Its A Long Sad Story

Behold the giant otter (Pteronura brasiliensis). Of the 14 living otter species known to science, this one is the biggest. Growing up to 5.6 ft (1.7 m) long, this mustelid can reach weights of 70 lbs (32 kg)! It inhabits parts of South America's Orinoco, Amazon, and La Plata river systems, where it lives in groups of up to 20 members. It feeds on fish, crustaceans, and even caiman.

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.

i was made fun of enough times by adults, by peers, for liking something and wanting to share it that i just. didn’t. anymore. 

dont fucking tease kids for liking things. even if you think its cringe. ESPECIALLY. if you think its cringe. because the way you speak and act towards them when they are sharing themselves with you STICKS and they will think of it years down the line.

“What’s that you’re drawing?”

*panicking* “It’s nothing, I’m sorry, I’ll put it away.”

“No it’s okay, I was just curious about it.”

“It’s nothing. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“You’re not in trouble, I just thought it looked like a character from a video game I like.”

Her face *lit up* the second I gave her the smallest bit of approval. She started asking me if I’d heard of various AUs for Undertale, and I tried to follow along as she explained her favorites. I obviously had to keep an eye on the rest of the class, answering questions and helping with algebra, but each time I passed her desk she had more things to tell me.