Category: Various and Sundry

Various and Sundry

Crisis of Infinite Star Treks: Not Exactly the The Corbomite Maneuver

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

This is the 17th entry in an ongoing series about Star Trek fandom and its future called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. Based on today’s updates, I’ll be writing about this through Spring 2017. Who woulda thunk it? While this amounts to legal maneuvers around the Axanar Lawsuit, a judge issued a ruling on Monday that will allow the lawsuit to move forward. Essentially, it’s a rejection of Axanar’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, but…

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Various and Sundry

FiveThirtyEight Follow-up on Basic Income

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

A couple weeks ago, FiveThirtyEight did an in-depth look on universal basic income and I talked about it briefly here. This is a great group to look at it because they are so wonkily numbers-driven. They’re back with a quick video recap, but the whole thing makes me feel I should be writing more about it here on the blog. As we humans face more and more automation, it seems like we need to find an…

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Various and Sundry

Crisis of Infinite Star Treks: A Klingon Language Hypothetical Scenario

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I would say that it’s inconceivable that this is the 16th entry in an ongoing series on Star Trek’s future and fandom, but then you might say I don’t know what the word ‘inconceivable’ means. The Axanar lawsuit has gotten additional press since Friday. Peter Decherney in Forbes has an excellent article going into both the legal issues and the corporate strategy. Perhaps because of this, some lawyers I know have been sharing links on social…

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Various and Sundry

Recommended Reading: The Rise and Fall of HBO?

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I’ve been thinking about “Peak TV” and such from a couple of articles I talked about back in January. Of course, one of the issues with TV or any cinematic development is that you need something of a development pipeline. As Walt Hickey’s article on FiveThirtyEight last week goes into, that might be one of the biggest issues facing HBO right now. Apparently, Game of Thrones may be shorter lived than some of us hoped.

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Various and Sundry

Crisis of Infinite Star Treks: Being a P’tach about the Klingon Language

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Would you believe this is the 15th entry in an ongoing series on Star Trek’s future and fandom? Don Adams would. Eriq Gardner wrote a good article in the Hollywood Reporter yesterday about a recent amicus brief filed in relation to the CBS/Paramount lawsuit against the Axanar fan film. As I’ve mentioned earlier in this blog series, I absolutely believe that CBS/Paramount has real and legally binding ownership of Star Trek intellectual property (IP). For non-fans, this…

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Various and Sundry

Crisis of Infinite Star Treks: The Briar Patch

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

This is the 14th entry in a surprisingly long series of posts about Star Trek’s future and its fandom called Crisis of Infinite Star Treks. I’m not sure if this is a lucky number or not. Michael Hinman’s passionate article shows a side I haven’t really delved into too much, not being a fan film producer. The not-so-nice comments by Axanar’s Alec Peters I first read about in the excellent Newsweek article I expounded about at length last week…

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Various and Sundry

Recommended Reading: The Actual Science Behind Dyson & Other Dryers

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

Recently, there’s been some news stories making the rounds on the Internets about the Dyson “air blade” hand dryer things actually being horrible germ-distributing death machines, etc. etc. etc. The reason for this conclusion appears to be the usual search for sensation by reporters as explained in this entertaining article by Emma Bryce. Don’t worry hypochondriacs, you can still worry.

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Various and Sundry

Recommended Reading: A FiveThirtyEight Look at Basic Income

By Bjorn Munson | by Bjorn Munson

I’ve been reading a lot about basic income over the past year or so, from activist like Scott Santens as well as actual studies that have been and are being done. So I was very pleased to see that the data-driven news site FiveThirtyEight decided to do a feature length article about it. If you want to get an idea about what basic income is all about — and what we really know about what…

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