A colleague of mine at Microsoft told me today about the recent send-off party for their director of research, who is being promoted. Because the guest of honor is a big fan of Star Trek, my colleague told me that they had decided to celebrate by watching the man’s favorite ST episode.<\/p>\n
“City on the Edge of Forever,” I said.<\/p>\n
My colleague just looked at me blankly. “Wait, how could you know that?” he asked. “Did somebody already tell you about about this?”<\/p>\n
“No,” I said, “but it had to be ‘City on the Edge of Forever’.”<\/p>\n
My colleague continued to look dubious, wondering whether I was putting him on by pretending to be clairvoyant.<\/p>\n
So I tried to explain it. “Look,” I said, “I know roughly how old he is, so I know he would have been watching original Trek when he was around fifteen years old. I also know he’s a very intelligent guy, and that he still takes ST quite seriously almost half a century later. Which means that his favorite episode would have been the best one, the one that perfectly intertwines love, fate, loyalty, and speculative fiction on a metaphysical level.”<\/p>\n
“Also,” I continued, as if that weren’t enough, “the one with an original script by Harlan Ellison.”<\/p>\n
I’m not sure my colleague quite believed that I had worked all this out from first principles. But I am sure that it’s as obvious to some of you reading this as it was to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A colleague of mine at Microsoft told me today about the recent send-off party for their director of research, who is being promoted. Because the guest of honor is a big fan of Star Trek, my colleague told me that they had decided to celebrate by watching the man’s favorite ST episode. “City on the … Continue reading “Episode”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12708"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12708"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12710,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12708\/revisions\/12710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}