consider the numbat

June 15, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's still here, still hopes you're doing outstandingly, and wants to see you thrive in the most outrageous way possible. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway141 - Analytics Special"Jon (@ferociousj) and Besha (@besha) take a look at all of the ideas that have been claimed thus far from a few different angles and try to see if there's any kind of pattern to the madness."Did we have a system when this podcast started? Kinda sorta! Would it have helped? Possibly! Do we have fun looking at the data anyway? Absolutely!!I recognize that you have other things you need to be doing, but if you've already done them, then you could always go to Apple Podcasts and rate us ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ -- because why not do another good thing today, honestly?Instant Band Night 15: POSTPONEDJuly 9th is looking increasingly untenable, quite frankly, as does September, but I haven't had time to update the event pages yet. I will soon, I can feel it.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.Somebody linked me to the wiki article for the numbat, yet another Australian animal that I had no idea existed until my adulthood (see also: quokka, quoll). One sentence in the Description section stuck with me: 

"Unlike most other marsupials, the numbat is diurnal, largely because of the constraints of having a specialised diet without having the usual physical equipment for it."

Their main food is termites, but they're not built for it; they don't have the powerful forelimbs or strong claws usually found on termitivores. And yet! They live. They don't have the wherewithal to bust straight into termite mounds and get their dinner -- they wait until the termites start their commute from base to wherever they're getting their food, and attack the termites' highway routes. This works well enough for the numbats that they've managed to survive for millions of years. Even without the tools needed for the job, they still hang on. I feel like there's a lesson somewhere in here, but I don't know what it is. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.How to build the pound-for-pound best toy for a 2yo out of common household items.Assemble the following objects:

  • The cardboard core of a roll of heavy duty aluminum foil (longer, narrower, and stronger than a paper towel tube)

  • A piece of yarn about 1.5x as long as the foil core roll

  • A toilet paper tube, cut in half

  1. String the yarn through the foil core roll.

  2. Tie a TP tube half to each end of the yarn.

  3. Watch your kid run around with it pretending to be a construction crane (as well as literally countless other things) for the next several months.

Be advised that the foil core roll may need to be reinforced with masking tape, and the TP tube halves may need to be replaced occasionally. These actions will in no way void the warranty. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • We don't need cops to enforce traffic laws -- in fact, letting humans do that in the first place is part of what got us into this mess. (Vice) So "Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police". ($NYT) While I'm here, who wants to read a free ebook called The End of Policing? (Verso Books)  

  • Here's a very good set of lists that specify useful places to donate in support of Black Lives Matter. (Vox) 

  • This is the definitive list of the politics of the Muppets, just fyi. (Thread from @edsbs on Twitter) (I didn't put up a Threadreader link because some of the replies are also entertaining) 

  • These demands coming out of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle are a good blueprint -- possibly the blueprint. (Seattle BLM via Medium) And actually, speaking of Seattle, they might be on the way to defunding their PD, too. (Mother Jones) 

  • Just because you're bored with isolation doesn't mean the virus is. Viruses don't get bored. The US isn't in a second wave of cases -- we're still in the first. (NPR) 

  • UC Berkeley's been working on a robot that jumps, and now it's worked out how to land. Trust me, the video is impressive. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Police body cams don't do shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit -- video of this type only serves as corrective if there's actual power behind it. (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • At least one language-learning app does seem to work, but the real trick just turns out to be "stick with it." (Michigan State) 

  • The Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at NYU has some recommendations for how Facebook should do the whole content moderation thing without driving its workers into a bottomless pit of despair. Design nitpick: who let these people get away with making their infographic nothing but different shades of blue? (NYU) 

  • Although on the whole we're becoming more and more nonreligious, there are new things in our lives taking the place of religion. (The Week) 

  • Our entire model of the shape and origin of the universe might be wrong. (National Radio Astronomy Observatory) 

  • Surprising perhaps no one at this point, it seems forced social isolation produces a literal hunger-like neural response for social interaction. (~$Scientific American) 

  • That said, here are 8 habits people have said they want to keep post-isolation. (Vox) 

  • Scientists may have finally found out what caused the Ordovician extinction 445M years ago. ($NYT) 

  • Researchers have created an AI tool that can take a blocky, pixelated photo of a real person's face and turn it into an extremely realistic-looking one that doesn't quite match; file this under "interesting and sort of useful for generating fake people, but not surveillance-state panopticon scary yet." (Duke) Btw, IBM's getting out of the facial recognition game. (The Verge) 

  • Astonishingly, roughly half the planet's surface is somehow relatively free from human influence; let's keep it that way. (UC Davis) 

  • What sort of naturally-occurring cosmic radio signal repeats every 157 days? No, really, what? (U of Manchester) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumSmellfinger, The Sun Rose Cold That Morning in May 

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.