SOD and VFX versus dialogue

[Darth Wong]

I have not claimed that SoD treats visuals as infallible

You have argued that since the visuals are not perfect, we should not use SoD. How is this different from saying that SoD treats visuals as infallible?

[Darth Servo]

That's not an analysis of anything I've posted here.

Why not?

That sounds like a canned response.

Canned or not, its still a valid criticism.

I have not claimed that SoD treats visuals as infallible,

Yes you do. Everytime you post about nit-picky details.

nor have I suggested that we treat dialogue as infallible.

No, you just think that its as good as objective analysis.

And there is certainly no connection between anything I have said and any form of Biblical literalism.

I see you haven't learned what the word "analogy" means yet.

[brianeyci]

If you are suggesting that Saavik actually changed appearances in reality, whether through cosmetic surgery or some heretofore unmentioned shape-shifting ability, then I would put forth that adhering to SoD has led you to propose self-evidently absurd conclusions.

Then so be it, because this approach is not suited to discussing characterization or themes or purposes or the context of the work within a greater whole.

It's been a long time since I read Mike's essay, but he does discuss some pros and cons about literary analysis, which to a trained eye is also broken down into many constitutent parts such as historicism, new criticism, biographical, feminism, Marxism, and so forth. But none of these techniques are adequate to the purpose of who can be winner in a battle. For that you need quantification, and the methodology must match the goal.

If you want to discuss how well Star Trek compares to other science fiction franchises of course you have to compare with others outside suspension of disbelief treating them as unreal creations, but if you want to discuss whether Star Trek can defeat the Galactic Empire, your historical method is unsound. And do you even know what historicism is?

[Darth Wong]

I think what linearA is failing to grasp is that the kind of information we're attempting to extract from these films is the kind of information which is horribly unsuited to dialogue, and perfectly suited to visuals. That's why he's obsessing over things like not getting Kirstie Alley back for ST3, and that's why he doesn't seem to recognize that even if you decided to treat these films as visual simulations rather than direct footage, you'd still have to extract the desired information from them in the same way, thus making the whole distinction nothing more than a nitpick.

[Eframepilot]

I think what linearA is failing to grasp is that the kind of information we're attempting to extract from these films is the kind of information which is horribly unsuited to dialogue, and perfectly suited to visuals. That's why he's obsessing over things like not getting Kirstie Alley back for ST3, and that's why he doesn't seem to recognize that even if you decided to treat these films as visual simulations rather than direct footage, you'd still have to extract the desired information from them in the same way, thus making the whole distinction nothing more than a nitpick.

But linearA makes a strong point about the reuse of stock footage, with shots of planets, starfields and entire sequences of battles being repeated. Clearly either there have been a very great many astounding coincidences or whoever has composed these films has taken many shortcuts and not paid much attention to detail. So in linearA's approach, the incongruities in TDiC's depiction of a planetary bombardment are better explained by the filmmakers having no idea what a proper planetary bombardment should look like.

Assuming that the entire episode of TDiC was a historical reenanctment, we would expect the plan of the bombardment outlined by the conspirators to be more correct and carry more weight than the actual bombardment itself, which was made by the sloppy and scientifically ignorant filmmakers.

[Darth Servo]

Stock footage isn't a problem at all. Afterall, we are simply MEASURING things in the film like SPEED. If a given even is shown once or a hundred times, the things being MEASURED remain the same.

One of the biggest users of stock footage was the original Battle Star Galactica series. How does them using the same clips over and over again change what we measure?

[Eframepilot]

Stock footage isn't a problem at all. Afterall, we are simply MEASURING things in the film like SPEED. If a given even is shown once or a hundred times, the things being MEASURED remain the same.

One of the biggest users of stock footage was the original Battle Star Galactica series. How does them using the same clips over and over again change what we measure?

Your methods are baed on the premise that the films are an objective depiction of reality. But the probability that entire sequences of events will exactly repeat themselves is vanishingly small. So the repeated stock footage shows that the reality itself which you measure is flawed and unreliable. This is why linearA's method is preferable: it treats the enormous gaffes as inaccuracies in production, as opposed to ignoring them and simply pretending that they don't exist.

[brianeyci]

This is why linearA's method is preferable:

What is his method exactly. Until he concludes something from the VOY Rise situation, or any other situation with his so-called method, then it's useless except for hot air. You didn't read the beginning where he mentioned writers, producers, directors and off-screen material as valid resources. I can argue anything with his method.

[The Silence and I]

Stock footage isn't a problem at all. Afterall, we are simply MEASURING things in the film like SPEED. If a given even is shown once or a hundred times, the things being MEASURED remain the same.

One of the biggest users of stock footage was the original Battle Star Galactica series. How does them using the same clips over and over again change what we measure?

Your methods are baed on the premise that the films are an objective depiction of reality. But the probability that entire sequences of events will exactly repeat themselves is vanishingly small. So the repeated stock footage shows that the reality itself which you measure is flawed and unreliable. This is why linearA's method is preferable: it treats the enormous gaffes as inaccuracies in production, as opposed to ignoring them and simply pretending that they don't exist.

I largely concur. It has bothered me greatly how haphazardly startrek producers handle visuals. Reused footage adds mass to the idea I've long ago come to accept as true: we are dealing with an account of reality, made after the fact and without much regard for details to boot.

Me rambling about why I think visuals are generally shit, aside from resused footage and magically morphing characters:
Starships sit close enough to bump shields all the time, phasers do wacky things (I don't mean phasorization), explosions look like utter shit (consider: photon torpedo detonations in TNG look like spots of expanding yellow/red dust. A simple bright white flash would be easier, and far more accurate. Shows how much these guys care about their visuals). Planets, even when not reused, are barren, boring and completely unnatural looking things often lacking any kind of weather or recongnizable geographic features. Starships orbit too fast and too low to be in geosynch, yet never have to worry about being over the horizon when the away team needs to beam back up. Electric arcs are somewhat common, yet never ever look like electricity, instead looking like someone blurred blue lines and made them look a dull as he could get away with then pasted them over the film. Hell, if you have TNG/DS9 DVDs you can even tell the visual effects were produced at a lower fucking resolution than the rest of the scenes! I have rambled a little...


...My point is that I agree that in the case of startrek visuals should be treated as what they clearly are: crappy representations of what happened a while ago. Note: This is important --> the visuals we have are not the same as doctored or poorly produced images of actual events. They have been created independently of any existing footage there may be and cannot be assumed to be accurate simulations of said footage. I have not observed enough self consistency or attention to important details within the visuals to begin to entertain the notion that what we see is an accurate similation of real events.[*]

************

Now--I do not so readily support the idea that a historical approach is better for getting what vs debators want. Those debators want numbers, and treating the visuals as the useless shit they are won't give numbers you can rely on, but neither will a historical approach half the time. I prefer the historical approach and always look at visuals dialog and intent every time I look into something for my own benefit. I am not fool enough to use that method here seriously.

[*] To prevent misunderstandings, this is how I look at visuals in startrek. I see them as utter crap and in order to continue to suspend disbelief I view them as equivalent to reproductions done by underpaid highschoolers with questionable abilities and far too little time. My tone of voice may indicate these opinions have been proven, they have not. I should also point out that these criticisms apply to the believability of visuals, not their artistic merit. Often that sucks too, but now and then it looks good, artistically.

[linearA]

Even a real photograph is only an approximation of reality. That doesn't change the fact that photographs convey far more information than dialogue, and in such a manner that the speaker's character and state of mind and fallibility is removed as a factor. This is true regardless of what method of analysis you choose to use.

A photograph efficiently conveys more information than a human language could ever possibly convey, and I agree visuals convey more information than dialogue. My point is that we assume there is an actual underlying event which took place in a fictional universe, which a production crew is trying to replicate. It is far easier for them to recreate the dialog than it is for them to recreate the visuals, because the visuals are more costly and complicated to implement. Therefore, it is more likely that the dialogue is closer to what was actually said than the visuals are to what the characters actually saw. And before someone pops out another Creationist analogy, let me remind you I am fully aware that dialog is not infallible, and should not always be taken at face value. Characters could be wrong, ignorant, insane, etc.

But they DO pay much more attention to the CONSISTENCY of visuals.

I'll grant that more thought goes into the visuals than the dialog, overall. The production crew tries to create a cohesive aesthetic that binds the series. Of course, many of the VFX shots appear consistent because they are simply reused.

However, in this case, the limitations of the medium are severe enough that the source material can't be reasonably interpreted as documentary footage.

Why not? Even real documentarians sometimes shoot extra footage based on their own research, in order to buttress the original stock footage they've uncovered. It's only a problem if you assume that the documentarian is dishonest, and in this case, the documentarian is the creator of the sci-fi universe in question! Besides, suspension of disbelief is the conscious decision to ignore these kinds of errors; you seem to think that "suspension of disbelief" means "belief". It doesn't.

I interpret suspension of disbelief, as used here, to imply that we're seeing on our television screens exactly what the characters are seeing in their universe.

When you have the combination of VFX errors, recastings, and the constant reuse of stock footage space battle sequences or location establishment shots, (in almost every episode of Star Trek), I would think the sheer quantity of shots which cannot possibly represent actual reality would be sufficient to reconsider using SoD at all. I would say that treating the sources as historical accounts better fits the nature of the source material.

Historical accounts which convey a wealth of information in far greater detail than a verbal account ever would. Fine, let's say it's a simulation rather than direct film: how does that change the basic nature of the analysis? It must still be presumed to be made as accurately as possible, correct? Therefore you can still look at it the same way as you would look at direct footage, correct? Or are you saying that it should be presumed to be a highly inaccurate simulation?

I'm saying it may very well be highly inaccurate, given the technical limitations of the production crew. Perhaps it would be easier to come to some sort of conclusion here if we address an actual example. Under SoD, does the actual, real-life Gorn look like what we saw on screen?

Fine, suppose we use your method of assuming it's a simulation rather than direct footage. Does that not still mean that the reality must have been as close as possible to the simulation, within the limits of the simulation's technology?

Yes. I'm not saying the production staff is trying to deceive us. I'm saying the production staff is doing their best to accurately depict the events that occurred.

Historians don't often need to decipher an author's state of mind, although it can sometimes be useful. More often, they rely on what the author actually says, keeping in mind the limitations of the medium. In this case, the “author” is really the combined efforts of the writers, directors, producers, and visual effects team.

