Author: sean
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Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th
No guys you don’t understand.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
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In 1974, four years after publishing his first children’s book about the close friendship between Frog and Toad, the author and illustrator Arnold Lobel told his family he was gay. “I think ‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out,” says his daughter, Adrianne.
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In monumental murals and iconic prints, Charles White captured the humanity of black America at a time when simply doing so was a radical political gesture. Getting his start as a precocious young draftsman in Chicago, White would gain employ under the WPA—a job that forced him to complete a painting every month for three years. He moved to New York with his first wife, fellow artist Elizabeth Catlett, where he fell in with the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance; the couple then went to Mexico City at the invitation of David Alfaro Siqueiros, working for a year at his influential printshop. White called his exposure to overtly political Mexican artists the single most profound influence on his career. While all of this history has led to his general categorization under “social realism,” I find the term a bit limiting, perhaps even with derogatory connotations meant to put down artists who rejected modernist purity and infused their work with activism and narrative. However, White’s immense talent—seen here in his incredible mix of velvety chiaroscuro and deft, lively line—was channeled as much toward politics as toward aesthetic beauty. “All my life, I’ve been painting a simple painting,” he once said. “This does not mean that I am a man without anger—I’ve had my work in museums where I wasn’t allowed to see it. But what I pour into my work is the challenge of how beautiful life can be.”
Charles White, Mother and Child, 1953
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Snow leopards and their giant nommable tails
BEHOLD DOGS
WE HAVE ACHIEVED THAT WHICH YOU CANNOT
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