Windshield Wire

There's a small icon on my car's dashboard.

When I push this button, current runs through tiny wires in my car's back window, and the resistance to this heats the window up. The head makes water deposited on this window by condensation evaporate, making the window clear for me to see out of. This is legally mandated for my car, as lawmakers think it a reasonable expectation that I be able to see what the hell is going on behind me when I drive.

The windshield, though, or front window, is defogged by blowing hot air from the engine. This is partially because the engine is right below it, and this is a ready source of heat, but mostly because the little wires would be way too prominent at that close a distance. The back window is six feet away from me, the driver. The little black lines are just too tiny to notice at that distance. The windshield, though, is merely inches away. To put little wires here would mean looking a little black lines constantly while I drive.

Let us suppose, though, that I didn't mind the wires, but needed some sort of automated system, so I don't have to bother with the button. I think I would resolve this by materials science.

I would need to produce a material that conducted electricity, but developed greater resistance under low temperatures. In temperate environments, where the window does not fog up, the wires conduct efficiently, and very little heat is produced. However, in colder environments where my own body heat makes a temperature gradient that encourages condensation, the resistance rises considerably, producing heat, and evaporating this fog before it can really get started.

Nah, there's defoggers set up the way they are for a reason.

However, if I were redesigning cars, I would make each of its vents independent. The front vents for blowing air at my face, the lower vents that blow air at my feet, and the vents that blow air at the outer windshield would each have their own dial for temperature and amount of air. As I turn the amount of air dials up, a fan in the vent is given more voltage, making it rotate faster and push more air. As I turn the temperature dial up, more of the air is routed past the radiator.

Autotranslation

I'm still hovering in that sick zone where I'm ill enough to want to do nothing but sleep when I have free time, but not quite sick enough to take a sick day from work. I tried sitting down with a notepad to come up with an idea, but only got an incoherent scribble out out that. I might have interesting ideas while whacked out of my mind on cough syrup, but then I'm too messed up to actually, you know, write them down.
So to amuse you, I have translated a comedy classic, the log commercial, into Chinese. I don't actually know any more Chinese as a language than "Hello, how are you, My name is Professor Preposterous, I am an American," but mechanical translation technology has gone a lone way since then. The log commercial is, of course, a parody of slinky commercials that ran in the sixites.
Google literally translates the log song's lyrics as:

楼梯上滚落下来什么
单独或成对
运行在你的邻居的狗
什么是伟大的零食
和配合你的背部
它的日志，日志记录。
它的日志
它的日志
它的大，它的沉重它的木材
它的日志
它的日志
这是比坏更好，这是很好的。
每个人都喜欢的日志
你会爱上它，登录。

This would be a mouthful to sing, so for that, I pidginized the lyrics until they fit.

楼下的什
么辊
粉碎了邻居的狗
也许可以吃
很容易携带
这是一个日志
的日志的日志
它大，它沉重，木质
的日志的日志
更坏，它的好
你会爱上日志
每个人喜欢日志

So, why do this elaborate waste of time? For one, translation technology amazes me. At work, I handle requests from all over the world, but officially, they're supposed to be filed in English, as we are an American company and cannot reasonably be expected to have, say, French speakers on hand. So when someone doesn't speak English....they can run their comments through this translation program, and be able to talk to us anyway.
Technology, hell yeah.

Reconfigurable Furnature

I think it would be cool if a mechanical engineer were to invent some sort of furnature that could be easily bent around into many different shapes. It would be a sofa, or a bed, or an end table, or an ottoman, or a TV stand, all at the click of a button. There's sofa-beds already, of a sofa whose interior can be unfolded to provide a bed, but I'm thinking of an even more flexible version that can become anything in the house that doesn't have water or electricity flowing through it. It would really help perpetually indecisive decorators.
Probably more trouble than it's worth.

