Helium Party Balloons

As we’ve reported before, our good friends over at Google are starting up a daily puzzle challenge. Each day’s puzzle will task your googling skills a little more, leading you to Google mastery. And much to our enjoyment, they’ve decided to share the puzzles with us at GeekDad (hmm… Google a Day? GD? GeekDad?), so each morning at 12:01am ET you’ll see a new puzzle, and the previous day’s answer (in invisitext) posted here. SPOILER WARNING: As a test, we’re going to leave the comments on so people can work together to find the answer. As such, if you want to figure it out all by yourself, DON’T READ THE COMMENTS! Also, with the knowledge that because others may publish their answers before you do, if you want to be able to search for information without accidentally seeing the answer somewhere, you can use the Google-a-Day site’s search tool, which will automatically filter out published answers, to give you a spoiler-free experience. And now, without further ado, we give you… TODAY’S PUZZLE:

The Father of Modern Russia taxed wearers of these in 1705. Only Orthodox clergy were exempt from paying to keep their what?

YESTERDAY’S ANSWER (HIGHLIGHT TO SEE):

Click and drag the image into the search box to search by image on Google Images. Find that Red Rock Canyon is in Nevada.

A recent NASA Image of the Day was Curiosity, the successor to Spirit and Opportunity.

Curiosity is the rover that will house NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), due to launch on November 25, 2011, and land on Mars on August 6, 2012. The rover and its mobile lab will perform a wide range of remote sensing tasks, including (hopefully? finally?) answering the question of whether Mars is or was capable of supporting microbial life.

At 900kg, Curiosity is five times as massive as the spectacularly successful Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and it will house ten times the mass of scientific instruments. Powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, Curiosity will be capable of traveling at up to 90 m/hr and will easily roll over obstructions as large as 75cm. The rover is controlled by a pair of onboard computers that are admittedly less powerful than an iPhone, but they’re also hardened to withstand the radiation and other hardships of space travel and interplanetary exploration.

Curiosity will be deployed to the surface of Mars using a new high-precision entry, descent, and landing system, as depicted below:

If you’d like to know more about the Mars Science Laboratory, the Wikipedia page includes a lot of high-level information that will be of interest. As well, back in April, Boing Boing had a great series of photos showing the rover during assembly.

Adafruit Industries, one of the leading online stores serving the DIY community, has introduced iCufflinks, accessories CNCed out of aluminum and packing pulsating LEDs that recall the way a Mac tower’s power button pulses soothingly when it is asleep. And it’s authentic, Adafruit reverse engineered the “breathing light” and put that goodness in the cufflinks. For Dadxxxors, the links are open source and you can download the code, circuit board files, schematics, and CAD files and hack your own.