Nitpicking Star Trek First Contact

"Resistance is futile"

-Every Borg ever in every Star Trek series that featured them

So, I know it's by no means a new movie, but I just finished re-watching First Contact (the second Star Trek: The Next Generation movie). I still think it's awesome, clearly the best of the TNG movies, and in contention (with Star Trek 4, naturally) for the best Star Trek movie ever made. However, some niggling things did bother me:

1. The Borg go back in time to assimilate Earth. They choose the time when mankind is about to launch its first warp-capable ship. Now, their goal of assimilation is to "add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own". So, if they want the technological distinctiveness, don't destroy the warp ship! Let them advance a bit, but then attack them while they're still weak. And if you just want the biological distinctiveness? Go back even further, why cut it so close? This bugged me about Terminator 1 & 2 as well. Fuck killing John Connor or his mother. Go back to colonial times and kill his great-great-great-grandmother or something. No giant steel factories back them to get knocked into, no pneumatic presses to be crushed by. Now, as for First Contact, if your goal is to incorporate biological diversity in the hopes of creating a perfect species, and you have access to fucking time travel, just go back in time until every species was in its caveman days and incorporate all the biodiversity you want with no resistance whatsoever. You may not get the tech, but who cares? You'll have nobody to fight and thus won't need the high tech anyway.
2. Deanna Troi finds Zephram Cochrane and gets pissed with him on Tequila. Used to synthehol, this intoxication is understandable. She passes out on the table stone cold wasted. But then half an hour later she's up and about and sober, talking about the future? What the hell?
3. Here's another thing that bugs me about Sci-Fi, as much as I love it. If human beings aren't alone in the galaxy, we're probably not really that unique. So it's just hubris to think that we are. Every species the Borg encounters, they assimilate en masse. But they meet humans, and what do they do? They turn Picard into Locutus of Borg, make him an equal to the Borg Queen/Hive Mind. What the hell makes us so special, and so much better than the Romulans, Klingons etc. that we're seemingly the only species where one of our cohort gets to retain individuality-gets a name, a special positions etc.-in a society that embodies hive mind conformity. That's just hubris on the part of the writers.
4. The Borg take over the majority of the Enterprise. To kill them, Data ruptures the primary warp core plasma conduit, destroying the organic part of the Borg Queen. Yet, within half a day, they manage to hide the entire 24th-century Federation flagship from the Vulcan vessel that notices a tiny warp signature from Cochrane's rocket, and then facilitate all the repairs necessary to get the hell out of there (including reproducing the Borg's time travel to get them back to the 24th century), within a few hours? I don't buy it! The Borg had totally interfaced with the Enterprise's circuitry and taken over all of engineering and over half of the rest of the ship, the deflector dish had been shot into space, and the warp core's plasma conduits had been cracked open by Data's mighty fists of fury. And all that only takes a day to undo, despite like 75% of the crew having been killed/assimilated by the Borg?
5. Hey guys, here's an idea: let's not waste some of the coolest high tech we've ever seen! Picard, I'm sure it was very cathartic to break the Borg Queen's metallic spine. But you know what would've been more cathartic? Studying it, so when you encounter the Borg again, you know how they operate. And you obviously figured out a way to travel through time, in order to get home; do you not think that might be knowledge people would want in the future? In Star Trek 4, they could only travel through time by getting a tiny Klingon Bird of Prey and whipping around a star's gravitational field (or something like that). You just found a way to move a 700m-long ship through time to a precise temporal destination. That seems like knowledge you might want to share, yet never again do we see time travel in any future movies.

Anyway, I know this was a nerdy and silly rant, full of pedantry, but still, these things irked me. I am happy to give lots of suspension of disbelief to futuristic sci-fi, but this was just silly and seems like sloppy/lazy script writing. The movie was still great, but why make such minor elements so improbable?

"Brave words. I've heard them before, from thousands of species across thousands of worlds, since long before you were created. But, now they are all Borg."

-The Borg Queen

Marseilles. First impressions: somewhat unimpressed

"The reason why all of us naturally began to live in France is because France has scientific methods, machines and electricity, but does not really believe that these things have anything to do with the real business of living."

- Gertrude Stein

So, as most of you are probably aware, I am currently in France. I'm here to do a series of experiments that I either cannot do in Manchester, or cannot otherwise outsource. In many cases, we would send off my samples to the lab in which I'm now working, they would do the processing and return them; however, they are seriously short-staffed and unable to process them independently, hence my presence here.

To that end, I recently flew to Marseilles to work in the IM2NP (The Institut Matériaux Microélectronique Nanosciences de Provence) at the Université de Paul Cézanne, faculty of St. Jérôme. I won't bore you with the details of what I'm doing here (until I get into my "What Do I Do" series of posts about my work, but the short version is that I'm layering very thin layers of germanium on the samples I created in Manchester.

Anyway, that's not really what this post is about. What I want to talk about is my initial impressions of Marseilles. Basically, it's a pretty mixed bag. So let's go with the tried-and-true (and somewhat trite) formula of the good, the bad and the ugly.

