I remember watching this hours after Spirit's January 3, 2004 landing on MARS. It was wonderfully exciting, watching the project's history then immediately seeing the first images back from the surface. Every NASA mission should be shadowed by such a talented film crew.

This episode is one of two. The second, Welcome to Mars, wasn't available for streaming at the writing of this annotation. You can, however, learn more about these rover missions from the Nova Online Mars site.

LINKS GOOD ON 2006-12-14

TED talk by spacecraft designer Burt Rutan

What's TED? "It's like going back to college for three or four days a year, and you get all the best professors, and they can only talk for fifteen minutes."
-- Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

Burt Rutan's company Scaled Composites won the Ansari X Prize by building a sub-orbital honest to goodness spacecraft. I've long been skeptical of space tourism. Something about the Soviet model leaves a bad taste in my mouth, a little like millionaires paying to ride on an aircraft carrier during wartime. The X prize and Rutan's vision, however, strike me as different. They aren't the bastardization of scientific exploration but the independent birth of entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit. In this clip, Rutan shares his vision for the future of space flight, and the sky's the limit.

Rutan's brainchild, SpaceShipOne, is a spectacular feat of engineering, a spacecraft built out of fabric and glue!

LINKS GOOD ON 2006-12-14

Occasionally I worry that the integrated circuit will be the undoing of childhood tinkering. Just look at how hard it is to work on your own car these days. "Infernal computers!" Then I see something like this, and I'm immediately reminded why childhood is sooo cool. It's an excellent mechanical, macroscopic, and home-made example of what our computers do everyday. Score one for the tinkerers, and well done kwilliam2.

This DIY adder is only one product of a thoroughly charming community, building mechanical analogs of what are now mostly digital devices. Here's a cool Lego adder.

TED talk by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte

What's TED? "It's like going back to college for three or four days a year, and you get all the best professors, and they can only talk for fifteen minutes."
-- Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

I'm a teacher, and I have a firm belief that technologies are best utilized when ubiquitous. I know I didn't really start to use the internet in class until my computer was connected to a dedicated stay-in-my-classroom data projector. Sure, back in the day, I could have checked out a projector, but I never would have done that just to show a 15 second clip from YouTube. Just image what would happen if every student had a laptop. Well, this guy's working on that. Click on the clip to hear how.