Science outstrips Science-Fiction. Again.

[gridlore]

A few weeks ago we picked up all five seasons of Babylon 5 at CostCo. I've been reveling in them a few episoides at a time (Great Maker, I need to do a Centauri costume) and have reached Season 3.

Where I found a funny.

Passing Through Gethsemane is one of the strongest of the stand-alone episodes of B5, in my opinion. The story concerns the order of monks who have come to B5 to study alien religions. Specifically, Brother Edward, who experiences a series of events that make him question who he really is.

The funny comes when Edward asks the computer to do a search on the following parameters: A black rose, the phrase "Death Walks Among You", the name Charlie or Charles, and a murdered woman. The computer announces that the search will take four hours.

I guess Google went out of business.

Speaking of Google, go there and enter the following: Zodiac, Benicia, San Francisco Chronicle

What comes up, how many hits, and how long did it take? Assuming that B5 has a complete library database, the phrase alone should have led Edward to the answers he was seeking.

Just amusing that they would put up with four-hour searches.

Comments

[crankyoldgoat.livejournal.com]

yeah, however, we don't know exactly how large the database is now that there are hundreds of other races with their databases also in place.

and, given Google's tendancy to retrieve hundreds if not thousands of irrelevant entries, the additional time might have been the application of extensive AI to weed out the crap.

plus, with limited space to put things on a space station, and preference obviously being given to processes that keep the station working, such a request would obviously be in the low priorty queue for any processors to work on.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

What you and jilesa said. Four minutes to search, four hours to prune the results to the probably relevant.