Inductive Highway

Electrical cars would be great. Low maintenance. Cheap to power. Super efficient. Extremely quiet. (Unless you want it to be loud, in which case we can make it sound like a well-tuned sports car.) Just one problem: With existing technology, you have a range of at most 50 miles before you need to recharge it. That's not enough in America, where our petroleum-powered cars go 200-300 miles on one tank of gas. (Depending on the efficiency of the car, and the size of the tank. A police cruiser getting 8 miles to the gallon just isn't going to go as far as a small hybrid that gets 60 miles to the gallon.) And where to charge it on the road? The American owner of an electric car probably can't find anywhere to charge it other than his or her own house.
But: All car journeys in America are either short trips around the city for errands, in which case 50 miles isn't that restrictive a limit, or trips to another city, which involve long freeways that are restricted only to cars. Pedestrians may not set foot on a freeway, as it is simply too dangerous. (Freeway speeds vary from 45 - 85 MPH, with the higher speeds being the more remote highways.) And with these two factors, I came up with a way that the freeway itself could power the car.
Electrical engineers have long had a technique to transfer electricity to things that are nearby, but not quite touching: Inductive current. So we would make the entire highway have inductive-current lines down the middle of each lane. Driving the electrical car down the freeway would charge it up, and use this electricity to go faster still. And at the driver's destination, they still have full batteries.
The devil of how to pay for this rears its ugly head, though. People are going to want a free ride, but the operators of electrical plants understandably want to be paid. I suppose while we're using non-contact technologies, Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, can come to the rescue. The driver would have an RFID tag on the bottom of their electrical car, which would indicate an account, and if it was valid, then that section of road gets inductive current turned on, and at the end of the month, the account gets a bill. You're charged per distance of road, which pumped a set amount of electricity into your electric car. This is fair.
The two things I wanted to avoid was accidental contact with pedestrians, which is why I wouldn't put it in ALL sections of road. Basically, the centers of road lanes could at any time become "third rails" (a railroad-based induction charge system), which has killed people in the past. (They touch it, or get very drunk and pee on it, and wind up electrocuted.) I'd also want to make sure this would be safe for gasoline-cars, which show no sign of going away, and even if they were, there would be a long transition period while they were still on the road. If the road set a driver's gas tank on fire, that would be bad.

Autobagpipe

The bagpipes are a celtic instrument in which the player uses a bag full of air to pump air through numerous pipes, each of which makes a tone. One of the pipes has little finger-holes so that you can play notes. (The other three or four pipes play a sort of background-chord.) You need a strong pair of lungs to play the bagpipes, or you run out of air quickly.
So if you're asthmatic, or perhaps lazy, how would I automate it? Well, I would have an air-pump, the kind made for aerating a fish tank, and have that pump air into the bag at a steady rate. You'd still have to use the finger holes and squeeze the bag, but this way, you don't pass out. As a bonus, this system is much less wet than your own breath unless you live in an extremely humid area. (Though modern bagpipes have ways of dealing with the moisture.)
What's that, you have arthritic fingers too? I could whip up a set of midi-controlled valves, so an embedded computer can ensure that it plays the right tune. You'll still have to squeeze the bag, but that's so easy that a small child could do it.
What's that now? Now you want to automate the bag squeezing for some sort of 24-hour musical festival that you couldn't stay awake the entirety for? Okay, a simpler version of the finger valves squeezes a clamp around the bag.
And now your neighbors are angry? Well, not everyone likes bagpipe music, and that I can't do anything about.

How would you weld a tank of inflammable liquid?

A search that lead to my blog asked how one would weld a tank of an inflammable liquid. English being what it is, "inflammable" means that it does, indeed, catch fire easily, this being the exact opposite of what most English speakers think it does. ("In-" as a prefix usually meaning "not.")
Anyway, metal parts are generally fused together with welding techniques, either by a blowtorch melting a metal that seals the two together, or an electrical flow that melts a metal that seals the two together. Either one would make a inflammable liquid explode, so how?
The traditional engineering way is to drain the tank, vent it out carefully, weld, allow to cool, inspect, and then return the liquid. After all, unncessary risk is something engineers try to avoid.
But this is MAD engineering, so we do things the insane way. We arrange a robot with a blowtorch that...
BLAM!!!!!!!!!!
Damn it all to hell. At least we used a robot so no one was hurt.

