At first I felt sad. Thinking of how Curiosity feels all alone in Mars. Slowly moving towards its objective day after day. However, Curiosity is not alone. Many people are rooting for her. Singing happy birthday and celebrating achievements. It has shown that machines carry the hearts of their creators. That makes me feel happy. Continue onwards Curiosity. Here is to another wonderful year of adventure and discovery!
Sorry about that! I do feel it is a huge accomplishment. Full stop. It is the interstellar part that puzzled me. Why not intergalactic? Of course it is a huge first step in both directions, and so are computers, the wheel and various technologies for that matter. However, we're still warming up in our stellar system.
Most people are weak on the difference between intra- and inter-. It's in the set of things I don't even consider trying to go grammar-nazi on because it's so widespread it's arguably correct now, and the "real" distinction is merely jargon used by several subcommunities.
People en masse will be clearer on finer points of language if those who already grasp them make the effort to polish their communications. Don't mistake lack of awareness for stupidity. Most people learn by example.
Corollary: every wrong apostrophe breed's another.
Wouldn't the very low atmospheric pressure prevent any sound from being transported? So it vibrates the birthday tune, but only via seismic waves, not sound. Nice touch anyway :)
I'm quite sure it doesn't sound like that on Mars, though. Think about how different dolphins sound because their music is sent through water instead of normal earth air.
My wife is very emotion driven. She legitimately cried about the philae shutdown, and had to rectify how she "looked at" the shutdown to not feel sad about it, but I feel like my sysadmin background helps in this.
These tools, as much as we attach emotion to them, are tools, extensions of the will of those who made them. A sysadmin will NEVER win in the long run. Our best success is averting failure yet another day; yet another day. Similarly an engineer will never build a tool that lasts forever. But each year is another accomplishment, another triumph of their competence against the increasingly likely probability that "everything is on fire."
So less than poignancy, I see it as a trumpet call, a triumph procession. Each year is another year of spitting in the face of every absurd hardware bug, quantum event, cosmic ray, and meteor that'd love nothing more than to ruin some scientist's day. These missions to which we assign so much personality do not "die", so much as "manage to persist against all odds", and it keeps me in constant awe of the people who set out and succeed, even a little, at these endevours.
(not a downvoter) Since it is mostly about transfering bits and wasting some time on the equipment it is not a big cost at all. Saving 0.0001% in the next travel to mars and they probably have covered the next 10 billion birhtdays.
