Well folks, I’m headed off to Big Sky Country tomorrow (aka Montana)! I’ll start the week at the MSL camera team meeting, where I will get all sorts of cool news about the MastCam, MAHLI and MARDI cameras which I will not be able to share with you.* After that, the lot of us will [...]
Archive for July 2010
Big Sky Country
July 31, 2010Force Fields and Plasma Shields
July 29, 2010Force fields are common in lots of science fiction, but how realistic are they? That’s the question I tackle in the latest Science of Starcraft post. Head on over and check it out!
We Didn’t Fake the Moon Landings
July 29, 2010But I want to get one of those dramatic glowing tables!
MSL Roves!
July 27, 2010I’m a little late on this, but I thought I should share the news: MSL now has a good head and neck on its shoulders, and has officially “roved”. Last week, engineers at JPL installed the “Remote Sensing Mast”, bringing MSL’s total height up to nearly seven feet tall (2 meters). Also, MSL drove for [...]
Starcraft Cloaking Devices
July 27, 2010Today’s the big day: Starcraft 2 comes out! Over at my Science of Starcraft blog I have two new posts. One is a nice short video summarizing the plot of the original game, so if you want to know what I’m talking about when I make game references in other posts, check it out. I [...]
HP dv6t Select Edition Notebook Review: First Impressions
July 24, 2010Please excuse me while I geek out about my new laptop… My work now involves some really significant number crunching, to the point that I was regularly using all the CPU and RAM of my previous laptop, and was then struggling to get anything else done while the calculations were running. And then they would [...]
The Science of Starcraft: Creepy Slime Molds
July 23, 2010My second article is up over at my new Science of Starcraft blog! This one is about the weird substance in the game called “creep” and its similarities to real-world slime-molds. Check it out! Even if you don’t play Starcraft, slime molds are really cool/weird. (PS – I swear I’ll be posting some real Martian [...]
New Deep Sea Vents Discovered in the Caribbean
July 22, 2010Here’s the second of my recent Universe Today Articles: scientists have discovered new deep sea vents in the Caribbean that will teach us more about sunless ecosystems. Good to know if we ever want to look for life in the oceans of Europa some day! Check out the article here.
WISE Maps the Sky
July 22, 2010I have two new articles up at Universe Today! The first is about the WISE infrared survey of the entire sky, which involved approximately a bazillion images, including the lovely view of the Pleiades shown here. You should go check it out.
The Science of Starcraft
July 21, 2010In 1998 the computer game Starcraft came out, setting the bar for real-time strategy games for the next decade. I loved playing Starcraft, and spent more time that I’d like to admit doing so. Starcraft also gave me my first taste of computer programming: the game came with a “map editor” which let you construct [...]