Silicon Production

I just learned that one of the many ways that silicon is purified (for use in microchips and such) is to combine sand (silicon dioxide, a very common form to mine silicon on earth) and hydrochloric acid (HCl, available in your local chemical store and in your stomach). You then get a SiCl compound that decays into pure silicon (and chlorine gas) when heated. Be careful when opening that oven!
So I'm left with the hilarious thought that if civilization ends and you desperately need to make a CPU for some reason, you can dig some sand from the beach, avoid eating for 24 hours, and then barf into the container. Bake in a wood oven, and there's your silicon.
However, if civilization ends, you'll have bigger problems than CPU shortages, and while it still exists, chemical supply stores are assuredly a better source of HCL.
This also reminds me that the northern African countries are probably an excellent source of silicon, since their composition, as I can see it by satellite, are 99% sand. Just bring a bottle of HCl and crank out the ingots by the millions....

Automation Irony

Why is it that we have robots for vacuuming, but filling out insurance cards, which is far more annoying, still has to be done by hand?

"Reverse" Racism

The next time I hear this term, I'm handing the speaker an enrollment form for the fifth grade.
There is no such thing as "Reverse" racism. Any irrelevant use of race to make a decision is racism.
For my non-American readers who are looking confused: America has a long ugly history with racism in which European descended people, ("white") thought much less of African descended people ("black"). So later on, it became apparent that some "black" people were equally contemptuous of "white" people. Although both reactions are racism, people have somehow filed away the term "racism" to mean only the first one. So when the second occurred, they saw it as being like the first one, only in reverse.
I most commonly hear this come up in discussions about Justice Sotomayor and her nomination to the Supreme Court. Her honor Soytomayor is Hispanic. Many in the right wing worry that she will be racist towards "white" people. Except that they don't phrase it that way.
I'd also like to remind people that racism is the unfair discrimination based on race. Unfair discrimination based on other things is not racism. Unfair treatment based on gender is sexism, unfair treatment based on age is ageism, and unfair treatment based on social class is classism. One cannot be "racist against old people" because being old is not an ethnic identification. (The old age example would be "ageism.")

Compound Failure

Here's a time worm joke on poor planning. This was supposedly a city council meeting in Mississippi, according to the quoted book. (Although I've seen it attributed to various cities throughout 40 of the 50 states on the web, possibly mis-attributions of the same story). The council planners make a three-part plan. Any two of the three alone would have been an excellent plan, but mixing the three suddenly becomes pure idiocy. (And aspect 2 wasn't very smart to begin with, I say get rid of that one.)

1. Resolved, by this council, that we build a new jail
2. Resolved, that the new jail be built out of the materials of the old jail.
3. Resolved, that the old jail continue to be used until the new one is finished.

Presumably next month's meeting was about the strange and alarming increase in jail escapes.

Now like I said, any two of those alone would have worked. (Albeit combining two or three alone would basically be waving your hands and yelling "TADA!!!") Plans 1 and 3 would be the best combination, in which the city builds a new jail from new materials, presumably of higher quality, and then move the inmates to the new one upon creation. Plans 1 and 2 would involve moving the inmates to another facility temporarily while the materials get recycled.
The material recycling is the least important part because jail components are quite cheap. Steel for the bars, concrete for the floors, walls, and ceilings, maybe some brick. At most, $20/ft^3, and that's assuming that we do something like have sophisticated electronic locks.
I see this kind of thinking all the time. Sometimes people just don't grasp the implications of some of their statements. Sometimes it's because they don't want to understand the implications, especially when this means harder work or less profit for them. Sometimes it's because they're working far outside of their expertise. Sometimes it's because they're not used to making connections.
As an example of purposely not understanding the connections, chickens are not legally animals in Louisiana. Although the legislators do understand that chickens are animals, they have ruled otherwise because cockfights are quite popular there, and they need a loophole from the animal cruelty laws to continue them. So their loophole is that chickens are not animals, they are something else and therefore exempt. (Food, I suppose? Living...food?) So an insane conclusion is required to preserve the status quo.

