Shatterrealm

Making a list of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes I would enjoy watching with my kids.

604: "Relics" - Scotty is rescued from suspended animation only to find himself obsolete in the 24th century.

608: "A Fistful of Datas" - a comical holodeck adventure.

610: "The Chain of Command, pt. 1" - Picard is suddenly reassigned and a new captain escalates tensions with Cardassia.

611: "The Chain of Command, pt. 2" - conclusion

614: "Face of the Enemy" - Troi must go undercover as a Romulan and face off her friends without endangering them or the mission.

622: "Suspicions" - Dr. Crusher works on a murder mystery.

624: "Second Chances" - When a transporter accident creates two Rikers, they resent one another.

712: "The Pegasus" - Riker conceals a treaty violation.

724: "Preemptive Strike" - Ro Laren's loyalties are divided between the Federation and Bajoran resistance fighters.

Deep Space Nine:

101: "The Emmisary, pt. 1" - Captain Cisco is assigned to help Bajor transition out of Cardassian occupation. He encounters non-linear, non-corporeal entities at the wormhole next to the station.

102: "The Emmisary. pt. 2" - conclusion.

104: "A Man Alone" - Odo is accused of murder.

113: "Battle Lines" - The space Pope gets lost.

119: "Duet" - Amazing episode. Everybody love.

205: "Cardassians" - A custody battle breaks out over a Cardassian boy raises by Bajorans. Bashir suspects there is more to DS9's tailor than meets the eye.

212: "The Alternate" - Odo's fake dad may have discovered his origins.

222: "The Wire" - Bashir gets a little closer to figuring out Garak, who is experiencing torturous pain.

219: "Blood Oath" - Jedziah Dax is reunited with some old Klingon friends who have a promise to keep.

226: "The Jem'Hadar" - Sisko and Jake go into the Gamma Quadrant, only to encounter an extremely powerful new enemy.  502: "Darmok" - One of the most praised TNG episodes, this misadventure explores the limitations of the universal translator.

503: "Ensign Ro" - Picard must work with a court-martialed Bajoran in order to get to the bottom of a terrorist attack against the Federation.

505: "Disaster" - When an accident traps several members of the crew on different floors of the ship, Troi finds herself in the captain's chair.

516: "Ethics" - Worf is disabled and no longer considers his life to be of any value.

518: "Cause and Effect" - Dr. Crusher realizes the Enterprise is stuck in a time loop.

523: "I, Borg" - The crew attempt to help a lone Borg drone regain his humanity.

525: "The Inner Light" - Considered to be one of the best episodes in the entire franchise.  Finishing this project a decade later, because we have kids now!

326: "The Best of Both Worlds, Pt. 1" - Riker begins to feel his career has hit a dead end. Then the Enterprise comes face-to-face with the Borg.

401: "The Best of Both Worlds, Pt. 2" - conclusion

404: "Suddenly Human" - the Enterprise discovers a wrecked ship with a human survivor, a boy raised by other species. He wants to go home to the people who kidnapped him, but Picard is unsure whether this is the right thing to do.

407: "Reunion" - K'Ehleyr returns to advise Picard, who has been chosen as a neutral party to arbitrate the selection of the new Klingon leader from two candidates, one of whom is suspected to be a traitor.

411: "Data's Day" - During a tense diplomatic mission, Data must also navigate the complex emotional minefield of Miles and Keiko's wedding.

417: "Night Terrors" - The Enterprise becomes trapped at a location that slowly drives its crew to dangerous insanity.

421: "The Drumhead" - A witch hunt breaks out on the Enterprise.

422: "Half a Life" - Troi's mother falls for a man whose culture is forcing him to commit suicide.

426: "Redemption, pt. 1" - Klingon civil war breaks out.

501: "Redemption, pt. 2" - conclusion

I plan to expose my children to many specific things, but I don't want them wasting too much time on Star Trek: The Next Generation. I love Picard and Worf and Data, but man. Most of that show really sucks. I've been watching it on Netflix and keeping track of the episodes that make the cut:

118 - "Home Soil" - A terraforming project is interrupted by the presence of a non-organic life-form.

