BA DE YA

October 01, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that likes to get all hepped up on candy corn and do some power internetting 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway83 - One Less Fixie"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Diamond (@diamondfischer) explore the final frontier before diving into ideas around dating, traffic, recreation, and the only reason to own a fixed-gear bicycle."Because Diamond is an excellent person, we spent a fair but not excessive amount of time debating the design merits of the latter-day Enterprises; we also, as it turns out, have some questions for Jeff Bezos, so if anyone can hook that up, let a man know.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). 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Demi Adejuyigbe's September 21st meme is very good, but here's something that isn't. I'm aware the the conceit of this particular piece is "rejected lyrics" and hence they don't have to fit the definition of quality I'm about to put forth, but look: you've all seen parody lyrics for songs that don't work, not in any sense of the word, not in any possible musical universe. You know you have. Not from Weird Al -- Weird Al is a professional and knows what he's doing. But you've seen them out there from others.This must stop.From here on out, I'm putting all people who are not Weird Al and want to make parody lyrics on fucking notice: you are officially prohibited by law from doing this until you learn the poetical concept of scansion. Here, I'll teach you: count the goddamn syllables in the original: does the bullshit you just wrote match? Is it at least close? If no, then your authorization is hereby revoked and agents are being sent to your house even as you read this. I'm not even getting into where the stresses fall within the line; that concept is apparently for level 301 students and above. The basics who go staggering around dropping this kind of raggedy-ass nonsense probably think rap is easy, too. Fucking hell, people. OK, rant over; thank you for coming to my TED talk. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Our toy budget for Quentin is thus far not very large. This doesn't mean he lacks things to play with, however: we were gifted a big bucket of wooden blocks from a family whose kid had outgrown them, and they've been a massive hit here. They've been integral, in fact, to the latest Quentin craze, which for lack of a better term I call The Ultimate Rattle: it's a square Tupperware box in which a couple of blocks have been placed before closing the lid. He'll get on his back and shake the living shit out of that thing; it's great.The other undisputable ruler of the toyscape thus far is The Staff of Destiny, otherwise known as any cardboard paper towel roll he can get his hands on. He bats at things with it, or just waves it around, or whacks two of them together, and when all else fails, he'll simply chew on the end of one. Thing is, we don't really go through paper towels all that quickly in this house. So I wrote an email to the street list (our street, which is a single-block cul de sac, has a Google group someone started -- have I mentioned that I love our street? this will be a topic for a later issue) asking anyone who finished a paper towel roll to consider dropping it in our mailbox, and between dropoffs and Sunday's block party (seriously, I love our street), we now have a backup supply. Further updates as events warrant! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Elizabeth Warren had another great idea for a law, this one aimed at solving housing inequality. Elizabeth Warren must be protected at all costs. (CityLab) 

  • Flu season usually kills between 12,000-56,000 people per year. Last year it was 80,000. Get your damn flu shots. (NBC News) 

  • Boston's public schools tried to work out an algorithm that'd optimize bus costs and school start times to give students the best possible chances of succeeding; it didn't go as planned. (Boston Globe) 

  • A startup claims to have a computer vision technology that can watch security feeds and identify the people carrying guns. Really? (ZDNet) 

  • Humans aren't actually good at spotting lies just by watching people talk. (538) 

  • There's a "dark core" at the heart of all negative personality traits. (U of Copenhagen via EurekAlert) 

  • Read this study on the personality traits most closely associated with conspiracy theorist wackjobs just for the explanation of an actual technical term called "BS receptivity." (Union College via EurekAlert) 

  • This is definitely the wildest case of naked, superpowered kidnapping I've ever read about. (Globe & Mail) 

  • Bucket hats are a thing again? Really? (Fashionista) 

  • Study says we overestimate the consequences of being honest in our minds. Note that this doesn't say anything about that odious "radical honesty" bullshit -- just being actually honest. (Quartz) 

