a useful illness analogy, maybe

March 06, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's gearing up for Instant Band Night 19 this Thursday and sincerely hopes to see your wonderful face there if it all possible 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's Apple Podcasts presence here, which includes a back catalog over 150 episodes long chock-full of excellent ridiculousness, including an experimental tabletop RPG and a couple of Star Trek fantasy drafts that could almost be their own show if I had the time to make yet another podcastInstant Band Night 19: SOLARIT'S HAPPENING THURSDAYDid you get your ticket? Did you tell your five coolest friends? No, seriously: I cannot guarantee the same magic that happened last time will happen again this time. It's up to you. It's up to you. Tell everyone! Bring everyone! All the info you need is below, including links to event pages with a description and FAQ if for some reason you're just now finding out about Instant Band Night and want to know what it is:March 9 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook) (Partiful)+ +  T E L L   Y O U R   F R I E N D S  + ++ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.My pandemic hobby has been ceramics and it's great, but it takes a long time to execute any ideas I might have, just because that's how it works.🤲 Clay has to be sculptedđź’¨ Then it has to dry completely🔥 Bisque firing🖌️ Paint it in (under)glazes and so forth🔥 Glaze firingDrying takes days on its own, and the firings are done on a schedule set by the pottery where I'm a member. These are not complaints; this is just the cadence you have to accept if you're gonna do this, and sometimes my brain gets super carried away with some of its notions and I start to feel something like impatience, which seems silly. Also: some of my ideas exist at the limit of my ability to physically create in the first place. For instance: "what if a tardigrade, but with a blue and white china pattern that I just freehand onto the surface because transfers would be entirely too fiddly?" The results were quite pleasing if I do say so myself, but you know what's less pleasing is spending a nonzero amount of time painting a second one and dropping it on the floor after dipping it in the clear coat. It split into segments, which I could theoretically still fire individually (one of the legs broke off, though, so that's gonna have to be a write-off due to how glaze firing works). I could then attempt the home craft kintsugi method I've been googling where you mix gold-colored powder with epoxy glue; these tardigrades are meant to be garden/houseplant decorations, nobody's eating off them. What do you think? Should I give it a shot? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Here's what I've got as far as notes from the last days of plague house: 

Thursday: Felix was back to his daycare post-RSV by Tuesday. I'm typing this on Thursday and Quentin is still on the couch. You know how I'm measuring progress? This morning he ate ten (10) grapes for "breakfast" but — but!! — I didn't have to wage an entire campaign of total psychological warfare to make it happen. He just ate 9 of them; the last one took a little persuading.

That's it. Quentin continued to improve gradually day by day, and on Sunday he ate half a slice of deep-dish pizza for dinner and a handful of cherry tomatoes without any prompting. Felix, of course, was fine by Tuesday and has continued to be fine. Today — Monday — both children are at daycare and school, praise be to all the gods above and below. One of the Slacks I'm in is my old college gang, many of whom are now parents, and in our parenting channel someone shared the wisdom that you have to look at illness of the school-missing variety the same way you regard the weather: rain's gonna come eventually. Sometimes you can predict it, and sometimes you're caught outside in a surprise shower. S'not anybody's fault. I'm doing my best to internalize this. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The mass extinction that ended the Permian was the biggest one in planetary history, and The Scientists think biodiversity loss may have played a big part, which is .......... concerning, given the amount of it we've been causing lately. (Cal Academy of Sciences) (Paper) 

  • It's nice to know that there are professionals out there who really are thinking quite hard about how to solve, reduce, or work around political polarization. (Nature) 

  • At the same time, that's a whooooole lotta red on this map of where the election deniers currently hold power. (Brookings Inst) 

  • The UN agrees we need to start looking into solar geoengineering. (Motherboard) 

  • Here's a very good (and if the modal dialog is to be believed, free for an unspecified time-limited span) longread on The Machine and one of its main skeptics, who rules. (Intelligencer) 

