contains one (1) bulleted Trek rant

April 11, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's re-committing to telling a certain baby that "your call will be answered in the order it was received" every time dissatisfaction rears its head 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe thing about having a 4yo and a baby who doesn't yet sleep through the night is that you can't put them in the same room together overnight, and it's also not possible to put yourself in the room with him without causing even more sleep complications. Long story short, we're sleeping in the office (the house's third and possibly actual master bedroom, considering it has the attached half bath) on the pull-out couch, which is also where my computer is, so the edit on the last episode we recorded (which admittedly was last year) still isn't quite complete. But it'll get there someday!As of the time of this writing, there are still 43 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings, plus howevermany wonderful reviews. You have the power to take us to 45 and beyond: you!!Instant Band Night 15: TIME WARPJuly 14th! The line must be drawn here and no further!! We WILL have an explosive celebration of musical creativity that must be seen to be believed, and you! will! be! there! (Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  r e t u r n i n g   i n   2 0 2 2  + ++ +  h a n g   i n   t h e r e  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I was going to use this space to talk about Star Trek: Picard and my complicated feelings about it, but I'll spare you the thousands and thousands of words that would no doubt have been spent and distill the whole thing down to bullet points; I'm passing the savings on to you, the reader! 

  • I like the characters

  • My affection for JLP is unshakable and I know I'm not alone; this was probably what the makers of the show were banking on

  • Because in all other aspects it's either a hopeless mess or needlessly grim

  • There are story beats and choices that make absolutely no sense

  • I don't mean this in some bullshit CinemaSins sense; they don't even hold up to the show's own internal logic

  • I will provide receipts if asked but please do not

  • The announcement that s03 will bring back basically the whole TNG gang overjoyed and enraged me

  • If they could've made that happen, why wait until season god damn 3 when they could have just started there

  • The number! of times! I've been watching this show and asked the screen "Why doesn't he call ____" or "Where the hell is ____"

  • We spent SEVEN SEASONS with this guy and his best crew of homies and their names have been BARELY MENTIONED up til now

  • Deep breaths, deep breaths

  • Again, I have nothing against the new characters we've met but holy shit

  • Alison Pill is doing a bang-up job btw

  • Also I can no longer keep track of how many Starfleet uniform designs we've seen but whoever you are, costume department, you're doing great

  • Thank you, that will be all, no further questions at this time, no questions, we're done here, thank you

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.At first I thought it was just allergies, but I think I caught a mild cold from Felix (the only symptom he exhibited was a runny nose, and holy shit did I ever have it for about 24h, plus a very slight run-down feeling). The obvious question then becomes "Where did Felix catch it?" and buddy, I have no fucking idea. Has he been sneaking out at night? Is that it?This past week's been Quentin's Spring Break, so he was just ........ home the whole time, which we'd already gotten quite enough of during the Everybody Caught Covid Isolation of March 2022. Fortunately we did have the ability to leave the house and even see friends, so that made it better. I'm looking forward to the rest of this week, which as far as I can tell is a normal! goddamn! schedule! for once!!!!!!!The only other thing I have to tell you about is that Felix apparently finds it hilarious when I have the hiccups. Unfortunately, no video evidence exists of the incident, but if I ever get the hiccups again perhaps we can make that happen. Trust me when I say it was unexpectedly magical; baby laughs restore at least 10 hit points every time. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "America Is Staring Down Its First So What? Wave: The United States could be in for a double whammy: a surge it cares to neither measure nor respond to." (~$Atlantic) 

  • Here's another writeup on that IPCC climate report; it's not all terrible, but that sort of depends on how you look at it. (Nature) 

  • At least 50 Amazon warehouses have gotten in touch with Chris Smalls about organizing unions. (NPR) 

  • Did Apple just straight up not think about the stalking implications of AirTag technology at any point on the road to releasing it? (Vice) 

  • Trump's stupid social media app has been an unmitigated disaster. (BBC) 

