House of the rising Moonglum

Within two days, two interesting things are happening in space. First, the Stardust mission will be passing the comet Wild 2 to pick up some sample o comet dust to bring back to Earth. That is just to cool. And second, the first Mars Exploration Rover will land on the fourth, hopefully doing better than the beagle. Fortunately there is another on the way though, just in case. These rovers can drive hundreds of yards per day, instead of a few feet as with the last rover that went to Mars. That rover, Sojourner, captured the American imagination with its limited capabilities. Hopefully these two will be able to do the same with even more capability. In any case, the pictures should be just amazing. Assuming that it works at all.

So I finally have Halo running on my Mac. This has been a long time coming. I remember seeing it demoed at MacWorld in 1999. And then seeing some people play test it after that. (I actually remember testing it myself, but when I sat down to work out the dates, that couldn’t have been right. I must have only helped test the network play for Myth.)

But then Microsoft decided to make the XBox and needed a great first game for it. So they bought Bungie. And then the XBox was delayed. And then the Mac Version couldn’t come out before the PC version. But guess what? It came out at the same time. And the network play works with the PC version. Pretty wild.

And it looks great on my new G5. Oh yeah. Now I only wish I had spent a little more on the graphics card! (OK not really, it looks fine. I have to live with just having vertex shaders, not pixel shaders as well. C’mon nVidia! We wants our driverssss.

Anyway… back to the story. So there was some dissension in the ranks when they went over to Microsoft. However it was generally accepted that this was a good move. So I’m chugging along happy as can be. Shootin. Punchin. Nice old school Bungie, when I run across this bulletin board. Sweet. Someone had different ideas. Note the for sale sign… Hyde Park Condo. Chicago Office. Integrity. I have to wonder when that went in.

This first picture just shows how pretty the game is. Mmm. Wide screen gaming. Oh yeah.

This second picture shows the sign a little more clearly.

Man these Jpegs just don’t do the beauty of this game justice. It is cool when you notice the lossy compression in the screenshots from your video game.

Well, I am home and back to work, and I think I also just stopped reading all the Iraqi blogs. So far, I have been reading all of the Iraqi blogs that I could find. When I started of course it was easy with just Salam Pax. His occasional poster Riverbend eventually also got her own blog, which was fun because she posted recipes as well. Salam’s buddy G started posting, and Salam started translating Istar’s “poetry” blog. I’m not sure it is actually poetry, but it sounds like it. In any case they both stopped blogging at some point in there.

Then I found some different soldiers’ blogs as well. Fortunately I quickly lost interest in those as they either went home or simply got boring. The one exception is Chief Wiggles who seems amazingly thoughtful and gives an interesting insight into the mind of the American intelligence machine. He also gives toys to kids.

Once I burned out on the Soldiers’ blogs, more Iraqi blogs started appearing. First it was a dentist who seemed generally happy, but also Sunni which gave a little different view. And he got his buddies Omar and AYS to blog. Then the real flood started. There was even a family blogging and a message board to which any iraqi can blog and it will get translated by the hard working bloggers there. And of course for the next big war on the horizon there is an Iranian blog too. (She’s a spunky teenager living in Iran. I think she is my favorite, though she doesn’t give a lot of editorial any more.)

They are all so great, that I was completely reading all of all of them. But this morning, I started, and saw how much there was from a single day. Then I quit my browser. Either I need to pick one or two to read, or someone else can have a turn. Brain overload.

Here is my attempt to answer Alain’s question about how many successes and failures there were in going to mars. Not that I am simply doing yes/no here, but there were many partial successes and failures, so feel free to argue with me on my stats. Note that I also count lander and orbiters as different missions which may be unfair to the Soviets since they started that earlier (though if the failure occurs prior to the landing phase of the mission, I only count it as one.)

Success:Failure

Total: 16:25
USSR(and Russia): 4:17
USA: 11:6
JSA: 0:1
ESA: 1:1

Mars is cursed I tell you. Here are the details:

1960-65 Six Soviet Failures, One US Failure, one Success. (1:7, 0:6, 1:1)
Marsnik 1 – 10 October 1960 – Launch Failure
Marsnik 2 – 14 October 1960 – Launch Failure
Sputnik 22 – 24 October 1962 – Broke up in orbit, causing US to think that the USSR had launched a preemptive strike, almost starting WWIII.
Mars 1 – 1 November 1962 – (First USSR flyby) Contact prior to flyby.
Sputnik 24 – 4 November 1962 – destroyed while leaving earth orbit.
Mariner 3 – 5 November 1964 – (First US Mars Flyby) Failed to record data
Mariner 4 – 28 November 1964 – (First success) Mars Flyby
Zond 2 – 30 November 1964 – Contact lost prior to flyby.

