See With Eyes Closed Digest

By Benjamin Hollon

Aliens and Dark Mode - Issue #5

#5・ Mar 19, 2021

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Aliens and Dark Mode - Issue #5

By Benjamin Hollon • Issue #5 • View online

Wow, it’s been a busy week. Most of my time has been spent writing a research paper. About aliens, no less. And of course I’m sharing it with you.

New Blog Post: Where is Everybody?

Here’s my research paper. A full-blown investigation of what it would mean if we found aliens. There’s a bit of technical lingo in it, but it should still be simple enough to understand.

Where Is Everybody?: Implications of the Fermi Paradox | See With Eyes Closed

This week’s post is a research paper I wrote this week on aliens. That’s right, aliens. My research papers tend to have a flair of the ridiculous (I’ve heard that my old teacher still talks about my paper on Religion in Space; maybe I should publish that one soon), and this one is no exception.

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Dark Mode!

The new look

I’ve finally gotten around to one of my most requested features for my site: Dark Mode! If you go to my website, there should now be a toggle switch in the top right corner; you can use that to switch between light and dark mode. By default, it will use whatever is in your computer or phone’s settings.

Please do let me know if you find anything messed up with this! It’s very new and there are bound to be color issues strewn here and there for the first week or two. I will be eternally grateful if you tell me about them!

Current Projects

I should be getting a telescope sometime this week! I’ll try to take some pictures and send them next week. I’m pretty excited! My first target will probably be the moon; almost everything else is on the other side of the Earth right around now. I might be able to snap a photo of Mars too.
I released an RSS feed for my site. I know a lot of people probably don’t know (or care) what that is, but if you do, here it is: https://seewitheyesclosed.com/feed/ Just plug that into a feed reader and you’ll get updates from my blog.

Other Stuff

I finished reading Of Mice and Men this week. I think that it has some of the best writing I’ve seen, but the ending is crazy sad (very near Where the Red Fern Grows level). Overall, I thought it was a very worthwhile read and highly recommend it.

Other than that, I discovered an outrage: on Windows, emojis get pixelated when they’re too big!

Part of a pixelated avocado emoji

I don’t know why this irks me so much; it’s obviously not a big enough deal that I would have noticed it before now. I guess it just feels like something that should be done better and isn’t. Even using simple SVG images instead of PNG or whatever this uses would solve the problem. It would take up a ton less storage too!

Ah, well. Ignore me if you like. I just needed to get that out of my system.

Thought(s) of the Week

I’ve got two related quotes for you this week:

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure … than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

– Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life”

Without the fear of heights, there can be no appreciation for the beauty of high places.

– Liu Cixin, The Dark Forest

Interesting side note: this Roosevelt quote is where JPL’s “Dare Mighty Things” motto came from that was on Perseverance’s parachute.

What do you think about these quotes? I’d love to hear your thoughts (just reply to this email). I might write a blog post about these quotes soon.

And with that, have a great week.

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By Benjamin Hollon

A weekly digest of my new blog posts, projects, and things I'm currently working on as well as just an eensy bit of plain old fun.

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