contains one (1) unsurprising cartoon endorsement

August 07, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's bracing for whatever hot weather is coming our way after the delightful cool spell we've been promised today 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI know I say this every week, but the possibility that we may return to podcasting cannot be mathematically excluded! In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 22: WILDThe next Instant Band Night is in a month+change and it's going to be ✨fantastic✨ — especially if you're there!!! Bring a handful of your coolest friends and bear witness to the most intensely joyful evening of creativity to be had in the entire Bay area!!Sept 14 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  T E L L   Y O U R   F R I E N D S  + ++ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + +Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOUIt's never too early to think about either the holidays or those people with fall birthdays in your life. Consider some clever ceramics! Brilliant little statues for your garden or home! A place to put your fruit! A little buddy to hold your garlic! I'm working (slowly) on even more delightful little weirdos and I hope to show you soon. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.It likely doesn't need my help, since I went to see it on Sunday night at 8p and the theater was literally sold out (I had to sit in the front row), but if you haven't seen the Barbie movie, go immediately. That's all I've got for this section! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Everybody is right about Bluey. Okay? This is just something you need to accept as a parent of little kids. Just fuckin watch it. You're probably tired of being told. I know I was! And then I watched the episode called "Takeaway." Here, I'm gonna spoil it for you incredibly quickly because you need to know: 

A five-minute wait for some takeout with two energetic kids turns into an unrelenting stress-fest for a tired dad (they get underfoot! they keep wanting to play with the outdoor spigot! they spill some of the food! they get the takeout menus wet! one of them has to pee in a bush for like a thousand hours! more demands about the spigot!), but just at the point where they cause him to spill the entire dinner on the fucking sidewalk and you think he's ready to lose his shit, he reads a fortune cookie.The fortune says: "Flowers may bloom repeatedly, but you can only be young once."Goddamn! All right!! Fuck!And then he lets his kids play with the spigot.

Talk about getting a dose of Perspective in like eight minutes of television. I'm going to start staring off into the middle distance even as I type this. Damn. Damn. Okay!!That's all I've got for this week. Next week, Quentin's school starts up again (kindergarten!?!?!) so I may have some more for you then. Or I might not! The aftercare program doesn't start up unil the second week of school, so my afternoons are going to be spoken for. You see how it is. Just watch some Bluey. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The Scientists are in the QA phase on a rapid COVID breath test that gives results in about a minute. (Washington U School of Medicine at St Louis) (Paper) 

  • It turns out there's an easy way to jailbreak just about any instance of The Machine and the fix is .......... unclear. (Seattle Times) 

  • Perhaps .......... unsurprisingly, The Scientists are having some trouble replicating the results on that LK-99 "room-temperature superconductor" compound. (Nature) 

  • Terms are confidential, so we can only hope they got paid, but the family of Henrietta Lacks reached a settlement with Thermo Fisher Scientific over the HeLa cell line! (NPR) 

  • Six questions to ask the next time you see a headline about a "rogue AI" doing something terrifying-sounding. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Some Engineers have invented a new kind of concrete that can store energy like a capacitor; now they just need to see if it works in bigger sizes. (Fast Company) 

  • This fucks severely: a consortium of economists have signed an open letter pushing for nationwide rent control. (Motherboard) 

  • Instead of a big cluster of bubbles, how about using an umbrella tethered to an asteroid to block a little sunlight and help stave off climate change? It would actually be a tremendous savings in launch mass, but there are still, uh, some challenges. (University of Hawaiʻi at Manoa) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists are looking at cicada wings for ideas on perfecting an antibacterial surface that can both kill bugs and release their corpses so their successors don't stick around. (Science Alert) 

  • As long as we're talking about insect wings, here's another project from The Scientists involving nanofilms inspired by butterfly wings that have vibrant colors and can keep surfaces cool. (Optica) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have put brain sensors in a Meta VR headset and they seem to work pretty well, which is great because we could always use more options for EEG sensors that we can stand to wear for long stretches. (UT Austin) (Paper) 

  • Fossil evidence shows jellyfish have been around for a little over half a billion years. (Royal Ontario Museum) (Paper) 

  • This isn't the first time it's been mentioned here, but The Scientists are getting incredible results using existing fiber optic cables to detect and analyze earthquakes. (Caltech) 

  • Here, have a good interview with the longest-serving EIC of The Onion on sparking creativity. (Big Think) 

  • Some Engineers have built a night vision system they call HADAR that combines infrared capture with The Machine to produce detailed images using heat detection, which up until now has been famously blobby and indistinct. (Purdue) 

  • What: it looks like just ........ smelling smells overnight can improve older peoples' cognitive functions by 226%. What?? (UC Irvine) (Paper) 

  • Talk about the ultimate writing challenge: every day I'm thankful to not be in the dating pool anymore, but I wonder if I'd be able to come up with a good a "date-me doc". ($NYT) 

  • Some Engineers have demonstrated a cool-looking soft gripper for robots with a truly impressive range of abilities; watch the little video, it's pretty good. (NC State) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

Photo by Levi Arnold on Unsplash(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on UnsplashNo reader interpretations came in for this one, which I imagine as kind of a Phoenix soundalike act from somewhere on the Scandinavian peninsula. 

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.