1965 Nasa’s Mariner 4 flies past Mars after Mariner 3 fails. Sends home 22 images.

1969-72 5 Soviet failures, 2 success, one US failure, 3 successes (5:6, 2:5, 3:1
Mariner 6 – 25 February 1969 – Mars Flyby
Mariner 7 – 27 March 1969 – Mars Flyby
Mars 1969A – 27 March 1969 – Launch Failure
Mars 1969B – 2 April 1969 – Launch Failure
Mariner 8 – 8 May 1971 – Launch Failure
Cosmos 419 – 10 May 1971 – Failed to leave earth orbit
Mars 2 – 19 May 1971 – (First object on mars, First orbiter) Mars Orbit/ Lander crashed
Mars 3 – 28 May 1971 – (First landing) Mars Orbiter/ Lander lost communication after 20 seconds on surface.
Mariner 9 – 30 May 1971 – (First US Orbiter) Mars Orbiter

1969 Mariner 6 and 7 fly by Mars, returning 100-plus pictures and analyzing atmosphere and surface.
1971 Soviet Mars 2 and 3 return 60 pictures of mars. Mariner 9 returns 7329 images resulting in the first complete map of mars.

1973-76 (5:3, 1:3, 4:0)
Mars 4 – 21 July 1973 – Failed to attain mars orbit.
Mars 5 – 25 July 1973 – Mars Orbiter
Mars 6 – 5 August 1973 – Contact lost upon landing.
Mars 7 – 9 August 1973 – Lander missed the planet.
Viking 1 – 20 August 1975 – (First successful lander) Mars Orbiter and Lander
Viking 2 – 9 September 1975 – Mars Orbiter and Lander

1976 The viking lander/orbiter probes provide our most complete picture of Mars to date.

1980’s (1:2, 1:2, 0:0)
Phobos 1 – 7 July 1988 – Lost communications prior to orbit insertion.
Phobos 2 – 12 July 1988 – Obrit achieved Phobos lander fails.

1990’s (2:6, 0:1, 2:4, 0:1)
Mars Observer – 25 September 1992 – Contact lost before attaining orbit
Mars Global Surveyor – 07 November 1996 – Mars Orbiter
Mars 96 – 16 November 1996 – Failed to leave earth orbit.
Mars Pathfinder – 04 December 1996 – (First rover) Mars Lander and Rover
Nozomi – 3 July 1998 – (First Japanese probe) failed to enter mars orbit
Mars Climate Orbiter – 11 December 1998 – Failed to enter mars orbit
Mars Polar Lander – 3 January 1999 – communication lost before landing
Deep Space 2 (DS2) – 3 January 1999 – contact lost at mars

1997 Mars Global Surveyor so far, has collected 120,000 images and, in 2000, found evidence of water existing on the surface much more recently than previously thought. Nasa’s Mars Pathfinder rover lands and sends back 20,000 images. All other missions in the 90s were failures.

2000’s (2:1, 0:0, 1:0, 1:1)
Mars Odyssey – 7 April 2001 – Mars Orbiter
Mars Express – 2 June 2003 – (first ESA probe) Mars Orbiter/ lost contact with lander.

And that is all that has been decided. Where will the hammer fall next? You decide:

En route:
Spirit (MER-A) – 10 June 2003 – Mars Rover Landing Jan. 2004.
Opportunity (MER-B) – 7 July 2003 – Mars Rover Landing Jan. 2004.

Future:
Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter – 10 August 2005 – Mars Orbiter
Phoenix – Late 2007 – Small Mars Scout Lander
Netlanders – Late 2007 – Mars Netlanders
Mars 2009 – Late 2009 – Mars Science Laboratory Rover
Mars 2011 – 2011 – Scout Mission

For more complete info see the mars exploration timeline, which has this same list, with links to the details on each mission.

Wow, a huge earthquake just occurred in Iran. Thousands dead and aid coming in from all over the world. Including the US. I wonder if this will help the Iranian leaders see that they are not alone, and working with the rest of the world is better than alienating them.

My Prayers go to those families affected by the quake. Earthquakes are something that I understand, coming from California.

Mars keeps up its record of taking out probes. Wow, it is amazing how many missions to Mars have succumbed. The rate is actually much worse than for probes of the other, much further away, planets. Especially odd given how many we have sent there. You’d think that we would figure something out by now.

Merry Christmas!

