I would think that programmed cell-death is also a way of making sure we don't have runanway growth... which is precisely what happens in cancer.
I'm just speculating here, but what's to say that we didn't have "immortality" at the cellular level before? Perhaps cancer cells are a throwback to this earlier form. Everyone knows that cancer cells keep reproducing until they take down the host with them. That's not a very successful strategy. Perhaps there were organisms that kept growing and reproducing without dying. Eventually the environment couldn't support them, and they could have all died. A strategy around this was probably to have programmed cell death whereby the cells would die off after a certain number of divisions. That way, the population would be somewhat constant, and there wouldn't be such a burden on resources. Furthermore, the dead cells could actually return some of the consumed resources back to the environment. In the long run, this would be more favourable... but once again, I am merely speculating.
Somewhat along the same lines, Carl Zimmer also talked about "resurrecting the genome" of a mammalian ancestor from about 80 million years ago. Snippets of the genome are present in all mammals today. By comparing the genomes of various mammals, they were able to come up with a pretty good approximate of the genome. This chart shows how much of the original genome different mammals have. Surprisingly, humans have lost only 25% of the original genome, whereas rats and mice have lost more than twice that. I would have thought otherwise since the earliest mammals were shrewlike... but I'm not a biologist/geneticist/whoever studies these things.
He also wrote this article some time ago that talked about Resurrecting the Genome. Here is another article (by him) on the same topic, that appeared on NY Times.
Once thing I've noticed about wikipedia is that articles are updated within hours of new information or breaking news. I don't see that happening with Encarta, due to this reviewing process.
Under wikipedia, the information is GPL'ed. They even say that you should contribute only if you want to (possibly) see your words be ripped apart and modified mercilessly. Wikipedia's content is covered by the FSF's GNU Free Documentation License
So does this information belong to MS, or everyone?
Seems like a good idea. Although as a somewhat frequent wikipedia contributor, I like the idea of seeing my words in "print" (for lack of a better word) immediately. The article says that you would submit your encyclopedia article which would be reviewed, and then edited by a bunch of reviewers. So the turnaround time is definitely longer than wikipedia.
Fostering a community spirit might be somewhat harder, I think due to the fact that the community isn't really actively involved in editing each other's works and contributing. It still goes through a review process, and the reviewers have the final say.
Wikipedia's strength (and some might say, weakness) is due to the large userbase that works on articles. Hence there is a broad spectrum of opinions and views when in the end sort of balances out. Would there be some sort of inherent bias due to the review process? I mean, does there have be any set of "officially sanctioned" view? Wikipedia has an article on Wikipedia criticisms. Can we expect to see an article that criticizes Microsoft or MS Encarta ON MS Encarta? That would be interesting.
I never use cmd. I use bash (or zsh) on cygwin. It is remarkably powerful and does everything I need.
I can't even imagine working on cmd without the things I take for granted on bash. piping, redirection (yeah, they exist on cmd, but not as powerful as on bash/zsh/ksh/whathaveyou), symlinks, advanced scripting and so on and so forth. Further more you have such a rich toolset with cygwin. You can do a whole bunch of stuff with grep, sed, and awk and a cool one-liner. Try doing that on cmd. I'm sure MS has it in them to create a really good shell language. But I guess they won't implement something new because like in the case of IE, they don't think that their customers need new features because they haven't "told them about it".
Thank God. I can't count the number of times I've had to deal with the stupid permission settings in Windows. Even for a simple thing like sharing files and folders over a home network. Their system is so convoluted and just completely stupid - pointing and clicking through various menus to set attributes... conflicting attribues... and all kinds of other crap. I was trying to set up access permissions on a home networked machine whereby it would authenticate against another machine on the same network. But you can't do that with "Workgroups". Only "Domains". All I have is a small home network of 3 machines - I have to set up a Domain Controller now? Why the distinction? All the "features" that microsoft has for their permissions system are simply inane and counterintuitive. To keep myself from pulling out all my hair, I just set the permissions to Everyone so that everyone and their mom on the home network can access the folder. But since it's just me at home, that's alright. And even then I've had trouble with that.
I'm glad they've decided to scrap it and move to a more unix-like. The next thing they should do is change their "automated task scheduler" tool. Make it more like cron. "at" just sucks.
