is probably quite different from money today, at least in the sense that the necessities of daily living are already taken care of.

No, I don't think so. Our browsers have no memories of previous times we've used the chat room. Especially, since ens_loami hasn't been really logged on for months (so even if the cache had been at fault, at least that name should have slowly disappeared off the ghost list). Also, the contents of those windows are sent to us from the servers. My theory is that there's a memory leak in the p-link code where people's names are kept in some buffer after they've logged off (bug#1). Note that the server actually does figure out that the ghosts are logged off/disconnected - as you can see when you pm a ghost - but does absolutely nothing about it (bug#2). Then, for some reason or other, the code puts the wrong number of chatters in the room (bug#3) and fills in the missing names with leftover ones from the buffer. Those are the ghosts. It's just a hypothesis, but it is plausible and testable. Clearly, I haven't seen the p-link code, so I can't confirm it.

I thought it ranked up there with the better of the Enterprise episodes. It had a good storyline and a fair bit of action. Spoiler (Highlight to Read): It also showed a bit of character development in Archer. I'd suspect that in the earlier days, we might have seen him arguing at the end with the diplomat for fair trials/release of innocent people, or even refusing to turn the rest of the prisoners back over. Instead, all Archer did was walk away from and scream back a pretty succint, yet terse reply. It made its point without too much preaching.

Lo'Ami stared back at Ziggy, suddenly realizing they had a problem. It wasn't just that their pilot thought the half-Trill was a Vulcan named Jeremy, nor that he was talking to people who were not there about a mission that wasn't theirs - it was also that Buddy Kinton had stolen his lunch money. No, that can't be right. Lo'Ami once again felt a momentary, sharp pain in his back. But, that too was not the major problem. The major problem was that Ziggy had just set a course and activated the Chocolate Moose's warp drive. With all the dilithium shattered to powder, he had just channeled a massive amount of precious energy into an empty chamber. Warning klaxons went off as the drive systems went down. The yacht floated on its momentum and was buffetted by the same currents that Kawalas had detected inexplicably accelerating and decelerating Arcadia's test torpedo. Sitting in the co-pilot's chair has the unfortunate consequence that in case the pilot becomes incapacitated, the crewman sitting there must take over control of the craft. Transferring control was easy enough. What to do with that control was another story. Yes, Arphazad Lo'Ami had graduated Starfleet Academy. He had taken the usual piloting courses. He had been a member of "Bright Green Squadron," the one so aptly named for its cadets; the ones who came out of the experience piloting as if they were so green they had never before seen a shuttle. Now was not the time to ask the junior officer sitting in the back, Kawalas, to take over control. Calling for help would be fruitless - Arcadia's transporters and tractor beams were down conserving power. Not that there was much control to gain. Drive systems were not responding. The helm control read off 27,000 km from Arcadia. Soon, they would impact the edges of the void; the edges that had bounced an unarmed photon torpedo and destroyed a standard science probe. "Kawalas, set off the phasers." The low-power phasers went off in all directions. The void's borders absorbed the energy. At least their mission would not be a complete failure. The edges of the void would be completely mapped. They were fluctuating in space. At least that might explain the currents. The location beacon read 30,000 km from Arcadia. With all attempts to regain control failing, and nothing else to do, Lo'Ami screamed: "Brace for impact!" At 30,013 km, the yacht's sensors detected biosign readings. *** On the bridge of the Arcadia, the face of the science officer on duty, Ensign Asimov, turned color. A burst of data arrived from the yacht, then: "The yacht is gone, sir." The bridge crew gazed at the science station. After a pause, short for a chronometer, but feeling like an eternity: "Sensors are picking up a debris field at its last known location."

First, welcome to STSF! There are no stock characters to choose from. You are only limited by your imagination and the constraints of the Star Trek universe. Some people choose to create biographies for the academy and post them in the "STSF Academy" board, but most people don't. When you graduate the academy, you're given the opportunity to sign on to an advanced ship. When you get assigned, then you create a permanent character, check it over with the GM's of the sim (the captain and first officer of the ship), and if they ok it, you post it on the specific sim's bio's board. You can see what other people have done by going through the STSF web boards. One way to approach the academy is to try out different characters you're considering using as your permanent one. Another is to just forget about what planet you might come from during an academy (and default off to being human) because one hour really isn't enough time for serious character development. Now, on to some limitations: characters should be reasonable in the Trek universe - you will be stationed on a Federation (or Klingon, in the case of the Qob) starship or installation, so you should choose a character who would reasonably be there. For example, a Klingon or Romulan would probably not fit in too well on the USS Hood (TOS sim). The age you choose for your character should be reasonable - there probably won't be any 12 year old (human) ensigns on a starship. And so on... And, webmaster, if you're reading... it seems this question of when to create a character as well as some others have come up quite a bit -- a FAQ?

