highly plausible theories on UFOs within

July 31, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's putting some weird little guys together in the ceramics studio these days 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe possibility that we may return to podcasting cannot be mathematically excluded!!!! 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 22: WILDIt's happening in September and you should get your ticket now! Mark your calendar and invite your friends today!! Sometimes brevity really is the soul of wit!Sept 14 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  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  + +Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOUNew stuff alert: there's a bunch in the Etsy shop right now! Brilliant little statues for your garden or home! A place to put your fruit! A little buddy to hold your garlic! I'm working (slowly) on even more delightful little weirdos and I hope to show you soon. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.All right, that UFO hearing ($NYT). At this point I'm not paying attention unless somebody brings irrefutable video footage or a bag full of spaceship parts or a body to lay on the table, but something someone said has now gone all the way into my brain. According to one Representative Eric Burlison of Missouri: 

"[T]he concept that an alien species is technologically advanced enough to travel billions of light years and gets here, and is somehow incompetent enough to not survive Earth, and crashes, is something I find a little far-fetched."

I mean ..................... he's not wrong, though. Right????On Star Trek, when a Federation starship pulls up to a planet and they have to send a shuttle down instead of just beaming to the surface, it's always dicey because the planet is always fucking dangerous (otherwise they would've just beamed down): there are hideous storms or gravimetric distortion or wild-ass radiation or something. We, uh, don't have that? On Earth? Plenty of spots on our planet that are calm and nice to land on. If there truly are aliens coming to Earth, what the fuck are they even doing that they can't handle our utterly quotidian gravity well and calm atmosphere? Are they bad pilots? Are their ships crap?What if my key assumption is wrong, and it turns out Earth is the fucking wildest environment possible in which to raise life? What if a gentle, breezy summer day here in California is the equivalent of a Saharan sandstorm from hell for 99% of all other galactic life? That cannot be it. Can it?For me, the only way the Alien Visitors scenario now makes sense is if we're getting the alien equivalent of those guys on that Arctic(?) expedition in The Terror, which I've never watched, but I believe can be summarized as "a pack of dudes who don't actually know enough to be doing what they're doing undertake a doomed mission using ships and equipment that are fundamentally inadequate to the task." Some brave but under-resourced dumbasses got themselves here by the skin of their teeth and then their shit just gave up on them. We stan some brave ET kings who were maybe not the greatest engineers of their day, but tried their best.Or maybe our solar system is something like a galactic game preserve, and being put on monitor duty is some kind of punishment in their society, so they send poorly-trained convicts in badly-maintained ships to keep tabs on us, so they crash a lot. Maybe that?Those are now the only plausible scenarios for the visitation of our world by alien life local to our part of the galaxy. I have spoken!! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I first want to make a vow to you, dear reader, here and now, that I will never again take for granted a standard-issue weekday where the kids are both at their daytime things. I'm not sure I did so before, but I sure as shit am never gonna do it going forward.The first thing Felix wants to do when I come into the kids' room to start the morning is sit down on the potty. Nevermind that he's wearing a diaper; he wants to sit on the potty and go pee. Buddy! I hope this is a sign that his eventual potty training will go well??Quentin's school starts in two weeks. (!!!!!) We swore at the beginning of summer that we would take a trip down to Monterey and see the Aquarium, and by god we're gonna fuckin do it a couple weekends from now:Day OneHave a normal morning/lunchDrive down during naptimeCheck into the hotelGet dinnerPut the kids to bedDay TwoWake up, breakfastSee some sights/go to a park or somethingBe there when the Aquarium opens at 10a🐟🐠🐡🦈🦦Drive home more or less during naptimeWish us luck! Not that we're leaving immediately, it's just that I would like whatever luck is headed our way to accumulate a little first, in the manner of a sand dune. Thank you. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "Does Sam Altman Know What He's Creating? The OpenAI CEO’s ambitious, ingenious, terrifying quest to create a new form of intelligence" (~$Atlantic) 

