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January 30, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that misses, just for an instant, the smell of a crisp cold outdoor morning 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. 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 19: SOLARWe're five weeks out and the anticipation is killing me. I cannot stress enough that you should come even if you don't play an instrument; it's always a great time and it's never the same thing. You should be there! All the info you need is below, including links to event pages with a description and FAQ if for some reason you're just now finding out about Instant Band Night and want to know what it is:March 9 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  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Holy mothershitballs: The Scientists (and Salesforce, it would seem) built a machine learning system that can design enzymes from scratch that actually hold up in testing (UCSF). They work despite only partially resembling natural enzymes, and even fold according to the predictions the machine made when it designed them. The possibilities for this technology are staggering to imagine.Wouldn't you be able to ask such a machine to dream up enzymes for breaking down any substance? Or disrupt any biomolecular process? "Give me an enzyme that digests polyvinyl chloride at room temperature and neutral pH" sounds great, but "Design an enzyme that destroys hemoglobin" sounds ......... less great. Imagine encoding such an enzyme into a bacterium that you know is capable of infecting and surviving inside people, and then, well. I'm sure what I've just described is much harder to do than it sounds at every step of the way, which is why — I'm hoping!! — they felt safe open-sourcing the machine in the first place. Maybe it would pay to be less pessimistic about this and more optimistic about the upsides, because they're huge. Maybe that!! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Two things this week, one frustrating and one elating:Quentin's pooped in his pants a nonzero number of times in the last week. He gets so absorbed in whatever he's doing that by the time he realizes he needs to go and runs to the toilet, he's juuuuust a little too late. We've been working on reminding him he needs to hold it as long as he can once he realizes he needs to poop so he can make it to the toilet, and indeed today he managed it quite handily (as he'd been doing more or less flawlessly for years!), so we lavished praise upon him. I gather this sort of thing is common, but if you have advice or strategies, let me know!Felix likes to do a kind of peekaboo where he hides just out of sight behind a wide open doorway between the kitchen and dining room, then shuffles into view with a huge goofy grin on his face. We always ham up our astonished reaction and he laughs and does it again; it's great. Yesterday, Quentin decided to get in on it with him for a few rounds, which resulted in a simple but absolutely goddamn delightful two-kid vaudeville act — I thought my heart might burst with the joy of it. Kids! I recommend 'em, for the most part!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Read this if you'd like a convincing and highly enraging answer to why all these tech company layoffs are happening. (The Verge) In case you were wondering, Ed Zitron says Google should fire Sundar Pichai and he's not wrong, either. (Where's Your Ed At) 

  • If you're in a drought but discover there's a shitload of ancient water buried deep underground, should you use it? (~$Atlantic) 

  • You probably know this already, but it's not an accident that the first five cops to get immediately charged and fired for Tyre Nichols's murder were all Black, and the sixth one (who's white) was simply relieved of duty. (AP) Now is as good a time as any to remind you that The End of Policing is FREE on the publisher's website!!! (ebook on Verso) 

  • The Scientists working on industrial carbon capture have developed the cheapest system yet. (Pacific Northwest Natl Lab) 

  • How much power could we generate if we slapped solar panels on top of all the big box stores? A fuckin' lot, it turns out. (~$High Country News) 

  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who are strongly in favor of scientific solutions (GM foods, vaccines, etc) think they know a lot about science, but the people who are strongly against also believe they're experts, which is: A Problem. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • Conventional wisdom says the ion engines we've got for satellites and space probes need to be much bigger to be more powerful, but Some Engineers tried overclocking a regular-size one and it worked great. (U of Michigan) 

  • BIG CHECKBOX. My friend Seung made it for funsies; surprisingly satisfying. (BIG CHECKBOX) 

  • Israel's top rabbi says lab-grown meat counts as kosher, which makes sense. (Food Dive) 

  • "How Nextdoor Put Neighbors In a Housing Policy 'Cage Match': The neighborhood-based social media platform notorious for stoking crime and homelessness hysteria is becoming an increasingly influential organizing tool in housing politics." (Motherboard) 

  • Turns out there's a term for "figuring out whether one industry's waste products might be useful for a whole different industry," and it's valorization. Anyway, The Scientists are figuring out whether industrial food processing byproducts might be good for something else, and it turns out: probably!!! (Ohio State) 

  • I stole this from Ryan Broderick's newsletter, but it really is a very good tweet. (@rebmasel on Twitter) 

  • DARPA posted their declassified budget for 2023 and it's worth paging through it just to see what kind of wild shit they're looking into. (DARPA) 

  • Gallup has discovered that a whole lot of us hate our jobs. (Gallup) 

  • I was wondering when someone was going to get around to this: The Scientists fed 150TB of telescope data to a machine learning system to see if it came up with anything that looked like an alien signal, and it found a few that had been previously overlooked. Further examination of their sources hasn't found any new signals, but still: very interesting! (SETI Institute) (PDF of paper you can read but not download, annoyingly) 

  • Some Engineers have been making better soft robots with surprisingly simple design changes. (Cornell) 

  • Women at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography get half the lab space of men. But it sounds like they're gonna fix it! (Science) 

  • How about some cool jewelry made from mathematical descriptions of chaos?!?! (AIP) (Paper) 

  • Either camera traps must make more noise than we thought or this is just a smarter-than-average bear. (People) 

  • Some Engineers are working on a heating system for buildings that's essentially powered by hot sand. Yeah!! (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The D&D people really do seem to have realized and accepted that they fucked up bigtime. (Polygon) 

  • The solar system has way, way more "rubble pile" asteroids in it than we thought, which means a DART-style impactor stands a better-than-average chance of not working; we should think more seriously about nuking them. Seriously! (Curtin U) 

  • What, uh. What ........... what time is it on the Moon? (Nature) 

  • "James Cameron and Hayao Miyazaki share the same beautiful cursed dreams: A paradoxical fixation on nature and war binds two living legends" (Polygon) 

  • Traffic pollution can fuck your brain up and now The Scientists have the scan data to prove it. (UBC) (Paper) 

  • Speaking of traffic, who knew Rolls-Royce was making an EV, much less that it's in high demand among the subset of the population with a spare half mil? (Robb Report) 

  • NASA is exploring the concept of propelling a long-range spacecraft by firing tiny bullets at its  (presumably armored) ass to speed it up. (Universe Today) 

A Fictional Thing

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

(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

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.