I was there. I know what Gene Roddenberry envisioned. He went on at length about it in almost every meeting. He wasn’t about technology, he was about envisioning a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out. Gene Roddenberry was one of the great Social Justice Warriors. You don’t get to claim him or his show as a shield of virtue for a cause he would have disdained.
Most of the stories we wrote were about social justice. ‘The Cloud Minders,’ ‘A Taste Of Armageddon,’ ‘Errand Of Mercy,’ ‘The Apple,’ ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,’ and so many more. We did stories that were about exploring the universe not just because we could build starships, but because we wanted to know who was out there, what was our place in the universe, and what could we learn from the other races out there?
Star Trek was about social justice from day one.
”
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David Gerrold, Author of the ST:TOS episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”
For her master's project, Barbara Bernát designed a set of fictional banknotes: the Hungarian Euro.
I am a total sucker for banknote mockups and aside from the simplicity, what caught my eye about Bernát's project is the one security feature: if you look at the notes under a UV light, you see the skeletons of the animals depicted on the notes:
Elsie has been really into sweet potatoes lately. So, of course, as soon as she leaves town, I decide I'm in the mood to make sweet potato fries.
You can go ahead and give me the "Worst Sister of the Year" award. :)
Really though, I think it was Elsie who reminded me (once again) that I really love sweet potatoes. They have so much flavor, nutrition, and they are a way fun color. So, I decided to work on my baked sweet potato fries skills, and I have a method I'm excited to share with you. It's sort of a variation on my favorite baked fries method with some slight changes. You'll see. The good news—it's super easy.
Best Baked Sweet Potato Fries, serves 2-3 as a side dish.
2 medium/large sweet potatoes 1 tablespoon cornstarch big sprinkle of cayenne (about 1/8 teaspoon) big sprinkle of cumin (about 1/8 teaspoon) 2 tablespoons peanut oil (or canola) salt, pepper to season cilantro for garnish
First, peel the potatoes. Then cut them into matchsticks. Try to keep them all relatively the same thickness (different lengths is fine). This will help them cook evenly.
Soak the cut potatoes in water for 15-20 minutes.
I think they kind of look like carrot sticks at this point. :)
Drain and pat dry. In a large ziplock bag, toss the potatoes with the cornstarch, cayenne and cumin. If you find that you are all out of large ziplock bags, spend 2 minutes feeling annoyed with yourself for not checking before you went to the store, and then another 3 minutes being distracted by Instagram.
Actually, don't do that. That's just what I did. You can also toss them in a large mixing bowl. Then toss with 1 tablespoon of oil. Cover two baking sheets with aluminum foil and coat with the remaining tablespoon of oil. You may be able to use just one baking sheet, depending on the size. But if you're unsure, just use two so you're not crowding the fries (this will help them bake more crispy).
Bake at 450°F for 10-12 minutes. Then flip all the fries over and rotate the pans. Bake another 10-12 minutes. Then turn the oven off, open the (oven) door just a little and allow the fries to sit in there for another 5-6 minutes.
Season with salt and pepper and garnish with a little chopped cilantro. You can see I went ahead and took mine to the next level and made chipotle mayo. You can make this too by combining 2/3 cup mayo and one chipotle pepper in adobo sauce in a food processor or blender for a few seconds. Easy peasy. Enjoy! xo. Emma
The Flow Hive is a new beehive invention that promises to eliminate the more laborious aspects of collecting honey from a beehive with a novel spigot system that taps into specially designed honeycomb frames. Invented over the last decade by father and son beekeepers Stuart and Cedar Anderson, the system eliminates the traditional process of honey extraction where frames are removed from beehives, opened with hot knives, and loaded into a machine that uses centrifugal force to get the honey out. Here is how the Andersons explain their design:
The Flow frame consists of already partly formed honeycomb cells. The bees complete the comb with their wax, fill the cells with honey and cap the cells as usual. When you turn the tool, a bit like a tap, the cells split vertically inside the comb forming channels allowing the honey to flow down to a sealed trough at the base of the frame and out of the hive while the bees are practically undisturbed on the comb surface.
