consider the fruncle/fraunt

November 26, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that will never, ever take clean air in the San Francisco Bay for granted again. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway89 - Human Enemy Capacity"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Sara McHenry (@yellowcardigan) unearth ideas for apps, newsletters, and vital scientific research that needs doing."In Sara's second episode, we go surprisingly deep on user stories for a dog app, but also a couple of questions that sound strange or dumb at first before turning out to be weirdly thorny the longer we think about them. Also, that burrito tunnel piece I mentioned can be found here.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.I took off after recording a recent episode to go run some grocery errands I couldn't fit into the day, and I realized when I got home that between the evening trip and the one I'd taken in the afternoon with Quentin, I hit a kind of Single-Day Total Grocery Quadfecta in the form of Safeway, Trader Joe's, Berkeley Bowl, and Target. Does anyone else split up their grocery shopping?TRADER JOE'S* Dairy* Bagged vegetables* Spiced apple cider* Occasional weird snacksBERKELEY BOWL (if you don't have Berkeley Bowl, and why would you if you don't live in Berkeley, substitute an organic co-op supermarket in your neighborhood, if one exists)* Produce* Meats* Bulk spicesSAFEWAY* All the mass-market bullshit I can't find at the other two, like Doritos and sour cream & onion potato chips* Safeway bakery department cookies to which I've become hopelessly addictedTARGET* Diapers* Household sundriesI live within walking distance of the first three, though of course they're arranged in such a way that none of them are on the way to each other. I can get to TJ's and Safeway in one trip if I make a loop, which I do occasionally if Quentin and I are both in the mood for a long stroll. Anyway, hitting all four stores in one day is something I almost never do; it felt like something that needed to be noted for posterity.And that's my courageous story. Occasionally this section just has to live up to its title, I guess?? I'm sure we all have things we're excited about in our day that would sound utterly mundane to anyone else; now that I've inflicted mine on you, feel free to tell me yours. 🎃 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I keep thinking about the practice of referring to friends of ours as "Auntie X" or "Uncle Y" to Quentin when they're not actually blood relations. I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, but I am saying I think it's semantically ambiguous. Had I been around when this practice began, I'd've made a suggestion that I might as well air here: there should be a new, separate word for the category comprising "friends you want to refer to as Uncle or Aunt to your kids, but who aren't actually relatives." Friend-uncles and friend-aunts, in other words. Dare I say it? Fruncles and fraunts. I KNOW IT LOOKS AND SOUNDS WEIRD. But maybe that's just because it's new? By definition, don't all new made-up words look or sound weird at first? I think we should just start using them, and by the time they've been out for a year, we'll wonder how we ever got by without 'em. I'm just sayin'. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Here's a great interview with the person behind the new Nancy. (Vulture) 

  • Huh: Billionaires vs. Poverty: Behind a Push to Use Data to Boost Economic Opportunity in Cities. (Inside Philanthropy) 

  • We could shrink the US contribution to climate-changing gases by a quarter if we can figure out how to grow enough seaweed to feed to cows. No, seriously. (MIT Technology Review) 

  • This is just a thought, but maybe -- maybe!! -- metastatic growth at all costs isn't a super good model by which to measure a company's success after all? The top five tech stocks have lost A FUCKING TRILLION DOLLARS since last year. (Gizmodo) 

  • Ha! We now have a reasonable idea how Twitter bots help the spread of fake news; read this for no other reason than to feel some good clean rage at the efficacy of a simple captcha and the negative likelihood of it ever being implemented. (Science News) 

  • How about windows that automatically turn frosted below freezing or above 89°F, bringing on significant energy savings? (Anthropocene) 

  • I was at TechCrunch Disrupt when I first learned about PlanGrid, a plain-on-the-surface but fascinating-in-the-details startup founded by an Asian woman that wanted to digitize blueprints for construction workers. Now Autodesk is buying them for almost a billion, so that seems to have worked out; nice. (TechCrunch) 

  • Please picture with me a future where airplanes have no moving parts and are hence technically safer, but also seem to be propelled by actinic glowing balls of terrifyingly high-intensity LIGHTNING suspended in front of their wings?? (MIT Technology Review) 

