Hulu is offering every episode of every Star Trek series free for the rest of the month -with the caveats that it's only available in the U.S. and you have to sit through unstoppable ads breaks. But the promotion for this event should be easier to use. The Star Trek Madness 2013 tournament brackets pit Star Trek characters against each other, with the champion to be decided by internet votes. There are a couple of drawbacks here, too. The field has only 16 characters, so some favorites like Sulu and Beverly Crusher are left out. And there are no tags, so you have to check the Hulu Tumblr blog to find daily matchups. Kirk has beaten Riker in the first round, no surprise there, but believe it or not, Jean-Luc Picard has already been eliminated by Benjamin Sisko. Voting is still open for Captain Janeway vs. Quark and Scotty vs. Geordi LaForge (until noon today; not sure what time zone). Link
Miss Cellania's Blog Posts
Dafna Kopelis told her cat to take the dog the rest of the way home. And that's exactly what happened! Well, it's not difficult to convince a cat that he's the boss, but it takes some talent to teach one to use a leash properly. Don't let the static screen fool you- this video is actually easy to watch. -via Daily of the Day
Gabriel always wanted a firetruck, since he was a little boy. He never grew out of that infatuation with firetrucks, so at age 32 (and a half), he bought one.
If we based decisions on practicality, we'd all drive Taurcedes until we had kids, then we'd get minivans and we'd all be miserable. At 65, we'd retire and finally get that entry-level Porsche Boxter that we'd been wanting for the past 40 years. That doesn't sound like a good plan to me.
The coolest toys in the world aren't practical. Koenigsegg certainly aren't. Jet fighters - nope. Army tanks - nope. Did you know that you can buy old aircraft carriers on eBay? Can you imagine wake boarding behind one of those things? "Cool" just isn't practical. I've come to terms with that.
So I went ahead and pulled the eBay trigger and was elated to get truck 1213 for just $100 more than the reserve price. A total of $3,600 which also happened to be the hard limit my wife had imposed on this particular invaluable transaction.
Read the rest of the story of how he got his firetruck from Ohio to his home in Montana. Link -via Metafilter
Here's more evidence that there is a cat picture available for any purpose whatsoever. The characters from the HBO series Game of Thrones are matched with the feline version of the character. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy
As the American economy has moved away from manufacturing to information services and the economy limps along, not keeping up with the number of people who need jobs, the U.S. Social Security Disability program has boomed. This boom covers up the real numbers of people who would otherwise be on welfare or counted among the unemployed. NPR looks at several factors that made this happen: for example, disability is for people who can no longer perform heavy labor, and don't have the education or skills for other jobs.
One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse's aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But that wasn't it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she's seen where you get to sit all day.
At first, I found this hard to believe. But then I started looking around town. There's the McDonald's, the fish plant, the truck repair shop. I went down a list of job openings -- Occupational Therapist, McDonald's, McDonald's, Truck Driver (heavy lifting), KFC, Registered Nurse, McDonald's.
And disability payments shift the expense of maintaining people without jobs away from states and onto the federal government.
A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn't cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And the Public Consulting Group is glad to help.
PCG is a private company that states pay to comb their welfare rolls and move as many people as possible onto disability. "What we're offering is to work to identify those folks who have the highest likelihood of meeting disability criteria," Pat Coakley, who runs PCG's Social Security Advocacy Management team, told me.
Other factors come into play, but the result is that 14 million Americans receive a disability check every month -and health care through Medicare. Learn more about the trend at NPR. Link
Friskies has a new celebrity spokes-cat. No, it's not Henri, the Existential Cat, but an even less enthusiastic feline star. -via Daily of the Day
As a grandmother who works online, I am happy to find the blog Grandma Got STEM. STEM stands for science, technology, engineering, and math. The blog is a response to the idea that grannies don't understand those fields, evidenced in the phrases "Explain that to me like you'd explain it your your grandma," and "Even my grandma could understand that." That attitude does a great disservice to women through the ages who are quite intelligent and have contributed magnificently to the world's body of knowledge -and also managed to live long enough to have grandchildren. That's a lot of them. Jans Wagner submitted information about her grandmother, Dorothy Gillett (both pictured):
My grandmother (no longer with us) got her BS in Astronomy from Wellesley in 1919, and had a long distinguished career first working on a family business which set up the first radio networks across the country, and ended up working for Lockheed for many years doing orbital calculations on the Mercury and Apollo projects. One of her titles when she worked for Lockheed was “Head Computer” so I always tell people I came by mathematical talent (such as it is, but I do have a PhD in OR from MIT) because “my grandmother was a computer”.
If you ever travel on the NJ Turnpike, and see all those radio towers in the Meadowlands (salt flats outside Newark) it’s because MY grandparents discovered that radio waves travel much better/farther in waterlogged sands then they do when broadcast off high buildings.
GGSTEM is full of such stories, from history, from relatives, and from the grandmas themselves. You can submit a story, too! Link -via Boing Boing
We've featured the x-ray art of Nick Veasey before. Now he has a collection called "Man and Machine." The x-rays combine people with the machines we've created.
In the image above of passengers sitting on a bus, it’s interesting, if slightly morbid, to learn that everyone on the bus is actually the same person – and that person is a dead body, moved around and posed by a willing undertaker.
