I remember seeing an interview with J. J. Abrams when the 2009 "Star Trek" came out. One of his first comments in the interview was, "I really felt we needed to ask ourselves, 'What can we learn from Star Wars?'" Um, J. J.? I like Star Wars fine (and am looking forward to "The Force Awakens,") but I love Star Trek for…

It's Obi-Wan's reaction that has always made me side with the explanation that it's an old smuggler's tactic to quote a bunch of gobbledy-gook to a potential new client to see how they react. If the reaction is, "Oh my gosh, that's amazing!," they know they're dealing with a newbie (and can probably get away with…

H. G. Wells' Dr. Giffin approves. (Though, as I recall, his first experiments were on a cat.)

It's been done.

Personally, I love optimistic science fiction, which is one reason I'm more a fan of pre-Abrams Trek (though I agree that even TOS had its "dark" moments). It's been said on this site by a number of others as well, but I think DS9 hit a great balance between showing how bad things could get while still maintaining a…

Honorable mention: L. Frank Baum must have been ahead of his time, because all the houses in the Oz books (written in the early 1900s) are described as being dome-shaped.

Relevant (skip to about 0:55):

Can we just have this as the next Terminator movie instead?

My understanding is that the EMH was indeed intended to fill that "non-human commenter on humanity" role on Voyager (at least initially; in later seasons he shared the role with Seven of Nine) and that Odo was the one to fill that role on Deep Space Nine.

That's an excellent point. My experience with group projects generally matches that of the article—more often than not, additional people just bogs things down. But I've also seen how that can change completely if you have a strong point leader or captain providing clear direction.

This reminds me of something they do in Southern California every summer called the "Pageant of the Masters," in which live actors in makeup and costumes pose on stage as famous paintings. It sounds boring to describe it, but it's actually pretty amazing:

Richard Feynman (as usual) was way ahead of them. In "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!," he writes about an identical experiment he conducted, in the chapter called "You Just Ask Them?" His results were very different, though; in his case, apparently, all the girls said yes.

Growing up in the 70's and 80's, it seemed like lights on electronic devices were always red, green, or yellow. Even my first desktop computer had green characters on a black background. Then, at some point, everything became blue. Blue is my favorite color, so I'm not complaining! But I can't help but wonder what…

Zepfram Cochrane: "What, you don't have a moon in the 24th century?"
William Riker: "Sure we do—it just looks a lot different!"

As someone who does a lot of freelance music composing, I'm always amazed at how well the ideas in these articles about writing transfer over to the work that I do. Apparently the principles involved in creating a great story are very similar to the principles that make for a great piece of music. Thanks for helping…

This is fantastic, though it's not new—I bought a poster version of it at the Exploratorium in San Francisco back in the '90s. I have it hanging in my home office to this day; it helps inspire my creativity as I work on writing music.

Then again... how do we know that's *not* a CG R2-D2 in the photo? :)

You mean he's not??

The Schrödinger's Cat paradox is pretty comparable in its creepiness (as another commenter has pointed out)... you're right, what is it with these people?

I agree; this is a minor pet peeve of mine as well. And a related problem is when they try to show how language has changed in the future, but do it in a way that makes no sense—exemplified by this quote from Star Trek the Motion Picture: "Voyager 6 disappeared into what they used to call a black hole."