I get spam

I get such strange email sometimes. Here's one sent to my blog's new address:

To: madengineering@gawab.com
From: mr aliu (address redacted)
Reply-To: (address redacted)
Subject: DEAL $20.5MILLION DOLLARS
Date: Mon, 18 May 2009 08:58:45 +0000

Good day to you,
I am the manager of Bcb Bank in Burkina Faso,my name is Mr Aliu Medena. i have a business which will be beneficial to both of us.The amount involved is ($20.5 million us dollars) which i want us to transfer out to your account.Please if you are willing to work with me,kindly reply to me for the deal.
As to your benefits,you shall be entitled to 50/50% of this fund for your co-operation in this deal while 10% will be set aside for expences both of us may incure during the completion of this business.Please have no fear and let me know if we can work things out,i hope my mail
will meet your favorable consideration.
Call me (Phone number redacted)
Yours Sincere
Aliu Medena

Gee, thanks for sending me this, Mr. Medena. I sure would love to commit wire-fraud over a supposed $10 million that I'm quite sure doesn't exist in any form, since that's not totally illegal in both the United States and Burkina Faso, and I'm quite sure that you can't just invent a bazillion little "fees" that you'll want me to pay to get this supposed money. And no, the $20 million can't be used towards the fees, naturally.
Also, I'll totally agree to this, since as an American, I must clearly be a principle-free greed-bag, and clearly have enough for you to ride the gravy-train for the rest of your life. And Burkina Faso is clearly a paragon of African honesty, where the police would totally give a wet slap were you to try to scam me on this.
And lastly, if you actually had access to that kind of money, transmitting it to any country on earth would be no problem whatsoever. You would not need to work with a native person of any kind, just call a bank and tell them that you'd like to open an account with wired money.
Nice try, Mugu.
PS: There seems to be something wrong with your keyboard. I think the problem is dust. You might want to, I don't know, clean it or something.

My own cranky beliefs

I've been enjoying Crank.net and the wacky people profiled within. Except that yesterday I noticed that I have a cranky belief myself. Ooh, the hypocrisy, it burns.
I reject Euler's equation, which I will explain below.

So if you take Euler's own constant, e, and raise it to a power involving "i," which is the square root of negative one, you get a complex number based on the variable "x." This of course gives you every mathematician's favorite equation ever:

Since this equation connects five important mathematical constants, so many mathematicians proclaim this the most beautiful equation ever invented.
Mathematical beauty is another idea that I reject. To be rude about it, it's pretty much jerking off over numbers. Oh god, yes, pi and e, so beautiful! Wank, wank, wank. My interest in math is mostly about correct measurements. Poets may claim that beauty is truth, but I expect my numbers to represent something in the physical world, and base my assumptions of their correctness on the correspondence to fact. And besides, the truth is often hideous. People are inhumanly cruel to each other, the universe doesn't care if you live or die, people have done monstrous things to each other for no good reason, and everything in the universe, you included, will eventually die. The universe itself will eventually die.
The "Beautiful equation" revolves around the cosine and sine functions. Cosine and sine are trigonometric ratios first found in triangles. In a right triangle, cosine is the ratio of the side adjacent to the angle to the hypotenuse (the long side). Sine is the ratio of the side opposite to the angle to the hypotenuse. The ratios are the same for any particular angle. Later, the metaphor was extended to circles, allowing for angles greater than 90 degrees.
In high end math, radians are used instead of degrees. In radians, the circle is divided into 2*pi sections. So 2*pi is the entire circle, pi is half the circle, and 1/2 pi is one quarter of the circle. Radians are dimensionless.
Remember Euler's equation?