And in the case of visuals, "what the author says" is far more detailed and subject to far more analysis than what a particular onscreen character says, in which the author is not even directly speaking.

True, but it's also far more likely to be inaccurate, because of the restrictions the production crew is compelled to work under. That's why I said that mundane events, such as Captain Kirk walking down a hallway, or Captain Picard sitting in his ready room, can be considered to have occurred almost exactly as they were depicted on screen. But I don't think we can say the same for certain VFX shots. My point is, with an historical methodology, we treat each shot as a different account, and endow more reliable accounts with a higher degree of credibility. If a particular account contains a visual effect, or a line of dialogue, which is inconsistent with the rest of the series, we simply dismiss it as an outlier. This method compensates for things like stock footage and recasting, whereas SoD has to assume that every shot depicts something that actually occurred.

I admit that we lose some of the benefits of SoD, such as the ability to draw reliable data from VFX shots. But we still retain some of that ability – e.g. we can still safely conclude that the Deathstar actually destroyed Alderaan, (because every account is consistent in that regard) but we may not be able to conclude exactly what the explosion looked like.

That's good. But I think you put too much faith in visuals, despite the fact that we know that visuals are merely the best approximation the production staff could come up with, rather than actual documentary footage.

If you acknowledge that the visuals are the best possible simulation, then why do you disagree that they should be examined as such?

I'm not claiming that visuals are worthless, or that they shouldn't be examined at all. I'm claiming that SoD is not adequate to analyze the data set of filmed material, because it is not a consistent methodology. It dismisses authorial intent completely, while assuming that visuals are depicted faithfully enough to draw roughly accurate conclusions about every visual. For example, you argue that the phaser “vaporization” effect the production crew came up with for the original Star Trek series is not at all what we would expect if the target was actually vaporized. So instead, you explore alternate ideas to explain the visual. We know the director intended for the target to be vaporized, but SoD doesn't allow that as a consideration.

Yet, we also know that when we see the Enterprise orbiting the same planet for the 6th episode in a row, the director intends for us to believe it is actually a different planet, hoping we will overlook the limited budget. Why does SoD allow for authorial intent in one circumstance, but not the other? In fact, as far as I can see, SoD doesn't even acknowledge the stock footage problem.

But these inconsistencies are solved by treating all of these instances as historical accounts. We appeal to authorial intent to explain the stock footage and the badly conceived vaporization effect, but this does not result in a chaotic “anything goes” environment where the author defines reality. Rather, the author of any one account is kept in check by other accounts, (i.e. other scenes, episodes, movies) just like real historians are kept in check by other historians. This methodology also helps explain continuity errors. They can be dismissed as coming from an unreliable account. Under SoD, we'd have to accept them, because, well, we saw it happen.

Fine, as I said, treat it as a highly accurate simulation then. Would you not agree that a highly accurate visual simulation conveys far more information, in a form much more conducive to direct analysis, than character dialogue in that simulation?

Yes, if the simulation were highly accurate. But I do not believe the production crew always puts together a highly accurate simulation – unless you believe that every other planet in the galaxy looks the same. Rather, we'd need to deal with each scene on a case by case basis. As an aside, it occurs to me that this is less of a problem for Star Wars, where the quality of the production is consistently much higher.

As I've said before, even real photographs are an approximation. You keep pointing out that the limitations of that approximation are different than the limits for a movie, but for the second time, my argument is pi]not[/i] predicated upon the two mediums having identical limitations. It is predicated upon your assumption that any non-representative aspects of that simulation somehow nullify the credibility of all other aspects, even when you know precisely why those non-representative aspects occurred.

The fact that non-representative aspects of the simulation exist does not nullify the entire simulation, but it certainly does call into question the validity of each visual. Secondly, you only know why these non-representative aspects occur because you momentarily step outside of SoD and move over to authorial intent. You know what the authors (director/writers) intended to depict. I see this as a serious internal inconsistency with the SoD methodology, and it is the reason I think the historical approach is superior. The historical approach does not need to ignore or explain away VFX errors, recastings, or stock footage. It simply acknowledges the intent of the author, but does not give control to any one author. The cohesiveness of the sci-fi universe is maintained by cross-reference, and outliers are dismissed.

You can still perform calculations this way, but you may not always be as confident in your results, because the degree of faith you can give to any particular visual effect is lessened. But you can still say with confidence that, for example, the Death Star destroyed Alderaan.

That would give us a lot of invaluable historical data. But we do not have anything comparable to an actual photograph when it comes to sci-fi television or cinema. All we have are filmed representations of what happened. We have something closer to an historical account.

No written historical account has ever contained the wealth of detail that is found in a movie. So if you're going to treat it as an historical account, you'll have to treat it as a rather remarkably detailed one. And you're downplaying the bulk of this data.

Yes, clearly the evidence we're dealing with is far superior to the evidence an historian is used to dealing with. I'm not downplaying that. I'm just saying SoD is ill-equipped to handle it consistently.

Visuals allow measurement only if the visuals are reliable.

Now that's just bullshit; even a blurry picture still allows measurement; the inaccuracy of the picture only affects the precision of the measurement.

Fine. I should have said visuals allow accurate measurement if the visuals are reliable.

I do not think the visuals we have are reliable. I am saying they are approximations. And yes, dialogue also would not be completely reliable.

Of COURSE they're approximations; real photographs are approximations too. You're still ignoring the main point.

The fact that they are approximations is really my main, and only point. The consequence of this fact, is that it is difficult to determine how accurate each approximation is. That is why I say SoD is not a sound methodology, because it insists we treat all visuals as depicting events accurately, when we know that the visuals cannot accurately depict reality all the time. (Again...stock footage, recasting, etc.)

For the umpteenth time, the dialogue is not the creator himself speaking. It is a character speaking. To ignore this extra layer of interpretation is absurd. Regardless of what technical limitations may bedevil the producers, what gets on the screen is the creators themselves communicating, not a character. And they are doing so in vastly greater detail than any character.

This statement seems to imply that you think I am proposing that we treat the filmed material as a literary body of evidence. I am not proposing that. When a character speaks it is not really any different than when the creator speaks. It is an event that is being portrayed. A character speaking, a door opening, Kirk's shirt ripping – they're all events which we believe actually happened historically, and which the production crew is trying to recreate.

I am not proposing that we treat sci-fi television as fictional literature. I am proposing that we treat it as historical data. Similar to SoD, the characters are real people, not literary creations. Only unlike SoD, we take into account the limitations of the medium, meaning we do not treat everything we see as documentary footage.

Fine, so we treat it as a highly accurate simulation. Would you not be able to take measurements from a highly accurate simulation?

You can, but it is probably not sound to put as much faith in the visuals as you do, although this clearly depends on the visual in question. But I am not claiming you cannot take any measurements, I am claiming that SoD is not an adequate paradigm to handle the data set in question, i.e. the filmed material we're talking about.

The two ideas are interrelated in this case because they both fall under the concept that the available data we have which allows us to analyze sci-fi television, (the filmed material) is not comparable in quality to documentary footage.

And I never said it was. I said that it should be treated in a manner which is analogous to the way we treat documentary footage.

Okay. Well, then I will revise my criticism in that regard, but I maintain that the material should be treated as historical accounts, and not anything like documentary footage.

It is more akin to an historical account, because we know that what we actually see on screen cannot always be what actually happened in reality. The idea that visuals are not always superior to dialogue follows from this.

Nonsense; a written historical account has a miniscule fraction of the detail that is found in a visual simulation. It cannot be analyzed the way a visual simulation can.

True, but that's really just a difference in quality. I'm suggesting that we apply an historical methodology to this visual data, because I think it is more consistent than SoD.

Rather, my primary goal is to convince people to use historical methods. My goal is not to make people prefer dialogue over visuals as a general rule. I believe historical methods are more adept at handling sci-fi television, simply because the limitations of the medium preclude us from considering what we see on screen to be a literal, photographic depiction of actual events. We know that Kirk saw something different than us when he looked at Saavik in either Star II or Star Trek III, and Luke saw something different than us when he looked at the Rancor. Therefore, what WE actually saw was only an account of what happened – not documentary footage.

No, even if we accept your logic, what you saw was a visual simulation, and it was the most accurate that could be made, subject to technical limitations. So since there is no technical limitation forcing people to make things look the wrong size, we can indeed measure things onscreen.

If we're only talking about the relative size of something, then I agree. I see no reason why that couldn't be measured to an acceptable degree of accuracy under either methodology.

[Eframepilot]

If we're only talking about the relative size of something, then I agree. I see no reason why that couldn't be measured to an acceptable degree of accuracy under either methodology.

Actually, relative size is frequently inconsistent, at least when it comes to the depiction of starships. The Enterprise-D should not fit into the space it occupies when docking with DS9, the Millenium Falcon is bigger on the inside than the outside, Chuck Sonnenburg recently observed that the size of Voyager members was too large compared to the landed Voyager in "The '37s", and of course there is the infamous 12,000 km Klingon Bird-of-Prey in Star Trek IV as shown by its size relative to the curvature of the Sun as it passes behind.

[linearA]

Of course, you cannot. For that you look at the visual. But your method says that dialogue is superior to visuals, so surely we shall be able to come to a conclusion relying solely on the dialogue.

My method does not say dialog is superior to visuals. I have said that dialog is more likely to be an accurate representation of what actually happened, being that visuals are more complicated to implement, but that does not mean that anything a character says is necessarily true. They may be lying, incompetent, insane, or what have you.

I assume there was a visual of Voyager destroying the asteroid? Well, I'd have to see it to make any kind of judgment. Measurements obtained from this visual may very well be accurate. Under the historical methodology, this visual would be considered accurate as long as it doesn't depict anything which is demonstrably extraordinary, i.e. it does not show Voyager doing something that we otherwise know would be impossible.

But I'm saying that you certainly can't trust every visual, because, as I've said before, things like the constant reuse of stock footage and recasting of characters show that filmed material is highly inaccurate. (Again, unless you are going to argue that every other planet in the galaxy looks the same, or that the Defiant was magically transported to another star system for a moment during a space battle.) Because of this, it's better to treat this footage as historical accounts, rather than accurate depictions of what happened.

But the dialogue seems to indicate there is something unusual about the asteroid.

Wrong. The characters say that there is something unusual about the asteroid. They could be lying, or wrong. Prove that there is something unusual with the asteroid.