When the honey has finished draining you turn the tap again in the upper slot resets the comb into the original position and allows the bees to chew the wax capping away, and fill it with honey again.
It’s difficult to say how this might scale up for commercial operations, but for urban or backyard beekeeping it seems like a whole lot of fun. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine these on the roof of a restaurant where honey could be extracted daily, or for use by kids or others who might be more squeamish around live bees. You can see more on their website and over on Facebook.
Update: The Flow Hive is currently seeking funding on IndieGogo. So far they’ve raised $1.8 million dollars in 16 hours.
Daqui alguns dias teremos mais uma edição do Oscar. Vários artistas serão premiados por suas obras, mas poucos terão a chance de mostrar como é trabalhoso concluir um trabalho como este. Para fortalecer este elo, confira neste post 20 atores que mergulharam de cabeça em seus personagens.
Para fazer Breaking Bad, Bryan Cranston aprendeu a fazer metanfetamina no Departamento de Narcóticos
Adrian Brody se desfez de apartamento e carro, e se mudou para a Europa com apenas dois sacos de roupas para se preparar para seu papel em O Pianista
Tippi Hedrin teve aves vivas lançadas contra ela por ajudantes, em preparação para a cena icônica do ataque em Os Pássaros
Clint Eastwood comprou os direitos para Os Imperdoáveis, e então esperou 15 anos antes de fazer o filme
Min-sik Choi queimou-se com um fio quente para simular o método com o qual seu personagem conta os anos na cadeia, no filme Oldboy
Durante as filmagens de Camisa de Força, Adrien Brody insistiu em ser trancado dentro de uma camisa de força e colocado dentro de uma gaveta de necrotério
Brad Pitt arruinou seu sorriso para filmar Clube da Luta. Ele foi até um dentista para serrar um pouco o dente da frente
James Franco frequentou um prostíbulo, enquanto preparava seu papel no filme Sonny
Christian Bale viveu comendo uma maçã por dia para se preparar para seu papel em O Operário. Em seguida, precisou desenvolver os músculos para viver Bruce Wayne em Batman Begins
As filmagens de O Náufrago tiveram que ser interrompidas para que Tom Hanks perdesse 20 quilos e deixasse o cabelo e a barba crescerem
Gary Oldman interpretou tantos personagens americanos que precisou frequentar um fonoaudiólogo para recuperar o sotaque britânico
Val Kilmer se tornou tão convincente em seu papel de Jim Morrison que os outros membros do The Doors não conseguiam distinguir quem estava cantando no filme
Por sua aclamada atuação como o Coringa, Heath Ledger passou um mês trancado em um quarto de hotel. Ele queria entrar em contato com a imprevisibilidade de um psicopata
Daniel Day-Lewis pegou pneumonia durante a preparação para The Age of Innocence. Ele caminhou por Nova York por dois meses vestindo roupas de época, incluindo uma bengala e uma cartola
Shia Labeouf decidiu que suas cenas de sexo em Ninfomaníaca precisavam parecer mais reais. Então, ele sugeriu que fizesse sexo com Stacy Martin (atriz do filme) diante das câmeras. Nada foi confirmado, mas a namorada dele terminou o relacionamento
50 Cent perdeu 25 quilos para interpretar um paciente que passava por quimioterapia
Scott Glenn assistiu fitas recuperadas que mostravam cenas de crimes reais envolvendo tortura e assassinatos para se preparar para seu papel em O Silêncio dos Inocentes. Ele ficou perturbado com tudo o que viu
Robert De Niro trabalhou turnos de 12 horas em um táxi em Nova York por um mês antes de começar a filmar Taxi Driver
Antes de gravar O Último dos Moicanos, Daniel Day-Lewis teve que ser encontrado. Ele havia desaparecido por 6 meses. Mais tarde, apareceu dizendo que estava vivendo no deserto para se preparar para seu papel
James McAvoy teve sua cabeça raspara para interpretar Charles Xavier em X-Men. Quando descobriu que o personagem seria retratado com cabelo, ele precisou usar apliques – cada um levava de 14 a 18 horas para ficar pronto
Robotic probes launched by NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and others are gathering information all across the solar system. We currently have spacecraft in orbit around the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, a comet, and Saturn, and two operational rovers on Mars. Several others are on their way to smaller bodies, and a few are heading out of the solar system entirely. Although the Space Shuttle no longer flies, astronauts are still at work aboard the International Space Station, performing experiments and sending back amazing photos. With all these eyes in the sky, I'd like to take another opportunity to put together a recent photo album of our solar system—a set of family portraits, of sorts—as seen by our astronauts and mechanical emissaries. This time, we have a multiple transit of Jupiter, great close-up images of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, as well as tantalizing new images of the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto, as two different probes near them, and, of course, lovely images of our home, planet Earth.
