from now on the food will only appear in cube form

June 25, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's perfectly happy to get its summer heat in single-day doses. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway71 - Jewel Beetle Sex Lure"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Chris (@rdesign) look into new hiring modalities, a destructive business, and a couple of reproduction-related questions/theories that may require more research."Besha's back! Never let it be said that we let geographic separation get us down, because technology came to the rescue. This one marks a new era of recording where we're no longer bound by the shackles of three-dimensional space!! (!!!!!!!!) It was also our first run of this recording method, so we ended up losing the other episode we did with Chris, but sometimes that's what happens when you move five-dimensionally.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcast app 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 Five for FightingIt's true: the fifth installment of Instant Band Night is happening on Thursday, July 12, and you should either come or invite your friends if you can't. THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS.1. The stage has a drum kit, guitar, bass, keyboard, and mics.2. We draw names out of hats to make instant bands that get 10 minutes in the green room to plan an 8-minute set.3. A hat-drawn artist will also take the stage alongside each band to draw their gig poster on a meeting room easel pad.You absolutely do not have to be a musician; just come have a good time, which I 100% guarantee.Thursday July 12507 55th St 946098p$5 doorBYOBSeriously: if you can't make it or you don't live in the Bay, invite your friends who do (Facebook / Eventbrite) -- the event's design dictates that it kind of lives/dies based on attendance, so help pack the place out and you will earn a place among the ascended masters of all things fun. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Besha and I have worked out a pretty reasonable method for recording the podcast from the comfort of our homes (which is good, since her home is now in Portland). Which is great, because I've missed having her on it, and also because it's producing quite a backlog of episodes (I recorded a few more with excellent friend and guest co-host Kelly Jensen that have yet to see the light). If I continue with the every-other-week publishing schedule, the current backlog won't be clear until the start of September, which seems faintly ridiculous. I think I might go back to posting every week, which means you'll be getting one of these once a week, too. Is this madness? MAYBE. You read it here first.Speaking of getting this newsletter, I have something to bring up that's going to sound like a (humble)brag, which is simply that I've heard from a nonzero number of friends that they really do enjoy reading this thing. And I just wanted to say: thank you. Thank you! Even if you haven't told me you like it -- even if you just open it up and read it at your (hopefully copious) leisure without replying -- you're why I do this, and I appreciate you.However, I also need to get better at self-promotion. So here's a request: tell a friend about this thing? Whether it's a forward, or a tweet, or a Facebook post? It doesn't have to be excessively fulsome or hyperbolic;* even just something along the lines of "This is a newsletter I like and I think you would too, because ___" would be great. I'll even put the link here for ease of copy/paste:https://tinyletter.com/ferociousjThank you for that, too.* But I won't stop you if you want to get nuts; I'm not here to tell you how to do you. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Operation Introduce Quentin to Actual Food continues apace. Thus far he has sampled, in various amounts:AvocadosButternut squashSweet potatoesCarrotsPeasGreen beansParsnipsBananasPearsPeachesPeanut butterPlain yogurtOatmeal (powdered)All the fruits and vegetables save avocado have been prepared in more or less the same way: steamed, pureed, and spooned into silicone ice cube trays to be frozen into surprisingly-pleasing near-cubes and thawed one at a time at will.* This system works beautifully, but it also has the side effect of turning one level of the freezer into what I imagine ration storage onboard the old USS Enterprise from Original Recipe Star Trek looked like. The list of foods will continue to expand, but I kind of want to figure out a way to get some blue food in there** just for the sake of color variety. The bag of sweet potato cubes is nowhere near depleted, but I've already secured some purple sweet potatoes in preparation for the great-day-that-comes.* Or three at a time, really: after his bottle, Quentin gets three (3) cubes, thawed all at once and mixed together. Interestingly, the green cube always overpowers whatever else is in there color-wise, turning the resulting mush green even if there's a seemingly strongly orange food in the mix. Not that I'm complaining per se -- I'd rather feed him green glop than brown glop, let's be honest here.** Technically, Quentin's already tried blueberries, too, using this small-mesh-bag-on-a-ring thing that enables him to gum and squish food around in his mouth, so he can get the juice and flavors (and no doubt some pulp) without risking choking. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Die lonely, DC Trumpites. 

  • So if it's possible to make a brain for a drone that's fingernail-sized, doesn't this mean lightweight, highly-responsive swarm drones just got that much closer? 

  • This issue's somewhat obvious Vox read is The border crisis is a reminder that Trump has no idea what he’s doing. 

  • The Drake Equation is a method for estimating the likely numbers of intelligent alien civilizations out there, but by its nature, it's basically a wild guess. If you plug probability ranges into it instead of numbers, though, the answers you get are sobering. 

  • How about we feed livestock with microbial protein instead of crops? 

  • You can make a self-driving car for cheap if you don't need it to go fast, which makes it perfect for campuses. 

  • What kinds of dangers does synthetic biology present? There was a study, and a hefty report (linked in the article) which, yes, I'm reading right now, and it's a fuckin' doozy. You can, too -- the writing is ... let's just call it "academic," but the subject matter is interesting enough to power through it. 

  • Who wants a quality longread on how Netflix makes its decisions on what to produce? 

  • It's probably amazing to be Rihanna, right? Does a day where she can wake up and read a headline like How Rihanna Forced The Beauty Industry To Acknowledge A World Beyond The Rich And The White count as a special one for her, or is it just another Tuesday? 

  • What I always tell people when I play any kind of Mario Kart against them is that I'm a Wario, I'm a gonna ween, and while that doesn't always come true, now there's data science to back up this very important assertion. 

  • They're not jetpacks, but you should still check out these finalist designs for personal flight devices based solely on how terrifying each and every one of them manage to be. 

  • Here's an interesting long(ish)read about a new nuclear reactor design that might finally be technically feasible. 

  • Another one on vertical farms and how realistic they are. I want to give a hand to IEEE Spectrum, folks; they do good work.

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumFruit Unit, Today All Problems Are Solved 

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.