December 3, 1964: filming began on the the original pilot episode of Star Trek, “The Cage.”
Dec 042014
Dec 032014
If you want some *real* brutality out of New York today, look no further than this recording of the isolated audio from Mariah Carey “singing” something that’s supposed to be Christmas music at Rockefeller Center tonight. Yowch.
Isolated, Unedited Vocals Of Mariah Carey’s Awful Holiday Performance
Dec 032014
Currently up on eBay, a 1972 16X20 poster for the NASA Flight Crew Health Stabilization Program. This was a post-Apollo 14 program to keep astronauts from picking up infectious diseases immediately before launch. Somehow, I suspect that the program would not use this particular poster today.
Dec 032014
N.Y. cop not indicted in chokehold death
In short: a behemoth was selling loose cigarettes on the streets of New York. Apparently doing so is illegal (your guess is as good as mine as to why that would be), but when confronted by the cops this guys response was to belligerently resist arrest. And so the cops used standard procedures to knock him to the ground and handcuff him. However, he had a heart condition and asthma… and since he was really quite large, the combo of adrenalin, being put on his chest and having cops bearing down on him to get him under control, his system shut down and he died.
Normally, such a story would get minimal coverage… maybe it was sad he died, but it wasn’t the cops fault that he was breaking the law (dumb though the law may be), and it certainly wasn’t their fault that he was massively overweight and in poor shape. but what makes it newsworthy: the same old story, he was black, the cop who put him in a bog-standard choke hold was white. That’s all anyone really needs to know, I suppose. Reverse the color values, though, and the news gets a lot more muted.
CNN is right now freaking out about “Oh Noes, tonight is the Christmas tree lighting in Rockefeller Center.” You *know* that CNN and the other newsies are secretly going “ohboyohboyohboyohboyohboy!!!”
Dec 032014
Sony got hacked… and hacked hard. It appears that the entire company got laid bare.
A Look Through The Sony Pictures Data Hack: This Is As Bad As It Gets
40 gigabytes of data have been posted online… and the hackers claim to have obtained 100 *terabytes* of data. This includes 3600 Social Security numbers, internal financial data, credit card data, passwords, as well as the complete version of the recently released film Fury, and fours as-yet unreleased films: Annie, Still Alice, Mr. Turner, and To Write Love on Her Arms. Of course, that’s just in the first 40 gig. The next 100 terabytes will undoubtedly have more.
A lot of people think the North Koreans are behind this, as they’re cheesed off about the forthcoming flick The Interview.
Bad as this is for Sony, maybe it’ll be the kick in the pants US corporations need to shore up their defenses. With recent reports that Chinese hackers could shut down part or all of the US power grid, it’s probably waaaaay past time to start listening to Commander William Adama and de-network, firewall and protect our systems.
Dec 032014
Barossa Valley wine called 72 Virgins sold as fundraiser for anti-Islamic organisation, Q Society
Now someone needs to market Hajj-brand bacon. Mmmm, bacon.
And if anyone gets snippy about how horrible it is that someone would dare use a religions particular silliness in order to sell something anathema to that religion, let me introduce you to Utahs very own Polygamy Porter.
Dec 022014
A good webcomic:
http://english.bouletcorp.com/2014/12/02/jurassic-park-the-loser-world/
The basic idea: what would happen if Jurassic Park was real. If the scariest monsters to ever roam the world were brought back to menace mankind, what would happen? In short: we’d make them real, real sad real, real fast.
Dec 022014
I was sure I’d posted bout this before, but a cursory search of ye olde blog didn’t turn it up. Oh, well. Anyway:
1989
America’s malls
A bunch of photos taken in shopping malls in the late 1980’s. A few things you might notice right off… there were a lot more people in the malls, and yet there was a lot less of each person back then. How the hell did we get so fat in a quarter century? Also: big, big hair, and some long-vanished fashions. I don’t care what all y’all say, 80’s chicks were teh awesome. Well, they were in the 80’s, at any rate. They’d stand out today.
And there’s the relevant Fark thread, where a bunch of Farkers my age and beyond bemoan their lost youth and Kids These Days.
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And then there’s this, wholly random outta nowhere:
[youtube KkKCiYX2AVA]
Dec 022014
Spacecraft Bound for Pluto Set to Awake Nine Years After Launch
New Horizons has been in hibernation, but will – hopefully – on December 6. The Pluto flyby phase will begin in January, with the closest approach on July 14, 2015.
While this story is cool and epic, they’ve always got to dump cold water on it by point out reality:
No voyage like this has been conducted since the epic days of Voyager, and nothing like it is planned again.
Gah.
In a better world, half the money spent on Medicare would instead be devoted to mass producing and launching probes of this kind. Sigh.
Dec 022014
As it turns out, this is a commercial for an Asian bank. Still, it’s packed with examples of the bizarre behavior of non-Newtonian fluids… fluids that turn kinda-sorta solid when you whack ’em real hard. Fluids that you can easily run across, but if you stand still, you sink. The most common such fluid, something you may well have on hand, is water mixed with corn starch. Mix up a batch and then punch it, you’ll find your hand bounces off. IIRC, antifreeze (ethylene glycol) mixed with very fine silica powder makes a *really* effective non-Newtonian fluid, to the extend that if you soak a lightweight kevlar bulletproof vest in the stuff and then shoot it, the fluid will solidify so hard, so fast that it will turn into a solid plate. The bullet resistance is still due to the strength of the fibers, but the solid nature of the fluid now spreads the impact over a number of square inches, creating it’s own trauma plate… a plate that both before and after is perfectly flexible.
[youtube D-wxnID2q4A]