Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes it had more stonefruit on hand to stress-eat after Felix eventually falls asleep, whenever that is

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

Plenty of time remains for you to check your plans and mark your calendar for the 14th of November in this, the year 2024! It's going to be the last one of the year, which means it's going to be special. (To be perfectly honest, they're all special, but that's just because every band that takes the stage is newly created five minutes prior and wonderful surprises abound) Shine your partyin' shoes and put them carefully in the closet next to your rockin' outfit, 'cause they're gonna see some use in four months!!!

Nov 14 2024
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 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 + +

Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU

Update! Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: go check it out!

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.

A little glimpse into how I usually put this together (although you may have figured it out by now): typically I save this section for last just in case anything pops up. What's popped up in this case is a surprising case of "I am completely fucking tuckered out for what seems like no apparent reason," so I'm afraid this is all you're getting here. Luckily, there was a bumper crop of interesting links over the past week, so keep reading for the good stuff.

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.

Right now I'm contending with Felix having some kind of regression in his bedtime routine, which saw a huge improvement over the last few weeks, but now he's having a big ol' screamfest upstairs so this is about the limit of what I'm capable of putting in here in between trips upstairs to plant him back in his bed. It's a whole thing; I'll tell you all about it later!!

Fascination Corner

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

• "How the "Working Class Republican" Scam Works: A brief description of how this is all gonna go." (How Things Work)
  

• The CrowdStrike outage was bad, but it could've been worse, and we need to prep for either prevention or mitigation of the next one like it immediately. (Vox)
  

• I'm not saying JD Vance fucked a couch, I'm just saying many people are saying it and isn't it a shame. Or is it. I'm just asking questions. Many people are asking questions. (Wonkette)
  

• Some Engineers worked out a way to generate hydrogen for fuel cells from a ridiculously simple-sounding set of ingredients, so instead of carting an explosive tank around on your ship, you just take a crate of recycled aluminum pellets, a little gallium, and some coffee grounds. What?? (MIT) (Paper)
  

• We knew this already, but it's important to have the numbers: just planting a shitload of trees isn't all that effective as a climate strategy — you have to think about where and how you do it, and sometimes it's better to just let a forest regenerate itself. Or — or!! — you combine the two approaches. Eh? EH?? (Duke) (Paper)
  

• Another thing we already knew: feed Machine-generated data to The Machine and it will quickly start spewing out useless nonsense. Given how much data The Machine seems to need and how small the available pool is getting, this might be a problem??? (Nature) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers built a tiny solar-powered drone that weighs less than a nickel and can theoretically fly for as long as the sun shines on it; there's even room for a little bitty payload. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• Fucking hell: Gilead's HIV drug, which is as close as we've ever gotten to having a vaccine for it, could be sold for just $40/year to everybody and they'd still pull a profit. (Guardian)
  

• Something down at the bottom of the ocean is making oxygen and it ain't plants. It might be those lumps of metal The Corporations want to mine??? Hey: how about don't. (Nature)
  

• The Scientists have designed a class of antibiotic that kills in two different ways, making it damn near impossible to evolve a defense against, but right now it seems to be mostly theoretical. Still a good idea, though. (U of Illinois Chicago)
  

• Cheez-Its are having a moment, huh. FWIW I've been under the impression I'm supposed to avoid them as a prediabetic, so I miss them dearly. (Sherwood)
  

• The plastic industry's "advanced recycling" is buuulllllshiiiiiiiit (HEATED)
  

• It's not scalable yet, but Some Engineers have worked out a way to break plastics down by laying them on top of something called a "transition metal dichalcogenide" and blasting them with a low-power laser. Okay! (UT Austin) (Paper)
  

• "AI Video Generator Runway Trained on Thousands of YouTube Videos Without Permission: A leaked document obtained by 404 Media shows company-wide effort collected thousands of YouTube videos and pirated content for training data." (404 Media)
  

