Monthly Archives: January 2004

Public Domain Images

While exploring the NOAA’s website, I noticed that they have a list of photos of weather and ocean related images that (being funded by your tax dollars) are mostly in the public domain.
I suspect I’ll be spidering and looting this collection shortly.

The Spirit of the New Year…


Well, Marvin didn’t get this one. Yesterday the Spirit rover successfully bounced to a stop on Mars, linked up with JPL and transmitted pictures back to Earth. You can see the first of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Press Release Images. I was hoping for some higher resolution images, which undoubtably will be showing up in the next few days. To all those who were involved in the mission: congratulations! We will be looking forward to the pictures and data you get back.

Addendum: Here’s a link to a
high resolution panorama
.

Another reason to move to Canada..

Lawrence Lessig’s weblog
contains a short message from Wallace McLean. He notes that in Canada every author who died before December 31, 1948 has passed into the public domain. His description of what that means is particularly poignant:

As of today, millions of pages of archival heritage, in hundreds of
archival institutions, have become the common property of all Canadians.

You are free to make use of this heritage in any way you want, by
publishing, digitizing, compiling, translating, adapting, dramatizing, or
treating the material in any other way. It’s yours to enjoy and share with
whomever, whenever, in whatever way you want.

A pretty nice holiday present for Canadians. We’ll have to wait another 15 years to celebrate the entrance of a single page into the public domain.

Stardust Succeeds…

Today NASA is reporting that their Stardust probe, designed for capturing a sample of matter from the tail of comet Wild 2 successfully photographed and obtained the desired sample. Unfortunately, it won’t return this sample until 2006, when it will drop it’s load somewhere in Utah. Nifty picture of the comet, which looks like pretty much every other chunk of rock hurtling through the universe: a big cratered potato.