paladin Vibes

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.

[image: tweet by thefourthvine, transcribed below:]

Extremely concerned that the response to #DraculaDaily on my timeline:

Non-lawyers: Jonathan, RUN

“When music teacher Mary Piercey-Lewis first arrived in Nunavut in 2001, she was surprised to find there was no formal music curriculum to teach from.

“There were absolutely no music resources for Inuit music,” she said, thinking back to her early music lessons in Arviat.

“There was lots of amazing music happening in communities, but no resources to really pull upon to use in the classroom, especially for high school.”

Piercey-Lewis — who in 2021 was named the Juno Awards’ Musicounts Music Teacher of the Year and won the Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence — knew that music could be a powerful tool for promoting Inuit culture and for helping students to connect with their Inuit identity.

So, with no formal curriculum to pull from, she got to work creating her own music resources for students.