#72 – Replicator
Posted on March 27, 2012 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comic
I wonder if a downside to the replicators on Star Trek would be the sameness of the food. You ask for a piece of fruit and it tastes great but it always tastes exactly the same amount of great. I wonder if you asked for a bunch of grapes if you would essentially get the same bunch of grapes every time. Then you could have a favorite grape of the bunch. I have a feeling there is a multi-page article somewhere on the internet that addresses all of this.
Tags: picard, root beer float, star trek
There are fifty-seven such articles… all identical, right down to the bad comma usage.
But seriously, I’m going to have to opine on that someday. Thanks for the idea.
Although I would have loved to have a replicator with a database for all of my Mom’s recipies before she passed on, there is also the idea that there are bad cooks out there whose complete works would be on file for posterity. bleh.
They’re in the 24th Century and they still can’t get Tomato Soup right.
An odd place to find Tamiia.
i’d have thought they could have a few hundred variations in banana, at least. perhaps a generic ‘banana-like’ template that it generalizes from to make a unique banana?
I would think a simpler way would be to simply parametrize the “banana” and apply a randomization factor to the parameters.
On the other hand, you would probably have somebody end up with a banana that tasted like acetone…
SHIRTSHIRTSHIRTSHIRT!!! (I would like to own this on a shirt please.)
I think this would work better as a poster or computer wallpaper.
The sameness of the food is actually a benefit. I’ve heard McDonnald’s goes to a lot of trouble to get enough cows into the ground beef to make sure it always tastes exactly the same.
I have seen this mentioned before at “http://qntm.org/caii”. It wasn’t just about food. There are classes where you lean about structural flaws in the plank of wood.
Hmm, that explains why, when I try a mcdonald’s hamburger, it tastes exactly as gross as it did the last time…
I’m not sure that “McDonald’s does it” is the best argument in favor of food preparation practices.
I recently realised that the computer in TNG was apparently racist (or speciesist? I’m not quite certain). Picard was famously able to order “Tea, Earl Grey, hot”, but in one episode thaey had a Romulan refugee who just wanted a glass of cold water, but the computer had him specify the exact temperature he wanted. Or maybe Picard once defined the variable “hot” in his personal replicator profile.
He did because he kept getting pissed that the computer would ask him every time to specify the temperature.
Also, every item has to be programmed into the computer for it to be able to replicate it.
Different people, much less different species, are unlikely to have a uniform idea of what water temperature (0°C to 100°C) is pleasingly “cold”. Hortas, being living rocks with a silicon-based chemistry (do they ever ask for, or drink, water?), for example.