Baltar's Blinky Machine
From Wiki Frakr
Baltar's Blinky Machine, sometimes known as a "Cylon Detector", was an ingenious device carefully crafted by Gaius Baltar for absolutely no useful purpose.
The primary function of the Machine appears to be encouragement of irrational behavior. It achieves this by displaying blinking green squares. The Machine initially malfunctioned and detected a Cylon instead of blinking green. Luckily Baltar, being a genius and all, took the the proper course of action and fixed the Machine so that it would blink green reliably.
The Blinky Machine is powered by blood samples. If the Machine uses the nuclear warhead to bombard the samples with metaphasic radiation through a carbonite matrix, then the positron pathways will break down and activate the flux capacitor, allowing the machine to detect a Cylon in 88 hours. As we have established, this would be bad, and get in the way of blinking the green lights, and Baltar fixed this problem. It has been theorized that Baltar could have further modified the Machine to blink more efficiently, such as by just blinking immediately when it detects a new vial of blood, instead of waiting for hours and then blinking. These theories prove that the theorizers are not geniuses, like Baltar. Duh. That wouldn't give him as much time do other important things, like stretch in his lab.
When the Machine was first created, the Admiral ordered that everyone in the fleet be tested, which worked out for Baltar because it gave him an excuse to hang out in his lab all day and do nothing but stare at the blinking green lights and stretch. But eventually everyone seemed to forget about it and it disappeared into the existential ether for eternity.
Trivia
- Staring at blinking green lights all day, every day, may be bad for your vision.
- Hanging your nads out around an unshielded nuclear warhead is rather silly. No wonder you can't get it up for Starbuck!
"Oh bugger off, how was I supposed to know that New Caprica was a cold, arid wasteland? It looked bright green to me, I thought it was a jungle! And why is this ship green? Damnit, somebody make the room stop blinking!" - Gaius Baltar