Active regions across the sun in an image provided by NASA on October 8, 2014.
(Reuters/NASA)
This week we have images of Beluga whales in Vladivostok, speleotherapy deep below Belarus, the Maha Shivaratri festival in India, the Chinese Lunar New Year, a partially-frozen Niagara Falls, a "Wearable Tomato" robot in Japan, and much more.
This photo taken Thursday, February 12, 2015, and provided by the Grand Teton National Park shows, an unusual cloud formation across the summit of the Grand Teton in this view from the park's headquarters campus at Moose, Wyoming.
(AP Photo/Grand Teton National Park, Jackie Skaggs)
At this pace, the country's robot population is going to outnumber people.
If you are a human who works at the Kawada factory outside Tokyo, most of your coworkers are robots. On the assembly line, the company's uber-advanced, human-looking robots can do the work of three people. They can also make you a decent cup of coffee.
There’s a very interesting piece in Nature today about how science is making it more clear than ever that the binary nature of the sexes isn’t actually binary at all — that there are a lot of gradiations in biological sexual development, brought on not only via chromosomal differentation (the old “XX” and “XY” thing) but a host of other processes. This is how people with XY chromosomes can (rarely) get pregnant and give birth, and how a man who fathered four children can be discovered to have a womb. Biology: It’s wacky.
I don’t imagine this report will make essentialists (“There’s men and there’s women and that’s it!”) particularly happy, but then it’s not actually the job of science to reinforce people’s comfort zones — or bigotries, to be less polite about it. But I look forward to the mental two-step some of these folks will take to try to cram this information into their understanding of the world, rather than to expand their understanding of the world based on this information. That should be interesting, and a little bit sad.
An anonymous reader writes: Face recognition software underwent a revolution in 2001 with the creation of the Viola-Jones algorithm. Now, the field looks set to dramatically improve once again: computer scientists from Stanford and Yahoo Labs have published a new, simple approach that can find faces turned at an angle and those that are partially blocked by something else. The researchers "capitalize on the advances made in recent years on a type of machine learning known as a deep convolutional neural network. The idea is to train a many-layered neural network using a vast database of annotated examples, in this case pictures of faces from many angles. To that end, Farfade and co created a database of 200,000 images that included faces at various angles and orientations and a further 20 million images without faces. They then trained their neural net in batches of 128 images over 50,000 iterations. ... What's more, their algorithm is significantly better at spotting faces when upside down, something other approaches haven't perfected."
1. Molyvos, Lesvos, Greece 2. Bonn, Germany 3. Stockholm, Sweden 4. Valencia, Spain 5. Washington DC, USA 6. Cullinan, South Africa 7. Nafplio, Peloponnese, Greece 8. Spello, Italy
Working only with layers of painted galvanized wire atop steel armature, UK artist Kendra Haste creates faithful reproductions of creatures large and small for both public installations and private collections around the world. A graduate of the from the Royal College of Art, Haste says she is fascinated by how such a seemingly ordinary medium, chicken wire, is capable of suggesting “the sense of movement and life, of contour and volume, the contrasts of weight and lightness, of solidity and transparency—values that I find in my natural subjects.” She continues about her work with animals:
What interests me most about studying animals is identifying the spirit and character of the individual creatures. I try to create a sense of the living, breathing subject in a static 3D form, attempting to convey the emotional essence without indulging in the sentimental or anthropomorphic.
