Star Trek Diplomas: All of them. I think.

So... StarTrek.Com has released a Starfleet Academy Diploma.  I wanted to see if the design was supported by canon (because I'm a huge fact-check nerd) and in my quest collected what I think to be all the diploma designs officially used on the show. I'm still looking though, so if you find one I don't have here, please leave a comment!

Confirmed authentic:

Voyager epi "Non Sequitur".

It appears to be the first time a diploma had been shown, if rabid Trekkers diligently duplicating it is any indication. If you register at the LCARSc site, you can download a free template to make your own!
(ref: http://www.lcarsc.com/entry.php/34-Freebie-Friday-Starfleet-Diploma )



Confirmed authentic: 

Enterprise: "Storm Front, Part II"

Earlier in storyline, later in established canon.
Found via http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Starfleet_Academy_majors


Official StarTrek.Com diploma (Released 2012):

 I can't find any epi screenshot to support this design, but it is nifty.
http://store.startrek.com/products/124082-customized-starfleet-academy-diploma



Plausible: "Official Fan Club" diploma circa 2009.

 According to a blog called TrekNostalgia this design was released pre Dec2009 (date of the blog) by the official Star Trek fan club. It appears to be the most reproduced diploma on the web. You can even buy them on Ebay, from a guy who makes sure the blue ink is iridescent.


As Official as it Gets:

From Wesley's... er, Wil Wheaton's Flickr.

This diploma was found on Wil Wheaton's Flickr (I even left the address bar in the screencap, since I wanted to share it, couldn't use the BBcode box, but couldn't save it either. Look ma, no (red)hands!) It was posted Jan24-2009 and (I think) was presented to him at Phoenix ComicCon of that year. It lists Wheaton as the academy President, Marina Sirtis as the Secretary of the academy, and Brent Spiner as Dean.


Confirmed:

Roddenberrysearch.com

One diploma I found on a "Swagbucks" site called Roddenberrysearch.com, and uses the logos of Roddenberry.com (official Roddenberry estate website). It's similar to Voyager Diploma, but blue.  I emailed the webmaster of the Roddenberry.com store to verify if it's been authorized, and it is indeed provided by Roddenberry.com.


Authentic Marathon completion certificate:

Unknown prop/episode

This I found via Photobucket user Sladeshine, because they thought it was Picard's diploma. It's a Starfleet Academy Marathon certificate for winning the race and is pretty nifty, so I thought I'd include it. The image could be a screencap, though the poster does not give any info on it. Memory-Alpha claims the family album was for Star Trek: Generations, but was not shown in the movie. They include a mock up of the certificate.

"This certificate was designed by the Star Trek art department and featured in (and scanned from) a behind-the-scenes feature in the July 2002 issue of Star Trek: The Magazine (Volume 3, Issue 03, Page 70)" - Memory-Alpha

Note: This mock up says the marathon was 40 kilometers, which is only 24.6 miles. It would be 42.2 km.
Remind me to make myself one if I ever run 26.2 miles! ;)


There seems to be no diploma mocked up for Starfleet Medical Academy.

Have something I didn't find? Let me know and I'll be happy to add it (and give you hunting credit, of course!)

Edit:
Mr J.Anderson of the LCARSc site mocked up a bunch of other certificates found throughout Voyager! (Conundrum: I want to save the images here for ease of viewing, but don't want to "thief" views to their thread. Go visit!)
-Picard's "Grankite Order of Tactics" [link]
-Ensign Kim's Apollo 11 Quadricentennial Commemorative Certificate ST:VOY . [link]
-Ensign Kim's Cochrane Medal of Excellence Award from ST:VOY S2 E5 - Non Sequitur. [link]
-Ensign Kim's Certificate of Completion for a non-humanoid engineering studies class, from ST:VOY S2 E5, Non Sequitur. [link]

He has stills to back them up too. Way too awesome!

Edit:
Roddenberry.com confirms that the products on Roddenberrysearch.com (of SwagBucks) are provided by themselves officially. :) The Blue "Voyager" type diploma added as "confirmed".  May29-2012

Janna... Year 28.

I had my birthday right as Finals started, so I'm a little late in posting.

Husband took me out to The Cheesecake Factory, my first time, and it was fantastic. The dark brown bread is to die for, the chicken cashew salad is delicious, and the cheesecake... need I say it? Yes, yes, I must: Ah-mazing. He got a great shot of me beginning to devour the chocolate banana shake. MUWAHAHAHA! Too old for silliness I'm not.

I don't want to gloat about gifts too much, but I would like to point out the awesome owl earrings my mom sent me (wearing them in the photo). Husband got me a fantastic camera. This camera has some ridiculous zoom, and I was able to get a dragonfly 25 feet off the ground.... You can see the veins in its wing. I take it pretty much everywhere now!

I upload the photos to my DeviantArt (http://weyrcat.deviantart.com/gallery/) because it lets me keep the size and quality to a greater extent than Picasa.

The Dragonfly:

Dragonfly 120424 by ~WeyrCat on deviantART

The Butterfly and the Hornet:
 
Hornet attacks the Ruddy Daggerwing butterfly by ~WeyrCat on deviantART

This one, like most great pictures, was all luck. I was trying to get the butterfly and meanwhile there were these hornets trying to scare it out of the tree. I managed to get this shot of the hornet dive-bombing it!

 There are a bunch more of me learning to use the camera, Muscovy, a Blue Jay, mainly birds. /grin/

So... I'm 29 now. In my 28th year I...

