is q squared a good book?

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Nobody wants their best friend hooking up with their wife or ex-wife. You have to be some kind of ridiculously understanding person.

Jack has no right to complain about who his EX-wife spends her time with. If Jack really was Picard's friend, he'd have understood.

 

[borgboy]

Exactly. People don't own each other. Not only did Jack have no claim on Beverly, but his reaction to her relationship with Picard...extreme is barely the word. I've never been able to think of Jack as the nice guy we always hear about after reading this book.

 

[Stoek]

Well in all fairness Trelane was upping the crazy so any minor problems Jack may have had were turned into major ones.

 

[Csalem]

I can only imagine what kind of flow charts Peter must have used to keep track of all the overlapping time lines and alternate realities!

I remember in Voyages of the Imagination he said one of his biggest difficulties was telling the characters apart from their alternate-timeline counterparts when they all got together. On tv it would have been easy as the uniforms could be subtley different or haircuts but in the written word it was much more difficult conveying to the reader which Picard was in the scene.
Ultimately I think he did a great job of working it all out.

 

[JD]

It's better to say that there are some hypotheses towards that end. Daniel Dennett is the major promoter of such ideas if you want to investigate further, but there's no actual evidence to suggest so. Granted, there's no evidence yet against it either, but burden of truth and parsimony and all that. (Dennett claims that the involvement of nanolevel structures in the brain implies a quantum basis for consciousness, if I remember correctly, but that's just supposition on his part.)

Even if it were true, though, I'll suggest the thing that moved me off of that as a resolution: if a person's selection of an action is based on a random flip of a coin or roll of a die somewhere at the submolecular level in their head rather than based on personal preferences or experiences and a weighted consideration of the options and their consequences, can you really consider that to have been them "making a decision"?

What Idran said. More to the point, even if there are quantum-level structures involved in neuron activity, it still takes a whole bunch of different ones working together to produce a given brain state or change thereof. And when you get a bunch of different quantum-level entities interacting in an ensemble, you know what we call that? Classical physics.

Interesting, thanks for the info guys.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

And when you get a bunch of different quantum-level entities interacting in an ensemble, you know what we call that? Classical physics.

Actually I would call it "Kraftwerk."

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Nobody wants their best friend hooking up with their wife or ex-wife. You have to be some kind of ridiculously understanding person.

George Harrison was cool with his ex-wife Patti Boyd getting married to his best friend Eric Clapton. He had some statement to the effect of, "I'd rather she was with him than some jerk." I think Harrison might have even best man at their wedding, IIRC. I have a thing in my stand-up act about it.

 

[Starbreaker]

It happens. Most people in life don't act rationally when their ex start dating their best friends. That's why we have Investigation Discovery.

 

[Idran]

Jonny's point is that no it's not "nobody", and no you don't have to be "ridiculously understanding". Just the normal amount of understanding is fine for being okay with it enough to not scream and raise a fuss and accidentally kill your ex-wife.

 

[DimesDan]

And Starbreakers point is.......

Actually, instead of arrogantly and condescendingly assuming I know what he meant, I'd rather here what he meant, same with Jonny too.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

My point was simply that there are people who are that understanding and forgiving in the world.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

George Harrison was cool with his ex-wife Patti Boyd getting married to his best friend Eric Clapton. He had some statement to the effect of, "I'd rather she was with him than some jerk." I think Harrison might have even best man at their wedding, IIRC. I have a thing in my stand-up act about it.

Not only was Harrison a guest at Clapton and Boyd's wedding, but Paul McCartney, Harrison, and Ringo Starr played a live set!

One other interesting Harrison/Clapton/Boyd piece of trivia. Sir John Hurt was the witness at the guitar-off where Harrison and Clapton dueled with guitars over whether Boyd would stay with Harrison or leave him for Clapton. Hurt and Harrison had been close friends since the late 60s.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

One other interesting Harrison/Clapton/Boyd piece of trivia. Sir John Hurt was the witness at the guitar-off where Harrison and Clapton dueled with guitars over whether Boyd would stay with Harrison or leave him for Clapton. Hurt and Harrison had been close friends since the late 60s.

That's interesting, I've never heard that before.

 

[DonIago]

I'm reasonably sure it says right in the book that Trelane was manipulating Jack toward being more crazy than he might have been otherwise as well. Put another way, Jack wasn't going to stay sane because Trelane didn't want him to.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

That's interesting, I've never heard that before.

Here's an old newspaper article on the Harrison/Clapton guitar duel, with quotes from Hurt. It happened in 1973, either during the filming of Hurt's Little Malcolm (which Harrison produced) or shortly thereafter.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Here's an old newspaper article on the Harrison/Clapton guitar duel, with quotes from Hurt. It happened in 1973, either during the filming of Hurt's Little Malcolm (which Harrison produced) or shortly thereafter.

Hmm. I wasn't aware that Harrison had produced any films before he put together Handmade to finance Monty Python's The Life of Brian. I'm learning all sorts of George Harrison trivia in this thread!

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

I'm reasonably sure it says right in the book that Trelane was manipulating Jack toward being more crazy than he might have been otherwise as well. Put another way, Jack wasn't going to stay sane because Trelane didn't want him to.

I'm OK with that.

And besides, Trelane - being a Q - can simply make people crazy if he wants, amirite?

 

[JonnyQuest037]

And besides, Trelane - being a Q - can simply make people crazy if he wants, amirite?

Interesting question, but I would guess no. I can't recall ever seeing any indication that Q could or would mess with someone's free will. If he could, episodes like TNG's "True Q" or VOY's "Death Wish" seem fairly pointless. Q just makes the people do what he wants them to, and zap, episode's over. So I'm guessing that perhaps Q isn't quite as omnipotent as he likes to pretend.

Unless you mean that Trelane could manipulate Jack Crusher into going crazy. That I could totally see.

 

[Idran]

Interesting question, but I would guess no. I can't recall ever seeing any indication that Q could or would mess with someone's free will. If he could, episodes like TNG's "True Q" or VOY's "Death Wish" seem fairly pointless.

What about when Amanda made Riker love her briefly in "True Q"? That's kind of into that area.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

What about when Amanda made Riker love her briefly in "True Q"? That's kind of into that area.

I haven't seen either of those episodes in well over a decade, so if that happened, I totally forgot about it and I stand corrected.

Just taking a stab in the dark at an explanation, maybe that was some sort of adolescent Q power that they only have for a short period of time?