hey mamma, hey mamma, hey ma-ma-ma

April 30, 2018

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's entirely too susceptible to falling down podcast rabbit holes and stumbling back into the light weeks later, blinking and covered in dirt. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway67 - Burrito World Tour"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Kelly (@enthusiosity), and special guest Erika (@erika) unearth ideas around food and personal branding before going deep on a club by and for nerds from all walks of life."This is also the episode where I chose to put a particular beloved Bay Area sandwich institution on fucking notice for their abomination of a meatball sandwich. Attention Ike's: you and I are enemies now.You can subscribe using:Apple PodcastsRSSStitcherGoogle Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/Instant Band Night 4 On The FloorNEXT WEEK. BE THERE: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.May 10 (Thurs)507 55th St (@ Telegraph)Oakland CA 946098p$5 doorBYOBDetails and FAQs live on Eventbrite and Facebook if you're into that sort of thing. Invite your people; it's going to be rad. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.We're very close indeed to the Eurovision finals, which have a special place in my heart due to being the most concentrated form of musical pageantry possible. I would like to once again renew my call for a feature-length documentary about how the venue and stage are set up and run, because that shit looks incredible and I want to know everything possible about how it works. Also, I wonder if anyone's ever done a study about the number of syrupy ballads that make it to the final year-over-year and whether there are patterns to be discerned. All due respect to the performers, but songs like this are not what I watch Eurovision for. I'm into bullshit like the bonkers little banger Moldova put together for 2017, whose excellent finals performance is still region-locked for some stupid reason;* the official video is here and you don't have to pay attention to it visually -- just put it on in the background. You're welcome.* I'm very much against the region-locking of Eurovision in general; why not let the whole world celebrate your weird-ass song contest through the magic of YouTube? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.My parents came to visit a little while ago and we made an important discovery: they have some kind of special Grandparent Magic. As you may or may not be aware, Quentin has what we like to call Resting Skeptic Face, a look of moderate-to-grave concern that he adopts pretty much all the time in all situations. He's certainly capable of smiling and laughing, but as a general rule, most of the people he encounters are going to get Resting Skeptic Face most of the time.This rule does not apply to my parents: smiles and laughs that would otherwise be at least a little work for others to elicit come freely and often whenever they're around. The effect doesn't diminish when mediated through devices, either; my folks live in Syracuse, and they can still get plenty of smiles and giggles over FaceTime. We're at a loss to explain it definitively, but it may have something to do with Quentin being their first grandchild -- we think maybe he's reflecting some of their enthusiasm, like an unconsciously empathic mirror? Or maybe he's just the world's sweetest little guy????? These are our theories. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The only elite council that matters is the Girl Scouts Cookie Executives of NYC. 

  • So it turns out there are other structures inside DNA that we didn't notice until now; what else is going on in there? 

  • Machine learning can spot cancer cells. This is just a thing that can happen now. What's the minimum number of disparate specialist neural networks you can loosely rope together to make an autodoctor capable of reasonably diagnosing 90% of common ailments? Do you need to make another one that sits atop them all and weeds out obvious diagnostic errors? Am I just talking crazy talk here? 

  • Climate change is increasing the range of venomous animals, which fuck that, but I'd hope that'd imply at least some of the animals who prey on them also come with, right? No? 

  • Hahaha satellites can be hacked hahaha this is kind of too terrible to really think about in great detail honestly 

  • After this one, we don't need any more studies about Trump voters. I'm comfortable calling it. 

  • My good ol' alma mater has figured out how to make smart walls for surprisingly cheap (relatively speaking), which could potentially be great and also sort of awful depending on how the tech is applied, not that that's a unique circumstance anymore, am I right? 

  • This one's old but good: Four ways to motivate employees, according to a top behavioral economist. 

  • Mara Wilson has some interesting points to make about social media. 

  • Are ........ are we looking at satellites-as-a-service here? 

  • Can everyone please stop paying attention to Seth Abramson and his sweaty promises of ultimate revelation and justice. Thank you. 

  • Your dismaying Trumpread of the day is this thread about something we all know we're seeing and have no idea how to stop. 

  • Here's your chaser, a refreshing rageread against the completely fucking stupid backlash being manufactured against Michelle Wolf by way of a scorching salvo fired in the direction of Chris Cillizza. 

  • Berkeley researchers have created a thin film that can convert heat to electricity, which makes me wonder how much can be harvested from CPUs and what it'd be used for. More cooling? In an eternal and balanced cycle? 

  • A good longread for you in the form of An Apology for the Internet From the People Who Built It -- it seems to be a distillation of a collection of interviews that are also almost certainly worth reading. 

  • Actually, pair that with this excellent musing on Ready Player One from Laura Hudson, who is correct. 

  • I take issue with the title of this article, which states A New Study Suggests There Could Have Been Intelligent Life on Earth Before Humans. No it does not. All it really does is ask the question, which is admittedly still goddamn fascinating. 

  • For multiple reasons I wish it were 2019 already, but one of them is that we'll be able to see this docuseries on the Fyre Festival, surely one of the top ten all-time monuments ever built to hubris and incompetence simultaneously. 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumSymmetrism, The House of Closed Doors 

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.