Friday's Food for Thought - 2/22/08

It's time for another Friday's Food for Thought! Sorry to get it up so late, but here it is.

Quote:

"We grow up hearing that trumpeters blew down the walls of Jericho, that Gabriel's trumpet announces the will of God, and that the largest and hippest of all animals, the elephant, has a trunk mostly (we think) for trumpeting. These grandiose images shape the classic trumpet persona: brash, impetuous, cocky, cool, in command. Anyone who has ever played in a band knows that if the conductor stops rehearsal because a fight breaks out, if somebody takes your girlfriend, if a tasteless practical joke is pulled, if someone challenges every executive decision no matter how trivial, it's got to be a trumpet player. That's just how we are."
- Wynton Marsalis

News Story: Google sponsors new race to the moon
I heard about this a while back, but now's as good a time as any to post it since there's a recent story about it. Google is sponsoring the Google Lunar X Prize, which has a $30 million prize for the first two teams to put a robotic rover on the moon that can transmit data and images to Earth. 10 teams have announced their entry into the competition.

The first X Prize was the Ansari X Prize, which was won by a team led by Burt Rutan (who I profiled a couple of weeks ago). To win the $10 million prize, Rutan's team had to put their privately-funded manned spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, into space twice in two weeks. There are a couple other other X Prizes now: the Archon X Prize for Genomics, in which scientists must sequence the genomes of 100 people in 10 days to win $10 million, and the Automotive X Prize, which is in development but will deal with "designing viable, clean and super-efficient cars that people want to buy."

Video: To show you all how I sometimes feel while editing stories for Harding University's newspaper, the Bison, here is "The Punctuation Police," courtesy of Picnicface.