The 83-year-old actor, who became known worldwide as the iconic Mr. Spock of the "Star Trek" TV series (1966-69) and subsequent films, died today Friday at home in Bel Air, CA of chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder.

Nimoy once admitted to not having given much thought to the character of Mr. Spock when offered the part for the TV series. "It was a job," he once said in a TV interview, "and likely one that I figured wasn't going to last too long." Still, he received three successive Emmy nominations during the show's three-year run, before it was cancelled by NBC in 1969.

But the show's cult following only grew rather than waned, and it proved so popular in syndication that the entire original cast was resurrected in 1979 as "Star Trek: The Motion Picture." Nimoy stayed with them for five more "Star Trek" films over the next 16 years, before they all retired their roles collectively in 1996 with the release of "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country."

Nimoy came out of retirement in 2009 to once again reprise the role in the latest reboot of "Star Trek" films, as an elder Spock who through the act of time travel would eventually meet and mentor his younger and more headstrong self, as played by Zachary Quinto. Following the release of "Star Trek Into Darkness" in 2013, he announced that he had COPD and was retiring from the role, once and for all.

Anyway, the story ended well. In true 'Murica fashion a pickup truck pulled up next to them and a guy standing in the bed of the truck with a lasso threw it over their heads and caught them up quick as you please.

It was pretty cool to see.

CNN.com

 Where it looks white and gold to me.

  That buttressed my initial thought  that people were seeing  different colors based on the properties of the monitor they were viewing or the lighting, shadows angle from their vantage.. But, I read that people together in the same room looking at  it on the same monitor at the same time and obviously under the same conditions see it as different colors.

A mummified monk found preserved in Mongolia last week has been baffling and astounding those who uncovered him.

Senior Buddhists say the monk, found sitting in the lotus position, is in a deep meditative trance and not dead.

Forensic examinations are under way on the remains, found wrapped in cattle skins in north-central Mongolia.

Scientists have yet to determine how the monk is so well preserved, though some think Mongolia's cold weather could be the reason.

But Dr Barry Kerzin, a physician to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, told the Siberian Times that the monk was in a rare state of meditation called "tukdam".

In order to bridge the moments between individual scenes, VFX were used to extend one shot to get to the next. CG was used in some cases to create CG windows, doorways or backgrounds; in other instances, VFX involved painting things out of a frame. "We were limited in the amount of reframing we could do," Soles said, noting that Lubezki and Inarritu preplanned the framing of the shots. "We had to reconstruct what was missing."
The pair said Rodeo FX also contributed to the pacing, explaining that it had to slow down or speed up the shots to match the drum beat in the score.
To create the Birdman character in shots in which he appeared alongside Katon, the actor first was filmed reading the Birdman lines against a green screen. For the shoot, a stunt double was used for Birdman, and then the VFX team replaced the face with a CG version of Keaton's face.
More "traditional" VFX work also involved creating CG backgrounds such as the reflections in the dressing room mirrors. (Without that, the production crew would have appeared in the reflections). And in the scene during which Keaton gets angry in his dressing room and appears to telekinetically move things like posters and chairs, those objects were all CG creations.

Female fictional characters conceptualised in the Muslim world are either veiled or portrayed as meek and oppressed in the public eye. However, Lahore-based Shahan Zaidi's debut superhero can finally help combat these stereotypes.

The main character of Zaidi's English-language graphic novel Bloody Nasreen is a 27-year-old girl from Karachi who wears skull-printed kameez with churidar and sneakers - none of what girls her age would wear. She's an anti-hero you're not supposed to like. Her smoking habits and aggressive nature are aimed to p*** you off.

Artificial Intelligence
Human Aggression
Alien Life

Laura Ingraham, the conservative talk show host, did not exactly provide the warm-up comments for Jeb, snidely suggesting that Bush's wife, Columba, would attract women voters since Jeb permits her to take loans out for large jewelry purchases and, of course, reminded  anyone who would listen of Mrs. Bush's Customs avoidance on return from her Paris shopping spree.

A prominent writer with a known disdain for religion was hacked to death on the streets of Dhaka, Bangladesh on Thursday. Avijit Roy was leaving a large, national book fair with his wife when the two were attacked by assailants wielding machetes. His wife, a blogger, suffered a blow to the head and is in critical condition.

I consistently see torture being portrayed as an effective means of getting good information. Cheney must feel vindicated.

This evening, I watched the first episode of the new season of, "House of Cards".

This little gem sets out, in my opinion, to portray the normalization of killing civilians, including children, in the pursuit of a suspected terrorist.

Kevin Spacey, playing the president, emotes a wee bit of concern, knowing that the collateral damage will include the innocent, children among them, then gives the go-ahead.
And they are all incinerated in an instant as he and his team watch on a large screen tv.

He looks slightly grave. But it is all in a days work. Tough choices. And then walks away, arm in arm with his wife talking about her political future.

I am curious about the narrative of these epics - and how they are conditioning us to the horror story brought to majestic heights by the Bush administration, and now portrayed as the new normal.

Is there no other way?

I thought he already did but maybe it wasn't official until now. Of course I'll see this film but not sure it's a good idea?

If you're younger than 30, you've never experienced a month in which the average surface temperature of the Earth was below average.

Each month, the US National Climatic Data Center calculates Earth's average surface temperature using temperature measurements that cover the Earth's surface. Then, another average is calculated for each month of the year for the twentieth century, 1901-2000. For each month, this gives one number representative of the entire century. Subtract this overall 1900s monthly average - which for February is 53.9F (12.1C) - from each individual month's temperature and you've got the anomaly: that is, the difference from the average.

The last month that was at or below that 1900s average was February 1985. Ronald Reagan had just started his second presidential term and Foreigner had the number one single with "I want to know what love is."

These temperature observations make it clear the new normal will be systematically rising temperatures, not the stability of the last 100 years. The traditional definition of climate is the 30-year average of weather. The fact that - once the official records are in for February 2015 - it will have been 30 years since a month was below average is an important measure that the climate has changed.

I will sit back and chuckle as I watch people who have bashed BHO for the last six years for trying to work with Republicans, twist themselves into pretzels, now that HRC is selling it to us.