contains one (1) strong opinion about the start of Xmas season

November 07, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that needs to really carve out time next year to visit all the open art studios because they're delightful 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayIn the back half of 2022 I hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast is on that list. In the meantime, you can find its Apple Podcasts presence here, which includes a back catalog over 150 episodes long chock-full of excellent ridiculousness, including an experimental tabletop RPG and a couple of Star Trek fantasy drafts that could almost be their own show if I had the time to make yet another podcastInstant Band Night 17: GO TIMEIT'S THIS WEEK. If you haven't already, put it on your calendar! We're making it as covid-safe as possible and there will be birthday cake. I'm hoping for a whole bunch of amazing songs about the Elon Musk Twitter meltdown, personally. A two-minute punk scorcher? A freeform rap soliloquy? An instrumental metal interpretation???If you don't already know what Instant Band Night is, imagine a great party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. If you play music, you can be one of 'em, and if you don't, you can just watch. It is, and I'm not exaggerating here, fucking incredible.✨🎶🎸PREPARE FOR UNBRIDLED CREATIVITY🎸🎶✨Nov 106p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I'm just going to say it: I'm a fan of starting the Xmas season the exact yoctosecond the light of dawn breaks on Nov 1. I don't know if this is ⚡ A trauma response from the pandemic❄ Nostalgia for the wintry days of my youth🎅 A renewal of perspective on Xmas now that I have small childrenIt might be a combo of all three! All I know is that I enjoy the cheeriness of the season now more than ever, and also TIME IS MOVING WAY TOO FAST. This means that to my eye, Xmas season comes and goes in about three eyeblinks.I need it to not do that.This means we have to start it immediately after Halloween. I do not condone extending Xmas into the time before Halloween — that time belongs to the Great Pumpkin alone and should remain Their domain. But yes, by all means start Xmas the day after!!!!!! Hang those twinkling lights!! Put up those snowflakes!! I want to smell apples and mulling spices everywhere I go at all hours!! WHO ELSE IS WITH ME ☃☃☃☃ 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin's birthday is on Sunday and I've sent invites for his party, which really amounts to just a playdate that happens to have cake at the beginning. Trying to figure out the invite list for it caused me to sweat blood (there were as many as 66 potential kids — just kids! — coming to this thing) until I got some advice to the effect of "how about you just invite the ones Quentin would actually be psyched to see," which amounts to his TK class, some pals he remembers from preschool, and that's about it. We've got a few grownup friends coming too, which will be great, but for the sake of my own organizational sanity I had to cut a huge number of very good friends who also have kids that Quentin doesn't really know all that well; cake for 66 was just never going to happen.I also had to send an update several days later for a venue change! One of Quentin's TK classmates had a party just a few days ago at a park in Berkeley with an amazing playground that included a seesaw big enough for six kids: two on each side and two hanging onto the middle, which seems to have been designed specifically for that purpose. I wouldn't have called this seeing as how he doesn't even like to go down slides, but he had the time of his life on that thing with five of his school pals, enough so that he asked if we could go back, and I realized it would just be easier and better to simply relocate the party there so we could be sure there'd be enough friends around to ride it with him.Felix is definitely starting to build what I call in my mind an "incidental vocabulary" in that he's getting better at repeating things we tell him, but he's also starting to maybe? kind of? deploy the correct words in the correct situations at what seems like better-than-chance levels. We thought for a second that he had "Breakfast" down, but he has yet to repeat it. Something we've definitely caught is "Bye bye!" and a wave when he gets picked up at daycare, or sometimes when people leave the house. In all cases, it is almost unbearably adorable. Further updates as events warrant! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "Homeland Security Admits It Tried to Manufacture Fake Terrorists for Trump: A new Homeland Security report details orders to connect protesters arrested in Portland to one another in service of Trump's imaginary antifa plot." (Gizmodo) 

  • The way votes are counted these days means actual "Election Night" coverage is increasingly irrelevant and stress-inducing and it's probably a good idea to get rid of it altogether. (Brookings Institute) 

  • There is now concrete data to back up the Missing White Woman phenomenon and it's incredibly depressing. They even built a calculator that can tell you how many news stories your own disappearance would generate! Let's just say you shouldn't expect to hear about it if I go missing, folks. (Are You Pressworthy?) (Columbia Journalism Review) 

