I’ll stand by the position that the Enterprise augment virus arc was an error, and the “explanation” for Klingon ridges is the same one you should use for the bridge of the Enterprise looking like it was cobbled together from plywood and plastic beads. This issue was best left to Worf’s lampshade in DS9 Trials & Tribleations.

It’s really interesting which visual differences humans will accept unthinkingly and which we will demand answers for. The Klingon ridges thing comes up constantly, but I have yet to see anyone earnestly ask why all the characters in Lower Decks have huge eyes and unnaturally uniform coloration, or why hand phaser beams in TOS go so much more slowly than later phasers and why everyone agrees to stay really still while they are being fired.

Nomadic people don’t just wander around aimlessly, and there are big differences in how desirable different territory is for nomadic hunter-gatherer humans. The principle is the same as with nomadic pastoralists: your group has a territory which can sustain them when hunted on/gathered from/grazed/etc over the course of the year, and your group will wander within that space in a deliberate pattern. If some other group decides to “just move on to” your group’s territory, hunting the animals and foraging the plants that your group knows they are going to need to survive the year, that’s an existential threat to you. And you can’t “just move on” yourself without wandering into the territory of yet more groups whose territory borders yours, and who will react violently to your presence for the same reasons.

Given the choice between fleeing to who knows where and fighting who knows who for the privilege of moving, or staying right where you are and fighting for the land you know your group can survive on, you stay and fight.

Humans spread out across the earth as the losers of these conflicts (those who survived, anyway) fled until they stumbled on new-to-humans territory, often displacing or eradicating groups of more “primitive” hominids they found there. This process continues until just about everywhere which humans can reach and which can support human life has humans in it. But expanding populations, the occasional natural disaster, and normal human frustration that their territory sucks while their neighbors have it great (which was often true; again, not all land is the same to a nomadic hunter/gatherer) meant that these conflicts were constantly reignited.

There was organized violence deployed by groups of humans against other groups of humans long, long before anything we would recognize as warfare. Particularly brutal violence too, because the objective was not to conquer other people (something which only makes sense once agriculture is the dominant mode of sustinence), but to either drive off or exterminate a rival group so you can use their territory for yourself.

And we don’t even need to talk about people here: we have records of chimpanzees fighting small scale wars of harassment and extermination against neighboring groups.

Pre-modern, pre-civilization, pre-aggriculture, pre-you-name-it human life was far more violent than what we deal with today.

Regarding the future uniforms, the same uniforms appear in most portrayals of “future starfleet” during the TNG era, such as DS9 The Visitor. I don’t believe they are meant to indicate a connection between alternate futures beyond being the next step for Starfleet uniform designs (although the uniforms shown for a similar time period in Picard turn out to be different anyway).

Regarding your question more broadly, yes. And also no. Both, really.

I’m not sure Q recognizes or cares about the distinction between spinning up an entirely bespoke simulated reality for Picard to do his thing in, versus altering the past such that branching timelines are created and shuttling Picard’s consciousness between them before ultimately closing them off. Or whatever other myriad mechanisms an omnipotent being would have for triggering the events portrayed. Nor is there any real way for us the viewer or Picard the participant to distinguish between those things. What is real, what clearly matters both to Picard and to Q, is that Picard did pass a test, and that Picard remembers those events in a way which will influence his future actions and relationships.

Civilization 4 was good at launch. Naturally it got even better over time.

Worth a mention that 4 is the most recent of these games released primary on physical hardware. That meant patching was a more difficult process so they actually had to hire a bunch of play testers to test stuff (and fix the problems they found). Contrast that to the approach of the most recent three games, which had their customers pay $70 for the privilege of being beta testers.

This is a shitty way to develop games. We should be mad about it because we deserve better.

I count eight Kims (two of them only partially visible) in that shot of the prison cell, and there’s a fair bit of room around the corner for more to be hidden. I think it’s also easy to believe there are more cells containing more Kims just down the hall.

It’s reasonable to assume that the Defiant class’s 50 crew compliment is pretty close to a bare minimum already. 16-17 active at any one time is a pretty short list as it is, with roughly half that posted to the bridge during normal operations and most of the rest in engineering, plus a transporter chief, doctor, and other specialists. Having two shifts of reserves is crucial for covering both a long term assignment and for battle situations: you need to keep the crew as fresh as possible in the long run, and in combat you need those people to fill in for casualties and act as damage control, security, and emergency medical personnel. So unless Section 31’s strategic level idiocy extends all the way down to inane meddling in shipboard operations (possible, these guys are morons with dangerously inflated egos!), it should be safe to assume that the Anaximander was supposed to be staffed with about 50 crew.

That sidesteps the question of why all of these comically evil people are okay with using this arbitrary contest to determine succession, instead of the usual route of organically murdering each other until someone emerges who is good enough at disposing of potential assassins that they keep the throne for a while?

I didn’t watch the movie, so I’m probably missing something. Did Georgiou also have to deal with a bunch of normal assassination plots after officially gaining the throne? Or are we to assume that by virtue of winning this contest, she is widely seen as too dangerous for anyone to attempt to usurp?

Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Barclay?

Yes?

Lieutenant Barklay and the huge, powerful, and successful paramilitary organization who employs him are exactly who is supposed to guard Federation worlds. Which is what they do.

I wonder how common is it for a starship to make their “Senior Science Officer” a two person team.

Clearly many captains don’t see filling the role as a priority: None of the Enterprise D, Voyager, or (until this episode) the Cerritos had a senior science officer posted to the bridge. This makes a fair bit of sense on the grounds that “science” is an extraordinarily broad field and most of the practical, problem-solving sciencing we see tends to fall under the umbrella of engineering, so subject specialists and engineers wind up carrying the load as appropriate. As they should! No science officer can possibly hope to be comparably well versed in any given subject than a more junior officer who happens to specialize in it.

Therefore, although scientific acumen is obviously useful, as is getting as much scientific acumen as possible onto the bridge to quickly react to whatever weird shit a ship encounters, the larger part of the job is going to come down to synthesizing the larger knowledge base of the ship’s contingent of scientists into an actionable answer. The Senior Science Officer should be asking themselves not just “what do I know about this”, but “who else on the ship knows more about this” and, in a pinch, “which of these different ideas are we actually going to try.”

Having two people in the role is beneficial for getting more scientific knowledge on the spot and ready to be used, especially if the two people involved work well together, but it’s a potential liability in that final point where two people can reasonably disagree, but someone is going to have to make a call on what the best option is. In many cases that person is the captain, but when time is scarce and the choice is between things the captain doesn’t understand, the choice is really going to come down to the science officer. And what happens when the two science officers disagree?

In this case, I think the correct choice between our two science heroes would be Tendi. She’s (generally) good with other people, she has actual command experience (in combat situations, no less), she knows the bridge officers better, and they are more familiar with her. Further, T’Lyn is nominally a temporary posting who doesn’t seem to view herself as a serious candidate for the role. All the conventional decision-aiding factors seem to favor Tendi, and we all know she’s qualified.

Which leaves me wondering why this was a particularly difficult decision for Freeman, and why Data recommended this seemingly unconventional solution. Heck, Data barely even saw these two officers working together, as the two of them spent nearly the entire time working independently.

So maybe having multiple “senior” science officers is a normal state of affairs, and the expectation is that the captain will ultimately be able to resolve any final-stage disputes without needing an explicit head of the science division? That’s plausible if potential awkward, and there do seem to be plenty of consoles at the back of the bridge for multiple science specialists to be sitting in.