City On The Edge Of Forever: Spock uses primitive technology to construct a machine to access the information stored in his tricorder. Genius is genius regardless of surroundings...
The Empath: Spock has the flash of insight that his own resistance to the energy field is what is empowering it.
The Galileo Seven: When all hope is lost Spock chooses to bet all on a desperate act, he jettisons all the remaining fuel to signal the Enterprise, knowing having done so within seconds the shuttlecraft will spiral into the atmosphere and burn up
I don't consider him a rationalist character. He is always hung up about what is logical, as opposed to what is observably right.
Uhura: Mr. Spock, sometimes I think if I hear that word "frequency" again, I'll cry.
Spock: It is illogical for a communications officer to resent the word "frequency."
What kind of answer is that? "Too bad you dislike your job?" A rationalist answer would have been something along the lines of "Can you explain why, maybe we can find out what went wrong with your feelings and find a way to fix them or work them around?"
There is a difference between rationality and smartassery.
Hence "(straw)" in the title. See e.g. this summary of a talk by Julia Galef about the difference between being a Straw Vulcan (memetic hazard warning: TVTropes) and being an actual practitioner of rationality.
[EDITED to link to the LW article that has a transcript of the original talk an a link to the YouTube video.]
Some people, like Keith Henson, argue that we've blown the thermodynamic opportunity to get off planet because we've already squandered the best quality fossil fuels.
This seems very strange. First, most of our rockets use hydrogen and oxygen. One doesn't directly need to use fossil fuels. Second, there's still a massive amount of energy available in terms of fossil fuels, it just involves lower energy return on energy investment. Third of all, there are many other sources of energy, with nuclear power being one of the more obvious, but massive amounts o... (read more)