The Beagle is on its way towards Mars! It is there! Maybe we will hear something soon. I actually don’t know what kind of cameras that thing has on it, and wether or not we will get inspiring pictures, but I just find all of these sorts of things exciting.

I just heard in my house, “See, C-Sections are much better because the babies have round heads. Everyone should have them so we don’t have any more babies with cone shaped heads.”

I had so many posts about Ramadan and Eid in Iraq, it seems like I should put in at least one post about my own holiday, Christmas. So I found an Iraqi blogger who moved to the US a while back who writes about the Iraqi Christian traditions. This is really interesting, since she lives in the US now, she can actually compare and contrast the differences. They still give out gifts, but instead of presents you buy, they are a special treat that you make and hand out to everyone. I guess it is kind of like Christmas cookies.

One thing that particularly interested me was the fact that they use Christmas trees. I mean that came from northern Europe, about the same time that they moved Christmas from summer to the winter, to match with the winter solstice ceremonies in order to aid converting my ancestors. But now it appears that the Christmas Tree is everywhere. Even in Iraq.

Sweet! But I think he should be called, Agmar, the Witch King.

So now they claim that the “chatter” has mentioned a specific flight number. That is just odd. If they are getting flight number, and telling us that they are, you’d think that they would have it all rounded up. Sigh, I sometimes feel like we are just being led along.

We are now at security level orange. Ahh the wonders of terror alert. Orange is a pretty color. No, not really. Orange is actually kind of an outdated color. It was big in the 70’s, but not it isn’t cool now unless it is an earth tone orange combined with other earth tones and used in a stylish item of apparel.

I know, I know, I’m not supposed to read this stuff, but the Saudi official english language paper had a wonderfully hopeful story about the future of Iraq with Saddam gone. Basically they say that he is not what it is all about. Which is a view I hold close to my heart as well.

“True, the capture of Saddam Hussein is a story with legs and will play out on the front pages for months to come. But the real story will be the future of Iraq — the reconstruction not just of its social system but that of its national spirit.

That, in my view, is more significant than the fate of a man who had projected himself as a titan, only to be exposed as a spineless buffoon hiding in a hole in the ground outside a mud house in a village on the left bank of the Tigris.”

Sweet! I thought that is might be him, but it has been finally confirmed that Paul Allen was the funding power behind Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites attempt at the X-Prize.

I guess I’ll have to change my mind about buying Microsoft products if it funds ventures like that. Kudos to Paul.

Keef Richards can not be killed by conventional weapons.

The BBC is on a roll today. Like to masturbate? Want a trip to Australia? Have we got a deal for you!

The BBC published some pictures from the Loya Jirga mentioned yesterday.

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of powered flight, and to celebrate one of my favorite X-prize teams, Scaled Composites, successfully fired their rocket engine in the flight vehicle, breaking the sound barrier. This is an amazingly fortuitous event. I really believe in their designs, and am sure that they will win the prize. Though I still do have a soft spot in my heart for Armadillo, though they have my vote for most likely to blow themselves up.

The coolest thing about both of these designs though is the use of safe propellants. The fuels that the big boys use are all so toxic that there is no way an individual could ever own one. But this gives me hope that we might have personal rockets at some point in the future. And with Moller all that’s left for the future to be here is my ray gun!

I have liked Clark a lot from when he first surfaced as a candidate, but I sort of wondered why he was a democrat. Wel in a recent speech he showed us why. Man that is scathing. At first I was taken aback and thought to myself that he just doomed himself, but now that I think about it, these were the same complaints I had at the beginning of the Iraq war. It is just that after having read some of the Iraqis’ thoughts on their blogs, I realized all of the good that came from the invasion and transmuted those reasons onto Bush. But the fact of the matter is that those weren’t the reasons that he went in. Some of clarks comments:

“I would have followed through on the original sentiment that the president gave us — Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. Instead, he executed a bait-and-switch. He took the priority off Osama bin Laden. He shifted the spotlight onto Saddam Hussein.”

Yup. That was my biggest frustration at the beginning of the war, that he had forgotten about Osama, and that he would take so much more effort to get. Well now I was also distracted from that cause. Wild.

“I’ll put my 34 years of defending the United States of America, and the results that I and my teammates in the United States armed forces achieved, against his three years of failed policies any day”

Nice.

“He said the United States should put “intense political pressure” on Pakistan to find bin Laden and move “substantial” U.S. special operations forces and intelligence personnel from Iraq into Afghanistan. To free up those assets, Clark said the United States should end its “fruitless” hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and turn the task over to the international community.”

And he has a solution. Interesting. There is no way Clark will get the nomination, but I like him. I like Kerry too, but oh well. He is just too damn boring.