  • As much as we in Silicon Valley like to make fun of the whole disrupter thing, I feel like there exist niches that only startups could reach into, and food waste is one of them. I'm not alone either! (Forbes) 

  • Uh hmmm I uhhhh well uh what um. Uh: do we ....... want? to grow mini-brains? in a lab? that might have the potential to somehow become ........ conscious? That seems like it might be a ..... a weird little gray area??? (Nature) 

  • Total-body medical scanning is now a thing, although it looks like there's only one of them right now. (UC Davis press release) 

  • Disaster relief is dangerously broken. Can AI fix it? (Fast Company) 

  • I don't need any new cookware, but it sounds to me like Great Jones would make a good gift for someone who's looking for a more permanent set of kitchen tools. (TechCrunch) 

  • HONK HONK: Introducing just a few autonomous cars into a traffic simulation reduces traffic. (Science) 

  • The Columbia Journalism Review has a problem with that "Silicon Valley tech people don't let their own kids use screens" thing that went around. (CJR) 

  • Is America really the richest country in the world? Only by a certain narrow definition. (TruthDig) 

  • It's too late for Thanksgiving, but this Choose Your Own Adventure-style "angry uncle chatbot" is a decent way to show yourself how to talk to a Trumpite and maybe have a chance of getting through. (NYT) 

  • Who wants to read a good book review of the dismaying future of algorithmic work? (NYMag Intelligencer) 

  • Are Pop Lyrics Getting More Repetitive? (The Pudding) 

  • Your fascinating but also depressing read of the week is this dual profile of a guy who writes the most obvious, ridiculous imitations of inane right-wing bullshit news he can think of so he can shame the people who fall for it, plus a person who reads his crap and falls for it fucking constantly. (WaPo) 

  • Here's a surprisingly thoughtful meditation on the impact of those "best X" restaurant lists, from someone who really, really knows: I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It. (Thrillist) 

  • There are a shit ton of manufacturing jobs about to be created in the US, and more than half of them will go unfilled unless something changes; here are some ideas. (MIT Technology Review) 

  • It's 2018 and we're still finding life forms on Earth that don't slot into any known kingdom of classification??!? (CBC) 

  • How to Give Better Advice. (Scientific American) 

  • An unsurprisingly large amount of thought went into the final design for Gritty. (Adweek) 

  • Facebook talks a big game about wanting to fix itself, but we all know what'll happen (Vox), especially given how comically they're still! in this! the year of Luigi 2018!!! able to fuck things up (BuzzFeed News). 

  • Here's an article that talks about a future in which nobody retires and how one might turn such a phenomenon into an opportunity rather than regard it as a hellish ur-capitalist nightmare scenario. (Harvard Business Review) 

  • The word "blockchain" is disappearing from earnings calls at a brisk rate, so at least there's one thing to be jolly about this holiday season. (Axios) 

  • Star Trek medical tech -- writing about which was one of my hands-down favorite gigs ever -- took another step closer to reality. (Star Trek.com/XPRIZE) (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • There's a documentary about the people who actually do content moderation on big platforms. I don't have the time to watch it, but someone should. (NPR) 

  • Sometimes industrial sites turn out to be great places for certain animals to hang out, which is something we should think about engineering on purpose for the endangered ones. (Anthropocene) 

  • Did you know that not all wavelengths of infrared are absorbed by the atmosphere? Some just pass right through and on into outer space. Which could be a strange but plausible way to cool buildings -- maybe even the whole planet?? -- down in the future. (Fast Company) 

  • AGROVOLTAICS. Check this out: plants that are just chillin' under solar panels grow great. Why not plant crops there? (Anthropocene) 

  • If you want to know whether something is actually using AI, there's a flowchart for that. (MIT Technology Review) 

  • Here's another use for seaweed we hadn't thought of before. (Horizon) 

  • Making friends isn't a matter of which groups you join, but the sheer number of them, which at first glance seems obvious, but has some interesting nuances. (Rice University press release) 

  • Nobody needs to write any more thinkpieces on Trump aside from David Roth. Facts. (Deadspin) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some restaurantsThe SmilerySecret Louie'sCURRY WOLF 

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.