Road trip on Mars: Thrill as Curiosity rover races up to 0.06 miles per hour. Marvel as it takes a mile-long detour NASA’s hardy Curiosity rover is on the move again: this time, a little road trip to avoid getting bogged down in Martian sand dunes. The six-wheeled robot is investigating Mount Sharp, a sedimentary mountain whose layers of rock should give scientists a better idea of the watery world Mars once was. But to do so, it'll have to …
"The US space agency's boffins hope the experience will help them figure out ways to improve the bot's modest self-driving capabilities."
An opportunity, maybe, to improve self-driving vehicles without risk to other road users of collateral damage.
"It stops if it doesn't have enough information to complete a drive on its own."
On second thoughts, no. Modest it may be but it's already way ahead.
I was perusing various YouTube offerings re. the red planet and discovered a whole subset of humans that seem to believe that we never put probes on Mars and everything was faked up using scenery from Death Valley or other deserts. Not sure which boggled my mind more: The beautiful, desolate imagery from Mars or the astonishing mindset of conspiracy theorists..
If you want to be really boggled, the most insane conspiratard groups are, in my opinion:
1 The electric universe people
2 The freeman-on-the-land people
Can we make a collection and see if we can get them into some kind of order of bonkersness?
It's confused a bit by multiple conspiracies with the same name. For instance 9/11 in order of decreasing probability, in my opinion:
1. some in US government agencies had enough info to stop it, but cocked up
... a substantial gap ...
2. they knew it was going ahead and they let it
... quite a big gap...
3. they knew it was going ahead because they had encouraged it
... a massive chasm
4 WTC7 was a controlled explosive demolition
... another massive chasm
5 WTC7 was destroyed by a secret space laser
Whenever I'm faced with 4 or 5 I useally tell people that all the WTC towers were holograms anyway because everybody knows it's impossible to build something higher than the Empire State.
There seems to be a special class of conspiracy theorists that simultaneously believe that:
1) That covid-19 is a virus intentionally created by the Chinese, and
2) The virus is just a left-wing conspiracy designed to scare people into wearing masks.
Schrodinger's cat would be impressed.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
