dreamed a dozen donuts and a duck-dog, too

June 22, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's at day 102 of isolation and counting; if I can do it, so can you! No, seriously. We can do this. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week; stay safe, stay sane, and we'll see you next week.Seriously, I recognize that you have other things you need to be doing, but if you've already done them, then you could always go to Apple Podcasts and rate us ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ because you can.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberIt seems laughable to try to throw Instant Band Night without a proven vaccine in place. Let's see what's up in November 2021.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Has anyone done any research on how often we physically breach our ideological bubbles? Especially these days? The pet theory I've developed is that in the Before Times, we might have only come into prolonged contact with Trumpites (or potential Trumpites) at work or family gatherings, and now that those are no longer on the table, it probably doesn't happen super often -- but I would love to know whether there's data backing that up. I'm wondering this because of that Tulsa Trump rally, even as hilariously underattended as it was. 6200 defiant, proudly vicious dumbshits still showed up; they're beyond help, right? There's no reaching them. I would be 100% content to let them attend all the Trump rallies they want so they can give each other the rona, except for the part where I worry that they'd touch off new bursts of infectivity among the rest of us before they croak. HOWEVER: I don't know that I've come within meaningful contact of any potential Trumpites since isolation began -- grocery stores require masks, so those don't count, and where the fuck else have I gone? Nowhere. Provided the rest of us all follow the same sensible isolation protocols we've been following this whole time, what does the math say about how safe we'd be in the aftermath of these idiots coughing in each others' faces to own the libs at their own mass gatherings? Has anyone run simulations?Before someone asks me to feel bad for thinking about this, just know that I can't, for the following reason:They choose this.Trumpites choose to support white supremacy, the brutalization of those they perceive as lesser, the kids in cages, all of it. They see all of it and they decide they're in. Kids in cages, for fucksake!!For this reason, I can no longer include them at the campfire of humanity. They've forfeited their seats. I am well aware it's possible for a Trumpite to change their mind: renounce Trump and all his works, contribute to anti-racist causes, etc. etc. These and only these may return. The rest of them must languish in darkness. The things they support must not be allowed to continue, much less proliferate, and so if they somehow manage to bring about their own destruction en masse at the hands of a pandemic they refuse to acknowledge and even helped to exacerbate, I don't have a single H2O molecule in my entire body to shed for any of them, much less enough to constitute a whole tear. I'm just sayin'. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin's memory for words is starting to power up. An outsider observing us might believe he'd simply decided to up his non sequitur game by 1000%, but what's actually happening is that he's just quoting lines from his various books at us at random. I'm guessing it's the 2.5yo version of "Oh hey, remember when--?" It's very good, but I bet he's going to confuse a lot of people if he keeps doing it past quarantine. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Here's a good little thread on the implications of Trump's rally getting absolutely punked by The Teens. (Claire Ryan via Threadreader) 

  • Our obsession with economic growth will doom us all: we need to start changing hearts and minds on the desirability of overconsumption. (Scimex) 

  • Code Switch wants to know (because it's a good question): "Why Now, White People?" (NPR) 

  • NASA scientists think there might be a lot more planets out there with subsurface oceans. (NASA) 

  • Here, have some real number-crunching on the rona vs. the economy. (Vox) 

  • The pre-Columbian indigenous people of the Amazon created "dark earth" in the course of their farming and fertilization techniques that's still having an effect today. (U of Exeter) 

  • I have to admit I want to do some messing around in Shared Piano with some friends; who's in? (Engadget) 

  • This epidemiologist's advice on how to form a quaranteam draws heavily from the paper I mentioned a couple issues ago and it's still good. (The Conversation) 

  • "Juneteenth should remind America what it owes Black citizens" (Vox) 

  • Oregonian friends, please visit Exploding Whale Memorial Park for me whenever applicable and know that in my heart I am jealous. (The Oregonian) 

  • Nobody believes fashion brands when they talk about how they stand with the Black community. (CNN) 

  • Why doesn't the awareness of implicit bias help to mitigate it at all, and is there anything that does? (Knowable) 

  • Here's a weirdly soothing site that lets you experience just driving around a major city listening to the radio. (Drive & Listen) 

  • Is ....... is there protein synthesis happening outside cells?? ???? (Nature) 

  • Pittsburgh is trying to get rid of its light pollution. (The Verge) 

  • It's not actually that fucking hard to give away money if you're a billionaire, and unbelievably, Jack Dorsey is turning out to be the model. There are problems, of course (mostly access-related), but the speed at which he's working makes the others look kinda stupid. (Recode) On the other hand, if you're an organization like the Minnesota Freedom Fund, having a sudden windfall can actually produce knock-on effects that look suspicious from the outside. (Vice) 

  • Used EV batteries would be a great way to store solar grid power. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Some quote-unquote Troubled Youths are turning an abandoned prison into a farm, and it seems to be helping them out. (Civil Eats) 

  • There are much, much better people to name those Army bases after. (War on the Rocks) 

  • There's a problem in psychology where the subjects for studies often turn out to be disproportionately from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic countries (WEIRD); what if there's a similar bias at work for animal studies? Adorably, the acronym being floated is STRANGE. (Nature) 

  • Why tech didn't save us from the rona. (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • Some enterprising Brits have calculated that there could be as many as 36 active civilizations in our galaxy. I, uh, got ahold of the paper (let me know if you want a copy) and it's intriguing; they've got their own take on the Drake Equation that I don't pretend to know enough of the math to fully understand, but what I could make out was at least interesting. (U of Nottingham) 

  • We could build a network of wireless fire sensors out in the forests using self-powered paper chips that cost 4¢ apiece. (American Chemical Society) 

  • Sustainable biomanufacturing is taking a while to figure out because discovering the pathways for synthesis is agonizingly slow work; researchers at Northwestern have worked out a way to do it outside of living cells much, much faster. (Northwestern) 

  • White supremacist groups are alive and well on Facebook, it turns out. (Tech Transparency Project) 

  • This idea for cleaning up space junk is so weirdly similar to one of my own that I can't tell if that means it's good or not. (Forbes) 

  • Hummingbirds can see colors we can't: confirmed. (Princeton) 

  • Our map of the ocean floor has more than tripled in size from 6% to 19% since 2017. They're hoping to get the rest of the way there by 2030. (Reuters) 

  • I don't know that I fully understand this writeup (and it's a toss-up at best whether the paper is going to be any more comprehensible to me), but it sounds like a professor wrote a simulation that seems to indicate that envy itself (not birth or education) creates class divisions all on its own. (Goethe U Frankfurt) (PDF of paper) 

  • If the bees all die, maybe we can pollinate flowers with soap bubbles. (iScience) 

  • Bored people in isolation can be a surprisingly effective cloud detective agency in some cases. (BBC Future) 

  • There's another weirdly rhythmic fast radio burst out there; this one has a 16-day cycle. (MIT) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumWARBLADE, It Is Happening Again 

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.