Tag: review

100 best star trek episodes

5) “Darmok,” The Next Generation, Season 5
A great episode to lure in people who wouldn’t ordinarily watch Star Trek. Fun and exciting but also deeply philosophical and smart. It’s a good story because it is loosely based on Gilgamesh which is, of course, the first story! So it’s vetted. Chaka, when the walls fell!

4) “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” The Next Generation, Season 3
TNG’s spiritual response to “Mirror, Mirror,” an alternate timeline in which our heroes are at constant war. Lt. Yar is back and the Enterprise-C has a woman captain. Plus Guinan kinda saves the day. The moment when the bridge darkens is the most badass lighting cue in television.

3) “Mirror, Mirror,” The Original Series, Season 2
I still remember seeing this at the age of 10. The ion storm near the Halkanian planet caused the ship to flip-flap back and forth for a moment and then — whammo — we’re somewhere else and Spock had a goatee. And instantly, somehow, I knew how the whole episode would play out. A bizarro world where the good guys are bad and ohmygod did I mention that Spock had a goatee. It’s so clever and so much fun and I went around saying “your agonizer, please” for years. I love Star Trek so much.

2) “The Inner Light,” The Next Generation, Season 5
Great men are adaptable, so when Picard just can’t get back to his ship he creates another life for himself. But is it reality? This episode is a 100x better and more insightful than The Matrix and the tones of a Ressikan Flute always make me cry. We love seeing our characters in places outside of where we expect them to be, and this is the humdinger of them all.

1) “The City on the Edge of Forever,” The Original Series, Season 1
Yeah, I know, everyone always picks this one, but I watched again to make sure and, yes, it really is the best. It just hums. Joan Collins’ Edith Keeler is a fascinating figure — someone so kind who, if left alone to promote pacifism at a key point in history, could potentially ruin the world. The ending just destroys me. Our 3 main characters, our eternal archetypes, are there. Kirk is clutching Bones after blocking him in his tracks. He’s holding on for dear life with his eyes shut. “I could have saved her!” Bones cries, as Edith now lies dead in the middle of the road. “He knows, doctor. He knows,” Spock replies, and even though the Vulcan is cold and logical, he’s hurting, too. Once they pop back through the Guardian and return to the planet, Shatner delivers the best line reading of his career. A simple “let’s get the hell out of here.” It’s a throwaway line, but the spin he puts on it is absolutely heartbreaking. This is science fiction at its absolute finest, using a way out and fantastical concept to address universal themes like loss and fate. It is, unquestionably, the greatest Star Trek episode of all time.

Dumb prison show

So, could you please explain to me why this kitchen has 12 chicks back there? Or why there’s so much cooking gear that they don’t need? Christ, it looks like the kitchen of a high-end steakhouse! Hey, look, a big assed dough mixer! For all the fresh bread that they totally make in prison all the time! And look, there’s a professional deli slicer, which they need for all the bologna and cheese sandwiches on white bread! And look! A fryer! And enormous ovens and stoves with 40 burners for all the intricate sauces that get served to the happy, well-fed prisoners!

an excellent takedown of this dumb new show

Grammar improves sales

Zappois noticed that products with high-quality reviews are selling well. They used Amazon Mechanical Turk to improve the quality of the reviews posted on its own website. Given that Zappos spent at least 10 cents per review, and that they examined 5m reviews, the expected revenue improvement should have been at least a few million dollars for this exercise to make sense.

fixing grammar / spelling led to increased revenue for zappos.

B&H Thrives

And what a roof it is: The whole operation is a crazy Willy Wonka factory. If you want to check out a product that’s not on display, a salesperson orders it by computer terminal from a vast stockroom in the basement. Moments later, as if by magic, the product arrives at the retail counter, via an elaborate system of conveyor belts and dumbwaiters. You can try out the gear, see if you like it, and, if you do, the salesperson puts it in a green plastic box and places it on another conveyor belt, which runs, above your head, to the pickup counter. There, an employee bags your purchase. Meanwhile, your salesperson gives you a ticket, which you take to a payment counter. After you have paid, you get a different ticket that you take to the pickup counter to get your merchandise.

At first, this all seemed like incredible overkill to me. But then, as I thought about it more, I developed a theory as to why B&H operates this way. With all the expensive electronics and cameras and lenses and laptops floating around the store, the system creates a series of checks and balances — typically, 5 employees are involved in every purchase — in order to reduce shoplifting and employee theft. That it works at all is not the most amazing thing about B&H, however. The most amazing thing is that the prices are so low that I don’t even bother to comparison-shop anymore.

No, wait: The most amazing thing is that the salespeople at B&H really know their stuff. When I recently bought a portable digital recorder, the salesperson knew that some gear was not compatible with flash memory cards larger than 2GB and spent a few minutes surfing the Web to make sure that the 8GB card I wanted would work with it.

No, wait: The most amazing thing is that I have often gone into B&H to purchase a specific product, only to be talked into something cheaper. For example, once I went in to buy a field video monitor to use for some interviews I was conducting. I expected to pay $600 until the salesperson said, “Why don’t you just get one of these cheap consumer portable DVD players? They have video inputs, they work just as well, and they’re under $100.” This was no accident. “The entire premise of our store is based upon your ability to come in, touch, feel, experiment, ask, and discuss your needs without sales pressure”.

Amazon Reviews Design

Since the initial release of the helpfulness question, Amazon’s team has played with many variations, some of which have become mainstays of the design. One of the first enhancements was to use Ajax instead of a page refresh when the user pressed the Yes or No button. This simple change of removing the page refresh dramatically increased the likelihood a user would vote on more reviews. To make more room on the product page, Amazon reduced the number of reviews they initially display. Now, when they have helpful reviews, they appear separate from the rest. On the most popular products, only the most helpful reviews show up.

the magic behind amazon the reviews of reviews brought in an additional 2.7b of revenue.