Yes, they could be lying. But under the historical methodology, a source is given the benefit of the doubt unless there is reason to assume it is delivering incorrect information. If there is some reason to suspect they are lying, either from something else in the episode, or from other information garnered from other episodes, then it may be reasonable to assume they are lying. I'd have to see the episode myself.

In this case, we could probably assume it's hyperbole. Similarly, ancient Greek historians would often give us figures for the Persian infantry. The figures would usually be in the millions. Since we know this is impossible based on a variety of other observed data, we dismiss it as hyperbole or ignorance.

We can also assume it is not hyperbole. Earlier you said this,

More often, they rely on what the author actually says, keeping in mind the limitations of the medium. In this case, the “author” is really the combined efforts of the writers, directors, producers, and visual effects team.

If Voyager vaporizing an asteroid is an extraordinary event, i.e. something which we have never seen before, or we have reason from other episodes to suspect is impossible, then we dismiss this instance as an outlier, and conclude this account is inaccurate. If, on the other hand, we can confirm Voyager's ability to vaporize an asteroid, than we can conclude this account is accurate.

And I can produce quotations from Bormanis, the science advisor, that say that Star Trek is supposed to advance science. As well, Chakotay is supposed to be a well-educated Starfleet officer, and would know what vaporized means. Star Trek intends its people to be heroes, not scientific ignoramuses. And I can turn your argument back on its head. In history there can be tendencies to lower the numbers for one reason or another, for example the Greeks at Thermopolyae. In other words using your methodology, I can argue for vaporized to be taken in the scientific sense as well as you can argue it for being taken as hyperbole.

No, the historical methodology grants certain degrees of reliability to different accounts, based on how congruently they cross-reference one another. Secondly, in almost every ancient historical account, from Sumerian, Egyptian, Biblical, and Greek historical sources, the overwhelming tendency is to exaggerate the size of armies. Your example of Thermopolyae actually inflates the Persian numbers as well, so it is no exception. The fact that the Greek side is reduced is not an example of some overall historical pattern which competes with the tendency toward inflation, it is part of a legacy which is meant to glorify the Greek army. (Besides, it is debatable that the Greek side was originally reduced at all. Herodotus gives something like 6 thousand soldiers, which is slightly reasonable. Perhaps only the Persians were inflated.)

Regardless, you did not really employ any methodology there. You just found a counter-example, but failed to address the specifics. More imporantly, you address many of the shortcomings of the methodology I propose, but you never acknowledge the criticisms I lodged at SoD. How do you propose to consistently treat visual data as representing an accurate depiction of an objective reality when that same data is marred with obvious production problems, stock footage, recasting etc. SoD doesn't even seem to acknowledge this problem; it sort of glosses over it by saying that dialog is more likely to be incorrect than visual FX – which is really just ignoring the production problem while continuing to analyze visuals as if they were always accurate.

If endless debate is your goal, inject subjectivism as much as you want like you seem to be suggesting.

I'm suggesting that we don't always assume events that we see on screen actually happened the way we saw them.

Then you can argue anything, because a rebuttal to any argument can be "it did not happen as the way we saw them."

Essentially you're saying here that without SoD, everything becomes chaotic and nothing can be analyzed. This is patently not true, because each account is only credible in so far as it is congruent with other accounts – just like historical data. You can't just argue anything – you can only argue something if it is supported by credible accounts. If an account depicts something which is highly inconsistent with other accounts, whether it's a visual OR a line of dialogue, then you consider that account to be unreliable.

Face it, your methodology sucks because it produces endless debate and no conclusion. If you want that, like an English essay, then fine, but the goal of a versus debate is to find out who is the winner and for that you need ground rules that both sides will be subject to, not a methodology where you can argue almost anything.

Well, unfortunately I don't know how well my methodology would fare in actual debate, because I've never tested it. I am only proposing it here, for the first time. But it is meant to overcome some of the problems I see in SoD, which as far as I can tell, have never been adequately addressed.

[linearA]

If we're only talking about the relative size of something, then I agree. I see no reason why that couldn't be measured to an acceptable degree of accuracy under either methodology.

Actually, relative size is frequently inconsistent, at least when it comes to the depiction of starships. The Enterprise-D should not fit into the space it occupies when docking with DS9, the Millenium Falcon is bigger on the inside than the outside, Chuck Sonnenburg recently observed that the size of Voyager members was too large compared to the landed Voyager in "The '37s", and of course there is the infamous 12,000 km Klingon Bird-of-Prey in Star Trek IV as shown by its size relative to the curvature of the Sun as it passes behind.

Probably for the most part you can get at least some roughly accurate figures for ship sizes. But yes, you're right. There are many visuals which give contradictory impressions as to size. This is another reason why SoD rests on problematic assumptions.

[The Silence and I]

This is why linearA's method is preferable:

What is his method exactly. Until he concludes something from the VOY Rise situation, or any other situation with his so-called method, then it's useless except for hot air. You didn't read the beginning where he mentioned writers, producers, directors and off-screen material as valid resources. I can argue anything with his method.

Firstly: I do not think the method I am about to use is valid for serious debate. Even though I find it more satisfying and feel it is closer to the truth I recognize that there is a degree of subjectivity which is a big no no for serious debate and comparison.

Secondly: I do not think you can argue anything using the method I am about to use, although I cannot be sure it is the same as the so called historical method being discussed. At least not if you are honest with yourself.

Now then.

VOY Rise

You want a firepower estimate from this episode, and I assert the visuals are so craptastic they are almost worthless. Whatever can I do now? Because I cannot assume measurements from the visuals are accurate and I cannot assume the dialog is accurate I have to be a little creative. (Unfortunately I do not have this episode or a transcript, so I'm making more assumptions than I should have to with such access) I can take a few approaches -- and likely end up with a few different results as well -- but I'll settle for one in the interest of time.

The episode as I recall it deals with mysterious asteroids flying towards some planet and refusing to respond to weaponry as they are expected to, which creates the mystery. The dialog you provided claims two asteroids have already been unsuccessfully fired on by the planet authorities and the resulting fragments struck the surface. I now ask myself if there is any reason to doubt this claim so far. I can think of no such reason. If this event did not occur then either the claim is a lie, and the subsequent events in the episode are so different the episode as we know it never happened, or no such claim was made and again the episode never happened. I am assuming nothing happened which made this episode worthy of being considered for non existence (see Threshold), so I assume the events happened, more or less.

Now I need to delve into writer intent. Yes this is a weak point of the analysis, you don't need to tell me, see above. The claim is that three asteroids were fragmented when they should have been vaporized. Twice by the planet authorities, once by Voyager. My next question is this: what does a Voyager writer know about fragmentation? I assume the answer is very little. Now, what event would such a person describe as fragmentation? Shattering into 10 meter chunks and smaller? Too specific to be sure. Broken roughly in half? Maybe, but this seems a little weak for the layman's use of fragmentation. Almost certainly if any piece of asteroid was larger than half the original the writer would not call it fragmentation. Now I have an upper limit on fragment size--not more than half the original asteroid size, and almost certainly much smaller.

Now I can do some research and find the smallest asteroid that can so threaten Earth that we would want to deflect it, but which is not actually seriously dangerous to the biosphere. I'm not actually going to do this step because this requires research and time and I'm lazy right now. Whatever this size works out to be it will be scientifically estimated, but will of course be less precise than scaling with a relyable image. I'll call it X (I imagine it will be large enough to destroy a large city with a direct impact, but hell, the research I'm not doing might lead to a very different size). I realized after typing this I did not explain myself as well as I could have. It may have been noticed I am treating X as a constant, and asteroid size depends on how small a fraction of said asteroid X represents, with a lower limit of 2X and an upper limit of nX where n is almost undefinable under this method of analysis (writer intent is the only limiting factor I can think of here, other than common sense. Make X too small next to the asteroid and visually it'll look like the asteroid was powdered--and I assume a writer would not call that fragmentation even if it in fact is). Since the planet authorities fired on the original asteroid, shouldn't I assume that has a size of X if I want to be conservative? I say no, because there were three asteroids. If the asteroid itself was barely a threat to the planet population then its fragments will be little more than annoying. Because the planet apparently enlisted the help of Voyager I assume they felt the fragments were dangerous enough to merit a serious effort, so I give the largest fragments a size of X.

Now I call X--my best educated guess for a dangerous but not globally threatening asteroid size--half the size of the original asteroid. It likely should be much less than half, but I am going for the best lower limit I can make with this system.

Now I sort of have an asteroid size. What next? We have dialog on Voyager claiming the asteroid should have been vaporized, and that the any fragments should have been a centimeter in diameter or less. Ok, my next question is do I have reason to doubt this claim. In fact I do. Startrek is extremely sloppy with technical dialog, so I must apply writer's intent again. I can assume even a Voyager writer knows that vaporization means conversion to gas, but can be even safer than that! In the writer's mind, had the weapons worked as intended non of those asteroid would have been a threat--that is why we have a mystery. The weapons did not protect the planet, but they should have, and I can think of no reason to doubt this intention. (Yes yes, subjective and all) I can safely assume sufficient fragmentation to leave each remaining piece harmless after passing through atmosphere, and the energy needed to achieve this may be calculated.

There you go. This will be a lower limit, based on dialog, science, past experience with dialog, writer intent and some careful choices/assumptions. Is it perfect? No, no it isn't. It also isn't faster, in fact it is slower. It is an application of my take on the so called historical method though, and that is what you wanted.

I cannot of course be sure of this number until I perfom this method on several other firepower events and see how they compare. This is not a one off method--you have to cross reference extensively.

[Darth Wong]

A photograph efficiently conveys more information than a human language could ever possibly convey, and I agree visuals convey more information than dialogue. My point is that we assume there is an actual underlying event which took place in a fictional universe, which a production crew is trying to replicate. It is far easier for them to recreate the dialog than it is for them to recreate the visuals, because the visuals are more costly and complicated to implement.

So? That's why many visuals are obscured or obviously of low quality (in a manner analogous to a blurry picture vs a sharp one). That does not mean that we should ignore an explicit visual if and when it is available. It only means that we should treat some visuals as low-quality images.

Therefore, it is more likely that the dialogue is closer to what was actually said than the visuals are to what the characters actually saw. And before someone pops out another Creationist analogy, let me remind you I am fully aware that dialog is not infallible, and should not always be taken at face value. Characters could be wrong, ignorant, insane, etc.

