This tracks with the usual definition in international relations.

e.g., International grant funding — whether to UN organizations like WHO and UNDP or directly to other countries and programs through US AID and its counterparts — is generally considered as important ‘soft power’ mechanisms. In principle, the recipients of the grants and loans are in control of their governance but as these are long term relationships, the donor countries have significant strategic influence.

This is why foreign affairs specialists have commented that, beyond the moral and ethical considerations in the elimination of US AID funding — and lesser contractions in international grants by other NATO donor countries shifting budgets to prioritize defence build ups — mean that the US and NATO donor countries are giving up soft power.

Meanwhile, China and the Saudis are reportedly gaining influence through direct and indirect investment, foreign aid grants and loans etc.

It’s more that Star Trek’s science advisor Dr. Erin MacDonald is a physicist who did her PhD thesis with the team in Scotland that got the Nobel prize shortly after she graduated.

As she puts it, her friends got her into watching Voyager when she was working on her PhD and she thought “oh cool, just what I am studying.”

There’s definitely a feedback loop going on, since Dr. MacDonald is whom they bounce their ideas off of.

She appears as herself - although as a Starfleet officer in the 24th century — in animated form in Prodigy, and explains ‘Temporal Mechanics 101’ in a learning module.

Jonathan Frakes mentions several things in the TrekMovie interview that may impact costs.

Alex Kurztman set the direction style with more close up, tight camera work. More, he specifically ordered special long camera lenses to enable that. This means that despite the enormous sets and UHD cinematography, with long lenses they are able to block the scenes without as much extraneous detail.

Saving the wide angles for when they need them but closing up on the characters, and doing more in set internal volumes must surely reduce a lot of crew time and accelerate production.

Good point. There are repetitive signals that her expectation is that he hasn’t materially changed.

Beyond the ‘you grew up’ startlement at his physical growth and development, she expects his temperament, preferences ambitions and values are exactly the ones she saw in him at six years old.

She’s not just missed the past year as a cadet in Starfleet, they both have missed his entire adolescent experience of youth separating themselves from their parents.

Interestingly, the challenge of needing to catch up with who someone has changed into is foreshadowed by Caleb and the others’ difficulties in understanding who SAM is now - and her own struggles to reconcile who she was with who she is.

When asked in the TrekMovie interview about the similarities to Matalas Prime in Picard, Jonathan Frakes said that most of it was the virtual set volume but they reused set pieces within it.

Well, that’s a lot. I’m not sure why I didn’t expect a cliffhanger, and I hope there won’t be one at the end of the season.

As we saw the wall of omega-47 mines, it occurred to me that Brakka had told Ake what he wanted in episode 6 — a return to the isolation of planets that gave him and the Venari Rahl their power — but neither she nor Vance appreciated the scale of his ambitions to return to the anarchy of past century.

And the Federation should have anticipated this kind of challenge to come from some quarter, even if they’d come to detente with the Emerald Chain. Those who benefited from the systems that were built up over the century of the Burn would have nostalgia for it and distrust against the Federation would not vanish quickly.

I appreciate the narrative structure of the season, Anisha and Caleb Mir represent those who struggled to get by around the powers and forces of the Burn. There is a personal story and a societal story about making choices to take the risk to move towards something better — as found family and as a society.

As it goes on, this show reminds me increasingly of The Magicians, on which SFA showrunner Noga Landau was a head writer at one point. There’s the quotidian developmental, coming of age challenges of students in their undergraduate years juxtaposed with massive and truly menacing events.

Bella Shepherd, who plays Genesis, said in an interview that Frakes was originally booked for direct her character’s feature episode in season two, but then he couldn’t be available because of conflicts but was expected to direct a later episode. It sounds as though they couldn’t make the schedules mesh.

Is it just me, or did the reuse some of the sets or set dressings from Picard season three and Discovery seasons one and three?

We hear that the production packs things up and puts them in storage as much as reasonably possible.

My recollection is that he said, “I stopped trying after that one after she escaped from the penal colony.”

I loved the Relaunch novelverse but I also love the new shows.

It’s unfortunate that the IP holder decided that for the books — unlike Star Trek Online — the storytelling in the alternate timeline couldn’t continue.

These are the 2025 Emmy awards.