Well, I think I know what part of the reason is. In a lot of Universities, they switched from C++ to C++ around 1998 or 1999. A lot of these people are coming into the workforce now. They are loathe to study anything else, since they only depend on what the university taught them. Basically, they are just tailormade computer scientists/engineers. They do not have the drive or urge to go out and learn something new. They basically don't even try to find out what's new because they only know what their courses taught them. A lot of them also joined the CS programs because "there's money to be made in computers". There are certain techonologies I like better than others, so as a personal choice I will use the one I like. But if I'm told I need to use the other technology (the one I don't particularly like, or know), then I'll poke through documentation and try and learn it. For example, I don't particularly like ColdFusion. But I had to use it once because that's what the department used. In another scenario, they were using CF, but I suggested that they change to PHP, which they did.
Anyway, so these "fanboys" know Java like the back of their hand, but don't want to switch to anything else. Which is why, just like the GP said, they will attack anything that could invalidate their "experience".
What I've noticed a lot of times is that Engineers can't write documentation and requirements worth crap. Ok, so I shouldn't make such a blanket statement. Some engineers can write well, but most can't. I think this will do two things:
a) Help computer engineers describe their program's requirements better so others can follow them better.
b) Help beginning computer programmers make the connection between a natural language description of their program and the program itself. For example, this can help them understand concepts of OOP programming (nouns->objects, verbs->functions, adjectives->properties).
It's not true that programmers don't always write requirements. One of the classes I had to take in college dealt with the Software Engineering/Development Lifecycle. One of the things we had to do was to create a requirements specification for our program. We had to write it in a concise manner so as to map it to actual parts of our code. From the requirements document, we went to a UML software (Rational Rose) and from there, to the (skeleton) code. That's what this software does, except it encourages us to write proper descriptions in the beginning itself, and then maps that to skeleton code.
Soft part preservation - Soft tissues are preserved only under exceptional conditions. Examples include preservation of Siberian Mammoths (freezing in permafrost), Pleistocene cave faunas and older mummified remains (dessication), and insects and small animals preserved in lithified tree sap (amber). Soft parts can also be preserved after being replaced by minerals.
Original hard parts - Resistant materials such as calcium, silica, and calcium phosphate are sometimes preserved as original hard parts in shells, bones, and teeth.
Recrystallized hard parts - It is common, however, for original hard parts to be altered during diagenesis and after lithification. Unstable minerals such as aragonite will recrystallize to a more stable form such as calcite. Mineral crystals within an organism's hard parts my regrow to become larger and consolidated. Often recrystallization destroys fine, internal detail within a fossil.
Carbonization - Organic-laden hard parts and soft parts can be preserved as a thin film of organic carbon. This occurs when the organic material is preserved undecayed through burial. As heat increases throughout burial the volitile components of the organic material (N, O, H, and S) are driven off leaving a thin film of black carbon behind.
Replacement - Chemical reactions that occur during diagenesis can result in the molecule by molecule replacement of mineral for mineral or mineral for organic tissue. Replacement can often preserve exquisite detail in fossils.
Silicification - replacement of calcite by silica.
Pyritization - replacement of calcite or soft tissues with pyrite
Phosphatization - replacement of low phosphate apatite with high phosphate apatite.
Permineralization - Porous organic structures such as wood and bone are often preserved by the mineral infilling of the pore spaces. A common way of 'petrifying' wood and dinosaur bone.
It would have been helpful if the scientists had provided a hypothesis on the preservation of the tissues. I googled this phenomenon and there seems to be a rather broad definition for "soft tissue". Soft Tissue, it appears, can be preserved in many ways (see above). I'm curious as to how this tissue survived micro-organisms, mineralization/calcification, carbonization, or simply, or even dehydration. How was it able to remain soft enough to be squeezed?
I'm slightly skeptical. The article talks about soft tissue, but none of the scientists even try to explain how soft tissue could have survived for seventy million years?
Disgust is an evolutionary mechanism for disease-avoidance. It is pretty much a gut/instinctive reaction. For example, we feel squeamish when we see something gross (rotting meat, dead things, infected wounds, dog crap, and other disgusting stuff). All of these sources of disgust are also potential sources of disease. So evolutionarily speaking, individuals that didn't mess around with potential sources of disease survived, while the others that decided to mess with it, didn't.
It is so obvious. He has had previous GPL violations. There was a page that listed them, but I can't find it anymore. He has made a lot of other software that was based off other software under the GPL. Then there is also the fact that he originally claimed to have written from scratch and then there's the time he claimed that he fired a co-programmer. WTF?! He said he had written it from scratch! Then what about the bogus explanation about variable and function names "sounding the same" because there are only "certain ways to do things". The man is a liar - plain and simple.