So? In real-life, we could have perfect recording of dialogue and it would still be just dialogue, nowhere near as reliable as even a blurry photograph.

I'll grant that more thought goes into the visuals than the dialog, overall. The production crew tries to create a cohesive aesthetic that binds the series. Of course, many of the VFX shots appear consistent because they are simply reused.

That doesn't change the point.

I interpret suspension of disbelief, as used here, to imply that we're seeing on our television screens exactly what the characters are seeing in their universe.

So you figure SoD means that there are giant yellow letters floating around in the Star Wars galaxy? No one ever said that we had to ignore the production aspects of the film.

I'm saying it may very well be highly inaccurate, given the technical limitations of the production crew. Perhaps it would be easier to come to some sort of conclusion here if we address an actual example. Under SoD, does the actual, real-life Gorn look like what we saw on screen?

OK, let's go with this example. Suppose Kirk said that the Gorn must have been at least 10 feet tall. Would you say that the Gorn is therefore 10 feet tall, even though he's obviously not? Would you say that because his suit is of low quality, and they couldn't find a 10 foot tall actor, that the Gorn is actually supposed to be 10 feet tall because Kirk said so? I'm curious exactly how you think this sort of thing is supposed to be resolved.

Yes. I'm not saying the production staff is trying to deceive us. I'm saying the production staff is doing their best to accurately depict the events that occurred.

Then anything in the visuals should be presumed accurate unless you can give a specific reason to conclude that the production staff was unable to achieve their objectives.

True, but it's also far more likely to be inaccurate, because of the restrictions the production crew is compelled to work under.

That's not how it works; you need to justify any particular claim of inaccuracy, rather than attempting to lay down a blanket rule. You admit that the production staff is not being deceptive, after all.

That's why I said that mundane events, such as Captain Kirk walking down a hallway, or Captain Picard sitting in his ready room, can be considered to have occurred almost exactly as they were depicted on screen.

Why? Since you reject the notion that the depiction is visually real in any way, or even presumed accurate, how do you know the "real" Kirk isn't a black guy who stands 7 feet tall?

But I don't think we can say the same for certain VFX shots.

Why not? Especially with newer effects, which are done largely with computers and eliminate most of the limitations of model-based technology?

My point is, with an historical methodology, we treat each shot as a different account, and endow more reliable accounts with a higher degree of credibility. If a particular account contains a visual effect, or a line of dialogue, which is inconsistent with the rest of the series, we simply dismiss it as an outlier. This method compensates for things like stock footage and recasting, whereas SoD has to assume that every shot depicts something that actually occurred.

What makes you think that SoD cannot dismiss something as an outlier? We do that with real scientific data, remember? You can't get much better suspension of disbelief than the way we treat reality.

I admit that we lose some of the benefits of SoD, such as the ability to draw reliable data from VFX shots. But we still retain some of that ability – e.g. we can still safely conclude that the Deathstar actually destroyed Alderaan, (because every account is consistent in that regard) but we may not be able to conclude exactly what the explosion looked like.

Your argument still seems to be based on a caricature of how SoD is actually supposed to work.

I'm not claiming that visuals are worthless, or that they shouldn't be examined at all. I'm claiming that SoD is not adequate to analyze the data set of filmed material, because it is not a consistent methodology. It dismisses authorial intent completely, while assuming that visuals are depicted faithfully enough to draw roughly accurate conclusions about every visual. For example, you argue that the phaser “vaporization” effect the production crew came up with for the original Star Trek series is not at all what we would expect if the target was actually vaporized. So instead, you explore alternate ideas to explain the visual. We know the director intended for the target to be vaporized, but SoD doesn't allow that as a consideration.

Bullshit. If the director intended for the target to be vapourized, he would have had anyone standing near him killed by the blast wave. This example highlights precisely why your method is goofy; you take unverifiable speculation about the director's intent and elevate it to a level of equality with objective evidence. What the director intended was a visual effect; the visual effect is in fact a far more accurate depiction of the event than any of your "author's intent" nonsense. Do you think the director sat down and thought about physics before making that scene? Of course not. He said "I want it to look like THIS".

And this is really the crux of the problem. You agree that there should be some imaginary sci-fi universe that we assume to exist, which did exist in the mind of the creators at time of production, and which is represented by the films. What you fail to understand is that for directors and producers of TV shows and movies, this imaginary universe is what they visualize, not a physics model. The physics model comes afterwards, based on what they visualized. In other words, the "author's intent" for an original movie or TV show is the visual appearance. You can only identify divergence from that intent when you can establish that the director was unhappy with the appearance, and would have wanted to change it but was unable to do so. But pretending that the creator's intent for a primarily visual medium is anything other than visual is purely disingenuous.

Yet, we also know that when we see the Enterprise orbiting the same planet for the 6th episode in a row, the director intends for us to believe it is actually a different planet, hoping we will overlook the limited budget. Why does SoD allow for authorial intent in one circumstance, but not the other? In fact, as far as I can see, SoD doesn't even acknowledge the stock footage problem.

Because the stock footage problem is not much of a problem. Is it really a big deal to say that two planets look alike?

But these inconsistencies are solved by treating all of these instances as historical accounts.

They aren't solved at all. What does the second planet look like? With no cues whatsoever other than the knowledge that they're supposed to be two different planets, what else do you have to go on? Nothing, so you end up falling back on the footage and saying "well, they probably look similar".

We appeal to authorial intent to explain the stock footage and the badly conceived vaporization effect, but this does not result in a chaotic “anything goes” environment where the author defines reality.

Actually, it doesn't solve the stock footage "problem" at all, and it creates enormous new problems in the vapourization effect. You have, in effect, inadvertently demonstrated the weaknesses of your preferred method with these examples. Thank you.

Rather, the author of any one account is kept in check by other accounts, (i.e. other scenes, episodes, movies) just like real historians are kept in check by other historians. This methodology also helps explain continuity errors. They can be dismissed as coming from an unreliable account. Under SoD, we'd have to accept them, because, well, we saw it happen.

And there are no unreliable scientific experiments in real-life? They happened too. Once more, you keep insisting on a caricature of SoD rather than the real thing.

Yes, if the simulation were highly accurate. But I do not believe the production crew always puts together a highly accurate simulation – unless you believe that every other planet in the galaxy looks the same.

You know, I'm growing tired of your increasingly florid descriptions of this apparently growing problem. Show us some episode names and screenshots to substantiate your descriptions of the severity of this problem.

Rather, we'd need to deal with each scene on a case by case basis. As an aside, it occurs to me that this is less of a problem for Star Wars, where the quality of the production is consistently much higher.

Shitty visuals are mostly a problem for TOS, where the creators didn't really have any idea what kind of physics laws were supposed to be in place. Like it or not, however, the visual effects that got made were as close to a representation of their intent as you're going to get, because their only intent was to make things look a certain way. Seriously, what "intent" do you think the director of a TV show or movie has, other than making things look a certain way? How can you dismiss visuals in favour of intent when the intent is the visual?

The fact that non-representative aspects of the simulation exist does not nullify the entire simulation, but it certainly does call into question the validity of each visual.

Why?

Secondly, you only know why these non-representative aspects occur because you momentarily step outside of SoD and move over to authorial intent.

Wrong. Understanding of technical limitations has nothing to do with your attempt to psychically divine authorial intent.

You know what the authors (director/writers) intended to depict. I see this as a serious internal inconsistency with the SoD methodology, and it is the reason I think the historical approach is superior. The historical approach does not need to ignore or explain away VFX errors, recastings, or stock footage. It simply acknowledges the intent of the author, but does not give control to any one author. The cohesiveness of the sci-fi universe is maintained by cross-reference, and outliers are dismissed.

You know, I grow tired of repeating myself. Once more, you are attacking a caricature of SoD. You are also ignoring the fact that the director's intent is the visual. Perhaps you do not realize what a film/TV director's job is. And finally, you promote solutions to "problems" whose severity you have actually not established without actually showing how these solutions would work. In some cases they do not help solve the problem at all, and in other cases they make things clearly much worse.

<snip more repetitions of the same basic idea>

Please try to refrain from expressing each idea more than a half-dozen times per post.

[brianeyci]

Of course, you cannot. For that you look at the visual. But your method says that dialogue is superior to visuals, so surely we shall be able to come to a conclusion relying solely on the dialogue.

My method does not say dialog is superior to visuals. I have said that dialog is more likely to be an accurate representation of what actually happened, being that visuals are more complicated to implement, but that does not mean that anything a character says is necessarily true. They may be lying, incompetent, insane, or what have you.

I assume there was a visual of Voyager destroying the asteroid? Well, I'd have to see it to make any kind of judgment. Measurements obtained from this visual may very well be accurate. Under the historical methodology, this visual would be considered accurate as long as it doesn't depict anything which is demonstrably extraordinary, i.e. it does not show Voyager doing something that we otherwise know would be impossible.

But I'm saying that you certainly can't trust every visual, because, as I've said before, things like the constant reuse of stock footage and recasting of characters show that filmed material is highly inaccurate. (Again, unless you are going to argue that every other planet in the galaxy looks the same, or that the Defiant was magically transported to another star system for a moment during a space battle.) Because of this, it's better to treat this footage as historical accounts, rather than accurate depictions of what happened.

Well then if dialogue is not superior to visuals and you resort to using visuals what is the difference between your historical method and what you perceive to be suspension of disbelief? How do you resolve the problem when Riker says the Enterprise-D is 50k kilometers away from a target and the target looks to be 50 km away? You resort to dialogue, claiming a VFX error. Is this not a tacit admission that dialogue is superior?

But the dialogue seems to indicate there is something unusual about the asteroid.

Wrong. The characters say that there is something unusual about the asteroid. They could be lying, or wrong. Prove that there is something unusual with the asteroid.

Yes, they could be lying. But under the historical methodology, a source is given the benefit of the doubt unless there is reason to assume it is delivering incorrect information. If there is some reason to suspect they are lying, either from something else in the episode, or from other information garnered from other episodes, then it may be reasonable to assume they are lying. I'd have to see the episode myself.

Since this is your methodology, I assume you are an expert at it, so let's keep going.

If Voyager vaporizing an asteroid is an extraordinary event, i.e. something which we have never seen before, or we have reason from other episodes to suspect is impossible, then we dismiss this instance as an outlier, and conclude this account is inaccurate. If, on the other hand, we can confirm Voyager's ability to vaporize an asteroid, than we can conclude this account is accurate.

