a mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood

August 12, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that saw Hobbs & Shaw and is going very slightly crazy trying to figure out who Vanessa Kirby reminds it of from its everyday life, if that's even a thing. Or does she just have one of those faces that just about everybody has an immediate social cognate for? Nahmean? Or am I talking crazy talk here? 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway118 - Westeros: Long Island"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Ben Hoyt (@bhoyt47) reveal elegant ideas for new food-based product offerings and a theme park that no one in their right mind would pass up."A technical difficulty that went undiscovered until we'd finished recording renders this one slightly shorter than usual, but once again Ben delivers with a high-quality finishing idea of his own.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcatcher of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal).Instant Band Night 12: The DozenthJust pretend this is a commercial jingle being sung by a quartet of extremely attractive voices:🎶 WE'RE ONE MONTH OUT 🎶🎹 THERE'S NO BETTER WAY TO SPEND AN EVENING 🎹🎸 YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE A MUSICIAN TO ATTEND 🎸✨ JUST COME HAVE FUN AND WATCH ✨😎 NO, THIS DOESN'T RHYME 😎 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.The Trumpites misunderstood something about us: they assumed that we would eventually get tired. My guess is that they didn't think we were capable of hatred on the same level they were, just because our side doesn't typically show it. But they were, of course, wrong: my hatred for Donald Trump is exponentially more powerful than it was the night he was elected, especially after three years of his stupid fucking bullshit.I hate him as a person: I hate how fucking stupid he is, I hate that he doesn't know it and can never be shown what an absolute fucking idiot he is and has always been, I hate that he thinks he's a beautiful genius while being the total fucking opposite every second of every day. I hate his obvious hatred and contempt for everyone, and I hate even more that it presents as a kind of lazy, poorly-worded dismissiveness, which is somehow worse because it implies he couldn't even work up the effort to hate us properly.I hate him as a president: I hate how he got elected, I hate the people he's inspired, I hate his entire political apparatus, I hate every single Republican bootlicker that swears he's their guy just so their side can score a few points for their rabidly inhuman agenda, which I also hate. I hate what he's done to this country* on every level -- the people, the policies, the press, the fucking judiciary. I hate that he does things like this and we just have to look at each other and shrug.I hate this stupid fucking asshole and everyone who proudly serves him so much that I might go bankrupt celebrating their eventual deaths. Some unknowable amount of time ago, I apparently invented a gesture meant as the ultimate show of contempt (we go into it in episode 84 of the podcast), and if for some reason I am ever given the opportunity to meet Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell in person, I promise you that you'll see it in practice.I don't know where I was going with this; it's possible I just wanted to get it off my chest. This whole piece started out as just another blurb for the links section (that piece on The Cut is devastating) and then it clearly got out of hand. But now I'm curious: have you also been in this same boat with me the whole time since 2016? If so, thanks for riding along.* It is obviously and clearly possible to distinguish the idea of America from the actual execution of it thus far. The former is the thing I love, a place I can occasionally glimpse; the latter is, well, the place we live in 99.99% of the time, with all the ugly real-world history thereof. This is what I mean when I say people need to stop tweeting "This is not who we are" every time something horrible and racist happens: of course it's who we are and have always been. It's not what we want to be -- that is, it's out of line with the ideals of freedom and opportunity for every person of every color that constitute the American Dream -- but that's harder to phrase succinctly. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin's ability to pick up words and concepts seems to be expanding. He sometimes asks for books by name, or by concept, or maybe by design? 

  • My excellent pal Yoz gifted us a copy of The Gruffalo which has been read more times than I can count; Quentin will root through his book basket saying "Gwuffo" until he finds it.*

  • There's a book we borrowed from the library that features a plane, which he'll grab and say "Plane!" Now that I think about it, he does this with a book about a truck ("Twuck") and a tugboat ("Tug"), too.

  • We've borrowed a lot of the BabyLit Primers from the Berkeley Public Library, and there's a better-than-even chance that he'll grab one of those off the shelf and say "Pwymuh" -- to be clear, other books also count as "pwymuh," but I feel like he correctly identifies the actual Primers more often than not.