Plugging in pi would result in the complex number -1 + 0i. Anything times 0 is 0, removing the imaginary part.
However, from goofing off with a calculator, I know that without the imaginary part, e to the power pi is slightly greater than 23. (It's irrational.) Throwing in imaginary numbers seems to be causing an abrupt, inexplicable change.
In fact, raising numbers to an imaginary exponent is so poorly defined that neither calculator nor amateur mathematician can explain how to do it. Natural numbered exponents are "Multiplying a number by itself that many times." a^2 = a*a, a^3 = a*a*a, and so on. Fractional exponents involve roots. a^1.5 is a times the square root of a.
So if "i" is the square root of -1, what would a^i indicate? Would it's result be real, like a, imaginary like i, complex, or something completely different?
Also, I would expect "e^xi" to be linear as x. As x increases, larger and larger results should return. If not larger along the real axis, than in total distance from the origin. However, Euler's equation is cyclical. Sine and Cosine go around in a circle, first increasing, then decreasing, then increasing again, back and forth forever. There should be a reason for this discrepancy.
Mathematicians often have a strange relationship with their numbers, and grow quite attached. When a Greek mathematician discovered irrational numbers, he was thrown off a boat for ruining their sense of mathematical order. That the other mathematicians could not disprove the existence of irrational numbers drove them absolutely crazy. It was proof that mathematics was not the pure orderly truth that they thought it was, and that it also involved messy generalities, just like real life.
I likewise suspect that Euler put together his equation on the grounds that he liked its structure, not because it actually corresponded to anything. Moreso, modern mathematicians love the idea that many of their fundamental constants are closely related. I kind of hope that I'm the one who's wrong about this, because I could take being wrong way more than they could.
I would like any commentators to describe what I got wrong, or describe a proof. A graphical proof would be the easiest to understand, but those are the hardest to construct in the first place. If someone does prove me wrong, I will add the "Stupid" tag to this post and describe their proof.
EDIT: Dr. Phillip Spencer of the university of Toronto's math department proves Euler's equation based on the Taylor series, and therefore this entire post is wrong. Having proved Euler's equation, all else follows. Well done, Dr. Spencer.

Alternative Medicine

Okay, I've noticed that some of you don't like traditional medicine. Please be careful with the alternates. Medical scams go back hundreds of years, it's why we have regulatory boards like the FDA in the first place. Because some people bottle some cheap oil, sell it as all-curing "snake oil," and laugh as the bankroll rolls in and the graveyards fill. Hence the term "Snake oil" to mean "fake medicine."
So what can you do instead if you still hate traditional medicine?

