Monday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Monday, December 15, 2025
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22 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Rob Reiner and his wife were found murdered yesterday. I know he did other things, but I always remember Reiner for All in the Family. RIP.
Latest on Ukraine from the Institute for the Study of War:
Bottom line: Russia will continue to pound their shoes on the table demanding maximalist conditions while Witkoff and Kushner will continue to conspire in their treason.
Monster Tales:
Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera.
Happy Christmas!
What could go wrong?
A Medicare program in Texas will use AI to approve or deny certain services. Here’s what to know.
And best of all:
@Scott: Nothing could go wrong with that at all! Fuck AI, man, I hate it.
@Scott: Around 2000, Allstate implemented a computer program called Colossus to evaluate personal injury claims. The real life experience of adjusters and lawyers working for Allstate was neutered by the company’s dictate that only certain factors could be considered, and it was those factors that determined the price range in which a case could be settled. Early AI! The result was a massive increase in litigation because the adjusters couldn’t “go against Colossus.” Using AI to make Medicare decisions is sure to run into the same log jamming that Colossus created for Allstate, and again, it will be the sick and injured who pay the price.
You want to know something truly pathetic? Over the past few days following Trump’s “pardon” of Tina Peters on state charges, media sources keep claiming that state officials are arguing that he doesn’t have the constitutional authority to override a state conviction, as if this point is up for debate. Here are some examples:
“Trump claims to pardon jailed Colorado election clerk Tina Peters, but state officials contend it’s unconstitutional” (ABC News)
“Democratic leaders in Colorado…argued that Mr. Trump had no legal power to overturn Ms. Peters’ conviction in state court.” (NYT)
“Trump says he will pardon jailed elections clerk, but state officials say he cannot” (BBC)
Have we really reached the point where anything Trump says automatically becomes a legitimate point of view?
And now for something completely different: the magic replicator in Star Trek* wouldn’t work.
Oh, I’m not arguing it’s impossible to take some form of generic “energy” and 1) transform it into matter, and 2) arrange such matter in a particular way to yield the galaxy’s most delicious cheesecake. Let’s take that as a given.
Now, how much energy would you need to make a 150 gram slice of cheesecake?
I don’t know the exact amount or in what units, but at least as much energy as is contained in 150 grams of matter.
So, if there’s a crew of a thousand or so in the Enterprise, how much food, water, soap, toothpaste, spare parts, medication, and assorted other stuff do they use up per day? Tons, at least. So you’d need several tons of antimatter, beyond what’s needed to power the ship, the weapons, etc. And an equal amount of matter to annihilate it to produce energy to make cheesecake.
You don’t need to use antimatter. You can use any energy source. Solar power, nuclear fusion, whatever kind of technobabble singularity the Romulans use, a zero-point module as in Stargate. But the impediment remains such massive amounts of energy are even more unrealistic that transporter duplicates, warp travel, wormholes, a brand new and far more extensive article zoo, and all the rest of the magic tech seen in Trek.
Now, if the universe contains the same energy now as it did when it was a dimensionless point before the Big Bang, what if you could find a number, say an infinity, of pre-big bang universes and tap them for energy?
That’s a long and winding road to travel to get cheesecake.
The news has been particularly horrific the last few days, but to shine a tiny little bit of light into the darkness, the bystander who tackled one of the gunmen in Australia is a Syrian immigrant who is now an Australian citizen. He immigrated from Syria in 2006.
@Jen: The optics of a Muslim immigrant to a Western nation saving Jews at a Hanukkah festival is exactly what we need right now.
@Kathy: I assume that the Enerprise doesn’t have a vast energy reserve for their replicators, but a store of matter somewhere and a catalyst that goes about starting the process of conversion. Alchemy rather than creating something from nothing. The catalyst would be Dilithium crystals or something. So, at any time there’s only a little bit of energy.
Probably uses human waste and other garbage as the base matter.
It’s also probably part of the transporter system — you can’t get two Rikers of matter out of one Riker, after all, and the same goes for making Picard a child due to transporter mishap, or an adult again.
