everybody likes a solo movie occasionally, right

December 09, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that would really like to know why the muscle that runs across the back of its left shoulderblade has decided to just go stone cold nuts all of a sudden 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway130 - The Feelings Picture Closet"Jon (@ferociousj), acting co-host Kelly, and special guest Katie unveil astounding notions for businesses, art, fiction, and an entire TV network."This episode also contains another amazing bad date story from Kelly, and that's really all I can tell you about it -- you'll just have to listen.Don't forget we're now taking questions from listeners in the form of 5-star reviews! If you've got a question for us, go ahead and leave us that ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and feel free to drop a question in the review, which at least one of us will do our best to answer!Instant Band Night XIV: Starting 2020 Off RightNewsletter readers get the news first: we're making a couple of little tweaks to the format of Instant Band Night for this next one. 

  • There aren't a lot of bands that end up taking the full 5m onstage, which results in a growing disparity between readiness time and stage time, so we're shrinking the green room time from 7m (which almost nobody used to the full extent anyway) down to 5m. I fully believe it's entirely possible to write a song in five minutes! 

  • We're gonna start at 7p instead of 8p. Starting earlier means we might be able to get more bands in, and also it's a nicer start time just in general, honestly.

You heard it here first! Updates will be made to the event listings shortly!✨ Invite your friends on Facebook if that's where you are ✨😎 Or just send your friends this link: http://bit.ly/instantbandnight14 😎🎸 PREPARE TO GET EXCELLENT 🎸 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I just realized I still haven't made concrete plans to see the last Star War. The Alamo Drafthouse's loyalty program gives you a free movie ticket on your birthday (good for 30d), but the catch is you have to make your purchase in person, so that means I'm going to have to go to the Mission to make it happen. Honestly, odds are good: see the last Star War at the Alamo with all the comforts that brings, for free? Hell yeah. I'll probably have to go solo -- but if past years are any indication, I'm definitely going a few times with various other people, so I'm not super worried about that. I like seeing movies by myself sometimes anyway; it's sort of like taking yourself out to a restaurant with just a book, which btw is also a thing I have definitely enjoyed in the past. If for whatever reason you've never tried it, I highly recommend. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We've been witnessing a new facet of Quentin's personality emerge over the past couple of weeks; I don't know how else to describe it other than "precious bossiness." When he wants to go someplace with us, say from the living room to his room or the kitchen, he grabs one of our fingers in his little hand and just starts walking: "Daddy this way." If he's eating a meal at the table, he wants "Daddy sit bench" instead of standing next to him, and will attempt to push and pat me into my customary place at the table. My guess is that he's starting to want to assert control over the world around him, and we at least accede to his wishes sometimes. It's pretty adorable right now, but I bet it'll get old if/when we take the off-ramp to Tantrum Town. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Take comfort that the worst typo you ever made probably wasn't as bad as this one. Probably. (Deseret News) 

  • Is the nightmare at Away over? Did Steph Korey actually learn anything, or will she lurk in the shadows for some unspecified length of time before trying to return in a new form? (The Verge) 

  • That "Coolest Cooler" Kickstarter fiasco has one hell of an end-with-a-whimper for you. (The Oregonian) 

  • Single-celled organisms can make what appear to be decisions. (Harvard School of Medicine) 

  • It only takes $30 and a little searching to make a deepfake porn of yourself -- or, well, anybody. Yikes yikes yiiiiiiikes (Motherboard) 

  • Researchers have demonstrated a proof-of-concept trachea-like structure built using a bioprinter that incorporates more than one cell type. Theoretically, someday we might be able to print entire replacement organs, or even bodies? Right? That's where this is going eventually, right? I mean why not? (Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine) 

  • If we can't get replacement organs out of a machine, how about from a pig? Pig-monkey chimeras have been successfully created, although they didn't last very long. (Science Alert) 

  • Here's some interesting reading about a Finnish experiment in communal grandparents. (~$Quartz) 

  • Once more from the back: raising the minimum wage doesn't result in job losses. (Axios) 