  • Possibly unsurprisingly, the public is more likely to accept action on climate change if they can see other countries are bought in. (U of Cologne) (Paper) 

  • Where are we on the whole political violence thing? The picture isn't crystal clear, but it's also not great. (538) 

  • A whole bunch of people driving across a bridge with their smartphones on turn out to be just as good at sensing its structural integrity as sensors strapped to the bridge itself. (MIT) 

  • It's almost impossible to believe now that we ever thought Elon Musk was a smart person; Ed Zitron's got the real good writeup. (Where's Your Ed At) 

  • "Facebook’s Monopoly Is Imploding Before Our Eyes: Competition, miscalculations, and regulatory scrutiny have all but killed the advertising giant's dreams of diversifying its business and rolling up the digital world into its platform." (Motherboard) 

  • Climate-induced droughts are exposing archaeological finds all over the place, which would maybe be a good thing under any other circumstances. (E&E News) 

  • Princeton and the Anti-Defamation League have launched an effort to catalog the threats and harassment against local officials, and they've already uncovered interesting patterns: unsurprisingly, women get 3.4x the shit men do. (Bridging Divides Initiative) 

  • Strong evidence from one of the only control groups left for shitty internet access suggests we should stop giving a shit about screen time and worry about The Kids feeling disconnected from their peers. (Michigan State) (Paper) 

  • Phase 2 trials of psilocybin for depression are still promising! (STAT) 

  • The Scientists have once again announced yet another material that could be used to scrub CO2 out of industrial emissions at the source that seems scalable!!!!! (NIST) They've also discovered a great method for turning sewage sludge into biogas for energy purposes. Okay!! (Washington State) 

  • If you enjoy Star Wars and you're not watching Andor you're making a mistake because it rules, and this article explains why pretty well. Not mentioned: the soundtrack is amazing. (The Ringer) 

  • Higher-quality violins really do produce measurably different sounds. (AIP) 

  • Here, have a diverting little read about the practicalities of building an arcology. (BBC Future) 

  • Antibiotic resistance is and will continue to be a huge problem, but what if we could just find compounds that weaken bacteria enough for our immune systems to close in and finish the job? (U of Geneva) 

  • The Scientists have taught a machine learning system to model the acoustics of a physical space and predict how things would sound from any point within it. (MIT) 

  • Why are food allergies a thing all of a sudden? (Vox) 

  • "What It’s Like to Direct All Those Cute-as-Hell Kids on ‘Abbott Elementary’" (Vice) 

  • A study of 514 people finds that men and women experience the transformative effects of travel differently in a couple interesting ways. (U of Otago) 

  • Some Engineers have discovered a feature of wifi-enabled devices that essentially lets an attacker see through walls with cheap off-the-shelf technology; at least their suggested fix is both simple and kind of funny. (U of Waterloo) 

  • "Air lubrication" is a thing you can do with a giant oceangoing vessel where you bubble air out underneath it and the bubbles help your ship move through the water without working as hard — apparently it's a 5% fuel/emissions reduction? I guess the process itself doesn't take much energy? Fascinating. Anyway, Carnival Cruises is outfitting 1/5 of its ships with it. (gCaptain) 

  • Every city and era gets the hero it deserves, even unlikely low-level ones who just want to share the experience of eating a chicken. (Defector) 

  • What did the first animals to make skeletons look like? (U of Oxford) 

  • "How to Make Guaranteed Income Work: Ten Lessons from Newark, New Jersey" (NP) 

  • The Scientists and Some Engineers teamed up to make a bacteria-powered sensor that can detect water contaminants at super low levels. (Rice U) 

  • Hilariously, a new study seems to show that if you want to build muscle mass, all you need to do is lower weights, not lift them. So, you know, just figure out how to do that repeatedly and you'll be all set. (Edith Cowan U) 

  • The unavoidably unfortunate conclusion to this new study is that a person wearing a suit is at least twice as likely to get a donation as a person in street clothes. (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • Tons of animals that we've always thought were silent turn out to make plenty of noise. Are they communicating? What was the first animal to make a noise? (NPR) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumKingdom Animalia, The Forest vs The Trees(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.