New Testingstan

The GM guys were smart, but they didn't have any fighting spirit & gave in to despair
whereas sisko et al decided to kick out logic & make the impossible possible

Well yes the sisko's balls are so big they warp space and time and probabillity. But i was hoping for a non-retarted memetastic answer Possibly too much to ask from TV Writers

well they were very intelligent but emotionally stunted, right?
So they didn't realise how hard the federation guys would fight, and that the DOminion's allies would not be 100% loyal, and so on. Because they didn't understand emotion, they were missing a vital piece of information, and they failed.

Yeah That makes some sense. Like I said Damar's rebellion may have been a factor they never anticipated.

Yet somehow they convinced Bashir of their view point. He was all 'this is math is INCONTRAVERTABLE!' to Sisko.

And they did have some capacity for the emotional/psychological thing. Remember how they analyzed Damar from a recorded speech of his?

They accounted (somewhat) for the idea of Damar's rebellion:

Statistical Probabilities wrote:Even if something unlikely were to happen that tilted the scales in our favor -- say an anti-Dominion coup on Cardassia -- we'd still lose this war.

Maybe the Romulan entry into the war had a butterfly effect thing? Bashir thought they would abandon the non-aggression pact "next year", but instead the Romulans declare war six months later.

I remember reading that one of the principles of the story was that they could anticipate societal/industrial/etc trends decades into the future, but couldn't account for individual actions and their possible effect.

Who knew Sisko and Garak would kill a Senator in order to provoke a war?

So they were Asimov's Psychohistorians ?

Pretty much.

I never got that episode. Bashir clearly stated that their theoretical model became more accurate the further into the future it got, but what kind of statistical model becomes more accurate as more variables are added?

maybe their model relied on the Dominion's leadership being vaguely competent, when the female changeling was anything but?

more accurate into the future happens because random variations tend to cancel out as you add more.

so in the short term, a battle could go unexpectedly well for the federation, thus they are wrong about the casualty count, etc.

but in the long run, extraordinary luck at one battle isn't likely to be repeated consistently. the dominion will probably get lucky at some point. things will even out

thus the prediction gets more accurate

Re-reading The Final Reflection to remind me how klingons are totally boss.

On Federation transporters 'Yes, our engineers will be very interested. They'll want to know why it makes that awful noise'

Klingons are shown in canon as being long lived

Is their infighting/love for killing each other a bio-cultural response to this

And have we discussed this before

Crazedwraith wrote:Re-reading The Final Reflection to remind me how klingons are totally boss.

On Federation transporters 'Yes, our engineers will be very interested. They'll want to know why it makes that awful noise'

I read that book as a kid and fucking loved it.

I just reread it. Still good. Not great but good. Worth reading.

I didn't know how much TNG and DS9 were aware of the novel canon but a lot of things seem to have references here. Including Prune Juice of all things.

And behold the nintiesest site of that the ninties ever nintiesed.

http://www.tasigh.org/takzh/index.html

That description seems apt.

Straha wrote:And behold the nintiesest site of that the ninties ever nintiesed.

http://www.tasigh.org/takzh/index.html

Ok, that is awful website design. But does make me wonder how much though Ford put into Klin-zha as a game or whether he just knew enough for the parrallels to the story.

The site layout looked awesome on mobile internets

TNG S8 is still going. Over 160 episodes now.

Wait, what?
What is this you speak of?
I must know

Oh, I remember that thing!
Good to see they've kept it up

Nice

We need an animated gif of that with some kind of snappy phrase

Or maybe a smiley

what am supposed to be noticing about those images