German teacher Jörg Hillebrand knows a lot about Star Trek. He knows how to translate star dates and the hours between them. He knows how many times Commander Ryker wore blue pajamas onscreen. He knows what other TV series used the same costume. And he knows what all the props used to be before they were portrayed as future technology.

Hillebrand noticed that Captain Jean-Luc Picard keeps an open book in his ready room. What book is it, and what page is it opened to? Hillebrand discovered it was two different books in different seasons, so he bought both of them. Not only did he find the exact pages, but one has a reference to the actor Sir Patrick Stewart!

Read the story of that discovery, and stay for David Friedman's interview with Hillebrand, where he tells us how he knows so much about Star Trek, and how his vast Star Trek knowledge got him a job as a research assistant for the series Star Trek: Picard.  -via Metafilter

As we have noted in the past, President John Tyler (1790-1862) left the White House in 1845. He had many children, the last of which, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853 when former President Tyler was 63 years old. Lyon Gardiner Tyler himself sired a child in 1928, when he was 75. That man, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, was the grandson of a President born in the Eighteenth Century.

The youngest Mr. Tyler had been something of a historical curiosity in recent years. Now he has passed on. Last Sunday, The Richmonder reports, he died at the age of 96.

During his life, Mr. Tyler worked in chemical engineering and thrived financially. He eventually purchased and restored Sherwood Forest Plantation, a home once owned by his Presidential grandfather. He also bought and restored the nearby Fort Pocahontas, which was constructed and defended by African American volunteer troops during the Civil War.

-via Educatëd Hillbilly

Students who are in college today grew up with iPhones. For the past three years, they've also had access to ChatGPT to do their homework for them. There are ways to know whether a paper has been written by artificial intelligence, but it's not as easy or reliable as Googling a phrase to check for plagiarism. College professors know students are using AI, since all the major services show usage way down during the summer break months. So what is a professor to do when it comes to final exams and you want to find out if the student has learned anything at all? This year, many are going low-tech and requiring students to bring blue books.

Blue books are standardized blank booklets of paper that are used to write out exam answers. This may frighten students, but it's not easy for the professors, either, since the students haven't used actual handwriting for their college years, and that makes deciphering what they've written really tough. But these students (as well as many of the rest of us) gave up handwriting because a machine can do it better. Is it any different to give up studying and learning because a machine can do it better? Read about the return to blue book exams in an article from The Wall Street Journal. -via Slashdot

May is as good a time as any to think about the problem of snow removal. The question came in to the guys of the What If? series (previously at Neatorama) about using a flamethrower to melt snow. Or would a microwave be better? This person was imagining putting either on the front of a car to melt the snow in front of you. If they had asked me, I would remind them that melted snow is water, water will soon turn to ice in a cold environment, and ice makes the road even more hazardous. But they didn't ask me.

Instead, they look at the pros and cons of flamethrowers, microwave emitters, infrared heat lamps, jet engines, and lasers, particularly in their energy consumption. I would also have some concern about what's under all that snow, like your other car buried in the driveway. Also about the safety of such snow-melting schemes. Find out the best way to remove snow illustrated with ridiculous theoretical scenarios in this video from Randall Munroe and Henry Reich.    

The skull pictured above was found in the Djurab Desert in northern Chad in 2001. It has been dated to somewhere between six and seven million years ago. But what is it? Its owner had a small brain and a protruding brow, like an ape, but also had a smallish jaw and an opening for the spine that hinted it could be a hominid. If so, it would be the oldest hominid fossil ever discovered. But where is the line between apes and hominids? The paleontology world in the 21st century looks at it as whether the creature walked on two legs or four. What is called the Toumaï skull was assigned the species name Sahelanthropus tchadensis, but that didn't classify where it stood in the evolution of humans. If only there were other bones that could indicate whether S. tchadensis walked on two legs, the question could be laid to rest. But it turns out there were other bones.

