Soccer Dad

Jews on Mars?

I recently received a joke that had previously made its way around the internet about Jews on Mars. It starts:

In a stunning development, we have learned that there is life on Mars -- but not the kind that had been anticipated.

The first indication, based on the current U.S. space mission, came when the small roving vehicle called Sojourner spotted a sign on the rocky terrain of Red Planet that read, "Welcome To Chabad House -- Bring Moshiach Now." The sign, in English, thrilled and confused NASA scientists back in Houston, who had no idea what it meant. Only after thorough research did they learn that it revealed the presence of a dedicated and particularly hearty group of Lubavitch chasidim, known for their tireless efforts to reach Jews in the most remote regions, urging them to perform mitzvot.

"We've been here for some time now doing our work," said a cheerful Rabbi Lou Steinwalker, captain of the spaceship "Mitzvah 613", in an exclusive phone interview. When asked how long he had been on Mars and how he got there, he said only, "where there's a will, there's a way."

He then excused himself, explaining that it was time for prayer and he was looking for a minyan. In a subsequent phone call, the Rabbi noted that in recent days another synagogue has been formed on Mars -- a reform congregation that he would not step foot in.

Actually though, Israeli technology is making transmission of the images from Mars possible.

The unique image-compression algorithm was developed by Gadi Sarousi, HP Labs’ Director of its Information Theory Research group, as well as Guillermo Shapiro and Marcelo Weinberger. HP said that the compression technology enabled the sending of the high-quality photos from Mars in a short period. Weinberger and Sarousi, both graduates of the Technion, wrote their doctorates under Professors Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv, the developers of the Lempel-Ziv coding algorithm – which has become the international standard for compressed information transmission.

"Because of the great distance between Earth and Mars, the signals are very weak, thus data can be transferred very slowly. Thus the way to speed it up is to compress the data and translate it into another form with many fewer bits without harming the quality of the image," Ziv told the Jerusalem Post. "NASA adopted the algorithm originally developed by our graduates, who are the second generation of our original work."

Actually Marcelo Weinberger is a native of Argentina and Guillermo Sapiro is a native of Uruguay. Of course that also demonstrates the ingathering of the exiles and Israel's remarakable diversity.
Crossposted on Bsurot Tovot and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at January 8, 2004 12:56 PM