How do you confirm Voyager's ability to vaporize an asteroid if this is all you get? Do you resort to the visuals?

No, the historical methodology grants certain degrees of reliability to different accounts, based on how congruently they cross-reference one another. Secondly, in almost every ancient historical account, from Sumerian, Egyptian, Biblical, and Greek historical sources, the overwhelming tendency is to exaggerate the size of armies. Your example of Thermopolyae actually inflates the Persian numbers as well, so it is no exception. The fact that the Greek side is reduced is not an example of some overall historical pattern which competes with the tendency toward inflation, it is part of a legacy which is meant to glorify the Greek army. (Besides, it is debatable that the Greek side was originally reduced at all. Herodotus gives something like 6 thousand soldiers, which is slightly reasonable. Perhaps only the Persians were inflated.)

You do not see why for propaganda purposes a historian would lower the number of soldiers present in a battle? You claim that for propaganda purposes a historian would increase the number of soldiers in a battle and I just gave a counter example.

Regardless, you did not really employ any methodology there. You just found a counter-example, but failed to address the specifics. More imporantly, you address many of the shortcomings of the methodology I propose, but you never acknowledge the criticisms I lodged at SoD. How do you propose to consistently treat visual data as representing an accurate depiction of an objective reality when that same data is marred with obvious production problems, stock footage, recasting etc. SoD doesn't even seem to acknowledge this problem; it sort of glosses over it by saying that dialog is more likely to be incorrect than visual FX – which is really just ignoring the production problem while continuing to analyze visuals as if they were always accurate.

I'm leaving the suspension of disbelief "shortcomings" to others like DW. Right now we are using your methodology. Your methodology's shortcomings are exactly why it cannot be used in a debate between who would win in a galactic war.

As for finding a counter example, linearA, linear approximation? How can a mathematician or a mathematician in training fail to see the utility in counter-examples? I fail to see why you say that me finding shortcomings in your methodology is not a valid form of debate, when what you are doing with suspension of disbelief is finding shortcomings in it.

Essentially you're saying here that without SoD, everything becomes chaotic and nothing can be analyzed. This is patently not true, because each account is only credible in so far as it is congruent with other accounts – just like historical data. You can't just argue anything – you can only argue something if it is supported by credible accounts. If an account depicts something which is highly inconsistent with other accounts, whether it's a visual OR a line of dialogue, then you consider that account to be unreliable.

I will give you that you cannot argue anything, but will you agree that you can argue almost anything? Because... here's the crux of it. Fans do not have access to the thoughts of the producers and writers and so on, so divination of their intent is mostly idle speculation unless you have quotations from them, and even then their quotatons can contradict themselves.

Well, unfortunately I don't know how well my methodology would fare in actual debate, because I've never tested it. I am only proposing it here, for the first time. But it is meant to overcome some of the problems I see in SoD, which as far as I can tell, have never been adequately addressed.

Do you not think it is arrogant in saying that you have never tested it before and never used it, yet it is superior to a tested methodology? The Silence and I is doing a better job with your methodology, but even he is not sure exactly what it is.

[The Silence and I]

To be entirely accurate what I used was what I like to use in dark alley ways where no one looks, and I thought it might be close to this other methodology.

If anything I think my prefered (when no one is looking...) method is more extreme than linearA's proposal because he is willing to accept VFX when there is no reason to doubt it, and I really don't. I accept some things as necessary--the general appearance of starships for example--but when I'm all alone I cannot give the benefit of the doubt to visuals. They just don't look right and I cannot get around it.

I mean, glowing starships and superdense asteroid fields and super luminous starfields and starships obviously forced into close and awkward placement so the camera can see both at once without zooming out? The resolution of the camera mysteriously dropping whenever someone fires a phaser or when Q appears or vanishes? All exterior shots being at this mysteriously lower resolution? High power weaponry detonating with a dim yellowish fuzz? Please. I'll spare you all a rant and leave it at this.

[linearA]

So? That's why many visuals are obscured or obviously of low quality (in a manner analogous to a blurry picture vs a sharp one). That does not mean that we should ignore an explicit visual if and when it is available. It only means that we should treat some visuals as low-quality images.

I’m not arguing that we ignore visuals. I’m arguing that we treat them as accounts rather than photographs. Regardless, the technical quality of the visual, however you want to measure it, (resolution, focus, etc.) is not as important to this discussion as the methodology you use to interpret the visual.

So? In real-life, we could have perfect recording of dialogue and it would still be just dialogue, nowhere near as reliable as even a blurry photograph.

I am saying that the visuals we see are not of the same evidential quality as a photograph. They have higher evidential value than an historical text, for certain, but they do not have an evidential value as high as an actual photograph.

I interpret suspension of disbelief, as used here, to imply that we're seeing on our television screens exactly what the characters are seeing in their universe.

So you figure SoD means that there are giant yellow letters floating around in the Star Wars galaxy? No one ever said that we had to ignore the production aspects of the film.

No, and this point is obviously the source of a large percentage of our disagreement here. I am not saying that inherent characteristics of the film medium, e.g. opening credits, closing credits, or commercial breaks, are a problem for SoD. SoD dismisses that as a limitation of the medium the same way an historian would dismiss an ink smudge on some old manuscript he was studying.

However, I am saying that things like stock footage reuse and recasting of characters are a problem for SoD because this indicates the characters in the show are consistently seeing things which we, the viewer, are seeing differently. This undermines, to an extent, the confidence we can have when we analyze visuals.

OK, let's go with this example. Suppose Kirk said that the Gorn must have been at least 10 feet tall. Would you say that the Gorn is therefore 10 feet tall, even though he's obviously not? Would you say that because his suit is of low quality, and they couldn't find a 10 foot tall actor, that the Gorn is actually supposed to be 10 feet tall because Kirk said so? I'm curious exactly how you think this sort of thing is supposed to be resolved.

If Kirk was talking about a human being, we would assume Kirk was wrong. But since Kirk is talking about a potentially expensive costume, it’s possible the Gorn he saw was actually 10 feet tall. We’d need to cross-reference this with other instances of the Gorn, to see if it actually appears as ten feet tall in that case as well. If there is no other information available, we just don’t know.

I realize the added uncertainty inherent in the methodology I’m proposing makes debate more difficult, but the alternative is to assume that the Gorn actually appears like that, as per SoD. Furthermore, there is another instance where we see a Gorn, but it is rendered in CGI, and it looks completely different. So how does SoD handle this? Do you say there are two species of Gorn?

That's not how it works; you need to justify any particular claim of inaccuracy, rather than attempting to lay down a blanket rule.

Of course. There are many visuals which are easy to justify as inaccurate.

That's why I said that mundane events, such as Captain Kirk walking down a hallway, or Captain Picard sitting in his ready room, can be considered to have occurred almost exactly as they were depicted on screen.

Why? Since you reject the notion that the depiction is visually real in any way, or even presumed accurate, how do you know the "real" Kirk isn't a black guy who stands 7 feet tall?

Again, you’re assuming that once we attribute less reliability to visuals, we’re suddenly in a state of chaos where we don’t know anything for sure. That’s not how it works. When Plutarch tells us that Alexander the Great was born in the month of July, how do we know he wasn’t actually lying, and Alexander was actually born in February? We don’t know that for sure – but we take his word because there is no evidence to the contrary, and he is not claiming anything out of the ordinary. Likewise, there is nothing extraordinary about Kirk being a white male of average height, nor is there any evidence whatsoever, from any account, that Kirk is actually black. So there would be no reason to assume he’s black.

But I don't think we can say the same for certain VFX shots.

Why not? Especially with newer effects, which are done largely with computers and eliminate most of the limitations of model-based technology?

You would be able to attribute a higher degree of reliability to visuals from newer productions.

What makes you think that SoD cannot dismiss something as an outlier? We do that with real scientific data, remember? You can't get much better suspension of disbelief than the way we treat reality.

SoD can dismiss things as outliers, but I don’t think it’s equipped to handle consistent visual problems. For the entire running length of either Star Trek II or Star Trek III, the characters must be seeing something different than us when they look at Saavik.

Your argument still seems to be based on a caricature of how SoD is actually supposed to work.

I admit that SoD is not bound by everything we see on the screen, e.g. the opening credits, or perhaps a microphone that wonders into the shot. But it does not handle things such as recasting or stock footage very gracefully. It has to invent explanations for absurd things we see on screen, because every scene is considered to have actually occurred as portrayed.

Bullshit. If the director intended for the target to be vapourized, he would have had anyone standing near him killed by the blast wave. This example highlights precisely why your method is goofy; you take unverifiable speculation about the director's intent and elevate it to a level of equality with objective evidence. What the director intended was a visual effect; the visual effect is in fact a far more accurate depiction of the event than any of your "author's intent" nonsense. Do you think the director sat down and thought about physics before making that scene? Of course not. He said "I want it to look like THIS".

No, he did not always have much of a choice in how it looks. Since a real vaporization would have caused a blast wave, that example is not useful for me to illustrate this point, unfortunately. A better example would be when we see a matte painting of some alien planet, which we saw used three times already in prior episodes as an establishment shot on a different planet. The only way we know that is not the same planet is by appealing to the director’s intent. Clearly, the director intended that to be a different planet.

And this is really the crux of the problem. You agree that there should be some imaginary sci-fi universe that we assume to exist, which did exist in the mind of the creators at time of production, and which is represented by the films. What you fail to understand is that for directors and producers of TV shows and movies, this imaginary universe is what they visualize, not a physics model. The physics model comes afterwards, based on what they visualized. In other words, the "author's intent" for an original movie or TV show is the visual appearance.

No, the visualization is not necessarily the author’s intent. The visualization is what the author was able to create within the budget allotted to him, as well as the technology available at the time. A director does not use usually use stock footage to accurately represent what he intends to show. A director uses stock footage because he is on a limited budget. Unless you’re telling me that the producers of Star Trek keep reusing matte paintings because they intend to show us that every planet in the galaxy hired the same architect to design their capital city.

You can only identify divergence from that intent when you can establish that the director was unhappy with the appearance, and would have wanted to change it but was unable to do so. But pretending that the creator's intent for a primarily visual medium is anything other than visual is purely disingenuous.

Are you saying it’s not self-evident to you that the use of stock footage, or last minute recasting of characters, does not imply a divergence from the director’s intent?

