crib pals don't have to be stuffies i guess

April 10, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that swore it didn't have room for any more podcasts and then went and listened to the first ep of Worlds Beyond Number dammit 

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 20: DOUBLE XA mere month away from the twentieth installment of Instant Band Night, perhaps the greatest time you can have on or near a stage anywhere in the San Francisco Bay area!!!!!! Think I'm kidding? Come see it and prove me wrong!!!!!May 11 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.Nothing here this week, folks; registration for the next school year's aftercare program is in the morning and I need to maintain a state of catlike readiness. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.It's been long enough that I think I can safely announce that Felix has made an addition to his personal Crib Crew: a little board book about trucks. Specifically it's this one, called simply Trucks, and it lives up to its title inasmuch as every spread contains one or two big pictures of some kind of truck or construction vehicle with its name underneath in big letters. Felix has made it clear that this book belongs in the crib when he goes to bed, and he brings it with him when I take him downstairs first thing in the morning (his bunny pals get stuffed into my pockets so I can hoist and hold him with my hands). It's got kind of a puffy cover, but is otherwise a standard board book. In any case, welcome to Felix's Crib Crew, Trucks!Felix is starting to develop a meaningful relationship with other books, too: not a day goes by where he doesn't want to page through Good Night, Gorilla at least once. After the first several times, he started to repeat "Goodnight" back during the appropriate part, which was extremely adorable, but ever since I pointed out that there's a balloon in it, he's mostly flipped through the first half of it before reversing course and flipping back to the beginning. Felix's relationship with balloons is fraught — he seems scared of them when presented with them in person, but in print form they seem to be a source of fascination. Maybe he's doing exposure therapy on himself? Surely that has to be the reason. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Sure, it feels like Xmas around here, but all the same, we should try to keep a sober eye on the three other criminal investigations that have Trump in their metaphorical crosshairs. (Vox) 

  • If you were reading the news in the 80s (or you were a kid who read Bloom County), you might remember the adultery scandal that torpedoed Gary Hart's run for President. Trump's done a lot worse and yet is (maddeningly) up in the polls. Why? (538) 

  • Reminder that Matt Taibbi is a clown and nobody has to listen or pay attention to clowns like Matt Taibbi. (Techdirt) 

  • Gotta say I don't love the prospect of Tesla employees sharing images and footage from their vehicles without the knowledge of their customers for funnylaffs! (Reuters) 

  • We're not phasing coal out fast enough. (Chalmers U of Tech) 

  • Current modeling suggests 90% of the world's salt marshes (an important ecosystem for several big reasons) will be underwater by 2100. (U Chicago Marine Bio Lab) 

  • "Want to Raise Kind, Generous Kids? Take Them to an Art Museum: New research shows seeing great art can inspire kids to be nicer and more generous." (Inc) 

  • We're at the point now where internet access should be considered a basic human right. (U of Birmingham) (Paper) 

  • Finland's been the happiest country on Earth for six years running now. Why? (The Conversation) 

  • The Scientists have demonstrated a scalable way to use bacteria to turn CO2 into polyester!!! (Anthropocene) 

  • Respect the cleverness: some guys busted into a coffeeshop after hours to cut a hole in the bathroom wall into the Apple Store stockroom next door and lift a $half mil worth of gear. (Motherboard) 

  • When a robot lies to you, what's the best way for it to regain your trust? The Scientists are starting to look into it. (Georgia Tech) (PDF of paper) 

  • Speaking of robots, children recognize that while Alexa is "smarter" than a Roomba, neither of them deserve harsh treatment. (Duke) 

  • NASA's sending a more diverse crew to circle the Moon in a couple years. (BBC) 

  • "Another 4Chan Troll Who Lives With His Mom Arrested for Threatening Anti-Nazi Sheriff" — I'm including this one because while ACAB, this particular sheriff appears to enjoy brutally dunking on Nazi idiots after arresting them, which I enjoy greatly and would like to see adopted nationwide as a standard practice. (Vice) 