  • Human aging isn't a single smooth journey uphill, but instead has three distinct spikes, at least according to the proteins in your blood. (Stanford) 

  • <seinfeld voice> What's the deal with plastic-eating microbes? </seinfeld voice> Here's a pretty comprehensive update. (NEO.LIFE) 

  • Cloud kitchens (or whatever you want to call 'em) are proliferating, but it doesn't sound like they're a super great deal for the restaurateurs; maybe someone should fix that part of the business model before it gets set in stone? (NPR) 

  • Pinterest and The Knot are banning plantation wedding ads and content. See? How fucking hard was that? (BuzzFeed News) 

  • So -- okay. Alright. There's a company out there called Shadowfax now. And we already had Palantir, and then Anduril, and also Mithril Capital or whatever it is. I'm calling a moratorium on any more companies named after stuff in the Lord of the Rings, unless someone wants to tempt fate and start a mining concern called Moria. I will also accept one (1) metalworking cooperative focused primarily on forging axes named Khazad. (TechCrunch) 

  • Given that there are bacteria out there who like to chow down on hydrogen sulfide, finding a microorganism that eats minerals isn't super surprising, but what if you find one that seems to prefer the ones that come in meteorites? (U of Vienna) 

  • Let's all agree to send this to the people on Facebook who need it the most: how to tell when something on the internet is bullshit. (The Verge) 

  • I wonder whether this experimental car-free neighborhood being built in Tempe will work, given that the rest of the city still has cars. Does that matter? I 'unno. (Fast Company) 

  • The best way to launch quadrotor drones might be to fire 'em out of a damn-ass cannon. I mean why not. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Here's a longread analyzing the failure of Finland's universal basic income experiment, but I can't remember whether Jacobin is untrustworthy or not as a publication. Why do I think this? Have I been poisoned by misinformation or maybe just my own faulty memory? Help me out here. (Jacobin) 

  • If you haven't been following the Google labor drama, here's a good catch-you-up. Funnily enough, I've hung out with Laurence in the past, and he's always struck me as a fundamentally kind, solid dude; I wasn't on Google's side in the first place with this, but I'm even less so now. (Vox) 

  • The memory of the long California drought is vivid enough that I still celebrate every time it rains. Imagine what it would be like to get a literal million years of rain, though. I'd believe anything evolved during then just to break up the monotony a little. (Nature) 

  • Problem: you want to do a minimally-invasive surgery that involves poking a guide wire deep into the human body, but how do you steer the fuckin' thing through complex blood vessels? Solution: use the outer magnetic field of an MRI machine and move the patient's body around, obviously. It sounds nuts, but it's been demonstrated at the proof-of-concept level. (Montreal Polytechnic) 

  • How did language ....... happen? A study done with preschool kids gives us a possible clue. (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology) 

  • I wonder what Ron Swanson would make of Carpentry Compiler, which is (a) more or less exactly what it sounds like (b) extremely cool. (U of Washington) 

  • Americans are depressingly good at determining social class based on short audio clips. (Scientific American) 

  • De-icing roads can involve nasty-ass chemicals; how about we use ones derived from agricultural byproducts? (Washington State U) 

  • When it comes right down to it, the innards of cells are just proteins -- shouldn't we be able to suck 'em out of the cell and suspend 'em in solution and get 'em to make stuff for us? Why do we need living cells to do it inside? (Northwestern U) 

  • How did life survive the Snowball Earth phase? (Science Alert) 

  • Only 9% of 15yo kids can tell the difference between facts and opinions. (~$Quartz) 

  • Well, I'm glad someone is thinking about this, anyway: transitioning the entire world to clean energy sources is going to go badly if it's done unevenly, so here are some things to think about. (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies) 

  • Will the future of work be ethical? [nervous chuckle] (TechCrunch) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some Federation starship classes and names that an online neural network gave me after I fed it two lists of canonical onesEmpire-class starship USS African RadioVarchuras-class starship USS FentonBig Snakes-class starship USS Undestroyable Planet 

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.