The Hammock Papers: Curiosity.

06 September 2012

Curiosity.

"Bradbury Landing is the first named site on Mars not marked by an object, but by ephemeral burn scars from [Curiosity's] landing thrusters. Project scientist John Grotzinger describes the site as 'four scour marks with wheel tracks that basically begin from nowhere.'"

It turns out that Bradbury Landing is also a kind of literary site, an interplanetary Newspaper Rock: the tracks left behind by the Curiosity rover are actually a form of Morse code.

Read the rest at BLDGBLOG.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...: the tracks are a code...how are they read? this fascinates me. Sunday morning java and brain buzz.

Susan Dyer
The Moveable Alphabet; September 9, 2012 at 12:17 PM
Rob Firchau said...: I'm wondering WHO is reading the code??? I like thinking about this.

Thanks for commenting, Susan!; September 9, 2012 at 12:39 PM

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MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL