Photosynthesis

Sometime last year, I took a look at my media habits. I was glued to a number of news podcasts, I was scrolling instagram, and getting angry at the world. It was the cause of unnecessary stress in my life, not the sort of stress that gives you a heart attack and sends you to the hospital, it was the sort of stress that effects you slightly over long periods of time. It was the sort of stress that bubbles beneath the surface like a dormant volcano. This experience is not unique nor novel. It is a side effect of an addiction, one designed by social media platforms like Meta and google who incentivizes its content creators to hook your attention, so they can sell ad space in between scrolls. This addiction is engineered by these companies similarly to how the tobacco company engineered cigarettes to be addictive, choosing profit despite knowing the health and safety effects on its users. Despite knowing all this, I still lay in bed at night, staring into a small screen shining bright light into my face like a plant trying to photosynthesize the last rays of sunlight in the evening.

Unlike the sun, this light does not provide the nutrients necessary for life. You cannot survive off this light alone. Looking at this photo, through your own computer or phone, you are receiving about 1/1000th of what comes from natural daylight. This photo shows a plant being lit only by the light of a cellphone, light that is fed to me based off an algorithm which has decided that I want to see this video of someone reporting on the Trump Tariff Fiasco. Much like the light of this phone, the quality of this news source is most likely garbage. Most of the content on youtube is. Its the light emitting equivolent a cigarrette. It provides an immediate chemical reaction in your brain, for a short term good feeling that ends just as quickly as it arrives, making you crave the next one and the next.

So what would happen if we kept this plant here, in the dark, feeding only on the light of a cellphone? I may continue to return to this image. However I will not be returning to Instagram. The platform simply does not provide anything positive for me. If anything it's constantly stealing my time and focus. So if you want to keep seeing more of my work, you're in the right place. This blog will be my archive, for better or worse.

New project

It is a little bittersweet, but I have recently changed projects. OSAM-1 was discontinued by NASA and I am incredibly disappointed that NASA didn't see it through, budget cuts are to blame unfortunately, despite it being so near completion. A lot of people put their heart, soul, sweat, and tears into it. I will post sometime with a lot of the “in process” behind the scene photos during the integration and testing phase of OSAM-1.

But for now, I am excited to share about a new-to-me project I have begun supporting. My first set of photos have been approved for public release. So without further ado, here is the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope! (RST)

You can learn more about the project here. https://science.nasa.gov/mission/roman-space-telescope/

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Contamination Control team performs a routine inspection of the Spacecraft Integrated Payload Assembly (SCIPA) at Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt Md., Mar 13, 2025.