contains one recipe for a better holiday(?) beverage

December 05, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that has received its first holiday card of the season and  therefore needs to get off its ass and figure out this year's design 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayAs we slide into the 2022 holiday season I still hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast remains 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 18: RECHARGEIt's in January! It's gonna be great! You should come join us, and bring a friend or two. You can add it to your calendar (venue address and all) by clicking here!If you've forgotten 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 chill and watch. It is, and I'm not exaggerating here, a goddamn inspiration every time.🎼 MUSIC! 🎼🚀 COURAGE! 🚀✨ CREATIVITY! ✨January 12 20236p$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.If you're avoiding booze for any reason, you can skip this one, just FYI!I'm here to present you with a booze alternative to eggnog, which is a beverage I have never understood on any level. This one is smooth, sippable, and — crucially — very tasty without involving eggs in any way. You'll need:🥃 A bottle of whatever cheap bourbon you've got onhand or can get easily🟡 4oz (which to my memory is a double heaping handful) of those generic yellow cellophane-wrapped butterscotch disc candies; Werther's Originals are NOT (repeat NOT) a suitable substituteUnwrap the butterscotch candies and plop them into the bottle, then let it sit for a day or two until the candies dissolve. Congratulations: you have created butterscotch bourbon, or butterbourbon if you feel like making use of a very good portmanteau. One word of mild warning: if you let it sit for a while, it separates into a bilayered liquid, but that's not a problem; just shake the bottle before you pour. It's an excellent, quietly festive sipping whiskey that goes down ribbon-smooth, and you didn't have to mangle an egg or cream or whatever the hell is going on in eggnog. I don't want to know! Don't tell me! Make yourself a bottle of butterbourbon instead, and create a new tradition to pass on to future generations. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Counting Quentin's birthday, we've now received our third invite to a birthday party for one of his TK class at a very particular park in Berkeley. And it makes sense! The first one was at least a month ago, possibly two, and it was there and then that the kids who were present made a twofold discovery: 1. There's a seesaw at this park that can hold at least 6 kids: 2 on each end, and 2 can sit in the middle and just sort of balance there2. It's ridiculously fun, to the point where the kids riding it started spontaneously chanting "Too fun! Too fun! Too fun!"But of course it only fires on all cylinders when the kids who are riding it are already pals, and the odds of 5 other friends from your school turning up at a highly specific, comparatively faraway park on any random day are miniscule. That was why we switched venues for Quentin's party from some other place to this park: guaranteed buddy presence. A bunch of his TK pals did in fact show up, and they had a blast. We'll be repeating this experience in a couple weeks with another TK kid, and I'm all for it. Tiny friends!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Whether or not it ultimately turns out the Moore County power substation attacks were an attempt to shut down a drag show (CNN), it seems inevitable that increasing numbers of armed shitheads are going to make life very bad indeed for friends of ours who do not deserve it. If you haven't already familiarized yourself with the term "stochastic terrorism," now is the time (Scientific American); what we actually do about it I don't know yet. 

  • At first I thought the sheer whiteness of Sam Bankman-Fried's apparent constitutional inability to keep his big flapping mouth shut in the face of what I can only imagine to be looming apocalypse-level legal troubles was darkly, comically impressive (Vox). Smarter people than me, however, have identified a telling pattern to his activity. (Molly White) (Ed Zitron) 

  • "Don’t Treat Your Life as a Project: Fight the tendency to see your life as a narrative journey." (Nautilus) 

  • A wild new hypothesis suggests IBS might be caused by .......... gravity. Your body essentially has to carry its guts around, and if something fucks with that in any way: IBS???? (Cedars Sinai) (Paper) 

  • Is wine just a bunch of bullshit? (Asterisk) 

  • [crashes through wall] New mRNA vaccines against malaria have been successfully tested in mice!! Oh yeah!!!! (GWU) 

  • Negative self-perceptions are all too happy to perpetuate themselves. (Shinshu U) 

  • The Scientists have (at least on paper) designed a system for making net-zero jet fuel that pulls carbon out of the air. (WPI) 

  • The Breakthrough Listen project just added a huge radio telescope array to its search for extraterrestrial technosignatures. (Universe Today) 

  • I don't want to call it a cure, so let's say The Scientists appear to have worked out a method for banishing morning grogginess, though it appears to rely on having the time, energy, and resources to take care of yourself first and foremost, so. You know. Work on that first, I guess. (UC Berkeley) 

  • Some Engineers used quantum computing to figure out the best way to coat a window so it will let in light but not heat, potentially cutting cooling costs by a full third. No word on how scalable this solution is yet, though. (Notre Dame) 

  • Is it possible we've been way overthinking toy design? Sure seems like it. (Guardian) 

  • The Scientists have invented a way to pull microplastics out of water by tossing in an adsorbent powder that can then be yanked out of the mixture with magnets. (RMIT) 

  • I love that it's 2022 and we're still discovering new minerals heretofore unknown to science, albeit inside meteorites that are by definition not of Earthly origin. (Science Alert) 

  • A VR study seems to show that a trip on a crowded train feels measurably longer than the same trip on an emptier one. (Cornell) 

  • Reading this writeup on Some Engineers who want to fertilize the ocean with iron nanoparticles in order to bloom phytoplankton and capture carbon rung a faint memory bell: I think whale poop does this job already, but we've also uhhh slaughtered a whole bunch of whales over the past couple centuries, so it makes sense for us to fill in the gap while their numbers recover. (PNNL) (Paper) 

  • Changing the color of your dishware can alter your perception of how your food tastes?! (Science Alert) 

  • This almost feels like a flex and I love it: The Scientists have demonstrated a method for recycling PVC, a notoriously recycling-resistant kind of plastic. (U of Michigan) 

  • It might be more effective to focus on saving specific populations of animals instead of entire species. (UMass Amherst) 

  • I guess I'll try to verify this over the next few decades: apparently experiences of daily stress decrease measurably as we age?? (Penn State) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some bandsThe Nature of WaterConfusion in ColorHair Plant(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think one or all of these bands sound 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.