* Herbalism
Before there were chemical pills, people ate plants to help them feel better. See, plants constantly engage in chemical warfare with each other, and some of the compounds they make kill bacteria, get us high, or relieve our pain. Aspirin, for instance, is concentrated salysitic acid, which was derived from willow bark. Why willow bark? Because hundreds of years ago, somebody noticed that if you had a headache and chewed some, the headache went away.
So most chemical pills that a doctor prescribes you, they often were derived from a long-ago herbal treatment. If you must bypass western medicine, herbalism is a reasonably sufficient substitute. Please be cautious that you're less certain of dosing this way, since plants can have wildly varying amounts of their active compound.
* Reflexology
Fancy foot rubs. Now while foot rubs are great for aching feet, they do not, as reflexologists would claim, cure problems outside the feet.
* Chiropracty
Fancy back rubs. Great for mysterious back pain. Useless for non-spinal problems. Practitioners claim that the spine influences the rest of the body, but this is dubious.
* Acupuncture
The ancient Chinese believed that a mysterious energy, "Qi," flowed through the body and that if it got blocked at any point, it would cause problems. So they developed a system of needle-stabbing to unblock this energy.
It works on mysterious pain, but nobody has any idea why, because Qi doesn't exist.
Also even more curiously, it even works if instead of needles, one pokes with fingers on the same spots. Albeit usually less effectively.
* Homeopathy
In the late 1790s, Malaria was a big problem for European explorers. Various remedies were tried, all of them utterly ineffective. A German doctor discovered the effectiveness of Quinine, and then despite being uninfected with malaria himself, took some anyway. To his surprise, he developed malaria-like symptoms, and so concluded that "Like-cures-like." That is, if one has a fever, one should take a treatment that causes fever in a healthy person.
Then the field went totally insane and decided that repeated dilution was the best way to deal with medical shortages. Homeopaths generally believe that solvents somehow have memory, and can remember what was dissolved in them even when diluted so extremely that not one particle of the dissolved substance could possibly remain.
So when you take a homeopathic treatment, you're drinking water that might have been near a poison at one time. Also, we should all be dead from drinking poop water, but for some reason that didn't happen. Maybe because water doesn't actually have a memory. It is a chemical compound, it does not have a brain.
Ultra-cheapskate homeopaths now even claim that "water memory" can be transmitted by sound. Now hold the glass up to the phone, so I can make it believe it's useful medicine. This way I can take your money without you even leaving your home.
* Vitamin theory
In the 1800s, sailors noticed that their typical diet of hardtack and rum tended to make them very very ill. It turns you that you need certain chemical compounds in your food, or you sicken and die. These were called the Vitamins, and were given letter names for easy remembering. Now you can buy tablets with all the vitamins you need, just in case you for some reason need to subsist on a hardtack diet.
Now a cranky theory is engulfing Africa, a continent currently riddled with AIDS and other horrible diseases. The theory states that megadoses of vitamins will cure all diseases. Even Ebola, AIDS, and other diseases that are strongly resistant to treatment.
If this was true, westernized medicine surely would have noticed by now. It's mostly wishful thinking, because a box of vitamins costs $1.83, and the same weight of anti-AIDS drugs costs $224. Africa is not famous for having lots of money.
* Reiki and Faith Healing
Reiki is an idea from Japan that one can move "Qi" from a healthy person to an ill one, therefore ending the ill person's illness. Remember several paragraphs ago when I said that Qi doesn't exist? Still doesn't.
Likewise, Faith Healing revolves around having religion take away a person's illness. It usually doesn't.
* Vibrational Medicine
Supposedly, human beings are made of energy, and changing the "balances" of this energy heals diseases. Pass the bong, man.
* Therapeutic/Magic/Quantum/Whatever Touch
Therapeutic touch claimed to cure illness at a distance through spooky action. An 11 year old proved it to be utterly wrong in 1998. So the practitioners renamed it Quantum touch and went right back to work. People might not understand quantum mechanics, but surely understand that vitalism is wrong, don't they?
* Naturopathy
If there's one thing I've noticed about people over the years, it's that anything they can label "natural," they love, and anything they can label "artificial," they hate. Combine this with outrage at being treated as a bunch of parts by western medicine, and copious bong-passings, and you get naturopathic medicine,
While the official principles are pretty impressive, advocating taking the most effective treatments, working with the self-healing nature of the body for best results, encouraging self-responsibility for health and so on, in practice this tends to be half-baked ideas fueled by what seems to be several doses of hallucinogens, long treatises on long-ago disproven cranky theories, and odd little obsessions like Dr. Kellogs whacked out love of enemas. (Naturopaths often proclaim that one's own intestines are sickening you by retaining some ten to forty pounds of stale poop, and offer to treat this with herbal enemas. Surely we would all be grotesquely ill then?)
* Iridology
Iridologists proclaim that all illness can be diagnosed by analysis of the iris. Most are also homeopaths, naturopaths, or one of the other less reputable branches listed above.
* Color therapy
Feeling bad? Here, look at this colorful poster! Don't you feel better already? See, it realigned your chakras, which are invisible undetectable wheels of light down the center of your body. (Chakras are a common belief in Indian religions, and are likely not real.) Let me shine this colored lamp on you to finish up the process. Man, don't you love these dank nugs?