Something else I've noticed is that he's really keen on identifying things in the illustrations. The pages of his books get turned at a slightly lower rate-per-unit-time these days, because he lingers over every spread to point out pine cones, rocks, mountains, bugs and animals, clouds -- just about every noun that he can see. He has some weird word for "haystack" that I haven't figured out (we also have a copy of Room on the Broom), and there's one library book that features palm trees, which he calls "pond" despite also being able to correctly identify ponds in the very same book as "pond." Mysteries; there will always be mysteries.* Sometimes he just says "Gwuffo" under his breath as part of an occasional ever-changing litany of Words Quentin Knows. He'll be walking around or riding in the car or the stroller and just start to babble words. Is he trying to tell us a story? Just going through some internal catalog? Motivated by centers of speech and language that are starting to come online and spin up to full power? I have no idea, but it's goddamn adorable. 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye. 

  • Advances in tech demand that the social safety net be redesigned. (Project Syndicate) 

  • For the real-ass Trek nerds. (Forgotten Trek) 

  • That the Savant exists is good. That there's a need for her in the first place is not. Also, she doesn't seem to be a scalable solution, which is similarly bad. Still: a remarkable story. (Cosmo) 

  • If you were really looking to break your brain today, try this article about whether time itself is actually without direction, and what that might mean. (Aeon) 

  • Charlie Warzel is right about our information system being poisoned; it's an extra bummer because I don't know if he or anyone else sees a way out of it. (NYT) 

  • One way to start solving the ocean plastics problem is to cram a bunch of corporate execs on a boat and make them look at a damn gyre with their own eyeballs. This one's an interesting read (I mean, they all are, but this one especially). (Outside) 

  • I don't know who needs to hear this, but just in case, here's a guide on how to give (and, in a sense, receive) criticism at work. (The Cut) 

  • If the illustrator really wanted to let us know how big this giant prehistoric parrot was, why not put it next to a human? (NPR) 

  • The prices of items at big box retailers actually encode information into their last digits, if this post is to be believed! (Rather Be Shopping) 

  • The visual part of this telepresence car thing is an interesting solution to the problem of "does that robot car see me? am I safe to cross the street?" but I would like to see the display simplified to cartoon characters, specifically Mario Kart heads. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Compared to people in older brackets, adults age 18-29 have way less faith in their fellow Americans, cops, religious & business leaders, and elected officials. But they also trust scientists, journalists, and college professors more. Honestly: good. (Pew Research) 

  • Evidence suggests gulls find the human gaze deeply unsettling, so if you're worried about them stealing your sandwich, just stare 'em down. (Science) 

  • There's tardigrades on the moon now. Those tough little bastards are probably gonna be OK. (CNET) 

  • Running an indoor farm takes an unsurprisingly large amount of electricity, but you can save a lot by just shutting the lights off intermittently without impacting growth. Technology! (Anthropocene) 

  • I was wondering whether this was possible, given that knitting seems like something you should be able to program: MIT researchers have created an application that can essentially reverse-engineer and execute the pattern for any knitted item based solely on a design of what you want the end product to look like, or even just a photograph of a finished piece. (Fast Company) 

  • Just giving poor people money to move to a better neighborhood doesn't work -- you have to actually help them do it. Surprising no one, it truly does improve their lives significantly! (Vox) 

  • Is it a good idea to seed the oceans with iron for phytoplankton to soak up CO2? It's kind of a big geoengineering project with unclear impacts, except oops: we're doing it already without meaning to. (Anthropocene) 

  • The case for child leashes. Honestly, I can kinda see it, and Quentin isn't even 2 yet. (Slate) 

  • I .............. don't know if I want a device that can detect what amounts to my spoken inner monologue. (Smithsonian) 

  • Income inequality is getting worse. Now what? (Fast Company) 

  • A little patch of stretchy sensors might be all you need to control a robot hand. (IEEE Spectrum) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumOrder of Operations, The Difficulty Will Only Increase 

Thanks

If you've read this far, I thank you. Feel free to forward this to someone you like, or inflict upon someone you don't.