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A robot that eats flies

By now, you’ve probably heard the sad news in science: The Genesis probe crashed yesterday. The probe contains samples from solar winds, and the capsule was supposed to have popped out a parachute to slow it down enough that a couple of helicopters could catch it. Instead, it hit the earth at 311 km an hour and buried itself halfway into the ground. Obviously, losing so much good data sucks for scientists, and I’m depressed myself.
Yet as I looked at the pictures of the fallen capsule, I couldn’t help but notice: Don’t they look, rather hilariously, like secret snapshots of a crashed UFO? All those puny humans, huddled uncertainly around the wreckage of superior extraterrestrial technology! It reminds me of what it’d be like if one of our probes ever landed on a planet with sentient life. What in hell would they think of the metal gizmo we’d plunked down on their back yards? Of course, crashes like this also serve to highlight the Andromeda Strain-class importance of our planetary protection protocols, an issue I wrote about several months ago.
NASA has posted a mesmerizing video of the falling capsule online. It looks even more like some crazy samizdat VHS tape of a plummeting alien mission gone terribly awry.
Still, I gotta hand it to NASA: They’re scientists, so when something goes wrong, they don’t try to cover it up. They show you the pictures, they write the press releases glumly concluding that everything went all to hell. It’s another reason I so prefer the culture of science to that of our sneeringly mendacious government administration. If anything goes wrong with the nation, you can count on Bush’s minions to try and hide it. But when something goes wrong in science, researchers immediately trot out the painful evidence. “Sure. Check it out. Here’s a video of our $260-million probe slamming into the earth like a bag of anvils tossed out of heaven.”
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”
“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912
“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex
» visit the Collision Detection archives
May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM
From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.
July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S
July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM
My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.
June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM
On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.
June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM
I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives.
According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable!
» see all of my photos on Flickr
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