Foreign Perspectives

As a standalone movie it certainly has all the aspects that you would expect to see in a big budget Star Trek film ie the grand CGI effects, the fast paced action, unexpected plot twists and so on. On all those fronts it succeeded very well with spectacular CGI sequences right from the impressive start through to the space battles towards the end, a number of Spock-centred surprises along the way and a sustained fast pace that produced a sense of urgency that made it feel like a normal length of episode.

However, the bigger question is: is it actually a genuine Star Trek movie or merely one that had that label tagged on to improve the box office success? Yes, there are characters that have the same name as those from the original series and, yes, you’d expect their younger selves to be less developed than they were in the original series and, of course, they’d be different in some ways due to changes in the timeline but, taking all those into account, was this a Star Trek crew? I think so but I’m not convinced that it was the crew of the Enterprise: it just didn’t feel that if you ran time forward a few years that you’d have a group of people working together in the same kind of way as you should have done. To my mind this film was created because the studio felt they needed another Star Trek movie but didn’t want to pay the big bucks to make one using an entire set of existing actors from any of the Star Trek series so instead they tried to create essentially another Enterprise style prequel but one that little bit closer in time to the original series.

Being really picky, as some have been, you might wonder where the Temporal Integrity Commission were when a rather major league change to the timeline was being made. Arguably this could be explained by the temporal change having taken place before the formation of the TIC itself thus they are never created (much like in Asimov’s End of Eternity). However, in other contact with the TIC this seems not really to be possible in that it appears to take a while before changes ripple up the timeline and, of course, there’s the issue of various people coming back in time in Enterprise (which, of course, is set before the events in this movie) to correct the timeline…

You could also wonder how come the Enterprise here which has just been built seems more modern than the older Enterprise as depicted in the original series? However, that’s not really as big a deal as you might at first think. Even in real-life places can change their look substantially over a few years and who are we to say what which Enterprise style would really be more modern? We’ve seen ourselves that really modern meant that home electronic devices must be silver (10? years back), that they must be black (5? years ago) and that they must be silver again: which look is really more modern?

What this movie does allow is for the studio to kick off another series based in the Star Trek universe but because it’s an alternate reality version of it, they won’t have all the baggage that’s built up over the years from the Star Trek franchise which, let’s face it, has begun to complicate life no end for the writers. After all, who but the most dedicated fan could remember everything that’s gone before and write a new series of episodes that’s consistent with that? What they’ve effectively done is the equivalent of firing Voyager off to the delta quadrant only more so in that there can’t be any contact with the regular Star Fleet headquarters which would, of course, require consistency with 40 years of episodes.

Worth watching, but don’t get too hung up on the inconsistencies.

One of the things that you notice when you’ve done a few courses with the Open University is that over the years successive courses tend to get better and the rough edges disappear.

So, it’s a bit of a surprise to find that the workload for the Child Development course is far from even week to week. Within the current book some chapters have taken nearly twice as long to do as others which is a really major change week on week. Now, you’d expect that there could be, say, 10% or so of a difference between weeks or that there could well be a somewhat more substantial difference over the course of a month or two. But doubling from one week to the next and then back to the normal level the following week seems very unusual.

Even more puzzling perhaps is that one would have thought that the educational psychologists would have had some input to the course design. Or perhaps, that lumpiness is a required feature for effective learning? I guess I’ll have to wait ’til I do an educational psychology course to find out!

If some of the claims getting published these days is anything to go by, they seem never to have had to submit an expense claim as a subordinate working in some company or indeed, perhaps more appropriately, the civil service.

Although the vast majority claim to have kept their expenses claims “within the rules” that’s not really the issue and claims that they have “done nothing wrong” isn’t relevant. The issue is that the rules themselves are, in many cases, quite ridiculous.

For example, it would be quite convenient had I been able to claim expenses for a home that was closer to work. Clearly this would have meant that I’d have been more available to work late and so on. Yet, of course, I can’t do that because there’s no way the company would pay for that. I see that Peter Mandelson has claimed for work done to repair his roof as it was leaking. Ironically, Peter is one of the more honest of the politicians yet the thing is: it’s his roof, so why should he be able to claim it as an expense?

What is clear is that there is a need for politicians to have a home near to Westminster and it’s reasonable that expenses for this should be paid for. After all, it is (in principle) a temporary job and moreover they also need to live in their own constituencies where, in effect, their true home is. What’s not reasonable is that all MPs should be claiming for this second home because obviously many already live in London and it’s also unreasonable for them to be able to constantly switch which is their main and their second home which seems, in most cases, to be done solely to work the system.

More generally they also need to recognise that it’s unreasonable for them to be the only arbitrators for their own salaries. Whilst recognising that it was far from perfect the simplest way of doing this seems to have been to tie their salaries down to specific civil service ranks and perhaps while they’re at it, follow the rules on expenses that the civil servants do.

One of the great things about the introduction of the chip & PIN technology was that it greatly increased security in the sense that you were no longer relying on the shop assistants comparing your signature against that on the back of the card.

If you’d been carrying the card around for a year or two chances are that the signature was barely visible but that rarely mattered anyway given the cursory glance of most shop assistants. Once the novelty value of the photo cards had dwindled it mattered little what photo was on the card although the current rarity of those cards does offer a measure of additional security to those who have them.

However, the problem is that your PIN is required EVERYWHERE. Fair enough when you’re buying something in a shop although it’s a little too easy to watch someone entering their PIN in a lot of locations and there’s a tendency for the person behind you in the queue to get so close that they can easily see your PIN. However, why the need to enter the PIN when you make a deposit in the post office? Not only are post office keypads more visible than most but why the need to identify yourself when making a deposit at all?
After all, the Halifax are able to take machine deposits without a PIN. Why can’t the post office?

Now that we’ve really started to ramp up the exercise aspect of our weight-loss programme we’re at the point where we’re hitting the buffers on the actual weight loss since the muscle that we’re building is heavier than the fat that we’re losing.

Now you might think that there can’t be a whole lot of difference in the density of muscle and the density of fat but in fact the difference is around 18% which is pretty substantial obviously. In reality though it’s probably going to hit us most in the early stages of our more intensive exercise programme, the thinking being that presumably there’ll be a much higher percentage gain in muscle in those early stages than later on. Thus whilst my weight seems to have stopped dropping over the last week or so, there is definitely less of me hanging out than there was a week earlier.

Later on it should be different in that maintaining the diet plan whilst simultaneously upping the ante with the exercise programme should eventually (within a week or two given the programme we’re following) reach the point where the gain in muscle levels off whilst the fat continues to disappear. I suspect that the weight would go down relatively quickly at that point but we’ll see in a few weeks time.

One wonders how many people who’d like to “lose weight” pack in their exercise programmes in the early stages due to their gaining weight from all that extra muscle that they’re building?

Incidently, one other trend that we’ve noticed in the gym this time around compared to our experience five years back is that there seems to be a massive growth in the use of personal trainers. Previously you’d have seen one every couple of days but now there are three or four going round with people every day. We’re starting to feel left out as we don’t have one but Wendy says I can’t have the blonde one that promises “great one on one fun” 🙂