I voted for "explorer" (which could really be any of them, except maybe the transport). Here's why. A battleship could potentially end up being about... battles. There are really only a limited number of times and interesting ways you can say "he shoots, he scores" and "they've just hit us so badly our warp core's going to blow." Anyway, I don't think Star Trek at its best (and certainly not Star Trek sims at their best, as far as I've experienced them) has ever been during on-ship battles. A scout or science vessel might be potentially interesting explorer ship, especially since they're small and you're unlikely to be able to shoot your way out of problems. (Think for a moment about how many ST episodes began with missing and destroyed science vessels). The main thing you're doing by choosing a ship like that is limiting your ship's abilities. If you really want a sim like that, you can sim up an opponent for one episode who limits your abilities in any class of ship. On the other hand, an NX-class Enterprise-era sim would work the same purpose. Cruisers are basically a general ship class: the could be explorers, battleships, or just about anything. Most STSF sims are basically taking place on cruisers from different eras (Constitution, Ambassador, Sovereign) already. A hospital ship might be interesting for the medically minded (or those who like medical technobabble); if it were run well, it would probably work. A transport just seems pretty boring. Could you really see Starfleet assigning a transport to do anything more than... transporting people/things? And, so, I chose "explorer" because an "explorer" doesn't have the ship limiting what you can do in a sim.

No, I said 125 BILLION kph What's the big deal? It's only 9 orders of magnitude!

Suggestion: we should have a separate top-level board for "silliness" ... maybe that would keep posts on topic... nah...

I think he was a Lt.(jg) when he was in ops, got promoted to full Lt. when he became the chief engineer, and got promoted to Lt. Cmdr. one season later.

What? You mean I didn't have to study all that subspace physics just to be a helmsman at an academy sim? Why didn't anybody say something!?!? :D

Hmmm lessee: x*y = multiplication ( multiply x by y) x^y = to the power of (mutiply x by itself y times) $%! = shorthand for :: kicks the guy who takes this post literally and explains this stuff in the behind :: This math lesson brought to you by the number e and the gradient operator.

=/\= Personal Log of Lt.(jg) Arphazad Lo'Ami =/\= ::Begin Recording:: :: Recorded on a datapad in his dimly lit quarters, while chewing on a bar-shaped food-like entity :: Personal Log, Stardate 10302.16. It's been two days since we broke warp ... warp ... I had estimated warp 9.9 + 20 more 9's - If ever we do achieve these speeds regularly, we will need a new warp scale. But, that does not look like it will be happening anytime soon. For our efforts, we have been rewarded with this :: moves arms pointing around room, exposing it to the datapad :: Our dilithium supply is shattered and unusable. Not to mention that the only thing to eat are Starfleet MRE's. :: nervously plays with the wrapper from the finished bar :: Engineering has estimated only a week of reserve power left from the emergency batteries, even with conservation measures in effect. The engineers will presumably transfer power from our impulse engines' fusion reactions to general consumption. When our hydrogen supply has run out, our time expires, and we remain forever lost... somewhere. On the bright side, there will still be plenty of MRE's left for whomever finds the ship. :: crumples the MRE wrapper and throws it in the direction of a trash can; misses; it falls on the floor :: Two days ago, we had simply failed a mission. We had not established relations with the Vogarts. But, we had returned to friendly space, with the only casualty being our egoes. The Vogarts had left us a trace of their technology - the cursed hypertachyon particles that clung to Arcadia as they naturally decayed. Captain Moose and Cmdr. Alces took them as a challenge to return to Vogart space, and show them our falsified technological equality. The entire science department got caught up in it, and I led them right through it. The rush to a solution blurred the slow, methodical, dispasionate work that is science and turned it into some kind of madness. We raced against time to catch the hypertachyons without stopping to catch our breaths and think about the implications of what we were doing to ourselves and to the rest of our crew. We did not even think through all the implications of that blasted equation we had so desperately sought out. The irony: an unseen energy asymmetry on the order of one micro-electron volt may have brought down one of the most advanced ships in the Federation fleet. On a personal note: After I was flung across the bridge, Dr. Dacotah mentioned something about a potential problem with my symbiont. However, an occasional spurt of lower back pain is the least of this ship's worries. It will not matter in a week anyway. I go back on duty in a few minutes. With all but the simplest of scientific equipment on energy conservation lockdown, and the sensors useless anyway, I don't see what I will do anyway. And yet, we all continue working; hoping against all hope that we will find a way home. =/\= End Recording =/\=

Ummm... webmaster... The schedule reflects the 1hr time difference in the Sunday night sim but the "upcoming events" doesn't.

