Waiting for Nemesis

Following the lead of Scott Kurtz, here's my Trek Films, sorted into order of goodness:

Wrath of Khan
The Undiscovered Country
The Search for Spock
The Voyage Home
Insurrection
First Contact
The Motion Picture
Generations
The Final Frontier


It only remains to see where Nemesis fits in.

Merry Wossname

I've just discovered Agnostica, which will henceforth be replacing Christmas for me.

Superstition

I'm not superstitious, so it was a delight reading an article on superstition in yesterday's Guardian on exactly that subject.

Here's a quote:

But it was in 1947 that a dozen pigeons gave researchers at the University of Indiana what was to prove the most fundamental insight into the roots of superstition and magic - even, many would argue, of religion itself. These birds were put on restricted rations, so that before long their body weight had fallen by 25% and they were permanently hungry. When each bird had, in the words of Professor Burrhus Frederic Skinner, been "brought to a stable state of hunger", it found itself spending several minutes every day in a special cage. At one end of the cage was an automatic food hopper, linked to a timer so that it would swing into place every 15 seconds, and remain in place for five seconds before disappearing.

Crucial to the set-up was the fact that, no matter what the pigeon did, the food came and went at set intervals. For the purpose of the experiment was to observe what effect its comings and goings had on the pigeons. And, sad to say, it made them - and, by extension, us - look somewhat foolish.

Before long, one of the pigeons had begun making strange counterclockwise turns in the intervals between the hopper's arrival. Others indulged in repetitive head movements, while two birds developed a complicated pendulum motion of the head and body. By the end of the experiment, six of the eight subjects were performing elaborate routines, clearly with the intention of hastening the return of the food. In each case, the routine grew out of some action that the bird had just happened to be performing when the hopper appeared.

Describing what is now regarded as a classic experiment, Skinner was in no doubt as to the mechanism involved: "The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behaviour and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking," he wrote. And while much of what Skinner said and did in his lifetime was controversial (he partially reared his own daughter in an enclosed box until the age of two, for example), on this occasion few would argue with his analysis. Nor would anyone who has ever crossed their fingers have any problem with Skinner's other comment on the pigeons' behaviour: "The experiment," he said, "might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition."

More here

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I am:
Kurt Vonnegut
For years, this unique creator of absurd and haunting tales denied that he had anything to do with science fiction.

Which SF writer are you?