all pumpkin everything

September 28, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that bought a bottle of some strange pumpkin ginger ale from Trader Joe's, a box of pumpkin spice Cheerios, and some limited-edition pumpkin Hostess cupcakes because fuck it, that's why 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe desk I want for our home office setup is having what I would charitably call "availability issues" at Ikea, but hopefully I'll be able to snag one this week. As you may have guessed, however, this means no new episode this week despite my possibly foolish promises! Listen: at least there's a sizable back catalog.We're still at 33 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts, which is better than 0, but is it better than 35? Or 40? Don't wait for me to ask a mathematician, just click on over and get reviewin'! (Please.)Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberIt seems laughable to try to throw Instant Band Night without a proven vaccine in place. Let's see what's up in November 2021.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I don't have a lot for you in this spot this week, folks; I haven't even had time to digest this Trump tax return stuff properly, if that gives you any idea how weirdly busy I still am with post-move tasks and childcare. In the meantime, I hope each and every one of you is as whole and hale as possible.PS: Holding myself accountable: I have not started my little personal side project of emailing at least one person I haven't talked to in a bit every few days, but hopefully that'll change once I have a desk??? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.The new bedtime ritual has more or less cemented itself, and I feel the time has come to share it with you:

  1. Put away toys.

  2. Night diaper.

  3. Brush teeth.

  4. PJs.

  5. Lie on the floor and look at the shadows cast by the objects on the ceiling by the lamp (smoke detector, hanging light, etc).

  6. Note the waviness of shadows from the curtains (ever since Mavis explained what causes the shadows to look like that, Quentin now tells us "The reason why is the gathers!").

  7. Rocking chair time part 1: one parent tells Quentin a highly abbreviated story of the building of the Golden Gate Bridge and our recent visit to Ocean Beach to look at the Pacific (this used to be me, but lately he's been asking Mavis to do this part).

  8. Lights out.

  9. Rocking chair time part 2: the other parent sings Quentin "I've Been Working on the Railroad" -- odds are increasingly good that he may chime in with his own off-rhythm/tune contributions, which are extremely adorable.

  10. Tuck-in; good night!

On at least one occasion thus far, Quentin has accepted the story of Tom Thumb and the Romulans, but overwhelmingly he prefers to hear about the Golden Gate Bridge. I choose not to read a future as a civil engineer into this, but it's an extremely difficult temptation to avoid. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Here's your thoroughly unsettling must-read about the chaos that awaits us if Trump decides he doesn't wanna give up power; yes, it's worth burning an Atlantic click on. (~$Atlantic) 

  • This story of a group of online strangers who came together to buy and deliver an extremely unique chair to someone who happened to have a tattoo of it (you'll have to read the story) is very good. ($WaPo) 

  • "Uber, but for evicting people" is a frustratingly pat way to describe this latest abomination of 2020 capitalism. (Vice) 

  • Here's a good but sobering 12-months-and-beyond roadmap of the pandemic from a panel of experts. (STAT) 

  • Ten minutes of massage or just rest can give your body a significant leg up in fighting stress. I need to start doing this more. (U of Konstanz) 

  • I was away from most kinds of the internet this past week due to moving and unpacking and such, but I did send at least one mournful message to a group chat when RBG died; turns out we all did it. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • In 15,000 use cases over six years, there's a statistically significant trend in the disruptive use of drones -- a good thing! (MIT Press Reader) 

  • The protests do not seem to have worked inasmuch as police budgets either stayed the same or increased. Is that the whole story? Maybe not??? (Bloomberg CityLab) 

  • Not all surfboards that wander are lost; at least in one very specific case, a delinquent board lost in Hawaii turned up in the Philippines two years later and 5000mi away. (Guardian) 

  • Longtime readers of this newsletter or listeners of my podcast probably know that I've been worried about space junk for literally years, so seeing this New Yorker article pop up in a bunch of places has been predictably satisfying. (~$New Yorker) 

  • Paradox-free time travel is at least theoretically possible according to one student/professor team who say they've crunched the numbers. (U of Queensland) 

  • Mouse embryos develop faster than human embryos because their segmentation clock chemistry is different. Does ....... does this mean we would develop quicker if we were somehow able to switch to the mouse version? Surely that's madness, right? (RIKEN) 

  • Reddit has been fairly free of QAnon bullshit, but their example may not be replicable on the other major platforms. (~$Atlantic) Facebook, surprising no one, is still basically just a god damn disaster, still, in terms of leadership (The Verge) -- so much so that there's an independent group of critics who've formed their own "Real Facebook Oversight Board." (NBC News) 

  • The skeletons of sea sponges are good inspiration for designing stronger, lighter bridges and skyscrapers. Sure, why not. (Harvard) 

  • This should have been obvious to all of us from the start: "'The Bachelor' Romanticizes Toxic Behavior, and It Has Dangerous Outcomes" (Vice) 

  • Before oxygen, what did life on Earth use to move electrons around? Might've been arsenic. Arsenic!! (UConn) 

  • Some research seems to indicate that given the option between a thing that's easy to understand and a thing that takes a minute to figure out, consumers actually prefer the more difficult choice when they look back on it, which is ........ huh. (RPI) 

  • Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of rude work emails, and they have different (bad) effects. (U of Illinois Chicago) 

  • I'm putting this in here so nobody has to send it to me: the venom of the goddamn Venezuelan fucking Pinkfoot Goliath fuck Tarantula might hold the key to designing a pain blocker for people with IBS. (U of Queensland) 

  • I realize safety concerns are no laughing matter and yadda yadda, but can these poor workers who built their own hangout spot under Grand Central not have one nice thing in their lives? (NBC News) 

  • Orcas are starting to act up off the coast of Spain and nobody can figure out if they're genuinely being assholes or just foolin' around. ($NYT) 

  • The saying should be updated to "time flies when you're having more fun than you expected." (Quanta) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumFire & Elephants, Advanced Lessons in Low-Light Photography 

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.