Still, it’s a captivating image that highlights the inner beauty and details often overlooked during mundane daily activities. The image proved so mesmerizing, in fact, that it had to be removed from roadways, where it was used as part of an advertising campaign, because it proved too distracting for drivers.
Not all the images involve dead people -some are just everyday skeletons. See more at Tech Graffiti. Link
Oh hai! TV reception been a little bad lately? Big Brother Cat is controlling what satellite signals actually reach you. -via Daily of the Day
Call it revenge of the snake. An unnamed woman in Liberty Eylau, Texas, found a snake. For some reason, she decided on a strange and dangerous method for getting rid of it.
"While cleaning up, she saw snake, threw gasoline on the snake, lit the snake on fire," said Deputy Randall Baggett with the Bowie County Sheriff's Office. "The snake went into the brush pile and the brush pile caught the home on fire."
Despite the efforts of several fire departments that responded to the scene, the flames completely engulfed the home. It is a complete loss. A neighboring home was also damaged on one side.
Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? That's the first question you are asked in the personal combat game Super Duck Punch. I chose well, and won my first round. It gets more complicated after that, with a hippo-sized hamster and a hydra with giraffe heads. Or the opposite of each. Link -via Metafilter
This kitten is dreaming with all four paws and his tail, too! -via Daily of the Day
James Tazruk, an Inupiaq subsistence hunter in Point Lay, Alaska, shot a lone polar bear. Only when he rolled the carcass over did he realize the bear was a nursing mother. Tazruk and his hunting partner then searched for the bear's den, knowing a cub would be there. They found Kali hidden about 1500 feet away.
The big changes and long trips began when Tazruk entered the bear's three-chambered den
"I'm not going to hurt you. I'm going to take you home," he told it. "Just don't bite me."
Biologists from the Fish and Wildlife Service estimate the cub is 3 to 4 months old. Tazruk, who described the hunt in a phone interview Tuesday, said he scooped it in his arm like a puppy. He began the long ride back to Point Lay on his snowmachine, holding the bear close.
About 15 miles into the trip, Tazruk and his partner, Paul Stone, stopped at a cabin and grabbed a pair of ski pants, he said. They tied the legs together to form a pouch, and he cradled the bear cub in his lap against the handlebars.
After a night in the village, Kali was flown to the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage. The cub will be sent to the Buffalo Zoo when he is fully recovered, and will have a permanent home at the St. Louis Zoo when their new polar bear exhibit is ready in 2015. Link
See videos of Kali at Laughing Squid. Link
(Image credit: Bob Hallinen/Anchorage Daily News)
The following is an article from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges into Music. (Image credit: Flickr user Alec McNayr)
After Uncle John saw Star Wars (12 times), he though he knew all the characters. But BRI stalwart Jay Newman pointed out that there was one important character that wasn't listed in the cast: the music.
PRODIGY
He's won 5 Oscars and 18 Grammys, and he may be the most widely heard composer of all time. Who is he? John Williams, composer of the film soundtracks for blockbusters like Star Wars, Jaws, Jurassic Park, and the Harry Potter movies -and the television themes for The Today Show, NBC Nightly News, and many of the "fanfares" heard during the broadcasts of the Olympics since 1984.
By the time Williams achieved music superstardom in the mid-1970s, he was already a 20-year veteran of the TV and film scoring business. In fact, Williams had been immersed in music almost from the day he was born, on February 8, 1932, in New York City. His father, an accomplished jazz drummer and percussionist for the CBS Radio Orchestra, got his son started on piano lessons at six years old. The youngster soon added trombone, trumpet, and clarinet to his repertoire. Then, when he was 16, his father landed a job with the CBS Television Orchestra, and the Williams family moved to Hollywood.
HE SCORES!
Music was the only career that Williams ever pursued. He studied at UCLA in 1950, and progressed so quickly that when he was drafted into the military in 1952, the 21-year-old found himself conducting the Air Force Band. In another two years, he landed at the Julliard School, where he studied under the world's greatest composers by day while playing in New York jazz clubs at night.
After Julliard, Williams's show-biz roots brought him back to Hollywood, where he first worked as an orchestra pianist, but it was his skill as an orchestrator that garnered the attention of such film music legends as Bernard Hermann (who composed the scores for Citizen Kane, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and many Hitchcock movies), Alfred Newman (All About Eve, How Green Was My Valley), and Franz Waxman (Sunset Boulevard, The Philadelphia Story). They utilized the young composer's skills to orchestrate musical cues for their film scores. After that, Johnny Williams (as he was credited) didn't have to look for work -it came looking for him.
The Internal Revenue Service got chewed out by Congress for wasting taxpayer money on a couple of videos made for a training and leadership conference in 2010. One was a parody of Gilligan's Island, but most of the $60,000 spent was for a Star Trek parody that "does not appear to have any training value."
The production value is high even though the acting is what one might expect from a bunch of tax collectors. In the video, the spaceship is approaching the planet “Notax,” where alien identity theft appears to be a problem.
“The IRS recognizes and takes seriously our obligation to be good stewards of government resources and taxpayer dollars,” the agency said in a statement. “There is no mistaking that this video did not reflect the best stewardship of resources.”
Congressional investigators concluded that the Gilligan's Island parody video was a legitimate training tool. Although the $60,000 spent on the two videos is a pittance compared to, say, a day at war, we've posted much better parodies made for $500 or less. The IRS should consider looking to the YouTube community to produce future videos. Link -via Viral Viral Videos