happy birthday to 🖖ME🎃

December 02, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that welcomes the coming of winter and its attending rains just as long as they don't drive too many spiders indoors, thank you in advance 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week, but that just leaves more lead time for you, because we're now taking questions from listeners in the form of 5-star reviews! If you've got a question for us, go ahead and leave us that ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and feel free to drop a question in the review, which at least one of us will do our best to answer!Instant Band Night XIV: Starting 2020 Off RightLet's start the new year by taking the stage together and really just kicking out the fuckin' jams as hard as musically possible.If you're still on Facebook, which I am because of just plain inertia and laziness, it would be really good if you'd open the event there and invite everyone you think would be down. Just a heads-up, though, there's like a 50-person limit now? Or something? Go give it a shot and see what it tells you?Otherwise, there's still this link, which I encourage you to send around by email or text or whatever seems like the best idea!We'll see you there. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Today's my birthday! Literal, actual truth: today I turn 40. Honestly, I feel pretty good about it -- no sign of an embarrassing midlife crisis looming, at least not that I can tell. I don't feel the need to buy a glitzy sports car or whatever else is supposed to happen. Is the midlife crisis actually a thing, or is it just an invention on the part of TV and movie writers to drive plots? Anyway, tonight Mavis and I are going to go to a nice dinner and, as has become tradition, since Mavis is an amazing baker/person, I'll have a lovely homemade dessert item made all for me [cue supervillain laugh]. The sheer decadence of having an entire apple pie all to yourself is the true joy of birthdays. This time around, there's a slight tweak: earlier this year, Mavis made an apple upside-down spice cake that was absolutely insane, and I've requested one of those instead. I, uh, may have already had most of an apple pie this week thanks to a confluence of Thanksgiving, extra pie dough, and the generosity and general aforementioned amazingness of my excellent wife. I don't know where I'm going with this; I guess I just wanted to brag a little? Maybe that's what happens when you turn 40: you become an unrepentant egomaniac. If you're still reading this, thank you. Seriously! Thank you for being here to whatever extent you have, and may this and all future years bring more joy than any and all other emotions. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I had a nightmare a while ago that for some reason I want to relate now, if for no other reason than to finally take it off my backlog (which is crude and haphazardly-arranged at best): 

  • I'm on a big cruise ship that has One Big Dining Hall

  • I've never been on a cruise, so this place basically looks like a giant cafeteria, with walls painted in a weird terracotta orange vibe

  • I'm front-wearing a baby in the Ergo carrier

  • I look down and realize this baby isn't Quentin

  • Well, where the fuck is Quentin, then??????

  • A feeling of inarticulate horror drops the bottom out of my stomach and I start to run through the dining hall, at first quietly saying and then just shouting "Oh no, oh no, OH NO"

I woke up with such a start that I was fully ready to believe I had shouted myself awake; thankfully, that hadn't actually occurred. This dream has yet to recur, so hopefully I'm not going to have too many of 'em over the next, you know, rest of my life? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Several climate change tipping points are in the red, and what's worse is they might produce, well, a cascade effect (that's never good-sounding, is it) and uh, just read the article. (Nature) 

  • Now here's something that'll actually make you feel a little better about the people in the world, or at least two of them. (Huffpo) 

  • How about a compound that renders MRSA more vulnerable to both the immune system and antibiotics? Here's hoping it doesn't produce serious reactions in humans! (Forbes) 

  • Here's an interesting idea: what if your next pop science book had an appendix in the back with numerical ratings for the strength of the individual claims it makes? (Undark) 

  • Playing board games into your old age can help you hang onto your cognitive skills, which is fascinating because I'm not sure how much better Mavis can get at Quantum -- by the time she's 70, she'll be literally unstoppable by any means short of cheating. (U of Edinburgh via Science Daily) 

  • Ikea might well end up designing Mars habitats, and you know what? I'm not mad at that prospect. (Fast Company) 

  • There's apparently a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat, which nobody thought was possible; what's weirder is this was discovered a couple years ago, but is popping up again for some reason? (Science Alert) 

  • It's technically possible to engineer a strain of E.coli that eats CO2. Huh. (Nature) 

  • Did you know mercury can travel through fog? Well, now you do. (UC Santa Cruz via Science Daily) 

  • The average American life expectancy has gone down lately, mostly because there are more people dying young from suicides and overdoses. The research paper's in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there's an easier-to-digest writeup on Vice. 

  • Abigail Disney seriously might just be one of the good ones. Threadreader kind of messed up the rendering (people numbering their tweetstorms should probably not be a thing that happens anymore tbh), but I have faith you can get through it as an astute reader; it's worth it. (Threadreader) 

  • I mean, it does make sense when you think about the accretion disks you always see around the renderings, but still: what if there are planets around black holes -- lots of them? (National Institutes of Natural Sciences via Science Daily) 

  • One of the problems we've been having with machine learning output is that it tends to incorporate inherent biases without us explicitly programming them in; what if we told it not to do that? It's an oversimplification, but not by much, at least not according to the writeup -- the actual paper is way beyond me. (Science Alert) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Stars in Your Eyes, This Won't Take Long 

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.