The question of life on Mars may remain unanswered, but according to NASA, rovers Spirit and Opportunity have dug up reason for us to believe it to be highly possible:

Water once "drenched the surface" of Mars, NASA scientists announced Tuesday.

..."NASA launched the Mars Exploration Rover mission specifically to check whether at least one part of Mars had a persistently wet environment that could possibly have been hospitable to life," James Garvin, a lead NASA scientist, said in a statement. "Today we have strong evidence for an exciting answer: Yes."

The astounding success of this mission will be awfully difficult to criticize by those who believe that NASA is the embodiment of throwing good money after bad. And if the public can generally agree that space exploration is a worthy investment, what's to stop a serious discussion on giving the private sector a chance to fully participate, so no one need complain about the difficulty and cost of launching robots and rockets except willing investors?

My copy of the March 2004 National Geographic came in the mail today, and I've just polished off a story about China's monumental difficulties with pollution, entitled "The Price of Growth in China." (Condensed version here.) It's with a mixture of amusement and disappointment that one reads the perspective adopted by such a traditionally morally neutral publication as National Geographic. The magazine's correspondent actually seems puzzled at the inability of a totalitarian-ruled country to properly address not only the physical ramifications of a modern industrial boom but also the resulting legal and humanitarian responsibilities. Cities are wreathed in smog. Workers are at the mercy of their government - at best stingy in terms of recompense, at worst violently uncompromising on labor rights.

To be fair, the Chinese people have never enjoyed the benefit of representative democracy through which to voice their concerns and petitions - indeed, America's rough industrial edges demanded considerable time and social struggle. The country will overcome these conflicts in its own time. But a little more than a slight acknowledgment of the political disparity, the fact that China is still ruled by tyranny, might help the author's attempts to reconcile Beijing's disregard for human life - a little bit like trying to determine the best layout for braille on the driver's side of the dashboard.

It looks as though Spirit and Opportunity won't just be sending us pretty pictures:

Evidence that suggests Mars was once a water-rich world is mounting as scientists scrutinize data from the Mars Exploration rover, Opportunity, busily at work in a small crater at Meridiani Planum. That information may well be leading to a biological bombshell of a finding that the red planet has been, and could well be now, an extraterrestrial home for life.

There is a palpable buzz here at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California that something wonderful is about to happen in the exploration of Mars.

...Those findings and their implications are headed for a major press conference, rumored to occur early next week -- but given unanimity among rover scientists and agreement on how and who should unveil the dramatic findings.

NASA is rumored to be staying mum on a wealth of data until it's ready to present. Is - or was - Mars inhabited? Though my intuition tells me that microbiotic lifeforms are almost certain to exist, I won't know before any of the rest of us. Even if this latest Mars missions fails to prove that we are not alone, we shouldn't miss the story already unfolding. Two low-cost, high-risk robot explorations on another planet are in the midst of an unprecedented operational and scientific success. And this is only the beginning of a complete repudiation of Luddites, skeptics and the generally unimaginative. With some luck and a blessing, the public won't forget this latest venture into the grand mystery.

Our new pair of office cameras each have the limited capability to record Quicktime movies. Besides the obvious benefit of documenting the lovely cubicles in which members of our staff live and work, we can easily augment our normal complement of photographs with videos during visits to project sites for surveying, inspection or construction supervision. The engineering world, however, is one of IBM clones, and the native multimedia application is Windows Media Player - which happens to not recognize Apple's Quicktime format.

Here again, technology saved the day. I scoured the internet until I found a reliable, shareware video converter; with it, our onsite teams can return to the office, import their Quicktime .MOV files and effortlessly change them to the .AVI format universally recognized by Windows operating systems. The Kodak cameras' video quality is similar to that of their snapshots - modest - but from location to camera to report, the procedure is seamless and utterly inexpensive. It's not a question of whether easy-to-create video will come in handy; it's a question of just how much.

Opportunity photographed a sunset on Mars.

We get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of space exploration in the latest issue of Cadalyst:

On January 16, 2004, on a clear bright day in space, engineers at ASI (Alliance Spacesystems) in Pasadena, California, held their collective breaths as a project they had poured their best efforts into faced its ultimate test. Given that this proof-is-in-the-pudding event lasted only a handful of seconds and took place 100 million miles away from their Southern California offices, there wasn't much they could do if their pet project proved faulty. But much to their joy and satisfaction, the robotic arm of the Spirit Rover deployed successfully, moving a microscope down for an up-close and personal encounter with the surface of Mars to examine the planet's dust in the closest proximity ever achieved.

This historical event — several years in the making, considering that the project began in November 2000 — owed much of its success to the quality and capability of these engineers' design software-SolidWorks and the appropriately named COSMOSWorks analysis software.

Talk about the Nuclear Family: work on these blueprints for multimillion-dollar appendages were completed not in an Apollo-mission style, fenced-off, high-profile laboratory, but between several cooperating firms contracted by Jet Propulsion Laboratories - linked by e-mail and the internet. A notable portion of work was done from engineers' homes, and the paperless approach reportedly cut labor time in half.

Either I made a discovery or I've finally joined the party: Newslink appears to be the consummate international media nexus, providing access to press agencies from every country in every region of the world. Have you been waiting for someone to take the pains to set up a comprehensive online directory? I'd suggest that tools like these are the secret behind Winds of Change's unmatched war reports, but that's like saying everyone can be Superman by climbing into red and blue tights.

Opportunity continues to rewrite our planetological and geological textbooks. If those rovers were sentient, I'm sure they'd be grateful for the peace and quiet.

You'd think we'd have been able to come to a consensus on this by now:

If you're the PC guy in the family or some other group, you've probably been asked this question: "At night should I turn my computer off?"

Ever since normal people have had computers, this question has made the rounds with a variety of "expert" answers. The early versions presented a trade-off between power consumption and stress on components. Turning the computer on or off, so the theory goes and accurately I believe, is the most physically stressful thing you do to it all day, so I think most experts have advised that it's better to leave the system on.

But in the age of the Internet, and especially in the age of broadband connections, there's a new angle probably more significant in the average case than all that wear and tear stuff. Some would claim that if you have one of those "newfangled" always-on broadband connections, then you're exposing your PC to more attacks than if you were to shut it off during periods of disuse.

In my early years of PC use, long before my junior year of college and first broadband connection, the computer was shut off after every session. I was not connected senior year - I can't quite remember, but considering I lived in a rickety old house with six mates of similarly humble means, I probably shut the computer off. I joined the 24-7 club and remained in for the next three years on the grounds that, as Larry Seltzer explains here, my computer experienced more stress when shut down and power back up. But after moving into my apartment and paying three of what I considered to be exorbitant electricity bills last summer, I decided to put the place into lockdown whenever I went away. I prefer open windows, so I didn't touch the air conditioner once; but I kept the apartment's living room ceiling fan on its highest setting nearly all the time. Before leaving the apartment, my two computers were turned off and the ceiling fan set to its lowest setting or switched off completely.

My bills are currently half the size of those from the summer - the first one to arrive that way came in September, immediately after my decision. My change of habits wasn't a perfectly controlled experiment, but a few conversations reveal that my fan wouldn't necessarily be a resource hog. Besides, the accumulated savings of a few hundred dollars is worth a layman's disagreement with Mr. Seltzer; and I leave server applications to the professionals. When I'm done with the box, "Shut Down" is Windows' best friend.

Q. Why do Mac enthusiasts tend not to be churchgoers?

A. Because they're busy worshiping something else.

Dear God. The roughest rugby game in the history of mankind would be Macphiles against Luddites.

(Now, now - some of my best friends are Mac users!)