My favorite bit of transporter trivia: in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, right before the transporter accident, Admiral Kirk interrupts Captain Decker who was helping an engineer configure the transporter. Dumb Kirk killed a man, and no one calls him on it or even seems to notice.
@Gustopher:
You know, I’ve never liked Kirk.
In Discovery season 3, the Starfleet admiral says something about waste being recycled, and turned to things like apples in the replicator. Like you suggest, that makes a lot more sense (assuming any of it makes sense).
On other things, IT picked the worst day to switch our phones. This week looked relatively relaxed, then all sorts of things fell on us. ON top of that, let’s waste time configuring the new phone…
@Kathy:
Nobody can figure out how the transporters worked. The amount of energy that would be released from converting the entire mass of the average human body into energy would be titanic. About the same amount of energy as what a typical nuclear power plant produces in 90 years…according to some physicists.
@dazedandconfused:
The reason for the transporter was so they wouldn’t have to do the visuals for either the Enterprise or a shuttle landing on almost every ep, or so I’ve read. On the other hand, they had to do the transporter visuals every time…
@Gustopher:
@Kathy:
That’s how I always assumed the Replicators worked. It’s a two way street. Replicator “absorbs” the poop, co2, old tea cups and then recycled it into whatever else was needed. My head cannon was that this was accomplished through “gravity” and “magnets” which either stuffed in electrons or took them out of atoms to make various materials. Like, it’s still magic. Just seems more interesting to me.
My problem with the replicator is after hearing about industrial sized replicators during DS9, I watched chunks of Voyager and got hung up on “replicator credits”. Like, you still got the same amount of pooh you have to deal with. Gonna waste all the water in it by venting it into space? Seems like the wasteful kinda shit Starfleet would do. Intergalactic poop litterers.
Anyways, I don’t like Voyager.
@Beth:
There comes a point in every science fiction show, when the tech involved work however the plot needs it to work. This applies also to novels and comics using the setting and characters of that show.
Stargate was also technobabble heavy, and how things worked could change, or explanations be made up, as required by the story.
The plot is almost as powerful as the author 🙂
I could kinda see a replicator. It’s basically a molecular level 3D printer. But transporters seem ridiculous. If you order a ham sandwich, the replicator only has to produce a few ounces of something close to ham. Maybe replicate a million of the same pig cell. The transporter has to get dynamic processes right, biochemistry as it happens and every brain cell dendrite in the right place, as they change.
All with no local receiving mechanism.
@gVOR10:
When I need to use teleportation in a story, I imply or state it’s some kind of trans-inter- dimensional thing, not a transmission of any kind.
It’s still nonsense, but more believable nonsense than disassembling and reassembling something as complex as a person, in blatant defiance of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle (I’m sure I’m indulging in my own blatant defiance).
But if we were to throw out FTL, teleportation, replicators, energy weapons, stun beams, neat fighters that bank in space like F16s, visible lasers that move far, far slower than a bullet, exotic energy torpedoes, shields, etc. etc., we may as well kill the whole genre.
@gVOR10: @Kathy: I much prefer Douglas Adams’s dispenser aboard the Heart of Gold. The Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser also known as the Nutrimat Machine and the Nutri-Matic Drinks Dispenser is a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation product designed to work out what drink someone wants through taste bud patterns and neurological signals. It is well known for producing a liquid which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
Well, it’s official. Our ranch is now a subsidiary of Riverbend Angus. At least my cows will get some high-powered, high dollar boyfriends. AND…..I don’t have to pay the “very expensive” bills anymore. Wheeee!
Close on my place in Oregon January 2nd. Not sure how long I’ll stick around this area. Kinda depends how long I can stomach working for an actual corporation. I’m kinda used to being the boss and just doing it, this whole “gotta get it approved and paid for by someone else” might cramp my style. 😉
@Mr. Prosser:
I read somewhere that in a chemistry lab, one can make a wide variety of alcoholic drinks using substances commonly found in it. Of course, you need ethyl alcohol as a base.
Right now you can purchase machines that mix drinks, but you need to provide the liquors and mixers, which limit what you can make. A larger machine with a mix of such chemical compounds, as well as some coloring agents and maybe sweeteners, and ice, can probably do much better.