That ladies and gentlemen, is the surface of mars. The lander touched down minutes before this was taken.
I followed the hair-raising flight, atmospheric breaking, parachuting, and rocket firing landing of the Mars Phoenix Lander today via Twitter.
Science, it works bitches!
images via NASA
A friend recently hit me with some good advice via IM: “Hang in there Manfred.” (Thats a reference to Accelerando for those not in the know)
The way William Gibson describes the future seems to fit better every year. “The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” Most of the technologies that appeared in 07 were measurably cool: the iPhone, the end of analog TV, GPS in cars & phone / blue tooth proliferation, Moore’s law and multi-core CPU’s, etc., etc. These are things that a number of years ago I looked forward to the way I now look forward to neural nanonics, private space flight, bioengineering, and other amazing stuff. Now they appear rather blah, about as exiting as a car or television set. The future is already here alright. I guess I just need to be more patient.
However it was a good year in the reading department. Accelerando by Charles Stross, Spook Country by William Gibson, The Night’s Dawn Trilogy (paperbacks 1 2 3 4 5 6) by Peter F. Hamilton to name some of most interesting ones. Of course Cory Doctorow and the usual crowd had some excellent blog posts. Penny Arcade had some truly great comics reminding yet again that “my people” are out there and going strong. 2007 certainly had an abundance of daily slack to consume.
I’m still holding out hope for my tribe. I expect we will continue to kick some ass and make sure things end up OK, preferably with lots of super bad ass scientific stuff.
Here’s to 2008 and the pursuit of slack and knowledge!
Go Japan! Golly, HD footage of the moon! Oh wait, we put a few people and cars on the moon 50 years ago. Kthxbye.
link to HD Video of moon flyover