Paleontologists are ambitious scientists. Paleoanthropologists, who study human fossils, are the most ambitious, since finding a hominid fossil can make up for years of fruitless digging. The Holy Grail of paleoanthropology is to find the earliest hominid, which brings worldwide acclaim in the field. In paleontology, there are certain ethical conventions that govern the ownership of fossils, the hierarchy of academic publishing, and the need to share research so that it can be confirmed. That all went out the window in the case of the Toumaï skull, as a femur found with the skull could be the key to what kind of creature S. tchadensis really was. The feuding and subterfuge went on for years as reputations and careers were shattered, and still hasn't been resolved. Read the gripping story of the French paleoanthropologists who had so much riding on the research into the Toumaï skull at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Didier Descouens)

The Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake was held yesterday in the British village of Brockworth. The event has been held almost every year for at least 200 years, and may be more than 600 years old. The origins and meaning of the event are obscured by time, but must have been a good story. A wheel of Double Gloucester cheese is tossed down the notoriously steep Cooper's Hill, and competitors race to catch it. No one ever catches it, so the first person to the bottom wins the cheese. You might think that a downhill race would be easy, but it also involves falling and rolling, so much that no organization will sanction the race anymore, therefore it is an informal competition where injuries are common. Yet thousands of spectators show up. There were seven races this year, with one reserved for women only. Winners included German YouTuber Tom Kopke, and Luke Preece, who wore a Superman costume. One person was sent to a hospital by ambulance.

Have you ever wondered why a blind person's guide dog is called a seeing eye dog instead of just a guide dog? That's because they came came from the organization The Seeing Eye, founded in 1929 by Morris Frank. Frank lost his sight in one eye at age six, and the other at 16. He heard about an innovative program in Germany that trained dogs to guide blind people. Frank ended up going to Switzerland to work with dog trainer Dorothy Harrison Eustis and came back with a female German shepherd he named Buddy.

The real innovation in training Buddy and other guide dogs was "intelligent disobedience." Buddy was trained to disregard her owner's commands when the situation called for it, such as in dangerous traffic. In 1928 Frank gave a demonstration in New York City to show reporters how Buddy could guide him safely in walking through Manhattan. The next year, Frank and Eustis opened the dog training program that's still in operation today. -via Nag on the Lake

Team Singapore dominated the 5th FAI World Indoor Artistic Skydiving Championships in Charleroi, Belgium, last month. They placed in a couple of team events and won a speed competition as well. Above is their performance in the 4-way Dynamic Open routine, in which they won first place. Don't blink or you'll miss moves you couldn't imagine were possible in a wind tunnel, and they make it look effortless. These athletes aren't limited to indoor skydiving; they jump out of planes all the time.

While I look at indoor skydiving as a bit, okay, a whole lot safer than the outdoor version, I can imagine I would find myself plastered to the ceiling or else flailing like an idiot until someone came and got me or else turned the air off. Meanwhile, these athletes are doing air ballet. Don't miss their dismount, when they actually exit the wind tunnel backwards. -via Geeks Are Sexy

When I was a kid, if anyone had to go to the hospital for a medical emergency, the telephone operator would call a funeral home and they would take you in a hearse, although with a temporary red bubble light stuck on top. They were the only vehicles that could accommodate a person lying down. Up through the 1960s, ambulance service in the USA was a local concern, operated by the police or fire departments, hospitals, or funeral homes. It was mainly a matter of transport, as few places had EMTs. Your odds of survival often depended on how long the trip took.

In Pittsburgh’s majority-Black Hill District, hospital transport was carried out by the city police, and they weren't all that enthusiastic about it. Local leaders looked into the problem, and in 1967, the nonprofit organization Freedom House Enterprises partnered with Presbyterian-University Hospital to develop an ambulance service with trained paramedics. The Black paramedics of the Hill District responded so well that people started calling Freedom House in an emergency instead of the police or hospital. Freedom House suffered political backlash and defunding from city leaders, but its standards of care started a revolution in ambulance service that was felt nationwide. Read about the paramedics of Freedom House Ambulance Service at Smithsonian. A video documentary is included.

The Bishop of Rome had significant temporal power from at least Pope Miltiades, a trend that generally accelerated (with interruptions, Byzantine and otherwise) until the papal domains assembled its own navy to combat Muslim invaders in 849. The Popes intermittently maintained naval forces in addition to armies in the centuries that followed.

Starting in the 1840s, the gradual unification of Italy squeezed the Papal States and its armed forces. The last warship serving in the Papal Navy (Marina Pontifica) was a screw corvette built by the British in 1859 and named the Immacolata Concezione. According to a 1963 article in the US Naval Institute's Proceedings, it had 8 18-pound cannons and a very comfortable cabin built with the Pope's travel in mind. The crew of 46, though, was primarily tasked with protecting the Papal States' fishing rights.

