Ready to be a part of the first permanent human settlement on Mars? Then you might want to check out Mars One, a group planning on landing the first 4 people in 2024, with 4 more scheduled to arrive every two years after that. The initial missions beginning in 2018 will be to land supplies and robots to build a habitation for the humans who follow.
I generally do a music post on Saturday night, and tonight being the 50th anniversary of the very first Doctor Who episode, that pretty much locks down the theme. A number of fans have done their own version of Doctor Who Theme, and I thought I would share a few of the ones I really liked today. The first one is by Camille and Kennerly Kitt, also known as the Harp Twins, and they have done a truly unique version. The next is Doctor Who Meets Metal from Eric Calderone. Then we have Lara plays the Doctor Who theme on violin, and I would like to point out the posters behind her and her R2D2 skirt.
Finally, we finish up with the famous Doctor Who Theme Song played with Tesla Coils by Ark Attack! If you haven’t already played with the musical possibilities inherent in Tesla Coils, it is really pretty simple. They are spark gaps (sometimes some pretty freaking big spark gaps) through the air generated by Alternating Current. How frequently they spark per second determines the frequency of the sound they make, which allows you to use them to play music. It works best with a standard synthesizer keyboard structure, where the key you press engages the preset oscillator circuit that feeds power to the coil at the desired frequency.
While I can not stand the smell or taste of coffee, the device itself is beautiful in its construction and elegant in its execution. I particularly like the blend of the Steampunk with the microchip tech, even though purists will no doubt not care for it. But the temperature stability is important to the flavor of the results, and I have always been a member of the Whatever Works School Of Technology. I wonder what other interesting hybrids are waiting for one of us to invent? Thanks to Worlds Without End for the heads up on this one.
I actually took some time off the other week, and besides attending NADWCon I spent a bit of time at the National Aquarium while hanging out in Baltimore. One of the more interesting exhibits was the Jellyfish section, which had quite a selection of types. As I remembered from swimming in the ocean, Jellyfish are not real good at orienting to the local up and down, which should be a bit of a plus for surviving in space (or any other zero G environment).
SIGGRAPH 2013 is coming up on July 21st through the 25th, with the latest and greatest in graphics development for movie production, gaming platforms, and scientific visualization. Some of the presentations and exhibits each year focus on new and emerging technologies, and as usual they have put together a prevue of some of the more interesting ones. A few of these are silly, and more of them need context to understand their potential applications, but a couple of them are obvious game changers that will revolutionize how we do things once they get into full production. And as a special bonus, I am including their Real Time Preview for this year as well.
Friends of the Planetary Society, founded by Carl Sagan and others to promote the colonization of space, have a Kickstarter project: ARKYD. The team at Planetary Resources has begun a project for mining the asteroids, starting with the ones featured in all those tweets from Low Flying Rocks which come much closer to the Earth than a lot of folks find comfortable. Step one is finding them heading our way when they are still far enough away that we have time to intercept them, and for that they are launching a gaggle of small telescopes specially designed to see the faint reflected light from their surfaces. And when there aren’t any rocks fling at us, they can use the telescope farm to monitor interesting things, like Jupiter and Saturn. One of the telescopes will be used to allow pretty much anyone who wants to contribute to take their own pictures of the things that interest them from an orbiting telescope, or have a picture of their choosing photographed in space, with the Earth as a backdrop. There are still 11 days until the project funding window closes, and they have made over $900,000 of their one million dollar goal, so you still have time to contribute and help make this project happen! And, if you contribute a hundred dollars or more, you also get a years membership in The Planetary Society along with the other rewards.