the dextrous, the sinister.

problem solving steps

At Le Mans teams enter 3 identical cars, and Mercedes had entered 3 CLRs, CLR 4 CLR 5 & CLR 6.

CLR 4 was being driven by Australian driver Mark Webber in practice two days before the race when he had the incident in the photo and flipped the car onto its roof on the track. Mercedes repaired CLR 4 and were ready for the pre-race warm-up, again driven by Webber, and on that warm up lap Webber again flipped the car and CLR 4 was pulled from the race. Both times Webber sustained absolutely minimal bruising injuries from his seatbelt and walked away from both crashes.

As far as Mercedes could see from the telemetry, this was a CLR 4 problem or a Webber problem, as CLR 5 and CLR 6 had both completed practice and qualification without incident and they were starting in 5th and 7th place respectively. So they went ahead with running those two.

4 hours into the race, CLR 5 has the accident in the clip above, getting tossed off the track, into the trees, where a branch narrowly avoids both impailing the Scottish driver Peter Dumbreck and also avoids piercing the fuel tank and blowing the car up. Dumbreck is briefly knocked unconscious but gets it together quickly enough that by the time help arrives he's got himself out of the car and is sitting on the grass next to it. He is also cleared with only minor injuries.

The CLR 6 is immediately pulled from the race and Mercedes never enters Le Mans again.

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.

Curiosity celebrates her 14th Martian birthday this week and she’s still trucking along in Gale Crater where she’s sampling Martian soil to learn about the geology and climate and teach us all about the ancient lakes that used to cover our nearest neighbor!

Thank you to everyone who keeps this post queued up so I never forget her special day. I love how much love this post gets every year.

If you would like to see what Tumblr’s favourite Rover has been up to recently you can read about her latest mission updates here and you can see her live position in Gale Crater on this map here. (You can also see the great photos she takes!)

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.

Curiosity celebrates her 14th Martian birthday this week and she's still trucking along in Gale Crater where she's sampling Martian soil to learn about the geology and climate and teach us all about the ancient lakes that used to cover our nearest neighbor!

Thank you to everyone who keeps this post queued up so I never forget her special day. I love how much love this post gets every year.

If you would like to see what Tumblr's favourite Rover has been up to recently you can read about her latest mission updates here and you can see her live position in Gale Crater on this map here. (You can also see the great photos she takes!)

- guy at work "Yes, and -" ing the bit me and my coworker were doing where we pretended to be owners of a fantasy medieval tavern not minimum wage retail staff

- at the gay club when Die Young by Kesha came on and two hundred people, all dancing and drinking separately, jumped up and down to make the "- beat of the drums *STOMP STOMP*" as loud as possible

- person who watched me stomp round the beach singing a made up song about breakfast foods to name a cat after and suggested more breakfast foods that would be good cat names

- guy who started a dance off with everyone across the road while waiting for the lights to change