In 1870, the Kingdom of Italy invaded the Papal States and, erm, persuaded Pope Pius IX that the temporal power of the Bishops of Rome had reached a conclusion. The Immacolata Concezione was integrated into the Royal Italian Navy. It later entered French service. The precise fate of the vessel is uncertain, but it was definitely the last warship to sail under the Papal ensign.

Do you recall Frog Baseball? The 1992 short was the first cartoon appearance of two adolescent slackers named Beavis and Butt-Head. It aired on MTV's Liquid Television. Before you go watch it, be advised that they play baseball with a live frog as the ball. The MTV audience went wild over it, and Beavis and Butt-Head got their own series and became television superstars. So did their creator, Mike Judge. With fame came controversy, since these two characters were anything but role models. But Beavis and Butt-Head managed to hold on for seven consecutive seasons, two feature-length films, and two series revivals stretching well into the 21st century. The kids who stayed up past bedtime and had to sneak to watch the show grew up with fond recollections of the two boys who never made it past their pubescent idiocy, at least in this universe. Weird History takes us through the entire history of Beavis and Butt-Head so far.

Two linguists in Australia studied a database of words used in written communication on the internet to see where all this vulgar language comes from. In other news, the words you write end up on a database called the Global Web-Based English Corpus (GloWbE). They ranked twenty English-speaking nations to see who uses the most vulgarities online, including misspellings designed to get past filters. The research paper published in the journal Lingua included terms defined as "blasphemy, curses, ethnic-racial slurs, insults, name-calling, obscenity, profanity, scatology, slang, swearing, tabooed words, offense, impoliteness, verbal aggression, and more."

The top nation for swearing is the United States. That's not because there are so many internet users in the US, because the study analyzed frequency, meaning Americans use the highest percentage of swear words in the total amount of words written. The UK came in second, with Australia in third place. Of the Aussies' third place ranking, the lead author said, "Some may find it disappointing," but surmises it may be that Australians are likely to filter themselves in writing, but not so much in face-to-face discourse. Read more on the rankings at Popular Science. -via Fark

(Image credit: Anna Frodesiak)

Some years ago, I was talking about my cat and said he liked to make biscuits on my lap, and my brother said he'd never heard that term before, but he instantly knew what it meant without an explanation. He has cats, too. If you aren't familiar with the term, there are plenty of cats in this video who will illustrate it. If you need no explanation, you'll still enjoy the cats. Spoiler: it's also called kneading.

While those cats are making biscuits, Dr. Sarah Wooten fills us in on the reasons for this behavior. Surprise- it's not just one reason. Cat make biscuits, of course, because it feels good to them. But kneading also serves their needs in several ways. Whatever gets their human to swoon over how cute they are goes a long way toward ensuring a cat's future as the ruler of the home. -via Laughing Squid

Scientists have found fossil remains of quite a few human species, with the caveat that "species" is still not quite defined. How different from modern humans does a hominid have to be to get a different species designation? A type of human fossil found in Israel 100 years ago is called Homo sapiens, but these people were different from modern humans in several ways. They used tools, wore jewelry, and buried their dead in graveyards. They may have traded with other communities. But anatomically, they seemed to be a transitional species or a missing link between modern humans and earlier species. Were they an ancestor of Homo sapiens in the evolutionary tree? No, because they arose and died out long after Homo sapiens was already flourishing elsewhere. They were more like a cousin to modern humans. Some now call them an archaic version of humans.

Later, these archaic Homo sapiens were found in far-flung parts of Africa, but the remains still dated to after the debut of modern humans. Research on these archaic humans highlights how many holes there are in the fossil record when it comes to the human family tree. Read about the skulls of archaic Homo sapiens at Aeon.  -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Wapondaponda)

Ryan George titled this video "If Red Carpet Interviews Were Honest," but I feel it's a distillation of the different facets of the business of celebrities. One pseudo-celebrity is interviewing other celebs as they march into an awards show in a carefully choreographed way designed to fill the airwaves with hours of chitchat. Just slot in the details of whoever is hot right now for the generic patter, and you've got a set of Mad Libs going. Why are you here? To promote my new project or else to remind everyone I exist. Who are you wearing? That's both a required question and a required answer because it's an ad for whoever is providing the clothing. Next time you are tempted to actually watch a live red carpet event (if that ever happens), you'll have to laugh at how generic they really are, and how much acting goes into them.