contains one (1) outlandish daydream

July 15, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that thinks it may have finally found a good way to roast potatoes and chicken at the same time (the trick is to boil the potatoes first in water that's had salt and baking soda added, then tossing them in oil and pepper). 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway115 - The Traumatizer 3000"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Gary Tyrrell (@fleenguy) discover ideas designed to boost personal brand awareness, stimulate hardware innovation, and help us relate to the dogs in our lives."In all fairness, I was unaware of the tradition of the Iron Ring among engineers, and I now consider myself educated; as ideas themselves go, it's a good 'un.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).The Next Instant Band Night is 9/12That's September 12, folks; mark your calendars. I haven't made the event listing yet, but don't worry -- it'll be there. 7/11 was great, btw -- thanks to everyone who came, and everyone who helped make it happen as always! 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Have you all had this daydream?A day from now, a fleet of consumer quadcopters flies over every one of the concentration camps currently operating on American soil, shedding leaflets by the hundreds. Oddly, the leaflets seem not to be addressed to the occupants, but to their jailors, with text that reads something like "GUARDS, ADMINISTRATORS, KEEPERS OF THIS CAMP: WE ARE COMING TO TEAR THIS PLACE DOWN. WE DO NOT WANT TO HARM YOU, BUT IF YOU DO NOT LEAVE WHEN WE ARRIVE, WE WILL REMOVE YOU BY ANY MEANS WE DEEM NECESSARY. CONSIDER AN IMMEDIATE CAREER CHANGE."A day is picked. The news goes out on social media and cannot be suppressed. Emails are circulated and phone trees begin to activate, circulating instructions that include places to congregate en masse for staging, where to park, best walking routes, tools to bring, and calls for medics and journalists. Hammers, crowbars, pickaxes, hatchets, axes, and heavy wrenches of every kind sell out at hardware stores throughout each city. Construction equipment starts to go missing. Drivers of garbage trucks and big rigs call in mysteriously ill. There's a spike in acetylene sales as welding businesses and car repair shops close up early, although sparks and bright lights can be seen through their windows at all hours.The day arrives. Traffic and news copters track vast numbers of American citizens closing in on the camps dressed in hard hats and heavy gloves, carrying wrecking equipment, interspersed with medical personnel and journalists in bright bandannas, raising dust as they come. Some of them walk; others drive big flatbeds laden with heavier tools and earth-movers. Many of the vehicles and motorized construction equipment seem to have been hastily armored with crudely cut and welded steel plate. The sound of singing becomes apparent from a mile away as the crowd approaches the first camp; it's "America the Beautiful."* The singing doesn't stop as the vanguard comes within sighting distance of the security cordon. The crowd displays no obvious firearms, and the cops and hastily-summoned guards compare conflicting orders and murmur amongst each other restlessly. As the rest of the crowd catches up with the lead elements and the true size of the opposing force becomes apparent, the cops and guards begin to trade significant, uneasy glances. Just then, as if by magic, the entire crowd falls silent, and with both hands held high, a man emerges from the front line and begins to walk toward the security line: it's Tom Hanks.** He's got one of those bullhorns slung over one arm with the separate CB radio-ish mouthpiece on a cord clipped to his shoulder, and he reaches for it slowly. "Testing, testing." His voice is clear. There are about a goddamn million news cameras aimed at his face. "We're Americans," he says. "Get out of our way." Thousands of voices behind him cheer. Thousands of hands raise hammers and crowbars and hatchets in work-gloved fists.And it begins.That's the daydream I keep having. I just wanted to know if anyone else out there has it, too.* This may be a daydream, but the national anthem is still too fucking hard to sing, and we all know it.** Daydream, remember? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin naps for a couple hours in the afternoons now, and when he wakes up, he's a little slow and dozy, so I've been trying something: after I open the curtains and turn off his white noise machine, I put a bunch of stuffed pals in his crib and leave the room. These pals include: 

The idea is to see how long he amuses himself before he starts to become vocally unhappy. Turns out he can hang for a while -- I check on the baby monitor occasionally, and he's happy to stay in there for anywhere from 10-30m, babbling to himself and playing with his pals; it's great.Lately, there's been a new (adorable) development. In the past week or so, he's started to say "seep" or "seepy" when bedtime approaches, which we're pretty sure means "sleep/sleepy," because he says it while toddling toward his room and flopping down onto his PJs. Literally on the day of this writing, as bedtime drew near,* he went into his room, picked up his stuffed pals, and started tossing them into his crib: "Seep. Seep." I wasn't able to let him keep them in there (big stuffed animals are some kind of suffocation hazard?), but if he does it again tomorrow, he can keep one of the smaller Snoopies; the Enterprise is a good ship, but not particularly cuddly.* I put this together the night before I send it. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Researchers built an AI that can beat world-class professionals at poker. Feels like all those poker scenes in TNG with Data at the table should be revisited. (Nature) 

  • Here's an interview with a roboticist trying to build self-aware robots. (Quanta) 

  • We've been told for a while that the Kitty Genovese story is some bullshit, and now we have data to back up the notion that humans actually do intervene in bad situations a lot more often than they don't. (CityLab) 

  • You know what, why not: a survey of 100 NYC teens on what things are cool to buy. (NYMag Strategist) 

  • We're probably about as smart as we're going to get, as a species, and we still make dumb decisions; we need to do some more thinking about thinking. (BBC Future) 

  • Gentrification might help desegregate schools? What? (CityLab) 

  • Follow that up with this article about the definition of "middle class" and who we really need to aim the tax hose at. (The Week) 

  • We have to train robots to get better at picking stuff up, so of course we needed to invent adversarial objects. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • If you give a computer 3.3M scientific abstracts on materials science articles written in the last 90 years, it can discover new ideas nobody'd thought of before. (MIT Technology Review) 

  • (A) This article about what counts as dancing for animals and why parrots seem to be the only ones who can do it is good. (B) Any article that can work in a reference to that one Killers song at least deserves a look, probably. (Atlantic) 

  • Who wants to see a drone that can split into a bunch of maple seed-style microdrones that all pilot themselves to their own individual destination? (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Instagram is rolling out new features that should help stem the tide of abusive comments a little. Every bit helps, right? (Gizmodo) 

  • Watching the USWNT party after their win is spiritually healing. (Slate) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumLow Level Adult, Various Tools and Fasteners 

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.