No, black holes by themselves do not emit light since nothing can escape from beyond the event horizon. The light is just a small part of a large range of electromagnetic radiation released by the black hole. This radiation comes from the accretion disk around a black hole, where matter that is spiralling into the black hole starts heating up immensely due to friction. Occasionally, matter escapes (from above the event horizon) in the form of bipolar acceleration jets. Scientists are not sure exactly why this happens.
The other form of radiation emitted by black holes is Hawking Radiation. Space is teeming with particle-antiparticle pairs that are constantly created and annhilated. In the vicinity of a black hole, one member of the pair can be sucked in (consequently annhilating its evil twin inside the black hole) while the other escapes. This gives the impression of the black-hole emitting radiation. Hawking came up with this theory when it was found that black-holes have temperature. That would seem preposterous since it means that the black hole was emitting energy, which it shouldn't.
Dark Matter is matter that cannot be directly detected through emitted radiation. But you can detect it through its effect on surrounding bodies. The effect is usually gravitational.
The concept of Dark Matter evolved from the "missing mass problem". You can estimate the amount of mass in a cluster of galaxies based on the motions of other objects around the object in question. When you compare this mass to the mass based on the total brightness (visible mass) of the galaxy, you can find a huge discrepancy. This is the "missing mass".
If it was a black hole, it would be detected by the movement of visible objects around it, or x-ray and gamma-ray bursts from acceleration jets and from energy emitted by the accretion disk.
Dark Matter is simply "missing matter", or matter that cannot be detected through emitted radiation. It can, however, be detected through its (gravitational) effects on surrounding bodies.
The formula Mn = 2^n - 1 applies to ALL Mersenne Primes in the sense that all Mersenne Primes are one less than some power of two. It does not mean that for every value of n, Mn is prime.
It's a mathematical curiosity in some cases - just to find it for the sake of finding it, or for the glory of finding it. You know, like being the first to do something cool.
Also, necessity is the mother of invention. Even if Big Primes aren't really a necessity, it has brought forth some really innovative algorithms and methods to finding prime numbers. Furthermore, it has developed newer and faster ways for multiplying integers.
In 1968, Strassen figured out how to multiply integers quickly by using Fast Fourier Transforms. Strassen, along with Schönhage improved on the method and published a refined version in 1971. GIMPS now uses an improved version of their algorithm. This improved version was developed by Richard Crandall (a longtime researcher of Mersenne Primes).
Another application of finding Prime Numbers is to test computer hardware. Since testing Primes involves a thorough excercise of basic mathematical operations, it provides a good test for hardware. Software routines from GIMPS were used by Intel to test the PII and the Pentium Pro chips before they were shipped. The search for prime numbers was also indirectly responsible for the discovery of the infamous FDIV bug on the Pentium, during the calculation of the twin prime constant (by Thomas Nicely).
A mersenne Prime is a prime number that is one less than the power of two. Hence:
Mn = 2^n - 1.
Mersenne primes have a connection with Perfect Numbers (numbers that are equal to the sum of their proper divisors) where by if M is a Mersenne prime, then M(M+1)/2 is a perfect number.
Yes, he did. And there is a sequel to it called Eternity as well.
Both are full of technical mumbo-jumbo and are hard to visualize. It had some interesting ideas - a lot of which were sort of advanced for the time. But theere wasn't too much character development.
As far as JMS doing ST goes, I think its a good idea. Trek needs some new blood. TNG was awesome, and I really enjoyed DS9 too. My response to Enterprise has been comparitively lukewarm. Right now I'm following BSG (Battlestar Galactica), which I'm thoroughly enjoying. I compare it to Enterprise, and I see a world of difference - so much more character development, and the characters seem so much more human, well-rounded, and complex. There is no constant talk of lofty ideals and principles (which is not a bad thing in Trek, but it sometimes gets repetitive in Enterprise, and it seems rather contrived).
Slashdot Mirror
I would think that programmed cell-death is also a way of making sure we don't have runanway growth... which is precisely what happens in cancer.
I'm just speculating here, but what's to say that we didn't have "immortality" at the cellular level before? Perhaps cancer cells are a throwback to this earlier form. Everyone knows that cancer cells keep reproducing until they take down the host with them. That's not a very successful strategy. Perhaps there were organisms that kept growing and reproducing without dying. Eventually the environment couldn't support them, and they could have all died. A strategy around this was probably to have programmed cell death whereby the cells would die off after a certain number of divisions. That way, the population would be somewhat constant, and there wouldn't be such a burden on resources. Furthermore, the dead cells could actually return some of the consumed resources back to the environment. In the long run, this would be more favourable... but once again, I am merely speculating.
