impediments to homemade surfactant manufacture

September 16, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that woke up a little too late to bear witness to the first rain of the season, but welcomes it anyway. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway123 - Oops, All Roddenberries"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Kelly, and special guest Molly explore splendid ideas for breakfast cereal and TV before tackling celebrity culture and space junk."Molly gave us an idea at the end of this episode that will send you into a momentary trance as you imagine how much better public transit would be if it could be put into practice.✨ NICE ✨We've hit 25 ratings in Apple Podcasts, a goal we set because someone somewhere told us 25 was a magic number to hit and we believed them because why not. And you know what? WE THANK YOU. This would still be an amazing opportunity for you to leave a rating if you haven't, not to mention a lovely review (even one that tries to convince me of the value of mayonnaise), because at some point we're going to record another set of episodes and we'll be shouting the praises of our reviewers to all carbon-based lifeforms within range.Instant Band Night: Lucky 13It's happening! It's on the 14th of November! Tell everyone.EV-RY-OOOOONE!! [gary_oldman.jpg]😎 http://bit.ly/instantbandnight13 😎Would it be weird if we encouraged people to wear their Halloween costumes, even though it's two full weeks later? I mean, Halloween is great and people only get to wear the costumes once -- seems unfair, nahmean? 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I bought a handheld bubble machine from Amazon because of a reason (Quentin) (Quentin is the reason): it's essentially a gun that fires bubbles. It's hand-operated -- no batteries, no weird noises -- and one pull of the trigger both draws bubble fluid out of the reservoir bottle and into a spreader ring while also spinning up a crank that powers a tiny blower fan aimed at said ring. The design of the whole mechanism is honestly impressive while also being just complex enough that a single part going out of alignment essentially junks the whole thing. No wonder it came in a pack of three from a company in China that I swear had a name generated by a neural network for only fifteen bucks. I'm on my second one; the third and last bubble gun sits and waits for its day in the sun.Anyway, the point is that this thing is pretty decent, but it consumes a fair amount of bubble fluid (perhaps at the direction of a certain tiny someone); the onboard bottle holds maybe 2oz, and I can go through an entire bottle in a day. So I decided to try some recipes I found on the internet for homemade bubble solution. Friends, I am here to tell you that either I emit a localized physics distortion field that prevents homemade bubble solution from working, or these recipes are some goddamn nonsense. On paper it seems like they should work: water + dish soap + glycerine or corn syrup for viscosity. But nope, nothing. They are WEAK. I usually like to do things myself, but I've discovered that I can get a 2L bottle of "real" bubble solution from Target for $5 -- an amount of bubble fluid that seems unimaginably extravagant, a reservoir that will last for eons, a bottle that will see the great wheel of the galaxy undergo at least a full rotation before it empties. I think I'm gonna get it tomorrow; may it not go out of stock at the Albany location. You're on notice, Albany, CA: that bottle of bubble fluid is MINE.What's new with you as the summer draws to a close? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.There's a new thing Quentin's been doing that's simultaneously adorable and heartbreaking, which is sometimes when he cries, he'll announce it while he's doing it. It sounds like he's saying "Quentin crying" or "Quentin cried" or maybe just "Quentin cry," but it's so, so sad while also being really, really cute. A couple times he's also said "I cry," which is amazing use of the pronoun -- we celebrate all of his grammatical discoveries. That's normal, right? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • If you stop to think about it, it's crazy that the entirety of life on this entire planet is built from 20 amino acids. What's weirder is that there might be strong mathematical reasons why that is, which means it's possible that life elsewhere in the universe could be based on a similar, if not identical, set. Right? (Tokyo Institute of Tech via EurekAlert) 

  • Here's an assessment of the actual factors that should go into making good housing policy. (Brookings Institute) 

  • Low-power thermoelectric generators turn out to be fairly inexpensive to build. Huh! (Vice) 

  • I must've missed this back in August: a good longread on the current "nobody actually seems to agree how fast the universe is expanding and therefore how big it is" problem. (Quanta) 

  • Remember how WeWork disclosed all kinds of wild shit in its initial IPO filing? Yeah, they're changing how all that nonsense works to make it slightly less cuckoo bananas. But here's my question: did they not fucking know how completely insane that stuff was in the first place? Seems like they didn't? Why would anyone want to get in on that now? (Fortune) 

  • Is democracy about to eat itself? Honestly, this paper sounds like it might be kinda convincing; I'll let you know once I've read it. Let me know if you want a copy! You could get it yourself from the professor's UC Irvine website, but it makes you join some kind of bullshit academia social network and then you can only get it in .docx form; I did, but then uploaded it to Google Drive for "editing" so I could download a copy as a PDF for the purposes of reading on my Kindle. You don't have to go through all that nonsense! Just reply to this email. (Politico)UPDATE: I'm halfway through the paper; did this guy not have a fucking editor? There's missing/extra articles and tense mismatches all over the place. It doesn't detract from the message, but it is distracting as hell. 

  • There's water on a planet about 110 light years away! (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • Motherfucker: why didn't I think of this? Real cheese can be derived from non-animal sources if you can induce bacteria to create the relevant proteins. There's a company working on it right now. (The Spoon) 

  • Color-changing ink that can be reprogrammed is now a thing, at least in demo form. (Gizmodo) 

  • Well, shit: serial killers may be more common than we thought. ($Atlantic) 

  • There's a weirdly compelling case to be made for removing age limits on voting altogether. (Vox) 

  • Monarch butterflies bred in captivity don't seem have a migration instinct, which is actually real bad if you want to interbreed them with wild ones. (Nature) 

  • Self-healing soft parts for robots actually make sense, I promise. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Milo's broke; my step just got 36% springier. (Vice) 

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.