Good Book Weekend

While I usually pretend to keep abreast of what books are coming out, this one was a surprise purchase, oh, about ten seconds after entering our local Barnes and Noble late last week: “Unseen Academicals” by Terry Pratchett. For some reason I hadn’t seen any announcements for this one, so dragging the hardcover book to [...]

Us on a Pixel

This picture is already two years old, but I just recently found that page and thought I share… Here we have a photo taken of all of us by the HiRISE camera on board of the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter – at the time Mars was about 142 million kilometers from Earth, which is comparatively close [...]

Coding With Experience

Over at DadHacker, Landon is celebrating his 30th year of programming in C. It’s a great reminiscence across several decades of coding, ending in three golden rules that should be repeated in the first chapter of every future programming manual: Leave the existing brace style in the code alone or change all of it Keep [...]

Marsian Art

Just found this via the always great Bad Astronomy blog: You have to click through for the larger version! What you see here is the result of dust devils removing the red surface dust in graceful arcs, with the grey sand in this particular crater on Mars shining through. Now how cool is that? Of [...]

21st Century Stuff

It is very satisfying to finally see something that really, really belongs into the 21st century. If you haven’t followed the developments at the International Space Station lately, here are a couple of things to meditate over: There are currently four spacecraft docked at the ISS: Three Russian Soyuz and a Japanese resupply vehicle. The [...]