Marginalia is a breath of fresh air in an internet that seems to be...disappearing. I actually like it's philosophy of not doing "useful" search queries - it's great just to see what's lost behind Google's wall of Reddit/Wikipedia/SEO Blogspam results. Funnily, after playing with it for a bit my gripe is that there isn't a way to exclude results from vanity domain names which are consistently the lowest quality results.
>I actually like it's philosophy of not doing "useful" search queries
Generalising this a little, it sometimes feels like the world has become all about optimisation and productivity, and the beauty of uselessness has gone missing.
Many of my favourite posts/projects on HN are from people who have set out to build something utterly useless in the name of fun - and sometimes they turn out to be useful after all!
It's true. Those originated as bootleg sales at county fair booths in the 90s, along with the concrete geese. The writer of Calvin and Hobbes was actually quite against them and merchandising in general, having seen the saturation of Garfield merchandise in the 80s.
There's lots of great stuff out there if you know where to look and that's cross-platform to boot. As other posters had said, don't focus on looking for hardware as any Windows/Mac/Linux machine will work fine. Also, my unpopular opinion is it doesn't really matter if kids are on a locked-down machine like ChromeOS when it's now easy to start up a Linux container, either locally or via one of the web-based IDEs. replit.com now has pygame which is pretty nice. The coding train channel on YouTube has a lot of nice videos on P5.js, physics simulation and generative art. Xojo (paid) is an easy way to make desktop apps.
The ISS takes over 10% of NASA's budget at over $3b/year in maintenance, so they won't be able to take care of it and sustain their proposed moon mission at the same time. Plus the low-hanging fruit for research has already been performed. My unpopular opinion is that manned spaceflight is an expensive national vanity project for modest research gains, and the projects that have been most successfull from a science perspective have been the deep space probes/space telescopes.
You also have to add in the PR benefits of each. If children aren't interested in space today, there won't be any government funding for space missions when those children become voters.
In that light, dropping manned missions entirely will probably reduce interest in space quite a bit. Probably moreso than a rover on mars that figures out the composition of some rock.
> Probably moreso than a rover on mars that figures out the composition of some rock.
Over the past 20yr hose rovers had gone from "testing the composition of probably dead rocks" to "actively looking for signs of current or former microbial life". Even the landings have gone from "shoot the thing at the planet and wait to hear back from it" to a live-streamed helicopter drop. I think they've excliped the ISS in terms of excitement for the junior-high and above crowd. Skyping someone in a blue jumpsuit who's floating around in a tube doesn't have the cool factor that "literally on another planet" gets you.