Not sure why a July 2024 release didn’t meet the cut off date for that year’s awards. Perhaps since the Emmys were originally for a standard September to June television broadcast schedule, July streaming releases get bumped to the next year.

As frustrating as it may be, my best recommendation is to borrow basic cookbooks from reputable authors from a public’s library or online library.

Here’s one that we have that has recipes that work:

https://archive.org/details/newcanadianbasic0000ferg

https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7643452M/The_New_Canadian_Basics_Cookbook

You will need to build some techniques and learn to measure and to follow recipes to start.

This means learning to decode what recipes are telling you and replicate what they say. It means not making substitutions until you can predict what the outcomes will be.

It also means to be willing to do repetitive and tedious tasks.

In the past, we learned this from family, helping and picking up basic skills.

Now it’s harder. In theory, cooking videos could and should help but when the emphasis of cooking videos is to perform and get views, it’s not so successful as it could be.

Start with some simple recipes with not too many ingredients and not elaborate ones with complex techniques.

I’m so very glad to see that Prodigy’s excellence continues to get the acknowledgment it deserves from within the creative community.

This Individual Achievement award is determined by the animators’ guild not an open Emmy vote. Having the winner for each of the show’s two seasons demonstrates the respect the work has within the animation community.

Yup.

And that Alcubierre’s effort, as a theoretical physics PhD student, to prove mathematically that there was a an exception to General Relativity that would make warp possible, was inspired by Star Trek’s fictional drive and not vice versa.

I and the physicists I know will go to the mat on the principal that the Alcubierre Drive is the first real life physics closed form proof of a warp drive.

For the purposes of this discussion though, the more fundamental point is that Alcubierre’s theoretical proof of concept for warp drives was created in the mid 1990s nearly 30 years after TOS first broadcast and TNG had completed its run.

As I have said here before, following the norm in mathematics-based theory development, Alcubierre started with a tractable corner case. This means setting he set a number of obviously necessary parameters to zero to make it possible to get to a closed-form solution that didn’t rely on crunching numbers.

His objective in his PhD thesis was prove there was an exception General Relativity that makes warp drives possible theoretically.

He did that, and as is usual with corner solutions, came up with something fairly absurd that would involve massive amounts of exotic matter and couldn’t steer a course due — simply because he intentionally set those parameters to zero for the purposes of the proof.

It’s a misunderstanding of the way theoretical reasoning and research gets done to say that Alcubierre’s warp drive isn’t the one in Star Trek, simply because he chose the simplest case for his proof. The Star Trek warp drive would involve setting these parameters to positive values - but that doesn’t mean it’s a different theory at the fundamental level.

As usual, more realistic applications of the theory, with nonzero values for those parameters that would:

• actually allow a ship to enter warp from a sublight velocity
• permit the ship to control its direction while at warp, and
• would not require massive amounts of exotic matter,

are very likely to involve massive amounts of numerical approximations calculated by a computer and advances in materials science.

Unless someone finds a mathematical trick to get around the numerical approximations with a better closed form solution — and comes up with a materially different basic warp drive equation — whatever we get eventually from this line of research will still be viewed as Alcubierre’s drive. Or, also likely an Alcubierre-OtherPerson drive.

It would be cool to have an AMA with one of the longtime group of tie-in writers for the franchise.

They’ve seen the evolution of TrekLit from the end of the TNG movie era through the Relaunch book universe and back to standalones.

I’ve watched most of the first season of Absentia. It’s intense and dark. It’s also more of a British or European style thriller in that it keeps you in the dark with genuine ‘who done it?’ rather than ‘how done it?’

Interestingly Violo was co-creator and senior writer of Absentis but didn’t get as much producer credit. Seems her talent moved her up into creative control more quickly than the WGA stepwise progression in titles allows.

Well, here’s another angle — Business Insider reports “Paramount won’t say whether Middle East money is funding its WBD deal”.

The headline and post summary are somewhat misleading in their incompleteness.

From the article:

The federal public service’s largest union has filed official complaints asking the government to “cease the unilateral implementation” of its early retirement incentive program until its parameters are negotiated with the union…

By offering separation packages to public servants to reduce its workforce, the employer is “bargaining directly with PSAC members on terms and conditions of employment,” the union says.

Also, if you have saved more seed than you need yourself, put it into your local seed libraries now.