The Problem with Technology

Glass cellphones... brilliant

About a month and a half ago, an Orbital Sciences rocket exploded during liftoff. Although nobody was injured from the explosion, hundreds of millions of dollars of supplies and equipment were destroyed in a matter of seconds. The fireball, which could be seen for miles, stunned observers; many hadn't even seen a lift-off before, much less an exploding one.

Only three days later, another space-related accident occurred: during a test flight of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo spacecraft, a premature wing rotation due to pilot error resulted in the destruction of the spacecraft, killing one of the two occupants and severely injuring the other.

Internet Pong Game

Here's a program I wrote earlier this year in July. It's a two-player pong game that involves communicating over the internet using Firebase. As I wrote this program, I also wrote a JavaScript library to take care of graphics and data communication over the internet. The library took the most work; the pong program just required some math and some creativity to help solve the problems I ran into... such as how the two computers would figure out who gets the top paddle and who gets the bottom paddle.

Partial Solar Eclipse

About a week ago, I was finally able to observe the second solar eclipse of my life – a partial eclipse with a maximum coverage of about 50%. The only other eclipse I have observed was another partial solar eclipse in May 2012.

Visualizing Time: An Essay

If time were stopped, would this falling pen look blurry to us?

Time can be a very confusing subject. It has a past, a present, and a future, but the future keeps changing and the present is always moving, while the past grows larger. Although most people think they understand time, they often get confused when they try to describe it. To help visualize and understand time, many people compare it to a very familiar concept: a line.

Feeding Hummingbirds

It's that time of the year when I get the most hummingbirds at my feeder. It's hot, and the fields are brown, but the little whirring birds make summer fun the whole season long.