Garbage Truck Watch 2019

October 28, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's basically just refreshing the air quality page for the Bay Area for the next few days, don't mind us 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway127 - Birthday Mode"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Nick Douglas (@toomuchnick) ponder a dizzying array of ideas for food-related products and stories, as well as a new Star Trek convention model."I'll be honest with you: this one is bursting at the seams with juicy ideas ripe -- ripe! -- for the plucking. Take them and run! Run, I say!In other news, in case you missed it last week, we're on Spotify now. But the real news, as always, is that if you're reading this, you could always head on over to our home on Apple Podcasts and just click that 5-star rating for us; it really would be fantastically helpful. A nice review would be even MORE helpful. You like helping, don't you?Instant Band Night: Lucky 13🤡 START 🤡🎃 GETTING 🎃😎 HYPE 😎🤓 Read the details 🤓👻 Pass it to your friends 👻😍 Add it to your calendaaaaaar 😍 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Do this math with me: 

How does "Adam Neumann Hunting, as in specifically hunting Adam Neumann for sport and nobody else" not immediately become a thing once this payout goes through and all 4000 of these poor fuckers lose their jobs? How does this guy not spend the literal rest of his life looking over his shoulder? In what world is he not going to be dodging bullets every time he shows his face in public? Is he going to spend that money on bodyguards?Here's another fun fact, though: Neumann could give everyone set to lose their job $250,000 and still have $700 million left over. Hint hint, guy.

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.If you're just now joining us, be advised that we are about to enter t-minus 2 days on Garbage Truck Watch. That's right, Garbage Truck Watch hits zero hour on Thursday morning sometime between 8-930a, which is when the garbage truck that services the 4-story apartment building next door arrives to take care of the two dumpsters in its back parking lot. The dumpsters are wheeled out one by one for the truck to grab, lift, empty into its back, and deposit back on the ground. This entire procedure is witnessed from a stepstool pulled up as close as we can get it to the window in Quentin's room, accompanied by declarations of "Garbage twuck! See it! Quentin garbage twuck!" Last week we missed it somehow, so I predict this week's sighting will be extra important. Further updates on Garbage Truck Watch as events unfold. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • INJECT THIS TRUMP SCHADENFREUDE DIRECTLY INTO MY VEINS (Twitter) 

  • There's an interesting case to be made that the protests in Chile are a harbinger of something that could happen here if we decide we really, truly have had Enough. (Philadelphia Inquirer) 

  • The most horrifying haunted hause fiction currently within reach is right here, folks. (McSweeney's) 

  • There might be a treatment for celiac on the distant horizon. (Northwestern U via EurekAlert) 

  • Who want a short-but-likely-to-keep-you-up-at-night-a-little-bit read on something the author calls "omniviolence"? (Nautilus) 

  • Long but worth it, and the headline does a good job here, so: The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Jesus fucking Christ: 60% of Uber customers don't tip their drivers. Only 1% of them tip every time. The fuck? This data is admittedly a couple years old, but still: the fuck? (Slate) 

  • Read this and delight in the story of a capital-P Professional at work. (Philadelphia Inquirer) 

  • There are monkeys in Malaysia that have started chowing down on rats, specifically the ones bothering oil palm plantations, and they're doing a great job. (Cell) 

  • Ahem: 6% of US adults account for 73% of its political tweets. (Pew Research) 

  • Top economists agree that if anything, the world needs more English majors. ($WaPo) 

  • Motherboard's got a surprisingly readable tour of what I guess we're going to have to call spacetime foam theory. (Motherboard) 

  • Planting strips of native prairie on farmland is a real good idea, everybody. (Civil Eats) 

  • Your interesting longread of the week is this one on how Twitch approaches moderation. (The Verge) 

  • This one about how dinner parties have changed over the years is also interesting, though more from a historical standpoint -- I have literally never attended a dinner party like the one the opening describes; they've pretty much all been food-based chill hangs, which is so much better. (Vox) 

  • There's a company out there working to commercialize robot and machine learning-driven protein drug discovery. Why not, honestly. (TechCrunch) 

  • The most ridiculous sub-sub-sub-sub-subcontractor story you're likely to hear this week. (BBC) 

  • A new high-precision CRISPR technique has been developed that sounds super promising. (Nature) 

  • I read the article and I still think this sounds like the world's biggest correlation/causation mixup: violent crime goes down when pollen counts go up. What? (Science Alert) 

  • I'm just gonna give you the headline here: What It's Like When Your Parents Are Extremely Online. (Vice) 

  • I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like there's been some subtle acceleration to bacterial chemical manufacturing science in the last year, and I'm all for it; this article's about using an ocean bacterium to make jet fuel. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • Whoa. Uh. It's possible to prime your brain to solve hard problems in your sleep using carefully-managed music cues? (Psychology Today) 

  • Some harsh lessons learned from the world's first robot hotel! (Design Build) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumFull Body Mohawk, Living for Revenge Alone 

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.