Heh.. I listen to the Huffington Post podcast now because it helps me go to sleep and I was woken up to what must've been an hour of the science of Star Wars. They would've probably gone for another day or two if the host didn't interrupt them, three or four times, to say they were out of time.

The American Academy for the Advancement of Science called HuffPo, quote, The Biggest Shitfarting Fucktards, unquote.

They could mean anything, or nothing at all!

Didn't a teleportation mishap happen in one of the movies? It kind of freaked me out too.

Star Wars the Motion Picture had the mishap. Fortunately the people in the accident didn't live for very long.

Hell is just a word.

So far, in physics, we can't read a quantum state without destroying it, so duplication in situ seems unlikely, even for a microsecond. By the time your nervous system has passed through the vacuum of space (try not think of information leakage or virtual particle noise or time dilation caused by accelerating your atoms to near lightspeed like the transporter is the Large Redshirt Collider) and is being reassembled, it probably doesn't qualify as "existing" in either place, and is just computer code (which would have to be compressed and encoded as a zip or something) existing as the starship's power grid and some kind of transtator data tape.

You're either dead long before the beam leaves the ship or the whole of your existence never exceeded quantum mechanics anyway, and what you are is a cloud of particles interacting with your form that is your age in years lightyears in diameter, made more complicated if you're on a star ship with a warp drive.

it's a lot more fun to think about it, rather than just pussing out like the guys in the video did.

Transporters are television editing equipment as a device you use on people, it's the most HP Lovecraft thing on Star Trek, and is always slightly more horrible sounding than awesome sounding.

Hi Meme! Did you see the new Star Trek movie? I did, I thought it was good. I liked the new lightsabers and the black Stormtrooper guy, what about you?

I liked it too. Black stormtrooper guy is hot.

Seriously, did you notice how much more chest rocked the gap in that jacket than when Poe wore it? Did you all notice there was a character named Poe?

I did notice that. At first I found him to be a compelling character with some great lines and palpable swagger, but then the screenwriter bungled Poe, and that whole You Know Which Part stood out as one of the film's dumbest moments (and let's be honest, there were many dumb moments). Poe would have worked great as Finn's Kamina or Obi-Wan figure, an inspirational badass whose vacated role Finn could grow into over the course of the movie, but then for no good reason the entire setup got lampshaded, and it was like, oh, nevermind, disregard that/ cocks. Instead of Finn becoming a hero in his own right, he remained the team's wimpy comic relief, damselling it up with Mary Sue Skywalker while Poe - who should have died gracefully - got to do all the cool-ass explodey, space dog-fighting stuff.

At this point, the new team is basically Jar-Jar, Lampshade, and Mara Katarn. :(

I don't know those names, I'm not into the expanded universe stuff.

Jar-Jar was the breakout character from the Prequel Trilogy; he is similar to Black Stormtrooper, in that they are both comical buffoons and they are both clearly intended to be black. Lampshade is Poe, a reference to the lampshading trope, i.e. when something implausible occurs, but instead of resolving the plot hole, the writer calls attention to it briefly and then moves on. Finally, Mara Katarn (Rey) is a reference to Mara Jade and Kyle Katarn, the EU's most notorious Mary Sues. (Star Wars has always been filled with Mary Sues, but Rey's shaping up to be the most egregious example in the primary canon. Imagine if "A New Hope" ended with Luke Skywalker beating Darth Vader in his very first lightsaber duel!)

Hopefully the next one will be better. According to the previews I saw, they will be bringing back Spock and Bones.

I remember seeing ads for "Spock Must Die!" (with an exclamation point) and I was intrigued.

If I had to explain the transporters, I would argue that they mess with the concept of location, so that all the matter in your location is in two places at once. Almost like a stargate, but instead of a two-dimensional portal it would be more like a three-dimensional container. That works well enough except for transporter malfunctions, but most transporter malfunctions are a complete clusterfuck anyway, where people turn into children or spider people or evil twins.