i CAN kick it

March 11, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that skipped a week unexpectedly thanks to *~*~~*~* and is putting this issue together to an old Tribe Called Quest album. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway100 - Co-Host Spectactular Part 2"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Kelly (@enthusiosity), and special co-host guest Besha (@besha) unveil offbeat ideas for literature, pool safety, and fashion before asking questions about sleep that deserve answers."Welcome to, as we put it, "the part of the Idea Factory that OSHA isn't allowed into." Also, I'm right about Spam.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcatcher of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal).Instant Band Night 9: PI DAYIT IS THE WEEK OF INSTANT BAND NIGHTIF YOU CAN, YOU SHOULD BE THERE🎃 IT'LL BE NICE TO SEE YOU 🎃Eventbrite // Facebook 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.We're at a hundred episodes of the podcast and still going, people. I wanted to lay out a top ten of my favorites, but to be honest, I haven't had the time -- I caught a case of food poisoning that laid me the fuck out for a full day, and only in the last couple of days have my guts truly recovered fully. Also, I suspect it's going to be hard to pull ten favorites out of the field; in a sense, they're kind of all my favorites for different reasons? So here's a question: do you have a standout? What is it? Or them, if there's more than one?If you don't yet listen to the podcast, here's something I about it that I don't know if I've been good at articulating in the past: as weird as it sounds, the whole point of it isn't completely about Me and My Kooky Ideas. Part of what I'm trying to get at is that there's almost certainly weird and delightful ideas that exist somewhere in the back of just about everybody's mind, and we should try to pay more attention to them. Yes, it is true that the guests I bring on invariably end up having a much better time than they thought they would, but I don't think it's 100% because I/my archive are just That Entertaining -- I think some nonzero part of it is delight at realizing how much raw craziness exists in a human mind (as opposed to my specific mind), and that maybe it could exist in theirs, too. Some people are more in touch with that inner fount of creativity than others, of course, but it's in everybody I know. Strangely, I think this also partially factors into why my co-hosts and I took pains (and mostly succeeded) to make a thing that anyone really can jump into at just about any point and be entertained; there's no continuity to speak of and no recurring inside jokes. It's meant to be modular and consumed in any order, sort of like this newsletter.Speaking of which: an experiment in organic growth, if you're down? Just forward this to someone you think would like it. I gather this happens already, but I'm curious to see what happens if I try to actively campaign for it every now and then. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.One of the first soft toys that Quentin showed any affinity for was a bunny, and now he has a larger one that he likes to snuggle with for sleeping. We've been mostly successful at teaching him the word "bunny," but like "duck," it's become another all-purpose noun for him, and also he seems to like substituting the first consonant with an "m" sound instead. So he ends up pointing at things and saying "money!" a lot. You're not wrong, kid. You're not wrong.In other news, Mavis bought him a set of really great fridge magnets that include all the capital letters, numerals, and a set of math symbols for some reason (it just seems weird because the amount of math you can do with only one copy of each number seems highly limited). I'm noticing interesting things about the ones that are Quentin's clear favorites: he loves the T and the 7, and keeps taking the + sign, the ÷, and the x (for multiplication as opposed to the letter X) and trying to stick them to other surfaces. There must be something about the similarities that he likes -- or maybe he just likes similarity? I wonder if he's going to notice the M and the W soon, maybe with the 3 lumped in there? Just gonna wait and see on that one. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • This'll be something to keep in mind once Quentin gets older: do we have to play with our kids all the time? (Slate) 

  • Too many people are 'gramming this one particular street in Paris, and the people who live on it want to shut it off from tourists. Honestly, I don't blame 'em. (CityLab) 

  • A good longread on the current state of the investigation into generating electricity at scale from poop.(Gizmodo) 

  • “Be yourself” is terrible advice. (The Outline) 

  • A math-adjacent look into what the happiest day on the internet was within the last decade -- actual decade, not Trump Time Dilation decade. (The Ringer) 

  • RING DING DING DING: it's possible that we have to sleep so our nerve cells can repair themselves! (Nature) 

  • Oof: what's the ultimate fate of all those "Uber-for-x" companies? (Atlantic) Pair this one with an ominously hard-to-argue-with Thousands of New Millionaires Are About to Eat San Francisco Alive. (NYT) 

  • If you haven't been following the Quadriga mess (and why would you), here's a timeline on the entire thing thus far. Cryptocurrency is the future of money, everybody! (Amy Castor) 

  • Here's a hot take from a Stanford epidemiologist on whether we as a species are likely to survive the next century. (Stanford) 

  • I admit this is something I've not thought about, but the scale of the problem is enormous: We have to fix fashion if we want to survive the climate crisis. (Fast Company) 

  • Hmm. Point: trying to be happy all the time will only lead to disappointment; instead, try to embrace sadness, how about? (Quartz) 

  • Scientists have demonstrated a way to turn CO2 back into coal. Huh. (RMIT U via EurekAlert) 

  • The Israeli lunar lander contains a 30 million-page library of human knowledge and art just in case we fuck things up irrevocably down here or get wiped out by an asteroid or something. (NBC News) 

  • Worth clicking around in: An interactive exploration of the geography of prosperity. (Brookings Institute) 

  • Absolutely no part of this long, long article on what an unbelievable bunch of complete fucking idiots the Trump dipshits are when it comes to foreign policy will surprise you, but here it is anyway. (Politico) 

  • I'm not gonna lie: I dig the Lime scooters. I've used them a few times for last-mile transit to/from BART to my house on days when I didn't feel like walking, and they were great. But holy shit, the economics of those things look like they might be a full nightmare. I guess I should enjoy them while they last?? (Oversharing) 

  • Literally the only use case I want explored for autonomous robot weaponry are the goddamn sentry cannons from the movie Aliens, for the sole explicit purpose of guarding terraforming installations from xenomorph attack and that's it. (Quartz) 

  • Nasty emotions can spread through populations in essentially viral patterns, but the pattern can be disrupted if you have the courage/energy to be kind, which I should really work on mustering. (NPR) 

  • There's No Such Thing as a Dangerous Neighborhood. (CityLab) 

  • Yesssssss: testing has begun on an autonomous submarine robot designed to explore deepwater environments; it's the very first baby step toward a ✨Europa probe✨ (Business Insider) 

  • Pinterest has been able to tackle anti-vax bullshit on its site without any huge fanfare; hint hint, all other social networks. (Fast Company) 

  • So there's a feedback loop/doom spiral thing we need to watch out for, where if the planet reaches a certain temperature, clouds stop forming readily, which means there's less of them to reflect heat, and you can probably do the math from there. Not great! (Quanta) 

  • The Glowing Squid That Illuminates the Strangeness of Nature is an extremely apt headline. (Atlantic) Speaking of squid, it might be possible to create new biodegradable plastics based on their ring teeth, but the catch is we have to do it through amplification of genetically modified bacteria, which I've been hearing about for years and don't for a minute believe is a technology we have anywhere near ready yet. (Motherboard) 

  • Here are a bunch of use cases that seem to always get proposed for blockchain, and why they're dumb. (SmartDec) 

  • Ornithopter-style flight might actually work better with four wings. You know what, why not. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Defining your identity by what you do for work is a path to abject misery, surprising ...... at least a few people, I guess? (Atlantic) 

  • DARPA is backing an effort to create an AI-powered bullshit detector for social science studies, and it's not a bad idea. (Vox) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumSadcannon, All the Sunshine Your Tiny Brain Can Handle 

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.