That version of the transporter definitely would have hurt the ratings a bit! As David Gerrold noted at the time, the transporter was needed to keep the show’s scripts moving along, but it also provided an annoyingly easy way out of a lot of action plots. . .

Reflecting on 30+ yrs in academia, when I started, simply no such thing as a predatory conference—nor predatory journals (only "bottom-feeding" journals 😂). By end of my career, I had to regularly counsel my grad students & postdocs about them, lest they be easily taken in. #AcademicSky#ChemSky

a woman standing in a body of water with a ghost in the background

ALT: a woman standing in a body of water with a ghost in the background

But it’s an odd book, as befits Blish’s style and polymathic interests. E.g., Uhura is a James Joyce fan, Scotty talks about Hilbert space, and the plot hinges on organic chemistry (!)

James Blish actually led off his 1970 standalone Star Trek novel “Spock Must Die” with this very idea, in a discussion between McCoy, Scotty, and Kirk. Reading it when I was 13, it didn’t occur to me that surely that thought would have occurred to everyone long before!

Ok, this one is a new one. Does anyone know how to get Liquid Crystal Display out of clothing? A laptop screen busted and stained my spouse's favorite pair of pants. We've tried: rubbing alcohol, shout, hydrogen peroxide, and dawn, to no avail. Anyone ever encounter this before?

Today in "Wait, WHAT?" I learned that Gene Wolfe — recondite, abstruse SF/F author Gene Wolfe — invented the machine that makes Pringles potato chips. It's on the company's own FAQ, which also implies his signature mustache may have inspired their ad mascot. www.pringles.com/en-us/faq.html

I remember Maggie Valley as a pretty area over that way, and I hope they made it through

Elisabeth Bik herself told me that - photomicrograph fakes as well. The Golden Age of being able to spot publication fraud may be ending right now.

I-40 really is its lifeline, and I assume that was your cross-country route. I used to make the NC-Research-Triangle-to-West-Tennessee round trip often in my grad school years, and I wonder what’s become of all those places now. . .

I had the same problem, compounded by apparently only being able to catch about 20% of the dialogue