  • We've spent decades talking about "recycling" without also talking about the "reduce" and "reuse" parts of that particular trinity, which has sort of fucked us. (The Conversation) 

  • That said, The Scientists have invented a really good bio-derived plastic that's really, truly recyclable for real this time. (Lawrence Berkeley Lab) 

  • Strikes (or in this case, the threat of one) fucking work: UPS Teamsters won an amazing contract. (Motherboard) 

  • OpenAI shut down its "was this written by an AI" detector because it doesn't fuckin' work. (The Verge) 

  • The Scientists are worried the Atlantic conveyor belt current might collapse within our lifetimes, which would be incredibly bad. (Motherboard) 

  • Fast food chains are starting to look into putting EV chargers in their parking lots, which of fucking course they should, they're everywhere!!! It's embarrassing we didn't think of this right away!! (QSR) 

  • I didn't really want something new to worry about, but The Scientists ran a model on the dangers of ancient pathogens being defrosted from melting glaciers and such, and it's ............ a little scary. (The Conversation) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists think they've isolated the part of the rat brain responsible for playfulness and laughter; it involved a lot of tickling. You gotta open the paper to at least see the little diagrams. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have built a proof of concept for a soft 3D display that can pop bits of itself up to form images, shake beakers, sort balls, etc. Weirdly adorable for something so abstract. (U of Colorado Boulder) (Paper) 

  • The sample container from OSIRIS-REx touches down in a couple months, and we'll finally be able to see whether we got any asteroid bits all up ins or not. (Ars Technica) 

  • Surprising no one, Elon didn't even bother to secure the @x handle from Gene Hwang (a friend of mine, weirdly!) before launching his stupid rebrand of what we all will continue to refer to as Twitter until it stops working entirely. (TechCrunch) Instead, he just took it from him. Booooooooooo (Also TechCrunch) 

  • The Scientists discovered tons of new species of giant viruses in a nondescript patch of soil outside of Boston. Which means there's probably more of them everywhere. Neat! (Science) 

  • One unambiguously good use of The Machine is to try spotting asteroids that might want to hit us, and The Scientists report an early version is working great. (U of Washington) 

  • I didn't even know people were trying out robot preachers. Seems like the last place you'd want to put a robot, doesn't it? (American Psychological Assoc) 

  • The Scientists have invented a new way to look inside people that they call magnetic particle imaging, and it's surprisingly compact and portable. (U of Würzburg) (Paper) 

  • Another thing that's sort of embarrassing nobody figured out sooner: if you want to get good data on what traffic is like, how about mounting automated camera systems on city buses? (Ohio State) (Paper) 

  • Back in the day, when your particle accelerator acted up and you needed to clean it, you got yourself a ferret. (Science Alert) 

  • The James Webb spotted water hanging out in the protoplanetary disk of a star about 370ly away where rocky planets are likely to form, which is damn interesting because we still haven't entirely nailed down the answer to the question of where we got all our water from in the first place ourselves. (NASA) (Paper) 

  • If you've got a honeycomb and you want to start making bigger cells, the mathematically-proven best way to make the transition is to sprinkle some five- and seven-sided ones in there; interestingly, bees and wasps both arrived at the same conclusion independently of each other. (Science News) (Paper) 

  • Speaking of bees, actually, why do we as a species keep putting them on our money? (The Conversation) 

  • The Scientists say they've detected phosphine (a potential sign of life) on Venus again, for real this time. (Supercluster) 

  • Tripless psychedelics for therapy don't sound great to me, I'm just gonna say it. (Vox) 

  • When do Americans eat dinner? (Flowing Data) 

  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Machine isn't good at figuring out humor yet. (Cornell) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Photo by Megan Ruth on UnsplashReader Steve says: "Monster High Rise is definitely the name of a ska band, which means "Princess of the Unknown Court" is a probably ill-advised concept album way out of their trumpet-based comfort zone and into the Led Zep "Gollum Stole My Girl" area, inspired by the singer's breakup with his photographer girlfriend. Only about five people ever really got it, but for those people it's the best album ever made." 

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.