120 - "Heart of Glory" - Pulled between his Klingon heritage and his human upbringing, Worf comes into conflict with a pair of old-fashioned Klingons commandeering the Enterprise.

220 - "The Emissary" - A half-Klingon woman fom Worf's past boards the Enterprise to help with an upcoming conflict. Stuff gets real.

[Yes. In all of Season 2, there was ONE episode that I thought was really good.]

302 - "The Ensigns of Command" - Star Fleet comes into conflict with a decidedly unrelatable, non-humanoid life form intent on destroying a human colony discovered in its sector; while Picard barters for time, Data is sent to the colony to convince them to flee. Thing is, they don't want to leave.

315 - "Yesterday's Enterprise" - During a pivotal battle, the Enterprise from decades past slips out of its own time, creating a new future where Star Fleet is at war with the Klingons and losing.

317 - "Sins of the Father" - When Worf's dead father is accused of treason, he and his secret brother return to Klingon to clear the family name, uncovering a political agenda.

TO BE CONTINUED

fom The Wall Street Journal, Sunday, February 18-19, 2012

Jonah Lehrer

 

"Ninety-nine hundredths of our activity is purely automatic," the psychologist and philosopher William James famously wrote. "All of our life is nothing but a mass of habits."

James was pointing out that, though we give habits little thought, they define our lives: how much we eat, save or spend, how often we trek to the gym and what we say to our kids each night.

But these compulsions aren't inscribed in our genes or hard-wired into the brain at birth. Scientists are discovering that habits are simply an extreme form of learning, a behavior that's so familiar we no longer need to think about it.

The malleability of habits isn't news to Madison Avenue: Effective commercials show how people can be quickly trained to do something new and then keep on doing it. The secret, it turns out, is the quick combination of a memorable cue and a rewarding experience.

Consider Febreze, a product designed by Procter & Gamble in the 1990s to remove bad odors. As Charles Duhigg recounts in his fascinating new book, "The Power of Habit," Febreze underperformed in early tests and was in danger of being canceled. Consumers couldn't fathom what the product was for.

Febreze didn't become a superstar until the P&G marketing team created an ad campaign based on habit formation. The television spots showed homemakers performing a chore-- making a bed, mopping the kitchen --and then spritzing a little scented Febreze into the air. The spritz was always followed by a big smile.

What's most interesting is that instead of focusing on removing bad smells, the ads set up Febreze-- to which perfume had been added --as the rewad for a bout of cleaning, satisfying the desire to make things smell nice, not just look good. The ads taught consumers a new habit, training them to associate the rewarding positive cue--a spotless space--with the use of Febreze. Before long, the product was a best seller.

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Now we can see how these habits take hold in our brains. In a new paper, the neuroscientist Joe Z. Tsien and collleagues at Georgia Health Sciences University describe a mutant strain of mice that were incapable of developing new habits. While ordinary mice quickly developed the habit of pressuring a lever to get a food pellet (leading to overeating), the mutant mice stopped pressing the lever as soon as they felt full.

These mice were missing a protein known as an NMDA receptor on their dopamine neurons. Normally, these receptors help to generate a big electrial response when an animal is repeatedly exposed to a rewarding cue, such as a food pellet. According to M. Tsien's data, this specific response is what transfoms ordinary learning into an automatic behavior. It doesn't matter if we're learning to overeat or to spray Febreze. That big signal from the NMDA receptor makes the difference.

This isn't the fist time that Mr. Tsien has tinkered with NMDA receptors. A few years ago, he created a mouse strain with too much of the receptor and created a freakishly smart rodent-- Mr. Tsien nicknamed it Doogie --that could learn and remember far better than a normal mouse. He has also showed that younger brains have significantly more of this receptor, which is why they absorb new information and acquire new routines so much more rapidly.

William James would appreciate this research. As he pointed out, the intelligence of humans is inseparable from our reliance on habits, the most mindless of behaviors. That's because they let us reserve brainpower for those things that can't be predicted in advance, those situations without relevant cues. Those are the circumstances that we actually need to think about. We have habits for everything else.

 

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Jared: Wow, you could use that to quit smoking.

Hannah: You could use that to cure Alzheimer's.

Jared: Ah. It always goes back to Alzheimer's.