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What's really hilarious is that there IS an episode where The Doctor's backup copy is lost during a mission, only to be rediscovered hundreds of years later by the inhabitants of the world that Voyager visited (not to be confused with the episode where The Doctor's program is abducted by what can only be called a "fence" for stolen tech.) Given that they had the ability to duplicate him once, (not to mention, had enough leftover spare parts to give to the Hirojen) one can only guess why they didn't make better use of him.

http://www.nitcentral.com/oddsends/defibril.htm

The Defibrillator File

Begun on July 15, 1996

Latest Defib-Flubs from the Guild

While doing research for a novel that I've been working on for six years and I came across a piece of information that absolutely stunned me. I was discussing emergency room procedures with Darla Neff--an emergency room nurse--and we eventually got around to the "defibrillator."

You seen it in action hundreds of times on television. The doctor or nurse grabs these paddles, slaps them on a patient and jolts the patient to get their heart started when the patient goes flatline. Except . . .

That's not how a defibrillator works!!

According to Darla, a defibrilator "de-fibrillates." When the heart is fibrillating, it is fluttering. The heart monitor looks like a series of "V"s. The defibrillator jolts the heart back into a normal rhythm so it can actually pump blood to the body. If a person is flatline, Darla says that the defibrillator won't do any good!

This piece of information was absolutely amazing to me. How many times have we seen this on television? I've seen it so many times that I think I could operate the machine. Darla tells me that if you have a person who is flatline, you either have to do chest compressions or use an external pacemaker or use drugs.

I mentioned this little tidbit in one of my "This Week At NitCentral" updates and promptly received the following comments from Robert J. Woolley, a medical doctor, "You're completely correct about defibrillators. What's a little scary is that I've watched a fair number of my fellow doctors (not just TV docs!) shock a flatline heart, which, as your consultant pointed out, does no good. I suspect that this is not because of television portrayals, but because the image of jump-starting cars is so deeply ingrained. The correct procedure is to administer epinephrine and/or atropine, and hope that these produce an irregular rhythm that you can then shock back to a regular one."

Then Lee Lorenz came up with a great idea. He suggested that I start a file to see how many instances we can find of incorrect usage of a defibrillator. Since I had just seen several on an avalanche of American Gothic episodes, I thought this would be fun!

Here's the rules for submission: The scene must show a heart that is flatline on a monitor. While the heart is flatline, the scene must show someone attempting to shock the heart back to life using the defibrillator. When you submit, please include the name of the series, the name of the episode (if possible, if not just include a line saying what the episode was about), a short description of the scene and, if possible, the date you saw it. I won't have time to double-check them so let's try to be accurate out there!

ADDITION TO THE RULES (April 27, 1997): Some have said that it is possible that the monitor might not be calibrated correctly and therefor show a flatline when in fact there's fibrillations. So . . . we will make this allowance. If the code blue team administers a drug intercardially (sticks it in their heart) before they shock the patient the first time, we'll let that one pass. (As was done in a recent X-File episode, "Synchrony.") This also means that with this additional rule, some of the defib-flubs a listed here may actually not be defib-flubs if they were sent in prior to April 27, 1997 because members of the Nitpickers Guild didn't know to check for the injection! (Always need to cover our bases!)

I'll start us off with the ones I saw in the last six episodes of American Gothic.

American Gothic: To Hell and Back (7/3/96). A woman goes flatline. The monitor shows it and the nurse substatiates it. The doctor calls for the paddles. The scene cuts away. When we come back, the doctor is using chest compressions. Then, the crash cart rolls in. The doctor start hallucinating and the nurse steps in with the paddles

Sure, but let us expound to an equivalent.[snip analogy failing]

For your next trick, explain why "Atlas Shrugged" and "Principia Mathematica" would make poor Saturday children's cartoons...

Time travel and existentialism have always been fundamental components of "Star Trek," so obviously any attempt to transpose context will result in humorous chaos. (Assuming you didn't utterly ruin the joke through zealous overdescription...)

Shatner on Enterprise is just silly.

If you spend any time whatsoever deconstructing any Star Trek series, "silly" is what you're going to come up with every time. (Ask Phil Farrand.) Even when the stories are internally consistent. I challenge you to listen to just one line of technobabble - randomly selected from any series - with a rational ear and not crack up laughing. Come on. It's Star Trek.

Here is An Excerpt from NBC's 2000 Olympics coverage.

There are many nitpicker sites on the net...

One of my favorites is Nitpicker Central.

You might like this site. We hang out there and nitpick stuff like movies, Star Trek, etc...

Oh wait: it is

There are plenty of us out there to nit pick the entire Star Trek canon :-)

May I recommend Nitpicker's Central for nitpicking Star Trek?

Besides, the Star Trek systems aren't very secure. They may even be less secure than Windows!

Think about it. Any alien can beam onto Voyager, and know how to use the computers and take over the ship. Among some groups of fans, this is called an "Invader Friendly OS".

Even though these books were "Unauthorized", they fall well under the fair use criteria.