  • If journalists covered every mass shooting like this, would there be actual change? Debatable, but it's at least a good first step. (Poynter) 

  • If you like malls and/or soup dumplings, this piece on LA's Din Tai Fung and the relationship between the Galleria and the Americana (which are literally next to each other) is interesting. (Eater) 

  • Speaking of malls, do The Kids still use them the same we did back in the day? (also Eater) 

  • Autonomous shipping might become a thing eventually; if so, we need to answer some big questions first. (Nature) 

  • "My Child's Police Interrogation of Me After I Fed Him Breakfast" (The Grudge Report) 

  • The Scientists have demonstrated a hydrogel stem cell treatment that can repair brain injuries in mice. (U of Melbourne) (Paper) 

  • Why do some of us — certainly not me, I know all the cool music all the cool kids listen to as long as you ask me zero followup questions — stop exploring new music as we age? (The Conversation) 

  • Those two South African orcas who've become expert shark murderers are just going HAM down there. (Science Alert) 

  • Haptic holography sounds extremely cool, but it just doesn't feel quite right yet. (UC Santa Barbara) 

  • I respect the hustle but also don't like where this is headed: scammers are using voice deepfakes to trick people into thinking their loved ones are in danger, send money now! Let's all set up verbal passphrases with each other so we'll know who we're really talking to on the phone. ($WaPo) 

  • The Scientists think we might have organic computers made from brain organoids within decades. (Johns Hopkins) (Paper) 

  • Eli Lilly's capping insulin at $35/mo. (NBC News) 

  • It's fucking idiotic that we're not already recycling solar panels, so I'm glad at least one company out there is on the ball. (Yale Environment 360) 

  • Speaking of recycling, here's a report from an EV battery recycling company on how their year went and what still needs doing. (Redwood Materials) 

  • When viewed from space, Earth's top and bottom halves are equally bright, which is ........ weird, considering the southern hemisphere is mostly water (dark) and the northern one is mostly land (light). This has puzzled The Scientists for half a century, but now they think they have the answer: clouds. (Weizmann Inst of Science) 

  • The last National Household Travel Survey in 2017 revealed that Americans having been taking slightly fewer car trips year over year since 2001. There's a whole lot more in this writeup on a recent study that used the data. (Florida Atlantic U) (Paper) 

  • Maybe don't look for a working device out from Neuralink anytime soon, or ever. (Reuters) 

  • The Scientists are creating a map of human proteins that interact with each other — what they call the "interactome" — and have already gotten interesting results that could help with drug discovery. (European Bioinformatics Inst) (Paper) 

  • Is it possible that having to get a license to do something like styling hair is a sign of some hot bullshit that's damaging society? No, really: why do we need a license to braid hair or become a travel guide, especially if it's not consistent across states? (~$Atlantic) 

  • The Scientists think animal consciousness isn't just a simple "there/not there" proposition — it might be a combination of ten different elements that can all be tested separately. (Ruhr University Bochum) (Paper) 

  • Some ancient cities fell apart after a couple centuries, while others lasted a thousand years or more. How? New data says: collective governance, infrastructural investment, and strong cooperation between households. HOW ABOUT THAT (Field Museum) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have hit upon applying the Hansel+Gretel notion of dropping breadcrumbs to rovers exploring exoplanetary caves. (U of Arizona) 

  • You know what? Yeah: Hieronymus Bosch tabletop figurines. (Polygon) 

  • NASA's confirmed the DART mission validates the whole "kinetic impactor" idea for anti-asteroid planetary defense. (NASA) 

  • The Scientists have invented a 3D printing ink crammed with bacteria that can make a mineralized bio-composite final product. (EPFL) (Paper) 

  • There's a fight happening in Salt Lake City involving heavy ski traffic and a proposal to build a truly bonkers-sounding gondola system to fix it. (Motherboard) 

  • "I’ve Optimized My Health To Make My Life As Long And Unpleasant As Possible" (McSweeney's) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

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.