Or lucky to have some random guy on the Internet who has a book that explains it and enough time on his hands to post the stuff on his web page...

First, a reality check on the mass media's understanding of basic research: In a molecular biology class, I watched a documentary from the sixties that - in pompous language - chronicled the discovery and characterizations of the lac and lambda repressor systems in bacteria (two prototypical genetic regulation mechanisms). The show presented the science as if the discovery of the repressor would lead to all kinds of wonderful things - cures for cancer, aging, etc. So, they exaggerated just a little... The same is pretty much true for DNA/the human genome. It is true that the discovery of the function of DNA as the genetic information caused a revolution in biology. However, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that it's really only one piece of the puzzle. (For the programmers in the audience:) Looking at the whole genome is like looking at a core dump of an entire computer's memory. It's totally meaningless unless you know a whole lot of other things about how to interpret the raw information. In the case of DNA, some of it is code for proteins, some for RNAs, some of it is control code, some of it structural, some of it junk, etc. Further, evolution builds not just by adding information, but by reusing information. The number of genes in the human genome is not much larger than those in a fly's - or a yeast's! - genome, and yet, humans are much more complex than flies and yeast. A lot of the complexity is added through systems of regulation (when and where to turn "programs" like proteins and RNAs on and off). The simplistic hypothesis that we're just products of an *entirely* predetermined code just doesn't work. While new treatments for all kinds of diseases are likely to be developed (and already have begun to come out, although I would guess the major *direct* clinical contribution of genetics to this point has been that we've become better at diagnosis) of the genetic revolution, I wouldn't hold my breath for a cure for aging. This all brings us to a second comment about popular media coverage of science: issues tend to be broken down into alarmist yes or no questions, prompting readers to ask questions like "has genetics gone too far?" What it would mean to "end genetics" is totally beyond me, unless we want to just stop studying science. Just about any new discovery or technology comes with its ethical pitfalls. Given the potential promise of genetics and its associated sciences, it would be foolish to place any kinds of blanket restrictions on it. The ethical issues should be discussed on a one-by-one basis, and decided by a consensus of an *informed* public's thoughts (the ** bringing to mind all the wrong fears about GM-foods, but that's another topic althogether) and the weight of scientific opinion. Whew... That was a long post... (PS. This particular Time article didn't do too many of the sort of thing I'm referring to - except in the headline - but lots of other articles do...)

For TNG, from what I recall, one of the tech guys just drew a somewhat exponential-looking curve with an asymptote at warp 10, and the fans have been trying to figure out the equation - with limited success - ever since. The TOS warp scale was w^3*c, where w=warp factor and c=speed of light. In TOS scale, 18c ~ warp 2.6

I'm not sure whether you just doomed us or saved us, Boost.

A-hem.. Arcadia already takes place on a Sovvy...

Thanks all for b'day wishes. As you may note, unlike some 99 year-olds we know, I am not yet old enough for wrinkles, beer-bellies, or baldness... it'll take at least another year for that.

Hi and welcome to STSF! See: http://www.stsf.net/schedule.php Also, general information on simming, see the "Getting Started" section: http://www.stsf.net/howto.php Hope this helps,

=/\= Personal Log of Lt.(jg) Arphazad Lo'Ami =/\= ::Begin Recording:: :: music plays in the background, the tune is not yet distinguishable :: Personal Log, Stardate 10302.09. I could make this log a long, technical description of the experiments and theory that led to the discovery of the hypertachyon particles the Vogarts used to transport us at very high speed back to Federation space. However, I have been intrigued by a reference made on the bridge to this mysterious pre-warp Terran known as "Elvis," and his appearance in "Blue Hawaii." I was forced to admit ignorance, however, a good scientist cannot remain ignorant for long. A small amount of computer databank research revealed the answer: the reference was to a 20th century Terran singer named Elvis Costello! Apparently, in the early 21st century, in an the American city of Las Vegas, the entire crowd at a certain "Hawaii Grill, Bar and Lounge" turned various shades blue after eating a spoiled Salmon Mousse while listening to a band playing Costello's music... "Blue Hawaii?" Sometimes Terrans manage to include some rather obscure incidents in their collective memories. :: pats himself on the back for his research prowess, as the computer continues to play: :: Computer Music> But she used to have a carefree mind of her own Computer Music> With a devilish look in her eyes... Computer Music> ... Veronica ... =/\= End Recording =/\=

"An Anomaly in the Space-Time Continuum" Thanks,