Because the stock footage problem is not much of a problem. Is it really a big deal to say that two planets look alike?

Of course it is. Planets look alike, cities look alike, battle sequences are reused. The chance that any of these things actually represents reality is remote, or outright impossible.

They aren't solved at all. What does the second planet look like? With no cues whatsoever other than the knowledge that they're supposed to be two different planets, what else do you have to go on? Nothing, so you end up falling back on the footage and saying "well, they probably look similar".

That might work, to an extent, with planets. But you’d be straining credibility to an extreme if you use that sort of methodology with cities or battle sequences, to say nothing of recasting.

Actually, it doesn't solve the stock footage "problem" at all, and it creates enormous new problems in the vapourization effect. You have, in effect, inadvertently demonstrated the weaknesses of your preferred method with these examples. Thank you.

The vaporization effect was not a good example, since the blast wave you describe would have a noticeable effect regardless of the reliability of the visual.

Rather, the author of any one account is kept in check by other accounts, (i.e. other scenes, episodes, movies) just like real historians are kept in check by other historians. This methodology also helps explain continuity errors. They can be dismissed as coming from an unreliable account. Under SoD, we'd have to accept them, because, well, we saw it happen.

And there are no unreliable scientific experiments in real-life? They happened too. Once more, you keep insisting on a caricature of SoD rather than the real thing.

How does SoD handle consistent imagery which shows us something which is clearly not what the characters are seeing? Let’s stick with a single example. How does SoD handle the recasting in Star Trek III? Will you admit that Kirk et al must be seeing something different than we are when they look at Saavik?

You know, I'm growing tired of your increasingly florid descriptions of this apparently growing problem. Show us some episode names and screenshots to substantiate your descriptions of the severity of this problem.

I did not provide names and screenshots because I thought this would be self-evident. I did a search for “reused stock footage TNG” on Google, and was able to find some examples:

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/incon ... gelone.htm
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/incon ... lanets.htm

Also, Star Trek: Generations reuses battle footage from Star Trek VI, the final episode of Deep Space 9 reuses stock footage from various battles in earlier episodes, and TOS and TNG reuse stock footage of ships all the time, (this is a problem because the star field changes from one shot to the next.)

Shitty visuals are mostly a problem for TOS, where the creators didn't really have any idea what kind of physics laws were supposed to be in place.

Shitty visuals are not the only problem. TOS, TNG, the movies, and DS9 use reused footage all the time. How does SoD handle this? Waving it away and saying “these planets probably look the same” strains credibility to the point where all analysis becomes absurd.

Like it or not, however, the visual effects that got made were as close to a representation of their intent as you're going to get, because their only intent was to make things look a certain way. Seriously, what "intent" do you think the director of a TV show or movie has, other than making things look a certain way? How can you dismiss visuals in favour of intent when the intent is the visual?

Visuals are not dismissed in favor of intent, unless there is a reason to. Under my methodology, if we see a duplicate matte painting we dismiss it because we know the director intends for this planet to be a different planet, and probably intended for it to look different.

The fact that non-representative aspects of the simulation exist does not nullify the entire simulation, but it certainly does call into question the validity of each visual.

Why?

Because you assume that the visuals you see represent an actual reality. But if we assume all visuals are like photographs, then we have a very chaotic and inexplicable reality, where battle sequences repeat and various planets have identical cities and locales.

Secondly, you only know why these non-representative aspects occur because you momentarily step outside of SoD and move over to authorial intent.

Wrong. Understanding of technical limitations has nothing to do with your attempt to psychically divine authorial intent.

You consider reuse of stock footage as a technical limitation. I’m saying you inadvertently appeal to authorial intent (no divining involved, just common sense) to reach the conclusion that the director intends for these repeat locations to actually be different places.

You know, I grow tired of repeating myself. Once more, you are attacking a caricature of SoD. You are also ignoring the fact that the director's intent is the visual. Perhaps you do not realize what a film/TV director's job is. And finally, you promote solutions to "problems" whose severity you have actually not established without actually showing how these solutions would work. In some cases they do not help solve the problem at all, and in other cases they make things clearly much worse.

<snip more repetitions of the same basic idea>

Please try to refrain from expressing each idea more than a half-dozen times per post.

So be it. I won’t repeat anything here, since most of what you said is a recap on the discussion above, and I’m fairly confident I’ve addressed most of your primary points above already.

[linearA]

Well then if dialogue is not superior to visuals and you resort to using visuals what is the difference between your historical method and what you perceive to be suspension of disbelief? How do you resolve the problem when Riker says the Enterprise-D is 50k kilometers away from a target and the target looks to be 50 km away? You resort to dialogue, claiming a VFX error. Is this not a tacit admission that dialogue is superior?

It depends on the scene. If Riker said he was wearing a blue shirt, but we see him wearing a green shirt, we dismiss the dialogue as erroneous because there is no credible production limitation in that case. As for your example, I would pass it off as a VFX error because a mere 50 kilometers is an unlikely distance between two ships in space.

I also wanted to add that your firepower calculations for the incident in Voyager would necessarily be based on dialogue. How else would you know the asteroid is made of nickel-iron? As far as I know, only a small percentage of asteroids are actually composed of nickel-iron, so this is not an obvious assumption. You’d need to rely on the dialogue to even attempt to calculate the upper limit.

Since this is your methodology, I assume you are an expert at it, so let's keep going.

I’m not an expert at it. I’ve never tried it in actual debate. It is meant to address the flaws I see in SoD. Whether it works, or is even adopted at all (which is doubtful, of course) remains to be seen.

If Voyager vaporizing an asteroid is an extraordinary event, i.e. something which we have never seen before, or we have reason from other episodes to suspect is impossible, then we dismiss this instance as an outlier, and conclude this account is inaccurate. If, on the other hand, we can confirm Voyager's ability to vaporize an asteroid, than we can conclude this account is accurate.

How do you confirm Voyager's ability to vaporize an asteroid if this is all you get? Do you resort to the visuals?

It depends. First, do we consider the vaporization of an asteroid to be something “extraordinary”, e.g. something that diverges significantly from what we know of Star Trek technology on the whole? I would say the answer to that is yes. Therefore, in order to believe that Voyager can vaporize an asteroid, we’d need some pretty good evidence. A single line of dialog would not be sufficient, and even a single visual would probably not be sufficient. We’d probably need either a combination of dialog and a visual, or another instance of Voyager (or a similar ship) vaporizing an asteroid.

You do not see why for propaganda purposes a historian would lower the number of soldiers present in a battle? You claim that for propaganda purposes a historian would increase the number of soldiers in a battle and I just gave a counter example.

My claim was that the lessening of numbers is quite rare compared to the inflating of numbers. But actually, another example occurred to me that supports your claim. The Biblical book of Judges depicts Gideon as routing an army numbering in the thousands with only 300 men.

I'm leaving the suspension of disbelief "shortcomings" to others like DW. Right now we are using your methodology. Your methodology's shortcomings are exactly why it cannot be used in a debate between who would win in a galactic war.

My methodology certainly has shortcomings of its own, but I think that overall, it is better equipped to handle sci-fi television footage than SoD.

As for finding a counter example, linearA, linear approximation? How can a mathematician or a mathematician in training fail to see the utility in counter-examples?

My background is actually in computer science. But oddly enough, the handle I use has nothing to do with linear approximation. It actually refers to an undecipherable hieroglyphic script, reflecting my (amateur) interest in history.

I fail to see why you say that me finding shortcomings in your methodology is not a valid form of debate, when what you are doing with suspension of disbelief is finding shortcomings in it.

I am not saying that pointing out shortcomings in the methodology I propose is invalid. Naturally, we’re here to point out shortcomings in other arguments. My complaint was that you failed to address the shortcomings of SoD which I put forth.

I will give you that you cannot argue anything, but will you agree that you can argue almost anything?

I agree you have more leeway than you would with SoD. But I also think that the added degree of subjectivity is worth the consistency.

Because... here's the crux of it. Fans do not have access to the thoughts of the producers and writers and so on, so divination of their intent is mostly idle speculation unless you have quotations from them, and even then their quotatons can contradict themselves.

But surely common sense tells us that when the director reuses a matte painting, we’re not actually supposed to imagine this is the same planet. But under SoD, the only evidence we have that we’re on another planet is the dialogue. So under SoD, we should assume that various episodes actually occur on the same planet, because we saw the same city. Since this is clearly preposterous, I’m saying my methodology is probably better.

Do you not think it is arrogant in saying that you have never tested it before and never used it, yet it is superior to a tested methodology? The Silence and I is doing a better job with your methodology, but even he is not sure exactly what it is.

It would be arrogant if I just started using it, and then insisted that everyone else follow suit. Rather, I am merely proposing it here, explaining why I believe it is superior.

[brianeyci]

Well then if dialogue is not superior to visuals and you resort to using visuals what is the difference between your historical method and what you perceive to be suspension of disbelief? How do you resolve the problem when Riker says the Enterprise-D is 50k kilometers away from a target and the target looks to be 50 km away? You resort to dialogue, claiming a VFX error. Is this not a tacit admission that dialogue is superior?

It depends on the scene. If Riker said he was wearing a blue shirt, but we see him wearing a green shirt, we dismiss the dialogue as erroneous because there is no credible production limitation in that case. As for your example, I would pass it off as a VFX error because a mere 50 kilometers is an unlikely distance between two ships in space.

And with suspension of disbelief, the ships are 50 kilometers away because in the rest of Star Trek ships always fight in close range and to have one piece of dialogue override all the other visuals we have is inconsistent. You seem to believe there is no need to maintain consistency with suspension of disbelief. I do not throw my hands in the air and say it is hopeless when contradictions occur. VFX errors are acknowledged, the limitations of the medium are acknowledged because we assume the director is trying to truthfully represent the ideas but may be limited. The burden of proof is on you when you claim a VFX error.

I also wanted to add that your firepower calculations for the incident in Voyager would necessarily be based on dialogue. How else would you know the asteroid is made of nickel-iron? As far as I know, only a small percentage of asteroids are actually composed of nickel-iron, so this is not an obvious assumption. You’d need to rely on the dialogue to even attempt to calculate the upper limit.

Wrong, because knowledge of nickel-iron as being a small percentage of asteroids is independent of the dialogue as you say and using nickel-iron would create an upper limit.

Since this is your methodology, I assume you are an expert at it, so let's keep going.