Somewhat along the same lines, Carl Zimmer also talked about "resurrecting the genome" of a mammalian ancestor from about 80 million years ago. Snippets of the genome are present in all mammals today. By comparing the genomes of various mammals, they were able to come up with a pretty good approximate of the genome. This chart shows how much of the original genome different mammals have. Surprisingly, humans have lost only 25% of the original genome, whereas rats and mice have lost more than twice that. I would have thought otherwise since the earliest mammals were shrewlike... but I'm not a biologist/geneticist/whoever studies these things.
He also wrote this article some time ago that talked about Resurrecting the Genome. Here is another article (by him) on the same topic, that appeared on NY Times.
Once thing I've noticed about wikipedia is that articles are updated within hours of new information or breaking news. I don't see that happening with Encarta, due to this reviewing process.
Under wikipedia, the information is GPL'ed. They even say that you should contribute only if you want to (possibly) see your words be ripped apart and modified mercilessly. Wikipedia's content is covered by the FSF's GNU Free Documentation License
So does this information belong to MS, or everyone?
Seems like a good idea. Although as a somewhat frequent wikipedia contributor, I like the idea of seeing my words in "print" (for lack of a better word) immediately. The article says that you would submit your encyclopedia article which would be reviewed, and then edited by a bunch of reviewers. So the turnaround time is definitely longer than wikipedia.
Fostering a community spirit might be somewhat harder, I think due to the fact that the community isn't really actively involved in editing each other's works and contributing. It still goes through a review process, and the reviewers have the final say.
Wikipedia's strength (and some might say, weakness) is due to the large userbase that works on articles. Hence there is a broad spectrum of opinions and views when in the end sort of balances out. Would there be some sort of inherent bias due to the review process? I mean, does there have be any set of "officially sanctioned" view? Wikipedia has an article on Wikipedia criticisms. Can we expect to see an article that criticizes Microsoft or MS Encarta ON MS Encarta? That would be interesting.
I never use cmd. I use bash (or zsh) on cygwin. It is remarkably powerful and does everything I need.
I can't even imagine working on cmd without the things I take for granted on bash. piping, redirection (yeah, they exist on cmd, but not as powerful as on bash/zsh/ksh/whathaveyou), symlinks, advanced scripting and so on and so forth. Further more you have such a rich toolset with cygwin. You can do a whole bunch of stuff with grep, sed, and awk and a cool one-liner. Try doing that on cmd. I'm sure MS has it in them to create a really good shell language. But I guess they won't implement something new because like in the case of IE, they don't think that their customers need new features because they haven't "told them about it".
Thank God. I can't count the number of times I've had to deal with the stupid permission settings in Windows. Even for a simple thing like sharing files and folders over a home network. Their system is so convoluted and just completely stupid - pointing and clicking through various menus to set attributes... conflicting attribues... and all kinds of other crap. I was trying to set up access permissions on a home networked machine whereby it would authenticate against another machine on the same network. But you can't do that with "Workgroups". Only "Domains". All I have is a small home network of 3 machines - I have to set up a Domain Controller now? Why the distinction? All the "features" that microsoft has for their permissions system are simply inane and counterintuitive. To keep myself from pulling out all my hair, I just set the permissions to Everyone so that everyone and their mom on the home network can access the folder. But since it's just me at home, that's alright. And even then I've had trouble with that.
I'm glad they've decided to scrap it and move to a more unix-like. The next thing they should do is change their "automated task scheduler" tool. Make it more like cron. "at" just sucks.
Well, I think I know what part of the reason is. In a lot of Universities, they switched from C++ to C++ around 1998 or 1999. A lot of these people are coming into the workforce now. They are loathe to study anything else, since they only depend on what the university taught them. Basically, they are just tailormade computer scientists/engineers. They do not have the drive or urge to go out and learn something new. They basically don't even try to find out what's new because they only know what their courses taught them. A lot of them also joined the CS programs because "there's money to be made in computers". There are certain techonologies I like better than others, so as a personal choice I will use the one I like. But if I'm told I need to use the other technology (the one I don't particularly like, or know), then I'll poke through documentation and try and learn it. For example, I don't particularly like ColdFusion. But I had to use it once because that's what the department used. In another scenario, they were using CF, but I suggested that they change to PHP, which they did.
