Crayoning-by-numbers
May 25th, 2009
Stuff You Wouldn't Believe If It Showed Up In A Film Script (part 53 in an ongoing series): the first TV image of Mars ever was made with crayons.
The people at the JPL were so excited to receive the images that they couldn't wait for them to be processed by the lab's imager. As the first picture was beamed down as a stream of 8-bit numbers—each point indicating a brightness point—they thought of a quick way to get an image straight away: Print the numbers indicating brightness in paper strips, put them together, and color them with pastel crayons.
[Via Kevan Davis]
