here's what I think of your "mind upload," buddy

March 19, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter singlehandedly keeping the Envy apple cultivar on the market (a strong contender against the current champion Sweetie, probably better than the runner-up Cameo). 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway64 - A Little Closer to Wham!"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Kelly (@enthusiosity), and special guest Lila (@lilabailey) work out new concepts for holidays, parties, and a much-needed specialization for therapists."Did you know Zihuatanejo is a real place and not just something that appears in a Stephen King story/movie? I honestly thought he'd just made it up. 2018 and I'm still learnin'!You can subscribe using:Apple PodcastsRSSStitcherGoogle Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/ 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I'm not gonna lie: I find it slightly baffling that the ideas contained in episode 60 of the podcast haven't yet caught fire, because there are at least two in there that are extremely good. Admittedly, they both involve a fair degree of investment, though in each case the resources required differ wildly. 

  • "Mediators as a Service" needs an entire engineering org as well as outreach to schools of both law and therapy.

  • "Aliens: Colonial Marines, But Left For Dead, And With Witches" needs, well, a top-to-bottom game studio, to say nothing of the fictional setting we subsequently ended up creating, which maybe needs an entire army of writers.

Too much work for me, but maybe not for someone else. That's the whole point of the podcast, honestly -- the hope that someone else will take one of these ideas and just fuckin' run with it. Take it! Take it and go!! But I want to recognize that as good as they are, some of them may require an entire team of someones, which may be too much to muster. Or is it? If I had a pile of money fall on my head from the sky, you would see such a blur of multi-Jons running around, I swear. Is it too late to start my own cryptocurrency scam? Who wants to buy some Woke Points?Also, an addendum to last week's spirited mini-screed regarding a certain book/trilogy and subsequent movie adaptation: the movie version of Annihilation is good. If you want to know what all the fuss is about the Southern Reach trilogy, probably just go see the movie and save y'self a bunch of frustration. It's worth seeing in the theatre for picture/sound reasons, but you can miss it if you're squeamish or horrify easily?? Not that it's a wall-to-wall gorefest or anything, but there's at least one image in there that I can't really unsee. Y'all who've seen it probably know what I'm talkin' 'bout. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We're about to tip over into the part where Quentin immediately crams whatever he can grasp directly into his mouth without hesitation. As of this writing, he only does it about 65ish% of the time; the other 35% he's either distracted, can't work out how to get the thing to his mouth, or the object is just too big to fit in there. He spends a lot of time jamming his fingers into his craw -- sometimes when there's already a pacifier in there -- and I wonder how it's gonna go when he actually has teeth. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be a worry quite yet, and neither does him crawling around looking for stuff to shove in there. He has yet to fully get the knack of turning over, to say nothing of crawling, but also we just don't have a lot of floor-level clutter that's the right size. Thankfully.Thus far, the main worry I have has to do with the sleep solution we're transitioning him to after he fully outgrows his Halo SleepSacks (which are great, btw) (but also, it seems ridiculous that their only sizes are literally Newborn and Small -- there's no Medium or Large???). We're using a Zipadee-Zip, which is almost -- ALMOST -- like the 5-pointed star thing the Simpson family crams Maggie into whenever they go outside in wintry environments, and also seems to work pretty damn well for Quentin (he's taken lengthy naps in it with nary a problem). The only thing I'm worried about is that he likes to jam his hands in his mouth before/after napping, so two of its four corners get pretty soggy. I guess we should just buy another one and rotate the dry one in while the other one airs out? I'm a genius, everybody. Look at the genius work out his parental provisioning live onstage!!!!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • This guy on Hacker Noon wants to explain Why Porn Might Just Be Crypto’s First Killer App, but neglects to mention that cryptocurrencies first need to be, you know, a stable fucking form of value storage and transfer instead of an advanced form of gambling for nerds. 

  • While I admit that it's extremely My Brand™, I'm still not installing Duolingo even though you can now learn Klingon with it. 

  • You know what, this is just going to be the newsletter of occasional PDFs that you can just download and put on your Kindle or whatever. This one is a compilation of novel and unexpected ways AIs have solved problems with which they were presented, and it's great. 

  • I don't get why everyone thinks this startup is in any way talking about "mind upload" when all they're doing is preserving your brain with extremely fancy embalming, in the hopes that your thoughts can later be read from it and uploaded. What fucking thoughts? There's no electrical activity in there at that point; it's a dead hunk of meat. Preserving your tissues and recording your neural impulses is what we should be talking about, but that kind of mindstate capture doesn't seem possible without an extremely complex and sensitive scanner or full neural lace. 

  • Seriously, though, what the fuck are these UFOs that military pilots keep recording? What are they?!?! If we were living in a news environment that wasn't a 24/7 Trump garbage fire, would this story get more lift? 

  • Your excellent Twitter hashtag for this issue is the one where you pretend an animal is a product from Amazon and #rateaspecies; the top ones are very good indeed. 

  • This site only gives you one article a month, but it might as well be this one on The Collapse of Racial Liberalism. 

  • I wish we could get more followup on/from memetically famous people like BBC Dad here. 

  • We're in what seems like Year 20 of scientists telling us fusion power is 15 years away, but maybe now they're finally right? 

  • Fake news travels faster and further than the truth, all the time, every time, and it's our fault, not any kind of algorithm's. Great. Why do I want to turn to philosophers to fix this for us? Isn't that one of the jobs of philosophy? To figure out how we know what we know? Can we, y'know, operationalize this thinking somehow, or is it only good for sitting around and writing papers? 

  • I was not kidding about PDFs of papers. Please open this one from CMU researchers about developing software for knitting machines that can handle any 3D object. It's full of math that's miles above my head, but also contains sentences like "Knit objects are inherently stretchy, and stuffing does not provide uniform pressure." Delightful. 

  • I am, no foolin', very happy to know that the ocean mapping XPRIZE is still up for grabs. Imagine that we had an idea of the shape of the entire US -- like, we know roughly where the borders are and how big the whole thing is, but had only really truly mapped Delaware; that's about how much of the ocean floor we have solid maps of. 

  • Fucking opioids don't even work as well on chronic pain as over-the-counter meds! 

  • Wild boars have been messing with rice and chestnut crops in Japan, and the best solution thus far has turned out to be, I shit you not, a ROBOTIC SUPER MONSTER WOLF. 

  • Look, I'm 100% committed to owning my Honda Fit until it falls apart around me, but I also kind of love this concept EV that they're reportedly actually going to start selling next year. 

  • Holy shit: an AI software tool that can work out how to synthesize chemical compounds. This is ..... astonishing?? Merck already bought it, even. 

  • You must read this article about the discovery of a 1.5M-strong penguin supercolony in Antarctica that nobody had any idea existed until just now.

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some underwhelming horror novelsThe Clown Who PunchedNight of the Pumpkin1-800-MONSTER-MUNCH 

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.