Anyway, so these "fanboys" know Java like the back of their hand, but don't want to switch to anything else. Which is why, just like the GP said, they will attack anything that could invalidate their "experience".
What I've noticed a lot of times is that Engineers can't write documentation and requirements worth crap. Ok, so I shouldn't make such a blanket statement. Some engineers can write well, but most can't. I think this will do two things:
a) Help computer engineers describe their program's requirements better so others can follow them better.
b) Help beginning computer programmers make the connection between a natural language description of their program and the program itself. For example, this can help them understand concepts of OOP programming (nouns->objects, verbs->functions, adjectives->properties).
It's not true that programmers don't always write requirements. One of the classes I had to take in college dealt with the Software Engineering/Development Lifecycle. One of the things we had to do was to create a requirements specification for our program. We had to write it in a concise manner so as to map it to actual parts of our code. From the requirements document, we went to a UML software (Rational Rose) and from there, to the (skeleton) code. That's what this software does, except it encourages us to write proper descriptions in the beginning itself, and then maps that to skeleton code.
Modes of fossil preservation:
Soft part preservation - Soft tissues are preserved only under exceptional conditions. Examples include preservation of Siberian Mammoths (freezing in permafrost), Pleistocene cave faunas and older mummified remains (dessication), and insects and small animals preserved in lithified tree sap (amber). Soft parts can also be preserved after being replaced by minerals.
Original hard parts - Resistant materials such as calcium, silica, and calcium phosphate are sometimes preserved as original hard parts in shells, bones, and teeth.
Recrystallized hard parts - It is common, however, for original hard parts to be altered during diagenesis and after lithification. Unstable minerals such as aragonite will recrystallize to a more stable form such as calcite. Mineral crystals within an organism's hard parts my regrow to become larger and consolidated. Often recrystallization destroys fine, internal detail within a fossil.
Carbonization - Organic-laden hard parts and soft parts can be preserved as a thin film of organic carbon. This occurs when the organic material is preserved undecayed through burial. As heat increases throughout burial the volitile components of the organic material (N, O, H, and S) are driven off leaving a thin film of black carbon behind.
Replacement - Chemical reactions that occur during diagenesis can result in the molecule by molecule replacement of mineral for mineral or mineral for organic tissue. Replacement can often preserve exquisite detail in fossils.
Silicification - replacement of calcite by silica.
Pyritization - replacement of calcite or soft tissues with pyrite
Phosphatization - replacement of low phosphate apatite with high phosphate apatite.
Permineralization - Porous organic structures such as wood and bone are often preserved by the mineral infilling of the pore spaces. A common way of 'petrifying' wood and dinosaur bone.
Source
-----------
It would have been helpful if the scientists had provided a hypothesis on the preservation of the tissues. I googled this phenomenon and there seems to be a rather broad definition for "soft tissue". Soft Tissue, it appears, can be preserved in many ways (see above). I'm curious as to how this tissue survived micro-organisms, mineralization/calcification, carbonization, or simply, or even dehydration. How was it able to remain soft enough to be squeezed?
I'm slightly skeptical. The article talks about soft tissue, but none of the scientists even try to explain how soft tissue could have survived for seventy million years?
Disgust is an evolutionary mechanism for disease-avoidance. It is pretty much a gut/instinctive reaction. For example, we feel squeamish when we see something gross (rotting meat, dead things, infected wounds, dog crap, and other disgusting stuff). All of these sources of disgust are also potential sources of disease. So evolutionarily speaking, individuals that didn't mess around with potential sources of disease survived, while the others that decided to mess with it, didn't.
This article has some interesting information.
It is so obvious. He has had previous GPL violations. There was a page that listed them, but I can't find it anymore. He has made a lot of other software that was based off other software under the GPL. Then there is also the fact that he originally claimed to have written from scratch and then there's the time he claimed that he fired a co-programmer. WTF?! He said he had written it from scratch! Then what about the bogus explanation about variable and function names "sounding the same" because there are only "certain ways to do things". The man is a liar - plain and simple.
I can see it now:
PPU Emulates Grand Unified Theory. Physicists surrender.
the microwires become diminutive substitutes for the CD-ROM, given that information can be stored magnetically on them, as with CDs.
Since when did CD's start storing data magnetically? I thought it was optically? Where can I buy these new-fangled magnetic CD's?!
the divisions are carried out internally by means of a process of anisotrophy.