---

I'm gonna go with the Herbs. Least ridiculous. Best tested. Natural enough for the chemistry-haters. Thousands of years of testing. Least crank riddled.

The Stupid Filter -- For Trolling Reduction

Many sites on the Internet currently suffer from an immense supply of incredibly stupid comments. Some of them are lame and without coherent point, some are whiny jocky-ing for attention, and some are deliberate trolls planted out of some deranged comedic sociopathy (read: they're deliberately pissing people off because they find it funny). Most websites deploy moderators to try and clean up the comments so that they're at least mostly readable, or have some sort of ranking system so that the crap falls to the bottom.
Enter the Stupid Filter. The stupid filter takes a string of text, ranks it from 1 to 5 on "stupid-ness," and passes this on for further processing. Websites can use this "stupid" rating to, say, auto-delete all postings above 4, and write a snide letter to their authors. A stupid ranking of 3 would merit a warning, perhaps.
The stupid filter could be used in many ways, since it merely categorizes based on comparisons to writings that other people found to be stupid. Stupid posts may be automatically disemvoweled, rendering it technically readable but easily skipped, or perhaps on forums, stupid ranking text could be proceeded by a big red "warning, written by a moron" text, such as this:
<------ WARNING: IDIOT
I especially like the forum idea, because having the concept of idiocy directed at your personal avatar might just encourage people to try to avoid spewing this crap. Moreso if it comes with a big fat warning before posting. One would click the post button, only to be shown a warning screen explaing: "Caution, your post registers over the threshold of stupidity! Are you sure you want to make a complete fool of yourself?"
Although knowing how people are, yes, they will make fools of themselves and then complain about how the filters are biased against them. Or they will claim that it is "ironic," since the filter is a computer program and can't tell the difference.

Sci-Fi fails science forever

Since I've been too busy this month to come up with any whacky machines or deranged schemes, I've instead decided to tell you about how fiction depicts science badly in ways that inevitably lead to my friends asking me stupid questions. Note that things required to the plot are acceptable breaks from reality, because a space opera that has 450 year breaks in the action would be unwatchably boring.

My list:

---

* Beings "Made of energy."

Energy is not a thing. Energy is a trait that things have. A "collection of energy" would not be able to have the required structure to maintain life. While this error is popular because energy is "intangible," leaving your heroes with the frightening prospect of an opponent able to walk through walls and such, it is unspeakably stupid. Also the usual solution of stuffing them into a battery or otherwise utilizing their component energy to destroy them demonstrates a certain lack of respect for...fact.

Or on the flip side of this, matter is interchangeable for energy, so I am "Made of pure energy" too, as are you. Therefore making this idea equally stupid.

* Being from "the beginning of time" and "the end of time."

While this came up to make the monster-of-the-week sound more fearsome, the truth is the opposite. A being from the beginning of time would lack complexity, due to a lack of available materials. There's not much you can do with just hydrogen. A being from "The end of time," which I take to mean the heat death of the universe, would have little energy available to it, and therefore would have to be geared more towards conserving this energy than intelligence, combat initiative, or whatever else the writer seemed to think it would develop. Superhuman intelligence and combat reflexes aren't going to do you much good if you starve to death, ya know?

* Aliens that are preoccupied with humans

This just smacks of collective egotism. If an alien did encounter the Earth, there's no reason why it would find us special automatically. In fact, an alien finding the earth might easily get distracted by the oceans, which cover 70% of the planet, conclude that the earth was a dull ocean world, and leave.