• The Scientists have figured out a way to break down PFAS forever chemicals at room temperature with the help of light and some photocatalysts; I would love to know how much work it takes to make the photocatalysts, though. I'm just sayin'. (Ritsumeikan U) (Paper)
  

• Oh shit: tree bark absorbs methane. (The Conversation)
  

• New data from the Jimmy Dubs makes The Scientists think Ariel, one of the moons of Uranus, has a subsurface ocean. Sure, why not!!! (Universe Today)
  

• Why do we blush? What parts of the brain get activated when we do it? To find out, The Scientists put some teen girls (notorious both for dealing out and absorbing judgment from others) in an MRI and asked them to sing karaoke, then watch footage of themselves while being judged by a putative audience. Incredible, honestly. (Netherlands Inst for Neuroscience) (Paper)
  

• CrowdStrike put up a whole "guidance and remediation hub" for their big fuckup that has a detailed explanation, apology, and explainer for how they're gonna avoid doing another one in the future. (CrowdStrike)
  

• Some Engineers have demonstrated a technique for 3D bioprinting voxels made of hydrogels (of course) and human cells. (UVA) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists think they might've found the place (in mice at least) where the placebo effect happens, a target that's been elusive for years and would be a game changer for the whole field of painkillers. (Science Alert) (Paper)
  

• It would be dumb to assume the fossil dinosaurs we've found thus far were the biggest examples of their species, right? So how big did dinosaurs actually get? (Canadian Museum of Nature) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers invented a highly promising way to recycle lithium ion batteries that involves magnets. (Rice U) (Paper)
  

• Butterflies and moths accumulate enough static electricity during flight that pollen probably just floats through the air onto their bodies from fairly significant distances, meaning they don't even have to land to collect it. You should click through to the paper solely for the graphs and visual aids. (U of Bristol) (Paper)
  

• It took thirteen days, but four pals did the Cannonball Run route in a solar-powered car they built themselves. (The Verge)
  

• At least one of The Scientists thinks computers can never achieve consciousness because of the way they process and store information, which is intrinsically different from ours. (Ruhr U Bochum) (Paper)
  

• Warehouses pollute the air around them; one guess as to which communities are most affected. (The Verge) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers borrowed inspiration from forests to design a 3D-printed desalination device that works on sunlight alone. (AIP)
  

• The Scientists have been tracking one particular whale shark for four years. (URI)
  

• Mass layoffs might be creating an environment ripe for data breaches. (SUNY Binghamton)
  

• How do you burn 21 racks on rigging the Hugo Awards and blow the whole thing by farming it out to utter fucking incompetents? (Polygon)
  

• The Scientists wanted to study prosopagnosia (face blindness), so naturally they turned to making people watch Game of Thrones. (U of York)
  

• End of an era: Southwest is moving to an assigned-seats model, something fully 80% of its surveyed customers said they want. (AP)
  

• Dogs might be more attuned to our feelings than we think, or at least to the smells we make when we're stressed. (U of Bristol) (Paper)
  

• Fucking hell: Komodo dragons' bodies coat the tips and serrations of their teeth in literal iron to keep them sharp and strong. (King's College London) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers are casting doubts on the idea of turning captured CO2 into useful products sustainably, but thankfully they have some ideas on how to fix that. (U of Colorado Boulder) (Paper)
  

• Any probe that lands on Enceladus or Europa looking for life may not have to dig very far according to the results of a new study. (NASA) (Paper)
  

• We call it "doomscrolling" for a reason. (Flinders U) (Paper)
  

• Instead of just one cap on a CO2 reservoir, we should think about lots of small ones. Seriously; it works better. (UT Austin)
  

• Once again, Some Engineers have hit upon a method for harvesting water from thin air with a clever nanomaterial. Someday I'll do a deep dive into this newsletter's back catalog to see how many of these have been invented since I started. (U of Utah) (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 and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible)

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think is an orchestrated instrumental album that sounds like an updated Yanni. Remember Yanni? It's .......... ok if you don't.

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.