  • More people in America are murdered when it's warm outside than when it's cold, which does not bode well for our climate-altered future, let me just say. (NYT) 

  • Technology (and PT) can help people with motor complete spinal injuries! (University of Louisville press release) 

  • SURE, YES, GOOD: a battery technology that uses CO2 captured from power plant exhaust. (MIT press release) 

  • Depressingly unsurprising: Ride-Hailing Drivers Have Lost Half Their Income in the Last Five Years, Study Shows. (Fortune) 

  • Who wants to look at the crazy results of a new imaging technique for bones and cartilaginous structures in preserved animals? (The Verge) 

  • Johnson & Johnson has been losing market share because millenials want a different kind of stuff to put on their babies, for different reasons. (Vox) 

  • I'm on record as saying I find watching American football fascinating on account of it being a turn-based strategy game; I will definitely watch a game if it's on, though I still couldn't name 3 current NFL players to save my life (ask me literally anything about the Star Trek universe, though). This, then, I find myself curious about: Amazon's NFL streams will feature an all-female commentary team. (Engadget) 

  • I think this would be an interesting model if we could guarantee the US military was itself free of white supremacists: Mexican Marines were deployed to disarm the entire police force of Acapulco and detained some of their leaders on suspicion of them having been thoroughly infiltrated by gangs. What if we could do this to a city every time an unarmed black person was shot by cops? Granted, the US Army/Marines would be very busy, but at least they'd have something good to do. Again, though, we'd need to make sure their own house was clean first, which I have no real visibility into. (BBC) 

  • Well, yeah: In Apple’s hometown of Cupertino, a debate over the fate of an old mall epitomizes Silicon Valley’s class divide. (Recode) 

  • Here's an oldie-but-goldie about Why So Many Smart People Aren’t Happy. (Atlantic) 

  • Rather than just stocking the shelves physically, machines at Amazon are starting to make decisions about what to sell and how much to charge, and it's working? (Bloomberg) 

  • As much as Twitter is responsible for raising the national angst index beyond all reason, I do enjoy these moments of "Twerendipity." (NYmag) 

  • A study on "flipped instruction" shows that it helps kids learn math better. Interestingly, this model looks to me just like how college classes work, or at least how some of them do; doesn't that suggest something about how schools below oughta? (University of Missouri press release) Maybe with less discrimination against poor people? (Vox) 

  • Machine learning image scanning systems can fail very easily for a surprisingly simple reason: they don't know when they're confused. (Quanta) 

  • YouTubers are buuuuuurning out and the company is not helping. At least not right now. (The Verge) 

  • It really is completely fucking stupid that the school day ends two hours before the workday. (Atlantic) 

  • Something I never thought about until just now: our fingers work great for gripping things because we can vary the friction on them at will, so designing a robot hand that does the same thing seems very smart indeed. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • How about a robot that can fetch and ferry supplies around a hospital for people, built by a women-led team? (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Mountain goats in Olympic National Park have become addicted to human pee and are being captured and airlifted out before they become a nuisance. 2018 just refuses to stop being wild, everybody. (Motherboard) 

  • Whoever is running the official Twitter account for Steak-umm is doing a great job, and I mean this in all sincerity. (Twitter thread) 

  • The NYT takes us into The Existential Void of the Pop-Up "Experience". (NYT) 

  • Every asshole North Carolinian senator who voted this law into place and every dumbshit who voted them into office should be clapped in irons and forced to help with the restoration work until it's finished or they collapse from exhaustion, whichever comes first. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • If you touched any kind of Nintendo gaming system in your life and were up to this point unaware of the Bowsette phenomenon, your ignorance is now at an end (Polygon). The original comic is a masterclass in compact storytelling, honestly (you might have to click through to read all four panels): witness Mario's hand on Bowser's shell as the two weep openly, an enmity forged through decades forgotten as they share the pain of rejection. Here's a question: what does the look on Bowser's face in the third panel communicate to you?

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumFlour Williams, All the Blood That Eventually Leaves You 

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.