-Ran an 8.1 mile trail obstacle course, the Super Spartan.
-Went on an 11.3 mile hike in Myakka Woods.
-Ran (at least) 24.4 miles (about 4 of it trail running) (in 2012). And started using [Fitocracy] to track my PT since I wasn't adequately using my 2011 training log. 
-Saw Trans-Siberian Orchestra in concert with Husband and Irma!
-Read 33 books for fun.
-Got sucked back into Neopets (the Habitarium did it), and [Once Upon a Time] (I have a crush on Rumpelstiltskin).
-Went to see Enchanted Island by the Met (streamed to a local theatre)... and somehow forgot to blog about it! But it was AMAZING! [Offsite link to videos!]
-Went to the Ft. Lauderdale science museum 'Museum of Discovery and Science' and the AWESOME Palm Beach Zoo!
-And went to see Mozart's Don Giovanni. Ok, so that was before my last birthday, but just barely!
-Credits wise earned 31 As, 1 A-, and 4 B+, and am sitting at a 3.922 GPA. 

 I also started running again, hurt my knee in the Spartan, quit running again, and working on running again, moved again, and consistently worked (though I had to go down to part time).

My awesome husband has been making great strides in his own arena, and we are setting new goals for ourselves as individuals and as a couple. Tightening our belts, reaching farther, and having as much fun as possible along the way.

I think it's been a great way to spend the last 365 days of my life, and I can't wait to see what year 29 holds!

Spring 2012 Final Grades

Final Grades:

Physics 1 Lab: B+. 87.0%
Physics 1 Lec: (A) 92.0% (Was curved above 93%)
German 1: (A).  96%
Interpretation of Poetry: (A) (% Unknown, everything returned with Letter grade only.)

*Note, this Uni works on a +/- system, but there is no A+. Also, I find numbers to be a better indicator of how I did, since a 93% A looks suspiciously similar to a 99% A on a transcript.

On the German: there must have been a curve: for those who know me on FB I was pretty much panicking when I got home from the final. I was furious over some directions and changes I made to my answers that I knew I shouldn't have (but did anyway). From the spreadsheet I have (yes I spreadsheet my grades) in order to receive the 96% in the class that I seem to have, I would have had to get a 98% on the exam (I had a 96% in the class prior to the final). I do not believe I did that well in raw numbers. Cest la vie.

My summer semester has a wee break in it before I reattempt Chem2 and it's lab. I still regret dropping it but still believe it was the right choice. I'll be taking advantage of the little break to go see an old friend get married, and spend some time with family. I'll also be pre-writing out as many pre-lab reports as I can fathom, because I in no way think that taking chem in the summer will be easier than taking it in the regular semester, but at least it's the only class I'll need to think about.

India Patents How to Sit, Stand, and sit "Indian style".

A friend of mine posted that "India patents 1,300 yoga moves" (via en.rian.ru/world). Here's a brief overview:

Hindu gurus and some 200 scientists compiled the list from 16 ancient texts to prevent yoga teachers in the United States and Europe from patenting established poses as their own. ... "We are making available the 30-40 most popular yoga asanas in the open domain," TKDL head, V K Gupta said. "The rest will be available only to patent offices." ... Indians have been outraged by attempts by "yoga gurus" in the West to patent poses. In the United States alone, the patent authorities have issued more than 130 yoga-related patents, 150 copyrights and 2,300 trademarks related to the ancient practice.

Hmm, I would think that unless you can prove a certain pose has not been done before, you shouldn't be able to patent it. How can they patent something hundreds of years old? As for copywriting, are they talking about "yogis" who copywrite books of how to do Yoga? I don't see why this is a legal issue... if I write about, even about a common subject, water, I copywrite my book. I don't own water, I didn't invent it, what I'm copywriting is the intellectual property of the words that came out of my brain and onto the paper. My work.

Yoga (6) as meditation seems to have been introduced around 3rd-4th century BC, when it wasn't India: it was the Maurya Empire(4) and Hinduism was just beginning to take root, and would lead to Buddhism, which also used Yoga as meditation. India (3) begins looking more like India around 10th C. AD, but isn't really the India we know it until 16th-18th century AD.

Yoga as a physical practice, or Hatha yoga (1), wasn't really set down and compiled until 15th C by Yogi Swatmarama, (in India) as "Hatha Yoga Pradipika" (2)(7). It's said to be the oldest surviving text on the subject, but is also said to be a compilation of older texts. It's free to DL online, btw, but seems to be mostly text descriptions and little pictures.

A patent (5) can be issued (bought) for novelty and non-obviousness. They could file yoga under this because even though there's a huge hunk of "yoga" that is really a weird revision of the practice that came out in the 70s, everyone still says "oh, it's an old Indian practice" etc. But patents expire after 20 years, unless renewed, and the thing becomes fair use. Yoga poses that have been around 500 years shouldn't be able to be patented. How can they "patent" something that old?

The article even states they're doing it in response to people patenting their own yoga poses, but they'd be able to do that as long as they changed the pose a little anyway. They're acting like "Patent trolls" to try to exclude other people from using/distributing something older than their grandfathers. It's idiotic!

/rant over.

Bib:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatha_yoga
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatha_Yoga_Pradipika
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/INDIA
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurya_Empire
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent
6. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga
7. Yoga Swami Svatmarama. Hatha yoga pradipika (Link is Download of PDF). [link]
8. Supercool tree asana image from Colourbox [link] It's NOT my image!