Slashdot Mirror
NASA To Send Poems To Mars
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Time Magazine reports that in and effort to involve non-rocket scientists in the next mission to the Red Planet, NASA invited the public in May to submit haiku, three line poems where 'the first and last lines must have exactly five syllables each and the middle line must have exactly seven syllables.' NASA promised to select five winners that will be adhered to the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) before it is launched towards Martian airspace. 'The Going to Mars campaign offers people worldwide a way to make a personal connection to space, space exploration, and science in general, and share in our excitement about the MAVEN mission,' said Stephanie Renfrow, lead for the MAVEN Education and Public Outreach program at CU/LASP. More than 15,000 entries were submitted by space geeks and poets the world over. A couple thousand were disqualified as too long, too short, or totally inappropriate, leaving about 12,500. The public voted online, and the five top vote-getters have been announced."
The winner:
It's funny, they named
Mars after the God of War
Have a look at Earth
It's funny, they named
Mars after the God of War
Have a look at Earth
Are we asking to be invaded?
apk host file
solves all computer problems
use it you retards
That's why we have to put people up there, to make it so..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Red sand between my toes; Summer vacation in outer space - Robin Williams
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They should have sent a POET. A poet. Not a poem.
While I personally agree with the sentiment, when NASA budgets are tight, why do something like this?
It doesn't provide any scientific return but it does give a target for an argument against NASA budgets. Why provide that?
slashdotter's lament:
modded to oblivion
for off-topic posts.
Wooo we are broke as hell but lets send some poems to Mars where no one will ever read them, and if they do, they wont care about them because they will be caring about FRIKKING LIVING ON MARS! Seriously tho, with how little money NASA has you think they would devote all of their budget to scientific missions instead of gimmicks.
No wonder NASA is having trouble with funding when this is how they spend time/money.
The rovers are sad
All this time alone on Mars
Please send poetry
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Earth is now hairy
Mars lets us move past old wounds
Onward, Burma Shave
Haiku are NOT that simple. From wiki:
The essence of haiku is "cutting" (kiru).[1] This is often represented by the juxtaposition of two images or ideas and a kireji ("cutting word") between them,[2] a kind of verbal punctuation mark which signals the moment of separation and colours the manner in which the juxtaposed elements are related.
Traditional haiku consist of 17 on (also known as morae), in three phrases of 5, 7 and 5 on respectively.[3] Any one of the three phrases may end with the kireji.[4] Although haiku are often stated to have 17 syllables,[5] this is inaccurate as syllables and on are not the same.
A kigo (seasonal reference), usually drawn from a saijiki, an extensive but defined list of such words.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
NASA sent a Poem to Mars
Poem to NASA
Haiku VIA Slashdot.
I think David Bowie has already long since earned the right to have his material on the side of the MAVEN and pretty much any spacecraft.
all hail Douglas Adams
It's one thing to send crap to where something might be alive and capable of reading it, but a planet with no known intelligent life that we've scouted out pretty well (for what it is)? What a waste of time.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Behold, my penis
Nobody ever touches
You could call it drought
The pornography,
It's all that I have these days
Apple blossoms fall
I know it's cliche, but disappointed :( Oh well lol
http://lasp.colorado.edu/maven/goingtomars/entry/?7381
The G
Seventeen syllables - or in the case of English, seventeen words - over three lines; five words, seven words, five word.
The English version should be seventeen words over three lines, holding five, seven and five words respectively.
Oh wait, I guess they did.
I would say a poem should be chosen by astrophysicists or poets, but the whole concept is just to interest the public in something ultimately non-scientific.
make your mars poem choice
using mob intelligence
silly message sent
It might be cheaper than printing a poem sticker, and more interesting also, to simply state that when you view the poem over your WiFi connection, you are sending electromagnetic signals out of the atmosphere, (past triads of listening satellites), and some photons of your WiFi access point's message may reach Mars if it's visible in the sky.
Just about anything that applies the special snowflake formula to the entire human species tends to win these things. We're total suckers for anything that affirms our special-snowflakeness, even if it's our epic fascination with beating the shit out of each other.
Vulcans? Too evolved. If doesn't count if you're good all the time. What matters is that once you were bad, but now you have risen. Otherwise you're just too smart for your own good and you don't really understand the shit that goes down.
Another typical science fiction plot:
Evolved race gives up on humans after 10 ms of initial observation. A billion years later, we prove them wrong. There's just no holding back special snowflakeness.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Every once in a great while an AC makes sense.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
haiku comp winners
etched on mars robot capsule
no life form will read
Well, zero, because of course you wouldn't send the DVD to Mars; you'd copy the poems onto memory. Five poems, at seventeen syllables per poem, what do you figure, a few hundred bytes? It's unlikely that the every byte of the computer's RAM is completely used, so just put the poems in the unused space. Weight: zero.
This reminds me of an old story. There was an aircraft in which the design was coming in overweight, so an accountant was assigned to be the "weight czar," to account for the mass of every subsystem and see how it could be made lighter. This weight czar was very annoyed when one subsystem, software, listed their weight contribution as "zero." He went over to the computer department, asked for the prototype software that went into the aircraft, and walked out with a huge stack of computer cards (this was some years back. Don't interrupt.) . He summoned the software team to a meeting, and shouted "You list zero for the weight of your software, but" (plunks down the stack of cards) "here is is, and this DOES NOT WEIGHT NOTHING! Don't try to fool me!" The lead software engineer went up to the stack of cards. He said "You don't understand. The software isn't the cards." He picked up one card and showed it to the accountant. "The software is the HOLES."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Went to Venus too
Goddess of beauty and love
Burnt our nuts (and bolts)
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
... you're drunk!
This just strikes me as a pretty useless way to spend NASA's time and money.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I think the real achievement is the low amount of inappropriate rejects. You would think there would be legions of trolls who would consider it a lifetime achievement to have a disguised dick joke sent into space by NASA.
MAVEN voyages
Where no man has gone before
Bearing PC verse
anonymous post
you made me snarf my coffee
for that i'll up vote
It seems that we have become the Vogons. Let me try my hand: Flaming poetry: Fireball on the launch pad is Inevitable
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
little red orb thanks
Our visit makes cosmos vast
no longer empty
Get a web developer
Misread that as "sending PORN to mars".
At first I read it as "NASA To Send Peons To Mars".
I was thinking, "Wow, here's my chance!"
Table-ized A.I.
Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Pick My Poem
Or I'll Blast You With My
Illudium Pu-36 Explosive Space Modulator!
- Marvin M.
Table-ized A.I.
Oh freddled gruntbuggely,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled grabblegrotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts
With my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!
Driving Cars
made of Mars Bars,
Taking Mars Bars
all the way to Mars
Stopping only at
Bars of Mars
Getting drunk on
Mars Bars
Where the liquor servered
are Mars Bars
Having Bar fights
in Bars in Mars
Getting kicked out
of Mars Bars