NASA's "Spirit" Exploration Rover appears to have arrived safely on the red planet this evening. The robot geologist touched down, sending back a simple message of its landing.

"...Tonight another first was made, for the first time in human history ... we have an interplanetary communications network. We went from the rover, to Odyssey [Mars satellite] to Earth to the Deep Space Network. So we've now established a communications satellite system over another planet for the first time in history..." -- Dr. Ed Weller, NASA

Link to Spaceflight Now, an independent site with up-to-the-minute updates (via /.), Link to NASA TV's coverage. (Thanks, JP and Bren!)

Ever since Wizards of the Coast relicensed Advanced Dungeons and Dragons under the terms of the Open Game license, third parties have been able to add their own rulebooks to the game-universe. Now there's a book of rules for integrating sex into your RPGs.

The first chapter discusses handling sex in a mature way, and provides an overview of various facets of sex such as humor, sexual orientation, fetishes, prostitution, pornography, commitment and infidelity, chastity, pregnancy and childbirth, and taboos. This is a fairly basic section, but more thought-provoking than you might expect -- at least as it pertains to a roleplaying game.

There’s a look at how the alignments relate to sex, as well as how each player character race typically views it. Other fantasy races are also mentioned, including centaurs, doppelgangers, dryads, giants, goblinoids, lizardfolk, merfolk, nymphs, and sprites. There are even considerations on other creature types: aberrations, constructs, dragons, elementals, outsiders, and more.

The new (and optional) rules for sex -- skills, feats, etc. -- are found in the second chapter. The Appearance ability score is brought into play, which is used for certain skill checks. Some of the new uses for existing skills include Appraising a potential partner, Bluffing to connect with someone, Knowledge about various topics, Perform (sexual techniques), several Professions (such as Courtesan, Masseuse, Midwife, or Tattoo Artist), and Sense Motive. New feats include such entries as Animal Magnetism, Chaste Life, Disarming Looks, Limber, Seductive, Sexual Training, Sterile, and more. Issues such as sexually transmitted diseases and their physical and social consequences are covered, along with birth control, conception, and pregnancy.

Link (via Fark)

The artwork of LA-based illustrator duo Kozyndan has been blogged here on BoingBoing before, but a quick wander through their online gallery reveals some delightful recent additions. Playful, tongue-in-cheek geek fantasies of robots, rabbits, the beauty of messy desks, and tributes to hip stores.

At left, a detail view of a rabbit-filled homage to Hokusai (the print is super-cool, and is hanging on my living room wall as I type this blog post). Check out some of the panoramas, too. We've blogged their SARS Art Project contribution before -- The Yum-cha Militia (My Mother thought she had SARS, but it turned out to be PMS)-- but there are many others (some viewable as QTVR panos).

Link to Kozyndan home page, link to online gallery. Most of what you see is available for online purchase; many prints priced at a wallet-friendly $25 or under.

Boingboing reader fRiT0 says:

The Curta mechanical calculator and its story are featured in the January 2004 issue of Scientific American and a Google search turned up this excellent website with information and pictures regarding this truly incredible device. The Curta is a mechanical calculator that was designed by Curt Herzstark while he was imprisioned in a Nazi concentration camp. It is a facinating instrument and a Curta in good condition is worth $1000+ on ebay.

Link (Thanks Mark Quin, and thanks fRiT0!)

Magic may happen this evening. The USA will attempt to safely land a scientific golf cart on Mars at about 8.30pm, California time:

Two NASA (news - web sites) Mars landers -- Spirit and Opportunity -- are speeding toward "sweet spot" touch down sites at different, but scientifically attractive locations on Earth's mysterious neighbor.

The opening act in this $820 million drama to place dual robot geologists on Mars is the landing of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) dubbed Spirit tonight at about 8:35 p.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST). The target: Gusev Crater -- a possible former lake in a giant impact crater on Mars. Primary among the mission's scientific goals is to search for and characterize a wide range of rocks and soils that hold clues to past water activity on Mars

Link to news story, Link to NASA Mars Rover home page. (Thanks, John!)

The NYT has published a detailed how-to for converting vinyl LPs to MP3s or CDs. When Napster started, it solved two distinct problems. The obvious one was that you might not have the CD handy that you wanted to listen to (either because you hadn't bought it or because you'd left it somewhere else, i.e., at your parents' place while you went to college), but the more subtle one was that ripping CDs used to be really hard. You needed specialied software, tons of hard-drive space, and you had to title all those tracks by hand.

This meant that once one person had gone to the trouble of ripping a disc, it made a lot of sense not to replicate that effort: better to download someone else's rips from her Napster share than to go through that fooforaw on your own.

Today, ripping CDs is literally a one-click operation, but ripping vinyl is still very freaking hard. Newsgroups like alt.binaries.sounds.78-era often get nice payloads of ripped wax, shellac and vinyl, but the general attack on P2P means that this stuff is getting harder and harder to find on demand, which means that more and more of us are having to individually rip our music, one side at a time, in order to transfer and preserve it (80% of the music ever recorded isn't available for sale -- if you want to hear the song on that groovy LP through your iPod's headphones, you're gonna have to get ripping).

Some LP restoration software suites, including Pinnacle Clean Plus ($100), come with an external preamp that plugs into a U.S.B. port and works with your existing sound card. (Clean Plus and other software choices are described in more detail in the accompanying article.) There is also the iMic from Griffin Technologies ($40, www.griffintechnologies.com), a small input device that converts analog signals to digital outside of the computer, eliminating the possibility of electronic interference from other computer components...

You also need lots of hard-drive space, because sound files occupy about 10 megabytes per minute; that would be almost a gigabyte for all 77 minutes of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's "Trout Mask Replica."

Link

The Haunted Mansion Fan Club has shut down for one month in solidarity with Roy Disney's resignation from the Walt Disney Company's board of directors, and they're calling for a one-month boycott of Disney parks and movies in order to convince Michael Eisner to resign.

The list of accusations leveled against Mr. Eisner by family groups, children advocates, safety officials, the press, consumers, stock holders, and Disney cast members is voluminous and can no longer be ignored or tolerated. Don't stand by as this man leads to ruin the dreams and memories of untold millions of people. Help take back OUR magical kingdom and restore what Walt created and gave to us. Enough is enough.

Link

Futurismic, a terrific group-blog run by sf writers, has decided to begin publishing fiction online, paying a nominal-but-respectable $100 per story. I love this idea, if for no other reason than it will give a bunch of writers an opportunity to read "slush" (unsolicited manuscripts), something that really helped me learn what mistakes new writers make and how to avoid them. Some other stuff I like: in an era when most magazines still insist on paper submissions, they're only reading via the Web, and insisting on ASCII, pasted into a form, for submissions. ASCII is the new PDF!

Stories should be compelling and well written, with a strong emphasis on characters confronting or embracing imminent cultural, social, technological, and scienctific changes. Post-cyberpunk, Information Age, and near-future extrapolations will be welcomed--serious or satirical, straight-forward or gonzo, optimistic or pessimistic. We are not interested in fantasy, horror, or more conventional SF themes such as space opera, time travel, first contact, or alternate worlds.,,

Our reading period for the first half of our publishing year will begin on January 3, 2004 and end on February 3, 2004. Any manuscripts sent before or after these dates will be deleted unread. Because of the short timeframe, you may send two stories during this reading period, but please do so in separate submissions. We'll begin to respond some time in mid-February, and hope to respond to all submissions within three months of the reading period's closing. At this time we're only planning to publish one story per month, so only six stories will be accepted during each reading period. (The second reading period of the year should occur in July 2004.)

Link