I’m not an expert at it. I’ve never tried it in actual debate. It is meant to address the flaws I see in SoD. Whether it works, or is even adopted at all (which is doubtful, of course) remains to be seen.

It is adopted but you do not seem to realize the problems in using it in a science fiction debate intended in determining the winner of a galactic war. In high school, New Criticism is taught. Treat the text as standalone. Do not interpret authorial intent, do not do biographical research, do not attempt to acertain its effect and influence by the works around it. Do you know why? Because all other techniques are easily abused and difficult to master. Anybody can make claims about what an author says or thinks, but it is impossible to prove without doing massive amounts of research. See The Silence and I's long post. Only rational, reasonable people can analyze anything with literary techniques because anything but considering the work as standalone requires research, and it is easy to lie about research and quotations, while the visual material is accessible. It is unsuited to debating a science fiction war.

It depends. First, do we consider the vaporization of an asteroid to be something “extraordinary”, e.g. something that diverges significantly from what we know of Star Trek technology on the whole? I would say the answer to that is yes. Therefore, in order to believe that Voyager can vaporize an asteroid, we’d need some pretty good evidence. A single line of dialog would not be sufficient, and even a single visual would probably not be sufficient. We’d probably need either a combination of dialog and a visual, or another instance of Voyager (or a similar ship) vaporizing an asteroid.

You see the fragmentation, there is no vaporization. You resort to the visual whether you admit it or not, so your entire objection appears to be a "grevious nitpick" as DW put it.

My claim was that the lessening of numbers is quite rare compared to the inflating of numbers. But actually, another example occurred to me that supports your claim. The Biblical book of Judges depicts Gideon as routing an army numbering in the thousands with only 300 men.

So you concede that your example of millions of Persians was full of shit? Get used to right or wrong, yes or no on this board, because if you sit on the fence when you're wrong people will flame you.

I'm leaving the suspension of disbelief "shortcomings" to others like DW. Right now we are using your methodology. Your methodology's shortcomings are exactly why it cannot be used in a debate between who would win in a galactic war.

My methodology certainly has shortcomings of its own, but I think that overall, it is better equipped to handle sci-fi television footage than SoD.

In what way? In a way that will settle a debate about a war between science fiction powers? You do realize you are posting in the forum titled Star Trek versus Star Wars.

As for finding a counter example, linearA, linear approximation? How can a mathematician or a mathematician in training fail to see the utility in counter-examples?

My background is actually in computer science. But oddly enough, the handle I use has nothing to do with linear approximation. It actually refers to an undecipherable hieroglyphic script, reflecting my (amateur) interest in history.

Ah, I knew this, linearA linearB Mesopotamia good you at least know something.

I fail to see why you say that me finding shortcomings in your methodology is not a valid form of debate, when what you are doing with suspension of disbelief is finding shortcomings in it.

I am not saying that pointing out shortcomings in the methodology I propose is invalid. Naturally, we’re here to point out shortcomings in other arguments. My complaint was that you failed to address the shortcomings of SoD which I put forth.

And I right now do not care about those shortcomings. Those are dealt with by other people's posts. My point is your methodology's shortcomings are far more severe when dealing with the question : "Who will win in a war?" If your methodology cannot come to a definite conclusion, then it is unsuited to debating Star Trek versus Star Wars. Hint : How many different history essays does a teacher mark in a year? Your methodology will generate endless debate with no conclusion.

I will give you that you cannot argue anything, but will you agree that you can argue almost anything?

I agree you have more leeway than you would with SoD. But I also think that the added degree of subjectivity is worth the consistency.

It is not worth endless debate. It is easily abused. It takes far more work. It takes research beyond the medium itself. In short, it sucks for answering the question who will win in a galactic war.

If you use literary analysis you will find that the Empire will win anyway. The Empire was intended to be a galaxy spanning military organization, with planet destroying weapons and body armor and armored vehicles and so on. Not comparable to a civilization with a mere 150 planets. But you will not get people to admit this because they subvert what literary analysis truly is, because they refuse to consider the whole. Then you get retards and endless debate over this quote and that quote.

But surely common sense tells us that when the director reuses a matte painting, we’re not actually supposed to imagine this is the same planet. But under SoD, the only evidence we have that we’re on another planet is the dialogue. So under SoD, we should assume that various episodes actually occur on the same planet, because we saw the same city. Since this is clearly preposterous, I’m saying my methodology is probably better.

It is not better for determining who will win in a galactic war. For that you require... numbers. Heard of them?

It would be arrogant if I just started using it, and then insisted that everyone else follow suit. Rather, I am merely proposing it here, explaining why I believe it is superior.

Evidently you have not seen the level of idiocy of certain people who believe a civilization the size of the galaxy and with planet destroying moons will have trouble destroying the Federation. Your methodology will inevitably come to the same conclusion, only it will take far longer and is easily abused. Instead ground rules of visuals only allows for a numerical quantifiable approach that is based on the director getting mostly what he wants with his visuals. In other words your objections are "a grevious nitpick."

[Patrick Degan]

My methodology certainly has shortcomings of its own, but I think that overall, it is better equipped to handle sci-fi television footage than SoD.

It most certainly does not, since it introduces a needless level of complication into the whole picture —something you seem determined not to grasp.

[The Silence and I]

My methodology certainly has shortcomings of its own, but I think that overall, it is better equipped to handle sci-fi television footage than SoD.

It most certainly does not, since it introduces a needless level of complication into the whole picture —something you seem determined not to grasp.

I'd like to say something here.

While I tend to agree that for the purpose of determining who would win a war, using visuals to generate rapid and easily demonstrable numbers is superior. However, I happen to think in this case it is incidental--the GE is simply so huge and so powerful that no other conclusion is possible to an honest, informed person. But if you really want to get as close to the truth as possible, then linearA's method is IMO superior.

When comparing startrek and the galactic empire visuals work fine for the empire and happen to be good enough for startrek, but to compare something much closer--like ST and B5--linearA's method, however tedious and hard to use, is the only way to be certain. Because (IMO--please remember this is all how I see things) Startrek visuals are so poorly produced they cannot be relied on independently of dialog (For the record, AFAIK B5 has adequate visuals to rely on them as we currently do, as does SW).

If I want to know if a Star Destroyer can destroy the Enterprise D I can look at the visual evidence, and that is good enough. But if I want to know how much firepower the Enterprise D can actually dish out and recieve, I need linearA's method. Now maybe I'll never get a solid number, but it is better IMO to have a range of numbers I can count on than a solid number that is based on worthless evidence (Startrek visuals).

Your mileage may vary, but that is how I see things.

[Darth Wong]

When someone says a method is "better", or "closer to the truth", they are presuming that they know the truth, and can evaluate how close the method's output is to that truth. This is a massive question-begging fallacy.

Since we do not know "the truth", how can evaluate that method A or method B comes closer to that truth? Do we evaluate the truth using the assumptions incorporated into method B, and then declare that method B comes closer to the truth? Is the fallacy of this argument not obvious to all observers?

The only fair way to determine which method outperforms the other is to see which method produces predictions which more accurately model future events. This technique of evaluation is not dependent upon the assumptions of either model. And this technique also happens to heavily favour the SoD technique; something I have pointed out before when this topic came up, and something its critics have never answered.

The fact is, once more, that the people who create these shows visualize events based on the visuals they've seen in the movies. The best known example is ST2. In ST2, there was a major dispute behind the scenes between Nick Meyer, who wanted to portray space combat as a dogfight between capships, and the old guard, who wanted to portray it as a long-range exchange of fire. Nick Meyer won out because the visuals were more exciting.

Of course, the people behind the scenes all agreed that this was not realistic. In other words, they agreed that it was not really accurate to the reality of Star Trek. So this would seem as if it's a vindication of linearA's argument. But watch what happens after this film; subsequent script writers watched the movie, committed its visuals to memory, visualized future events after having incorporated those visuals into their conceptualization of Star Trek, and wrote stories consistent with those visuals.

All of a sudden, "manual targeting" became a commonplace tactic when the chips were down in combat. Ships were now routinely positioned so close to each other in combat that a passive gas-sniffing torpedo could actually find its way to the target in seconds. Sisko said onscreen that he wanted to close to "500 metres" before firing (shades of "wait till you see the whites of their eyes"). Romulan cloaked attack tactics were said to typically involve closing to 3km before decloaking and firing. In Nemesis, the ships were so close together that the Enterprise-E was able to literally fire blind and still hit the Scimitar through sheer probability.

In other words, looking toward the future, and weighing these different models of analysis in terms of their predictive ability, visuals can actually defeat writers' intent even in the most literal sense of the word.

[Darth Wong]

I am saying that the visuals we see are not of the same evidential quality as a photograph. They have higher evidential value than an historical text, for certain, but they do not have an evidential value as high as an actual photograph.

If this is what you are saying, then how is that different from my method? According to my method, visuals have greater value as evidence than historical text, which is basically the dialogue. And I never said the visuals were actually as good as real photographs; I only said they should be treated in a manner analogous to the way we treat photographs.

However, I am saying that things like stock footage reuse and recasting of characters are a problem for SoD because this indicates the characters in the show are consistently seeing things which we, the viewer, are seeing differently. This undermines, to an extent, the confidence we can have when we analyze visuals.

Explain why that confidence should be lowered beneath that of "writers' intent", which is easily as malleable, far more difficult to evaluate, and can even change over time (at least a film, once created, stays that way). Once again, you consistently distort "most reliable" into "perfect".

OK, let's go with this example. Suppose Kirk said that the Gorn must have been at least 10 feet tall. Would you say that the Gorn is therefore 10 feet tall, even though he's obviously not? Would you say that because his suit is of low quality, and they couldn't find a 10 foot tall actor, that the Gorn is actually supposed to be 10 feet tall because Kirk said so? I'm curious exactly how you think this sort of thing is supposed to be resolved.

If Kirk was talking about a human being, we would assume Kirk was wrong. But since Kirk is talking about a potentially expensive costume, it’s possible the Gorn he saw was actually 10 feet tall. We’d need to cross-reference this with other instances of the Gorn, to see if it actually appears as ten feet tall in that case as well. If there is no other information available, we just don’t know.

So how does your method improve our ability to analyze this scene, then? What information can you extract from that scene which I can't?

