falling outside the normal moral constraints

June 10, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's in all likelihood taking a break next week, since the whole family will be in South Carolina for a wedding, but who knows! 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway112 - Harold & Britney For President"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Kelly, and special guest Amy L decloak choice notions for medicine, social science, art, and a must-have accessory for fans of the medium of comics in general."Seriously: I will never get to the bottom of the mystery of Infinity Gauntlet Guy and this fact will lowkey haunt me for years. I can just feel it.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcatcher of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal).Instant Band Night 7-11🍧 ONE 🍧🍧 MONTH 🍧🍧 OUT 🍧🎸 SEE 🎸🎸 YOU 🎸🎸 THERE 🎸 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Two short and unrelated items for you this week:1.This is old -- predating this very newsletter by a couple of months, in fact -- but we have to talk about this list of the top five Iain M. Banks novels, which is very wrong.

  • Why is Consider Phlebas on here

  • I don't trust a writer who can't even get his its/it's straight, for fucksake

  • Where the hell is Surface Detail

Am I weird if I say the best thing about Consider Phlebas is the appendices at the end? Maybe that's weird, but I have to live in my truth.If you haven't read any of the Culture novels, I am here to tell you you're missing the fuck out. Start with The Player of Games and then go in chronological order from there; you can thank me later!!2.The new Wolfenstein game looks good; I would love for there to be an alliance declared among all game devs for the calendar year of 2020 where all of the enemies in the shooters they make are Nazis. Full stop. Is there a gun in your game? Do you use it to kill enemies? Make the enemies Nazis. I admire the Wolfenstein brand's commitment to Nazi-killing -- at this point for literal decades -- and I think it's about time everyone else stepped the fuck up. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin has discovered the room to his room closes. Our apartment's bedroom doorknobs have those button-style locks on the inner knob, so I've taken the precaution of making a tool that'll pop the lock if needed (coathanger wire: what can't it do?). We've got his room in a state where I'm comfortable with him closing the door and just hanging out in there if need be for a little while, but of course that doesn't actually happen; I think he's mostly doing it because the act of opening it gives him a giggle. To be clear, he doesn't actually know how to work the doorknobs yet -- he's just pushing/pulling on the door itself and getting lucky -- but the day will almost certainly come. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Who's got $35,000 to lend me for a visit to the International Space Station? (The Verge) 

  • Hilariously diabolical. (Polygon) 

  • Title says it all here; also, the article is interesting. "Capitalism used to promise a better future. Can it still do that?" (Brookings Institute) 

  • I wonder if next week will be a better one for YouTube. Not that I feel sorry for them or anything. (NYMag Intelligencer) 

  • Books aren't as easy to fact check as you think, so maybe take everything you read with a grain (or a rock) of salt. (Vox) 

  • Wait, what in the motherfuck? You can convert plastic garbage into diesel or jet fuel with the aid of a simple carbon catalyst and some heat? What?? (Washington State via EurekAlert) 

  • This is an interesting read on "upgrade arbitrage" -- buying slightly old business-class computer hardware for home use, since it pretty much does the job and is way cheaper. Mostly it reminds me to announce that if anyone out there has a nasty Windows laptop they don't have a use for, get in touch, 'cause I feel a hankerin' to build an Artemis bridge for no reason other than to have it! (Tedium) 

  • The cops don't check themselves, so now it's up to us and our databases. (Undark) 

  • The great thing about science is that this glass battery technology whose capacity apparently improves over its lifespan is getting peer-reviewed right now and we'll eventually find out if it's bullshit or not. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The Kids are out there doing stuff with AirDrop now, apparently. (Atlantic) 

  • The applications for this use of wifi that can literally see people breathing through walls are both exhilarating and troubling. They're troubhilarating. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Here's a little robot submersible designed to "hunt" and capture lionfish for commercial use, but surely it requires an operator? You can't tell me there are robots out there capable of distinguishing lionfish from (a) background (b) other fish that efficiently? (MIT Technology Review) 

  • This cheap and serendipitously beautiful device for collecting and purifying water is almost comically poetic in its elegance of concept and execution. (U of Texas) 

  • We need to give robots common sense eventually, but first we need to figure out how we learn it, so it's time to watch babies very closely. (Aeon) 

  • The Giving Pledge hasn't worked; I wonder if there should be a new version called At Some Point We'll Remember There Are Way More Of Us Than You, And Bricks Are Easy To Come By. (Chronicle of Philanthropy) 

  • Why do people tend not to move away from where they live even if you pay them more? (CityLab) 

  • Efforts are underway to figure out how to cultivate octopuses in bulk so we can do research on them, which I ......... both do and don't feel great about. (NPR) 

  • The internet is splintering and we need to fix it or something worse will undoubtedly happen, is what this thinkpiece posits. (Quartz) 

  • SpaceX is starting to think through the whole "going to Mars" thing and is totally fine with getting help with some of it. Good! (Ars Technica) 

  • Do babies look like their dads? (Atlantic) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some new and exciting words I put together out of the letters on the fridgeKNABSTEONSNETHMORLFUINDAR 

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.