* Nuclear = OMG DANGEROUS
If nuclear, "atomic", or radioactive substances appear in the show, they will almost always be dealt with in a hysterical manner, assuming that all of these substances are made of pure evil and will cause anyone that so much as looks at them to die.
Likewise, assuming something is dangerous because it is "atomic." Everything that can be handled has atoms. They are not dangerous.
Radiation is a danger, because it burns biological life, the same way a hot stove does. But if you're afraid of your hot stove, there is something wrong with you. Radiation can be dealt with, there are engineering things that can be done to lessen or eliminate the dangers.
This was more common in productions made in the 1950s, and is mostly giving way to:

* Genetic Engineering = Evil
A genetically engineered or cloned organism is almost always depicted as being an uncontrollable monster that hungers for human flesh. Likewise, humans who are genetically engineered or cloned are unemotional, perfectly willing to follow orders, and evil.
Genes do not do this. Genes determine how an organism will produce proteins, which in turn determine the organism's shape and physical traits. There are genes for blue eyes, there is no gene for "evil."
The biggest real threat in genetic engineering is allergies. For instance, some tomatoes are genetically engineered with fish genes to make them ripen sooner. People that are allergic to fish are also allergic to these tomatoes, because the proteins resemble the fish proteins that their bodies are oversensitive to.
Another worry is that genetically engineered plants will cross pollinate natural plants. This would not be a big deal, except that A) the genetic engineering companies regard this as copyright violation and sue, and B) the genetic engineering companies often insert genes into the organisms they make to make them sterile. Large swaths of plants going sterile, and the farmers who grow them abruptly getting nonsensical lawsuits is a big problem.


* Outright unit errors


Watts is energy over time, or "power" as physicists understand the term. Volts measure electrical force. Ohms measure resistance. Light years are distance. Amps are number of electrons.

Even George Lucas messed this up and had to severely retcon himself. ("I did the Kessel Run in 6 parsecs." He then had to make up a story about the Kessel Run involving many black holes to cover up the fact that he thought Parsec was a unit of time, when it is actually distance.)

* Silly rules

The reactor only works when operated by a Hindu born in Mumbai. This is not explained away with a security based explanation, (which might actually make sense if the station was built by Mumbaians who wanted to thumb their nose at everyone else, and had some way of actually detecting the religion of the person operating it,) but with techno babble. Again, a blatant "this group is special" effect appears, stinking up the whole script.

* Likewise, biology non-sequiturs

Vitalism is false, but I can't tell you how often I've seen a script where getting a resource cruelly from a biological source oddly counts more than from mechanical ones. For instance, a sugar reactor magically (and illogically) getting more energy out of blood than from bags of sucrose, despite blood containing less than 1% sugar by volume.

* Destroy the Earth

"You can't spray that can, it'll destroy the earth!" Usually, they mean destroy all life on earth, which is much easier to do. Actually destroying the earth is very very very difficult.

A meteor that would destroy all life on earth would be about 3 miles wide. A meteor that would destroy the earth would be larger than the moon.

* Robots

Holy cheese, there's more wrong with fictional robots than I have space in one entry for, so I'm breaking it up

* Robots hate Biological Beings

For some reason, all Robots, Computers, AIs, and other technology-based entities are depicted with a deranged hatred of any human, animal, or other biological based being. Who the hell programmed them that way? Since computers are programmed and follow their programming literally, this leads to the ridiculous conclusion that all the available programmers were severe nihilists who both wanted to commit suicide and take all biological life with them.

* Illogical instructions equals explosion

Because clearly surge protectors don't exist. A computer confronted with invalid instructions tends to lock up, crash, or reboot, not explode.

* That is illogical

Robots in fiction seem to have this supernatural ability to grasp the truth of the matter and scorn any attempts to deceive.

The truth of the matter is, as computer science majors say, "Garbage in, Garbage Out." If you tell a computer that Pi is 5, it will blithely run with it, producing all kinds of odd, illogical results. If you tell it that you are 600 feet tall, and ask it your weight, it will probably give an answer around 1900 - 2200 pounds.

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For all my hatred of these, I see them constantly. They grate me the way that spelling, pronunciation, or grammar errors would grate an English major. Argh.