  • Thomas Piketty is optimistic about us seeing some sort of wealth redistribution sometime soon; has he lost his goddamn mind? Let's read this interview and find out. ($NYT) 

  • I can feel this newsletter turning into an Ed Zitron repost machine, but listen: if your calendar has become absolutely fucking polluted with work meetings, I would like you to read this piece and see how much of it resonates, or if your meetings are actually (unfortunately) genuinely necessary. (Ed Zitron on Substack) 

  • The stolen notebooks of Charles Darwin, missing for over 20 years, were returned anonymously in a pink gift bag. (BBC) 

  • Speaking of Darwin: disbelief in evolution appears to be consistently correlated with being a fucking asshole across nationalities, religions, even genders. (UMass Amherst) 

  • On the importance of a liberal education. (SMBC) 

  • The Scientists have managed to breed bees that are resistant to colony-collapsing varroa mites. (U of Exeter) 

  • AR contact lenses are making surprising progress. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • If you're reading this on a mobile device, The Scientists have some bad news for you. (PsyPost) 

  • Instead of designing a city with the usual systems for wastewater, heating, power etc, Some Engineers suggest a modular framework where all of that shit is integrated: imagine a world where excess electricity is used to help run the sewage treatment and whatnot. Turns out this would be crazy efficient from an emissions standpoint, not to mention just plain better and smarter. (Stanford) (Paper) 

  • Very careful measurements of the mass of the W boson indicate it's heavier than The Scientists thought it should be, which is actually a huge, huge problem for the model that describes the universe as we currently understand it! (CNET) 

  • More frenetic commercials are better at holding our attention; who wants to predict when we'll hit the point where advertisers go so apeshit with this discovery that it burns out all of our visual cortexes? (Notre Dame) 

  • Mathematical laws govern all kinds of patterns in the world; The Scientists are ginning up an AI that can derive them from observation instead of us having to figure them out for ourselves. (Cornell) 

  • NASA is letting SpinLaunch test their crazy-sounding system for suborbital altitudes sometime this year. (TechCrunch) 

  • Some Swedes have demonstrated a process for making steel without producing CO2 emissions, which is a pretty big deal. (AP) 

  • Is there anything we can learn from people who think the flat Earth is a thing? (Grid) 

  • The Scientists think they've really found a bunch of fossils created the day the meteor hit and ended the dinosaurs' world. (BBC) 

  • Looks like Instacart has actually been making moves in the world of protecting tips for its workers. (TechCrunch) 

  • Preliminary research has been done around the personality traits that most millionaires exhibit. (U of Münster) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have figured out how to turn waste plastic into a cheap and surprisingly effective industrial carbon capture solution. (Rice) 

  • I don't remember if I ever linked to a story about Worldcoin -- it seems possible I might not have simply because it sounded too stupid to be real -- but it turns out Worldcoin is real, or at least as real as any web3 crypto bullshit can be, and it's not going well. Surprise!!!!!! (BuzzFeed News) 

  • We could keep harvesting energy from solar cells after the sun goes down if we just slap a thermoelectric module on the back that uses the heat differential to generate electricity. (AIP) 

  • Good smells are more or less consistent across cultures. (Paper) 

  • The NYPL is digitizing wax cylinder recordings that haven't been played in a century; they're not even sure what's on them! (NPR) 

  • There's an exoplanet forming 508 light years away that seems to be breaking all the rules we know about for planetary origins. (Guardian) 

  • Some Engineers have demonstrated a proof of concept for making working neuromorphic computer chips out of, uh, honey. (Washington State U) 

  • "The promise — and problem — of restorative justice: Who is restorative justice restoring?" (Vox) 

  • What in the motherfuck: do fungi communicate through their mycelium using electrical impulses that constitute .......... language?? I think this is only possible if you consider all of the impulses our brain tissue transmits to be directly translatable to language, which seems unlikely. Right? Still, the paper is interesting, or at least what I could understand of it. (Guardian) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumCast Iron Corgi, An Extraordinary Act of Trust(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because now I'm curious) 

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.