Hello citizens! CaptainCrumb here with a special treat from the delicious(?) future. That's right, in my hands is a copy of the Official 1978 Star Trek Cooking Manual. Let me explain something: I can't really cook. I could really use a food replicator, so that idealized future seems tantalizing indeed. Unfortunately, this book only covers manual food assembly techniques. I guess that will have to do.

As far as I know, there have been 3 Star Trek cook books attempted. This was the first of them so it seems like a good place to start. The second one was never actually published, so we'll be skipping it for obvious reasons. I'll also probably look into the new Star Trek Cookbook some time in the future.

I don't have any plans for trying to cook something tonight, so we'll have to start with something a little different. This is an old book - it was published a year before I was born. One of the really cool things about it that really shows its age is that it includes a Fortran IV program source listing. That's right - I said IV, not even Fortran 66. Just for the hell of it, I decided to convert it over to ruby, a much more modern language. Be warned, it's still just a conversion of a fortran program so it looks like utter crap.

And now again, in ruby:

food = ' SIHT MARGORP SI' dish = ' NETTIRW NI ATAD' pan = ' LARENEG NARTROF' fryer = ' VI TI YAM NUR N' waffl = ' O KNUJ SENIHCAM'

fmt007 = ' ' * 2 + "n" * 3 + ' ' * 5 + '%2c' * 20 fmt73 = ' ' * 2 + "n" * 3 + ' ' * 5 + '%2c' * 7 + '%12.6f' pad = Array.new(20).fill(20)

puts fmt007 % [ food[1], waffl[3], dish[2], food[12], dish[3], fryer[2], waffl[13], *pad ]

baked = 5 recip = 71.0 / 113 recip *= baked

puts fmt73 % [ waffl[13], food[3], dish[10], waffl[13], waffl[3], pan[6], waffl[4], recip ] puts fmt007 % [ dish[2], pan[5], waffl[6], food[10], fryer[7], waffl[2], dish[10], fryer[4], food[5], waffl[11], dish[1], pan[8], *pad ] puts fmt007 % [ pan[7], waffl[1], pan[14], dish[15], fryer[6], food[3], waffl[9], fryer[8], pan[1], dish[4], waffl[12], *pad ]

May the gods of agile programming spare my tarnished soul. Notice the extra spaces so that we can still use 1-based arrays, fortran style. The *pad is another necessary hack since ruby's C-style sprintf code doesn't like getting too few parameters (oddly enough, it doesn't complain about getting too many).

Next post, I'll actually attempt to cook one of the recipes - the necessary ingredients have already been acquired. Till then...