  • Some Engineers have worked out a method to make recyclable electronics using water instead of harsh industrial chemicals. (Duke) 

  • Ask 1224 women across a variety of diverse backgrounds how to refactor the economy to make it work better for them, and you'll get a surprisingly uniform set of intelligent, practical responses. (The 19th) 

  • In the sense that they produce toxins that they wouldn't otherwise if they were well fed, it would appear bacteria can get hangry, too. (UNC) (Paper) 

  • Coral reefs can have trouble recovering after a bleaching event because the dead coral skeletons get colonized by algae afterward instead of more corals, because corals grow slower. Now what? (UC Santa Barbara) (Paper) 

  • There's evidence that magic tricks only work on you if your anatomy is similar to the magician's: monkeys without opposable thumbs aren't fooled by feats of sleight-of-hand. (U of Cambridge) 

  • The Scientists have succeeded in creating human heart organoids. (Technical U of Munich) (Paper) 

  • There's a widely accepted theory that humans essentially self-domesticated in the sense that we selected for people with prosocial, cooperative traits as we started to form societies, but it's hard to test because there are almost no other self-domesticating species out there. The Scientists think elephants might be a good candidate, though. (Max Planck Inst for Psycholinguistics) (Paper) 

  • "The Urban Exodus Narratives Are Wrong: The Census Bureau has published two population estimates that say cities are losing people fast. But factoring in the margins of error on their data changes the story entirely." (Motherboard) 

  • Some Engineers have hit upon another good way to reduce aerodynamic drag on big ships using something called the Coanda effect, which would be great for converting them to wind power and eliminating the shipping industry's emissions footprint. (Chalmers U of Tech) (Paper) 

  • This sounds ridiculous, but The Scientists have run the numbers — controlling for other correlations, crucially — and concluded that climate change is responsible for a rise in the number of home runs that get hit in baseball year over year. (Dartmouth) 

  • It might be possible to use the DNA fragments in household dust as a forensic tool. (NC State) (Paper) 

  • What if .................. water-based batteries???? (Texas A&M) 

  • The Scientists have done the math and it looks like storing big lakes of hot or cold water underground could save a ton of energy for heating/cooling buildings. (Lawrence Berkeley Natl Lab) 

  • A rocky exoplanet orbiting way too close to its home star to be habitable appears to have a magnetic field, which is great because up til now we weren't sure other planets have those. (Science Alert) 

  • The Scientists say it should be possible to predict which species are about to be threatened with extinction based on a few factors and take action before it becomes a problem. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • Human ribosomes apparently interpret mRNA 10x slower than bacterial ribosomes, but ours do it more accurately, which is nice. (St Jude Children's Research Hospital) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have shown that an effect similar to the double slit experiment can be produced in time rather than space: a mirror flickering on/off fast enough can make a laser pulse interfere with itself. (Nature) 

  • "The revenge of the pop-up: Nobody wants them. Nobody likes them. Why is the worst UI element of all time ubiquitous again?" (The Verge) 

  • Some Engineers have built a proof-of-concept artificial pancreas capable of regulating insulin that's powered by literal blood sugar, which you have to admit is pretty elegant. (ETH Zurich) (Paper) 

  • It's been a while since we've had a miracle use for graphene pop up around these parts; this one's a COVID and flu sensor that can give you a reading in just ten seconds. (American Chemical Society) 

  • Initial testing suggests that adding baking soda to concrete can not only help it sequester CO2, it makes the resulting material set stronger and faster. (MIT) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have demonstrated a method for removing microplastics from water using ultrasound pulses. (American Chemical Society) 

  • I can't put this any better than the headline: "Earth prefers to serve life in XXS and XXL sizes" (UBC) (Paper) 

  • Using data from online chess games, The Scientists have identified ten clusters of popular opening moves, which I guess is different from the usual system chess nerds have been using. (Complexity Science Hub) (Paper) 

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) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

🎺 Reader Lauren H says they're "clearly a 90s punk/ska band from a mid-sized Midwestern town. 10/10 would listen." 

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.