May 23, 2021

Technology Manifesto, Invisible Masks, and Reinvented Wheels - Issue #9

By Benjamin Hollon • Issue #9 • View online

Well, it looks like I’ve missed a few weeks. I’ve been pretty busy with AP exams and I still have some tests coming up, but I had some cool stuff to share with you, so I’ll do that now.

New Blog Post

My Technology Manifesto | See With Eyes Closed

This article is a copy of my “Matrix Manifesto” assignment for my Media Literacy class. When relevant, I have linked to other blog posts of mine. Topics without links are likely to have some soon; I want to be thinking and writing about things like this more often.

seewitheyesclosed.com • Share

Current Projects

Vocado - I may have mentioned this in the past, but I’ve been enjoying reinventing the wheel lately. My website used to run using ExpressJS, an immensely popular framework for sites, but I decided to recode it myself without dependencies (read about the left-pad incident). That just got released this week. You won’t see any visible differences, but Vocado is the wizard behind the curtain.
Bradbury Autocomplete - I’ve written before about my autocomplete based on Bradbury’s writing. Just wanted to share a cool phrase it came up with this week: “mask of invisible noise rising.” I have yet to check how much of that it just copied verbatim from its sample texts, but it sounds pretty cool either way.
Interplanetary Twitter - I think I mentioned this before, but I’m thinking through how Twitter (or really any communications) would work on an interplanetary scale, where light-speed delays would cause huge waiting times. It’s proving very insightful and I hope to publish something about it at some point.

Other Stuff

I seem to usually use this area to talk about space, so I’ll give you a quick rundown (though I do have other things this time).

First, China’s Zhurong rover just landed on Mars and sent back some cool pics!

Zhurong's first color image

Next, I have a sadder one: Rocket Lab had a failed mission. If you don’t know Rocket Lab, they do similar things to SpaceX but launch out of New Zealand and have a few traits that I think are much better. I’ll probably go into what those are some time later. For now, here’s their press release about what happened. I, for one, am extremely disappointed by this failure since I am possibly a bigger fan of Rocket Lab than any other private space agency, but I’m confident they’ll be able to keep going after this setback.

In my final space news item for this week, I’d like to bring your attention to the Lunar Eclipse on the 26th! You should take a look up at the sky!

In other news, I got a couple of class awards (Media Literacy and Biology) and was inducted to NHS this week, so that’s pretty cool.

Quote of the Week

Every murderer is probably someone’s old friend.

– Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Have a great week.