Anisotrophy? What kind of "trophy" is that? However, there is something known as anisotropy.
Researchers say that the greatest difficulty will be with the reading of information.
Excellent! Now my Perl scripts will truly become Write Once Read Never!!
No, black holes by themselves do not emit light since nothing can escape from beyond the event horizon. The light is just a small part of a large range of electromagnetic radiation released by the black hole. This radiation comes from the accretion disk around a black hole, where matter that is spiralling into the black hole starts heating up immensely due to friction. Occasionally, matter escapes (from above the event horizon) in the form of bipolar acceleration jets. Scientists are not sure exactly why this happens.
The other form of radiation emitted by black holes is Hawking Radiation. Space is teeming with particle-antiparticle pairs that are constantly created and annhilated. In the vicinity of a black hole, one member of the pair can be sucked in (consequently annhilating its evil twin inside the black hole) while the other escapes. This gives the impression of the black-hole emitting radiation. Hawking came up with this theory when it was found that black-holes have temperature. That would seem preposterous since it means that the black hole was emitting energy, which it shouldn't.
Dark Matter is matter that cannot be directly detected through emitted radiation. But you can detect it through its effect on surrounding bodies. The effect is usually gravitational.
The concept of Dark Matter evolved from the "missing mass problem". You can estimate the amount of mass in a cluster of galaxies based on the motions of other objects around the object in question. When you compare this mass to the mass based on the total brightness (visible mass) of the galaxy, you can find a huge discrepancy. This is the "missing mass".
Wikipedia provides more information.
It doesn't have anything to do with black holes.
If it was a black hole, it would be detected by the movement of visible objects around it, or x-ray and gamma-ray bursts from acceleration jets and from energy emitted by the accretion disk.
Dark Matter is simply "missing matter", or matter that cannot be detected through emitted radiation. It can, however, be detected through its (gravitational) effects on surrounding bodies.
Why has the parent been modded informative?
The formula Mn = 2^n - 1 applies to ALL Mersenne Primes in the sense that all Mersenne Primes are one less than some power of two. It does not mean that for every value of n, Mn is prime.
It's a mathematical curiosity in some cases - just to find it for the sake of finding it, or for the glory of finding it. You know, like being the first to do something cool.
Also, necessity is the mother of invention. Even if Big Primes aren't really a necessity, it has brought forth some really innovative algorithms and methods to finding prime numbers. Furthermore, it has developed newer and faster ways for multiplying integers.
In 1968, Strassen figured out how to multiply integers quickly by using Fast Fourier Transforms. Strassen, along with Schönhage improved on the method and published a refined version in 1971. GIMPS now uses an improved version of their algorithm. This improved version was developed by Richard Crandall (a longtime researcher of Mersenne Primes).
Another application of finding Prime Numbers is to test computer hardware. Since testing Primes involves a thorough excercise of basic mathematical operations, it provides a good test for hardware. Software routines from GIMPS were used by Intel to test the PII and the Pentium Pro chips before they were shipped. The search for prime numbers was also indirectly responsible for the discovery of the infamous FDIV bug on the Pentium, during the calculation of the twin prime constant (by Thomas Nicely).
A mersenne Prime is a prime number that is one less than the power of two. Hence:
Mn = 2^n - 1.
Mersenne primes have a connection with Perfect Numbers (numbers that are equal to the sum of their proper divisors) where by if M is a Mersenne prime, then M(M+1)/2 is a perfect number.
Can't discount him outright. He had his hand in some really good episodes too:
* Writer, "All Good Things..." * Writer, "Frame of Mind"
And movie:
* Story, Star Trek: First Contact
But yes, some of what you say is true.
Yes, he did. And there is a sequel to it called Eternity as well.
Both are full of technical mumbo-jumbo and are hard to visualize. It had some interesting ideas - a lot of which were sort of advanced for the time. But theere wasn't too much character development.
As far as JMS doing ST goes, I think its a good idea. Trek needs some new blood. TNG was awesome, and I really enjoyed DS9 too. My response to Enterprise has been comparitively lukewarm. Right now I'm following BSG (Battlestar Galactica), which I'm thoroughly enjoying. I compare it to Enterprise, and I see a world of difference - so much more character development, and the characters seem so much more human, well-rounded, and complex. There is no constant talk of lofty ideals and principles (which is not a bad thing in Trek, but it sometimes gets repetitive in Enterprise, and it seems rather contrived).