jtotheizzoe:
Imagine a Living Mars
Mars was likely not always the desolate, red-rocked planet that we see today. The Curiosity rover has found what appear to be water-smoothed pebbles, shaped by ancient rivers of flowing water. Curiosity and previous missions have also seen footprints of alluvial fans and river deltas, sure signs of a previously wet world.
Software engineer Kevin Gill has taken those observations to the next level with these simulations of a “living” Mars, covered with seas and lakes and teeming with vegetation and clouds. He used a survey of Martian terrain and elevation, plugged in a sea level to form oceans, and then painted the clouds and terrain as it might look or have looked.
It’s definitely more an exercise in imagination than in reality, as there’s no indication of past forests or marshy plains on the red planet, but it’s an informed imagination, a realization of a planet’s possible rich past or terraformed future.
Check out Kevin Gill on Flickr.
Much like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy imagines as the result of terraforming.
Mixee Me is now in public beta, and we’re giving away stuff to celebrate
mixeeme:
We are happy to announce that we are officially in public beta.
To celebrate, we are giving away loads of FREE Mixees. Here’s how to get ‘em:
- Make a Mixee online: http://www.mixeeme.com
- Tweet @MixeeMe, link your Mixee’s URL, tell us why your Mixee is awesome
- Every hour from 1 PM to 9 PM EST, we will pick one to give away for free!
That’s it! Enjoy!!!
Great project and a great team. Go, Nancy and Aaron!
continuations:
It feels a bit strange now that I wrote a post yesterday morning about “Apple’s Glory Years,” not realizing that in the evening I would see the news that Steve Jobs had passed away. There have been many excellent tributes and I read a lot of them last night (collected here on delicious) with…
I suppose every time I read “technology visionary” I thought of “technology-product visionary” in my head. Perhaps it’s just a semantic distinction, because to me “technology” includes not only the bare metal programmers and fundamental scientific researchers, but also those who add value and innovation to each layer on top of that (operating systems, applications, platforms, networks, etc).
Finding interesting technologies that have not been mass-marketed, and curating them, massaging them into tools that everyone can use, is something Steve Jobs excelled at. That seems a core part of his self-description of living at the crossroads of science and art.
good:
A new study from the U.S. Department of Education maps the ‘State of the States in Education.’ States colored green are the country’s top ten performers, yellow are the middle range, and red are the bottom ten performers.
Read more on GOOD→
California cheaped out with the 1970s tax revolt. Before that, they were up near the top, and now they’re hanging out with the deep south.
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you.
But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers that the rest of us paid to educate…Part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
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Elizabeth Warren, Senate Candidate, MA (via innonate)
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