What are your favorite peculiarities of the Star Trek series or individual peculiarities of certain characters?

Here are some of mine:

1) Lack of seat belts on the Enterprise’s bridge
2) Incapacity of Data to use grammatical contractions like can’t or doesn’t
3) The explanation how inertial dampers work
4) The universal translator which works for almost any language galaxy-wide
5) The Ferengi’s distaste for clothed women
6) The kissing of holographic women on the holodeck

There’s a great book I read a couple of years ago, called ‘The Physics of Star Trek’. Who has heard of it, or read it?

From Wikipedia: The Physics of Star Trek is a 1995 nonfiction book by Arizona State University professor Lawrence M. Krauss. It discusses the physics involved in various concepts and objects described in the Star Trek universe. He investigates the possibility of such things as inertial dampers and warp drive, and whether physics as we know it would allow such inventions. He also discusses time travel, light speed, pure energy beings, wormholes, and other concepts. The book includes a foreword by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. The Physics of Star Trek was met with generally positive reviews. It became a national bestseller and sold more than 200,000 copies in the United States. As of 1998, it was being translated into 13 different languages. It was also the basis of a BBC television production. Krauss got the idea for writing the book from his publisher, who initially suggested it as a joke. Krauss dismissed the idea but later thought that using Star Trek might get people interested in real physics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Physics_of_Star_Trek

Sure, we all know Star Trek is fiction, but warp drives and transporters and holodecks don’t seem altogether implausible. Are any of these futuristic inventions fundamentally outlawed by physics as we understand it today? The Physics of Star Trek takes a lighthearted look at this subject, speculating on how the wonders of Star Trek technology might actually work—and, in some cases, revealing why the inventions are impossible or impractical even for an advanced civilization. An example is the “dematerializing” a person for transport would require about as much energy as is released by a 100-megaton hydrogen bomb. (from Amazon)