greetings from plague house

February 27, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that could use a vacation right about now 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 podcastInstant Band Night 19: SOLARIs that — no, really? That can't be right. Holy shit: the next Instant Band Night is NEXT WEEK. Did you get your ticket? Did you tell your five coolest friends? No, seriously: I cannot guarantee the same magic that happened last time will happen again this time. It's up to you. It's up to you. Tell everyone! Bring everyone! All the info you need is below, including links to event pages with a description and FAQ if for some reason you're just now finding out about Instant Band Night and want to know what it is:March 9 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook) (Partiful)+ +  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  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I've got nothing for this space this week because, well, check #dadthoughts 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Long story short: Felix had to come home early from daycare on Thursday and on Friday we took him to the ER — not because it was a huge emergency, but there were no regular appointments left by the time we called and they wanted us to bring him in somewhere so a doctor could look at him.Anyway, turns out he had RSV. So now we all have RSV. Again.👶 Felix is more or less over it; his appetite is the only thing that hasn't bounced all the way back. Also, he coughs at night and a little during the day.😎 Quentin is still in the middle of it, maybe? It's not kicking his ass up and down the street like it did last fall, but he's not having a good time and even though he doesn't consciously choose to he's making it our problem by expressing his every desire as a whiiiiiiiiiiiiine and refusing simple, instant solutions to elementary issues.*😑 Mavis is so tired — so very tired — and her throat is so sore she has to take breaks from talking. You want to hear something horrible? She took time off from work hoping for a little R&R!! Guess what she's doing instead!!!!!🫠 I'm the only one in the house whose body has remained technically functional the entire time. For some reason all I've gotten is a very faint sore throat (we're talking 0.4 on a 1-10 scale) and what I'm calling the Night Cough. So I've been doing ........ a lot. I've limited my stress-eating to a few curly fries and a big slice of that chocolate mini sheet cake Trader Joe's sells in the back, which would be impressive-sounding if not for the fact that I'm prediabetic. I say why even have a bloodstream if it's not going to be coursing through a body that feels at least a little joy???Obviously this isn't the exact same strain of RSV we got last fall; we would be immune to that. But is it a wimpier relative? Or does having had a different strain grant partial immunity? I'm hoping it's just a wimpier strain, because the obvious vector was Felix's daycare and I don't want anybody to have a scary time. I'm done with scary times for the rest of the goddamn year.* As in:10 QUENTIN: "I'm thirsty."20 US: "Please drink [literally any of the three different liquids we've placed within arm's reach of you in plain sight]"30 QUENTIN: "Nooooooooooo"GOTO 10Now we realize this is probably because his throat is bugging him, and he does eventually drink a few sips of liquid, but the struggle!!!! And don't ask how it's been reacclimating Felix to the concept of eating if you don't want to hear about the Groundhog Day nightmare I lived fifty billion times a day where he clamored to be sat at the table, asked for and then refused three different foods, then ate about one (1) grape's worth of something before asking to get back down. By the end of today we were sort of able to corral him back into something resembling a structured meal time, but we'll see how breakfast goes tomorrow (technically today if you're reading this the morning I send it). 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Wash your hands, folks: norovirus comin'. (Vox) 

  • Also, if you've seen that stupid study about "uhhhh did masks work during covid??" please read this. (Vox again) 

  • Another person has been confirmed to have been cured of HIV using stem cell transplantation. (Nature) 

  • The Scientists have invented a catalytic converter-like device that makes your gas furnace exhaust a hell of a lot cleaner. (Oak Ridge Natl Lab) 

  • Four-day work week! Four-day work week! FOUR-DAY WORK WEEK (U of Cambridge) 

  • DARPA wants to test a nuclear-powered rocket engine in space soon. (Supercluster) 

  • American Girl now has 90s dolls; don't mind me, I'll just be over here in the corner turning into a pile of ancient dust and bones. (Polygon) 

  • Why is there so much junk DNA in our genomes, and why does the amount of it vary between organisms? The Scientists' latest proposed answer is simple: the stuff that's next to useful DNA sticks around. (Tel Aviv U via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • There are a bunch of global warming accelerators more properly and ominously called "amplifying feedback loops" that The Scientists are worried we haven't properly taken into account. (Oregon State) (Paper) 

  • Literal babies are better at figuring out what motivates other people than what we're currently calling AI. (NYU) (Paper) 

  • Electric jet ski? Electric jet ski. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Some Engineers have demonstrated a way to make an anti-dust surface using nanoprinting. (UT Austin) 

  • If you want to restore a natural habitat, don't forget to throw in some soil from a pristine neighboring region. (Anthropocene) 

  • Did you know there are this many free art museums in LA? (The Art Newspaper) 

  • The Scientists have figured out that designing orchard layouts differently can have a big impact on how productive they are, but frustratingly, neither the writeup nor the paper give us pictures of what the layout should be. Apparently it's important to plant your trees in rows perpendicular to whatever natural habitat they're bordering, for starters. (U of Göttingen) (Paper) 

  • On paper, the notion that we could approach emission control more fairly with rationing works, but I dunno how you're gonna get actual people behind it in the numbers you'd need. (U of Leeds) 

  • We might be making things out of fungus instead of plastic someday. (The Verge) (Paper) 

  • Five thousand years ago, people in the Middle East and southern Russia liked to party by sitting around a communal pot of booze and drinking through fancy yard-long straws with built-in filters; sounds pretty damn great, actually. (IFLscience) 

  • The Scientists have discovered a method for turning plastic waste into a useful carbon nanomaterial that seems potentially scalable. Question mark? At least click through to see how much fun the headline writer was having, alliteratively speaking. (Rice U) 

  • SPY BALLOON SIMULATOR (Spy Balloon Simulator) 

  • Some Engineers built a new kind of generator that can run on just about any fuel and have already commercialized it. Nice! (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Is ......... did we accidentally discover an antibiotic that can't be resisted???? (UC Santa Barbara) (Paper) 

  • Three new species of nautilus have been identified in the Indo-Pacific. (Mongabay) 

  • We're actually making marginal progress toward figuring out how to avoid flaming arguments. (Science) 

  • A Smart Car-like tiny EV for city folks is outselling Tesla and everybody else by an embarrassing margin in Indonesia. (Rest of World) 

  • Nobody recycles clothes because trying to figure out what blends the fabrics are made from is a gigantic pain in the ass; The Scientists have invented a fiber encoding method for dealing with this exact problem that works great and can be made cheaply. (Anthropocene) 

  • I can't do better than this opener: "Scientists have discovered six galaxies in the early universe that are so incomprehensibly massive that they pose a challenge to our basic understanding of the cosmos, reports a new study." (Motherboard) 

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 on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

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.