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Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's still accepting leads on a supplier for those Trader Joe's chocolate oranges, but not at the extortionate prices Amazon resellers are trying to pull off 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayStill on hiatus through the end of the year, but here's a question for you: have you started keeping an idea file of your own? Do you want to be on the podcast? Drop me a line, 'cause I'm curious.Someone put in a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating in Apple Podcasts, which now puts our total at 34 -- thank you whoever you are, you beautiful superhero -- who'll be the one to get us to 35? Is it you?? Why not????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.This is my friend Kate's fault, because I couldn't stop thinking about my favorite nonfiction reads of 2020 and how they were all scientific papers that I absolutely did not 100% understand. I mean some of them I did, but others contained math that was so far beyond me that it might as well have been magical incantations. If you've been a subscriber since the start of the year, these should at least sound passingly familiar:

• One was a group of scientists trying to see if dogs would follow commands given by robots. Literally! It was called "Dog Sit! Domestic Dogs (Canis familiaris) Follow a Robot's Sit Commands." 

• Then there was "One of Everything: The Breakthrough Listen Exotica Catalog," which as near as I can tell tries to enumerate every category of object known to astronomy, just so everyone knows what things look like. The fascinating part here is the section they just call the Anomaly Sample. Anomalies are classed I-V, where Class I is "something normal that's in a place we dont expect," Class III is "a thing belonging to a known category that has a wacky property we've never seen before," and Class V is "something that literally appears to defy known laws of physics." There's examples of all of them! 

• "Crowd Sourcing: Do Peer Crowd Prototypes Match Reality?" was an effort to see whether teens could sort strangers of the same age into the correct clique, basically. It also made interesting observations about the cliques themselves, which had hilarious names like Populars, Smarts, Emo/Goths, and the Anime/Mangas. 

• According to "The Astrobiological Copernican Weak and Strong Limits for Intelligent Life," which as far as I can tell tries to refactor the Drake Equation, there should be at least 36 other civilizations in the galaxy. This one definitely had the most insane-looking math in it, which is entertaining to look at in and of itself if nothing else. 

• Finally, "Language Development During Interstellar Travel" is a fascinating treatise on the way language would probably drift in a sealed environment like a generation ship.

If you want a copy of any of these, just let me know. I could try to search through past issues for the links, but eh -- I downloaded the PDFs and I can just pass 'em along. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin's preschool is on break until the 4th, so we've decided to start showing him Sesame Street a little more regularly; we've started with the 1980 season because why not. It's great: he absolutely fucking loves it, which in and of itself is surprisingly rewarding to witness: he smiles and laughs and it's extremely precious. Also, I've already seen at least one little animated bit that woke some primal memory -- a quick stop-motion animation of a bunny trying to build something out of wooden blocks -- so I'm interested to see how often that happens. One thing I didn't remember was how funny it tries to be: almost every little skit ends in a slide-whistle moment, most of which I think bounce off him right now, but at some point those will undoubtedly start to hit, and I'm looking forward to that, too. Sesame Street: still good after all these years! Hell yeah!!!!!!! 

Fascination Corner

I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.I mean, they're not wrong: "America’s COVID-19 Death Toll Is So Devastating That The Numbers Have Lost Meaning" (BuzzFeed News)Let's just for a second -- there! now! -- believe in the possibility of an alien radio signal from Proxima Centauri. (Scientific American)Here's an article on whether Joe Biden can actually accomplish the task of healing the American divide that offers two deeply opposed viewpoints. (The Conversation)Advice for your 2021 resolutions, if you're making any: focus on helping others instead of yourself, and you might be happier for it. (U of R)If you need something to really bring out the rage, just keep this article open on your phone and glance at it every once in a while: "Amazon and Walmart have raked in billions in additional profits during the pandemic, and shared almost none of it with their workers" (Brookings Institute)New antibiotics? Okay! (Wistar Institute)Instagram-friendly cookware is, perhaps unsurprisingly, doing amazing right now. (Vox)Seals make absolutely insane synth-like ultrasound noises underwater and we haven't figured out why yet. (Science Alert)Creative people on platforms like YouTube and whatnot can make millions, but most of them earn a pittance; there should be a middle class for them, too. (~$Harvard Business Review)If you make a robot with legs, just put wheels at the ends instead of feet. (IEEE Spectrum)Soccer teams in the UK have been giving some of their lonelier fans the gift of human contact during These Unprecedented Times™. ($NYT)How about a glue that cures with magnetic fields instead of heat or whatever? (Nanyang Tech U)Absolutely do not click this link if you haven't finished season 2 of The Mandalorian, but if you did, read this thinkpiece immediately. (Vulture)What in the fuck: you know how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell? Mistletoe cells don't have any functional mitochondria. How are they alive? Literally, how? (Quanta)The most charming historical thing you're guaranteed to see today: ancient street food stalls from Pompeii, complete with paintings. (NPR)Sounds like I might need to read this Stanford prof's book. (Protocol) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumDiet Worm, Oh, Lucky 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.