daylight savings doom approaches

March 07, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that renews its request to the universe at large for a fully functional Green Lantern ring 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe thing about having a 4yo and a baby who doesn't yet sleep through the night is that you can't put them in the same room together overnight, and it's also not possible to put yourself in the room with him without causing even more sleep complications. Long story short, we're sleeping in the office (the house's third and possibly actual master bedroom, considering it has the attached half bath) on the pull-out couch, which is also where my computer is, so the edit on the last episode we recorded (which admittedly was last year) still isn't quite complete. But it'll get there someday!As of the time of this writing, there are still 43 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings, plus howevermany wonderful reviews. You have the power to take us to 45 and beyond: you!!Instant Band Night 15: TIME WARPJuly 14th! The line must be drawn here and no further!! We WILL have an explosive celebration of musical creativity that must be seen to be believed, and you! will! be! there! (Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  r e t u r n i n g   i n   2 0 2 2  + ++ +  h a n g   i n   t h e r e  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Still not a lot going on up here, except to note that the Friend Gallery Experiment as outlined in a previous missive still continues to be excellent, so thanks to everyone who's been guest-curating thus far. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Felix seems to have added a near-midnight wakeup back into the rotation. We're in no mood to attempt training him out of it, mostly because daylight savings is coming in a week to fuck whatever we're going to do anyway, so maybe we'll try afterwards. The near-midnight wakeup is reasonably easy to deal, with, though: a quick-as-I-can diaper change and then a bottle he can drink while laid down -- sometimes he's asleep by the time the bottle is empty. At least it's somewhat predictable??Felix can now sit up more or less on his own if he's got the C-shaped Boppy pillow snugged up around him. He smiles back when we smile at him. There are things that make him laugh. We're also starting to hear sounds from Felix that are suspiciously close to intelligible phonemes. When he's not doing that, he likes to make pterodactyl noises and slap whatever pillows or toys are in his immediate surroundings. Having passed the 7mo mark not too long ago, he's now in what Mavis and I call the Peak Baby stage, where he most strongly resembles the canonical baby we've all got in our heads from movies and TV and whatnot. Peak Baby lasts roughly from months 6-9; I have forgotten what comes after Peak Baby. We will all discover it together in a few months! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • A legion of fact-checkers has joined forces to put up a website debunking bullshit related to the invasion of Ukraine. (ukrainefacts.org) 

  • Speaking of: there's a word for what we're doing when we post online about Ukraine, and it's "milling." (~$Atlantic) 

  • Who knows whether this'll even be relevant by the time I hit SEND, but here's a sobering read on Putin from an expert. (Politico) 

  • Well, fuck. "Democrats Are Still Delusional About Trump: The belief that a prosecution can solve a political problem is wrong." (~$Atlantic) 

  • If there's life on other worlds, it may not use the same molecules we do, but there might be universal laws behind the functions of those molecules that could help us parse whatever we find. Okay! (Santa Fe Institute) 

  • The Scientists have demonstrated a technique for turning CO2 into clean fuels without byproducts using specially-engineered bacterial enzymes. Frustratingly, there's no hint whether it's something they're looking into scaling or commercializing??? (U of Cambridge) 

  • The plastics pollution treaty is moving forward. (Reuters) 

  • I knew those Starlink satellites were messing up astronomers' views from Earth, but I didn't know they were also forming weird trains. (AccuWeather) 

  • "Climate stories don’t have to be depressing to be effective: A new study shows how positive stories about characters whose actions match their intentions change the minds of readers" (Anthropocene) 

  • Obviously it would be better to pulverize an incoming asteroid so the resulting debris burns up in our atmosphere than to just let it impact whole, but now an actual idea for how to do it has been designed. (Universe Today) 

  • Some guys are working on a way to identify, culture, and commercialize natural microbe-derived food additives instead of artificial chemicals. (Modern Farmer) 

  • Here's an interesting interview on "Why climate solutions will fail without the help of social scientists". (Vox) 

  • Time for a salute to the humble Corsi-Rosenthal Box. (The Conversation) 

  • Why don't predators routinely gobble up the entire population of their prey and go extinct? Is that something we can maybe learn from? (The Conversation) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists are making some progress figuring out algae as biofuel and bringing us one step closer to the future Becky Chambers imagines, which frankly can't come soon enough. (Texas A&M) 

  • "How To Overcome Imposter Syndrome In Academia When You’re Six Raccoons Living In A Fjällräven Parka" (McSweeney's) 

  • Did you know there's an ongoing drama over a planned ecommerce venture in the world of knitting? (Input) 

  • Carnivory has evolved independently at least a full dozen times in the world of plants. (Knowable) 

  • Some Engineers have cooked up a wearable device from garbage that's powered by human movement. (U of Surrey) 

  • "Police Abolitionists Are Building a Dispatch App To Replace 911: With police killings reaching record highs, Raheem is helping activists respond to emergencies without calling the cops." (Vice) 

  • A big metastudy concludes that agreeableness is super important for increasing your odds of success in life. (U of Arkansas) 

  • The Scientists have worked out a method for detecting bacteria based on spectroscopy that uses machine learning to identify them without having to separate the samples out first. (KAIST) 

  • I mean. This is pretty much how it goes when we want to release tension, right? (Berkeley Mews) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Nightwhales, You Will Know Her By the Sword She Carries(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.