I realize the added uncertainty inherent in the methodology I’m proposing makes debate more difficult, but the alternative is to assume that the Gorn actually appears like that, as per SoD. Furthermore, there is another instance where we see a Gorn, but it is rendered in CGI, and it looks completely different. So how does SoD handle this? Do you say there are two species of Gorn?

Show me the screenshots.

Why? Since you reject the notion that the depiction is visually real in any way, or even presumed accurate, how do you know the "real" Kirk isn't a black guy who stands 7 feet tall?

Again, you’re assuming that once we attribute less reliability to visuals, we’re suddenly in a state of chaos where we don’t know anything for sure. That’s not how it works.

Fine, then give me an example of something you can know for sure using your method.

When Plutarch tells us that Alexander the Great was born in the month of July, how do we know he wasn’t actually lying, and Alexander was actually born in February? We don’t know that for sure – but we take his word because there is no evidence to the contrary, and he is not claiming anything out of the ordinary.

But you don't know for sure. If there were conflicting accounts, you'd be fucked. And in Star Trek, the dialogue conflicts all over the place; as stated previously (and as conceded by you), it is actually less consistent than the visuals.

Likewise, there is nothing extraordinary about Kirk being a white male of average height, nor is there any evidence whatsoever, from any account, that Kirk is actually black. So there would be no reason to assume he’s black.

See above.

You would be able to attribute a higher degree of reliability to visuals from newer productions.

And what degree of reliability do you assign to character dialogue, when it is interpreted through the mind of a fictional character and is often mind-boggling stupid and obviously wrong, in a manner that makes visual effects errors seem trivial in comparison?

SoD can dismiss things as outliers, but I don’t think it’s equipped to handle consistent visual problems. For the entire running length of either Star Trek II or Star Trek III, the characters must be seeing something different than us when they look at Saavik.

What relevance does this have to any of the scientific parameters of these events? If you want to extract scientific data from these films, you use a scientific method. If you want to show something is wrong with this method, you need to show how it is failing to extract accurate scientific data. Harping on something that is totally irrelevant to that kind of data extraction is a red-herring, akin to the "yellow letters in space" thing. It speaks to a kind of inaccuracy which is totally unimportant, like the fact that everyone in movies is always made up to have perfect skin tone even though this is obviously not the case in any realistic scenario.

I admit that SoD is not bound by everything we see on the screen, e.g. the opening credits, or perhaps a microphone that wonders into the shot. But it does not handle things such as recasting or stock footage very gracefully.

Sure it does, for its intended purpose. Your objective seems to be to show that if the method is not perfect, then it is not the best method for our purposes. The conclusion does not follow from the premise. You don't really do anything to provide examples of situations where your method would extract data of superior accuracy to mine; you only point out that my method is not perfect. Well congratulations, Sherlock. But you're still missing the point. Even in your precious Saavik example, can your method extract data that mine can't? Tell me exactly what Saavik really looks like, using your method. Does she look like Kirstie Alley? Does she look like the obscure actress in ST3? Does she look like some imaginary person in the casting director's head? Give me a drawing of what Saavik really looks like, if your method is better at extracting accurate information than mine.

Bullshit. If the director intended for the target to be vapourized, he would have had anyone standing near him killed by the blast wave. This example highlights precisely why your method is goofy; you take unverifiable speculation about the director's intent and elevate it to a level of equality with objective evidence. What the director intended was a visual effect; the visual effect is in fact a far more accurate depiction of the event than any of your "author's intent" nonsense. Do you think the director sat down and thought about physics before making that scene? Of course not. He said "I want it to look like THIS".

No, he did not always have much of a choice in how it looks. Since a real vaporization would have caused a blast wave, that example is not useful for me to illustrate this point, unfortunately.

Nice backpedaling. That example actually shows how your method FAILS. Directors visualize things. That's how they work. They do not create physics models in their heads. You can't handwave away this failure by simply saying it's a bad example and moving on, because it illustrated precisely what is wrong with your thinking. They did probably intend it to represent vapourization. But over the years, they realized that it's obviously not vapourization, because the visuals don't look like vapourization would, which is why the TM made up some technobabble bullshit about "transitioning out of the continuum". Visuals can and do override author's intent, and even the authors themselves will act accordingly.

A better example would be when we see a matte painting of some alien planet, which we saw used three times already in prior episodes as an establishment shot on a different planet. The only way we know that is not the same planet is by appealing to the director’s intent. Clearly, the director intended that to be a different planet.

No, we know it's not the same planet because they say it's not the same planet. I never said that I totally dismiss dialogue, remember? I only said that I'm not going to believe something a character says when it's totally at odds to what I'm seeing. No psychic interpretation of "director's intent" is required. The fact that they look identical can be attributed to planets which look similar but not perfectly identical, and low-quality footage.

And this is really the crux of the problem. You agree that there should be some imaginary sci-fi universe that we assume to exist, which did exist in the mind of the creators at time of production, and which is represented by the films. What you fail to understand is that for directors and producers of TV shows and movies, this imaginary universe is what they visualize, not a physics model. The physics model comes afterwards, based on what they visualized. In other words, the "author's intent" for an original movie or TV show is the visual appearance.

No, the visualization is not necessarily the author’s intent.

Who the fuck said the "author" is the only creator of the shows? The directors, cinematographers, etc. don't count? What about changes which are made in the story at time of direction? They don't count because they were not "author's intent"? Have you ever watched the special features on the movie "Gladiator"? Half of the best scenes in the movie took place because of decisions made by the production staff, not the script writer. Are you saying that these people don't count, and that any changes they make don't count? Is Gene Roddenberry not regarded as the creator of Star Trek despite not writing the vast majority of the material?

The visualization is what the author was able to create within the budget allotted to him, as well as the technology available at the time. A director does not use usually use stock footage to accurately represent what he intends to show. A director uses stock footage because he is on a limited budget. Unless you’re telling me that the producers of Star Trek keep reusing matte paintings because they intend to show us that every planet in the galaxy hired the same architect to design their capital city.

No, they reuse them because they obviously think the two settings look very similar. What can your supposedly superior method reveal about these scenes which mine doesn't?

Are you saying it’s not self-evident to you that the use of stock footage, or last minute recasting of characters, does not imply a divergence from the director’s intent?

Correct. It is not self-evident at all. The director made a conscious decision to do all of those things. Maybe it was to save money, maybe it was because an actor died, whatever. Doesn't change the fac that it was in fact the director's intent; director's intent can change as a film is made. Once again, I recommend you watch the "Gladiator" special features. It is amazing how much a film can be transformed during production. And look at the example of transporters, which were never in the original author's conception of Star Trek but which were added because of the production budget, which did not allow for shuttle landings. Did this stop them from becoming a key player in the Star Trek universe? Nope. Chalk up yet another failure for your approach.

Of course it is. Planets look alike, cities look alike, battle sequences are reused. The chance that any of these things actually represents reality is remote, or outright impossible.

Bullshit. It only means that its precision is not absolute, which is something I have never argued in the first place. Would you deny that, based on the visuals, we can conclude that these cities probably look similar?

That might work, to an extent, with planets. But you’d be straining credibility to an extreme if you use that sort of methodology with cities or battle sequences, to say nothing of recasting.

Show how your method gives us information about these scenes which is somehow not provided by method. Once again, you are using the creationist "attack the best method by showing that it's not perfect" mindset. If you want to show that your method is better, you'll have to do better than harping on problems that, as far as I can tell, your method does not actually help with at all.

How does SoD handle consistent imagery which shows us something which is clearly not what the characters are seeing? Let’s stick with a single example. How does SoD handle the recasting in Star Trek III? Will you admit that Kirk et al must be seeing something different than we are when they look at Saavik?

Sure. But for the purpose of extracting empirical data from the films, it makes precisely zero difference. As far as an analysis of events is concerned, what matters is where she is standing, what she says, whether she operates a weapon, etc. Not her facial features. And once again, if your method is superior, and my method is stymied by its inability to say exactly what Saavik really looks like, then why don't you show us, using your method, exactly what Saavik really looks like?

I did not provide names and screenshots because I thought this would be self-evident. I did a search for “reused stock footage TNG” on Google, and was able to find some examples:

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/incon ... gelone.htm
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/incon ... lanets.htm

So my method would be forced to conclude that these cities look very, very similar. What conclusion would you draw? Do you figure the cities look totally different? Show us how your method produces superior results in this situation.

Also, Star Trek: Generations reuses battle footage from Star Trek VI, the final episode of Deep Space 9 reuses stock footage from various battles in earlier episodes, and TOS and TNG reuse stock footage of ships all the time, (this is a problem because the star field changes from one shot to the next.)

Once again, show us how your method produces superior results in this situation. My method is forced to conclude that the events depicted in these scenes were almost identical, subject to the limited accuracy of the medium. What information can your method give us about these scenes which is superior to mine?

Shitty visuals are mostly a problem for TOS, where the creators didn't really have any idea what kind of physics laws were supposed to be in place.

Shitty visuals are not the only problem. TOS, TNG, the movies, and DS9 use reused footage all the time. How does SoD handle this? Waving it away and saying “these planets probably look the same” strains credibility to the point where all analysis becomes absurd.

Once again, you resort to harping on the same point over and over. I grow tired of it, so after answering this several times already, I'm just going to end this and refer to my responses above.

[Darth Wong]

If I want to know if a Star Destroyer can destroy the Enterprise D I can look at the visual evidence, and that is good enough. But if I want to know how much firepower the Enterprise D can actually dish out and recieve, I need linearA's method. Now maybe I'll never get a solid number, but it is better IMO to have a range of numbers I can count on than a solid number that is based on worthless evidence (Startrek visuals).

Why don't you perform an analysis of Star Trek phasers using this method then, in order to demonstrate its superiority? It's easy to say that method A is not perfect; in the scientific arena, creationists are experts at pointing out the imperfections and uncertainties in science. But proving that method A is not perfect does not automatically lead to the conclusion that method B will produce superior results, and linearA has concentrated all of his efforts on proving that method A is not perfect. He harps on the recasting of Saavik, without explaining how his method would show us what Saavik really looks like. He harps on identical-looking cities due to reuse of sets and mattes, without explaining how his method would show us what these cities really look like. He harps on reused footage in movies like the BOP explosion in Generations and ST6, without explaining how his method would show us what this scene really looked like. B wins by default if A is not perfect, right? I know people get upset if it looks like I overplay the creationist card, but like it or not, this is a textbook creationist debate technique.