Kyle XY, levitation is hella lame... but restarting a heart!

Kyle XY is a "sci-fi" (and I use that term loosely) show which currently involves a few people who can do certain impossible things. It involves that old canard of using only 10% of your brain and somehow longer gestation in the womb means an even bigger brain so they get special abilities like levitation by changing the polarity of their electromagnetic field in order to repel the electromagnetic field of water (in case you're not sure, that's the biggest load of bullshit ever).

I suppose the show comes on ABC family so I shouldn't expect a Joss Whedon caliber show... but in the season finale the secret cabal of shadowy scientists were extremely impressed with Kyle's ability to restart somebody's heart. That's right, ability to fly is lame... but being a glorified defibrillator... WOW!

In a previous episode there was need to make whether Kyle cured somebody's cancer ambiguous because that's so much harder than lifting objects with your mind. The amazement of the task magically performed seems to correlate with how much people would want to help other people out medically rather than the actual requirements.

Boo, a cheap ABC family show, having fairly crappy writing. What's next? Is Wildfire's broken leg going to heal after all on the show Wildfire? Wonders will never cease!

Sarah Connor Chronicles: Robot Souls

The latest failing. Yes, robots lack souls. They can't have faith or commune with God. My god! I'm a robot!

Stargate SG1 had similar lines where Daniel Jackson said something similar to Replicarter.

*sigh*

Apparently robots don't have interests groups and you can malign them to your hearts content. Soulless automatons unable to ascend or commune with the non-existent.

Blow em up...

Early in the 6th season of Star Trek: DS9 the Federation placed a large series of mines blocking off the entry of the wormhole to the Delta Quadrant. Rather than your ordinary space mines these were self replicating ones. So each time they blew up a mine the nearby mines would replicate a new mine. Well, after a while the Dominion with the help of Damar figured out a way to deactivate the mines ability to replicate so they could take the mines out in one swoop after they were all disabled. The Resistance on DS9 (currently under Dominion control) tried a couple different ways of stopping the mine field from being disabled.

What they should have done was blow them up. The mines are self-replicating, and due to the week long process of disabling them all, they could have bought some time by blowing the mines up. The non-replicating ones would clearly be less fit than the replicating mines. If you take out a replicating mine you get another replicating mine. If you take out a non-replicating mine, you get a replicating mine in its place.

They could have done well to try to destroy the mine field early while they were being disabled. Sure, they protected the deflector dish and the weapons control, but it wouldn't be hard to shoot stuff at some mines and blow them up. The replicating mine wildtype would take over the pool of mines quite rapidly.