The Good: Well, to start with, it's been mostly beautiful since I arrived. In stark contrast to Manchester's cold, grey, drizzly springs, Marseilles, situated in the lovely south of France, is pretty sweet at this time of year. Though I had some showers initially, and some chilly air to boot, for the most part, it's been just right: high teens or low-twenties, sunny, and just generally very pleasant.

Second, the people I work with seem very nice, genuine and intelligent. I've met the majority of the people with whom I'll be working, and they all seem to be upstanding guys and girls. So, working should be pretty decent. Also, Isabelle, the woman in charge of the lab here, is a bit more proactive about pushing me to work, which I really do need; a more laissez-faire attitude results in me slacking off. A lot. As in, what I've done for the last 30 months or so. So, with any luck, that'll spur me into doing some solid work, which I sorely need to do. Similarly, I have a few friends here (Véronique, Sandrine and her husband Damien). So, it's been great to see all of them again, and all have been very accommodating to me.

Finally, the food. Though I haven't really sampled too much French cuisine yet, I had some lovely dishes at the conference Isabelle held last week. Furthermore, the French have refined cheese and bread-making to an art, something I have enjoyed already, and intend to continue doing so.

The Bad: In short: the residence. I'm staying in student halls while here, kindly set up by my host. However, the French halls have clearly earned their reputations for being god-awful. Firstly, the fall prey to the typical shortcomings of student residences; they're small, loud (at all hours), ugly and dirty. Fair enough. My room is equipped with a single bed-this is something I swore I'd never sleep in again, but fair enough, it's par for the course for student halls. The kitchen is awful-three small electric hot plates (two of which have no knobs and the feet are broken off so you have to prop up the front to keep your pan from sliding off and only one of which has an exhaust hood over it), no stove, no garbage can (seriously), etc. The coin laundromat in the residence is expensive and doesn't provide any change. But the biggest affront, for me is that there's no internet access in the rooms. The only internet you can get in the hall is through the mini internet cafe thing in the front. It consists of five computers (only four work at all), all running a stripped-down version of Internet Explorer that reboots itself every half hour or so, discarding anything you've written. Also, it's so limited that I can't even delete messages in my webmail-I just get a "not authorised" message; and don't even think about doing anything that requires Flash, Java or sound or any kind-that's just crazy talk. They're slow, connected to ancient 15" CRT monitors and generally in poor repair. I know this may seem like a minor, whiney gripe, but it's a really big thing for me-the internet is how I keep in touch with friends and family, it's my primary source of entertainment when on my own, I use it to research, relax and play, and it's a big blow for me to not have it. At least the office has a (really fast) broadband connection, and I now have 24/7 access.

In addition to the internet thing, the hall is also located in a really dodgy area of town. I have been repeatedly warned not to walk alone at night, especially from the metro station (which would be about a 40-minute walk). As I understand it, the odds are pretty good I'd be mugged/stabbed/whatever. So, I'm heeding that advice. This wouldn't be a huge problem except that the bus from the metro station to my hall stops at 8:30 every night, a ridiculously-early hour for such a big city. There are night buses from downtown, but they are slow, infrequent, potentially dangerous and stop running at about 12:30AM, which makes going out for an evening on the town difficult. Especially because there is no nightlife whatsoever in the area of my hall. None. There's an internet cafe, a corner shop, two restaurants, two laundromats, a pharmacy and a bakery within a twenty-minute walk. That's it.

Basically, the area feels somewhat like a ghetto in a country much more financially destitute than France. I realise that Marseilles is a fairly poor city, but really-this is France! Not Rwanda, not Afghanistan, France. They should be able to do better than this. As for the hall, it just reeks of "bare minimum effort". There are walls and a ceiling and we should be happy for that, dammit. Any other amenities, anything to make one's personal life "enjoyable" is just lunacy. There's a comprehensive lack of attention to detail that's pervasive in the design and implementation of these mediocre living spaces. I don't expect the Taj Mahal, but for a prosperous first-world nation to not provide at least basic internet access to its student, in 2008, is ridiculous.

The Ugly: The city in general is not so much with the pretty ugly. There are exceptions, and areas of the city that predate WWII are generally quaint and pretty. There are a fair arrangement of churches, the harbour is lovely, and the surrounding scenery exquisite. However, most of the buildings can be generously described as "utilitarian". They are boxy, plain, poured-concrete structures; they are drab and at times dilapidated. The university buildings are equally boxy and uninteresting. It's not a big deal by any stretch, but don't come to Marseilles if you expect picturesque French villas nestled around the Mediterranean.

I'll be in Marseilles for a total of about two months. Having been here for two weeks, I already am a bit homesick, and am pretty frustrated with some of the shortcomings I've seen. I expected better, especially given this is the second-largest city in a country known for its history, prosperity and modernity. France should be a beacon of good social order, with well-equipped public transportation and a modern infrastructure, both physical and digital. I hope my opinion will improve, but right now-though the people seem lovely, and it's great to see my friends here again-I have been largely unimpressed with the city itself. Maybe time will change that opinion.

"I have tried to lift France out of the mud. But she will return to her errors and vomitings. I cannot prevent the French from being French."

-Charles de Gaulle