important Crib Crew updates within

April 20, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's been sheltering in place for 40 days and counting. How are you? 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway137 - The Costco of the Middle Ages"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Amy ponder a superior assortment of ideas from two different lists, including innovations for travel, entertainment, and vampire defense.""Nightmares are dreams, too, friend." This episode absolutely bursts with quotable moments and candidates for titles, but then what else was even possible with Amy's third appearance. Note for whoever wants to keep track: this was recorded on day 8 of my particular quarantine count.Speaking of counting, we're holding steady at 31 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts, but what if this is the week that a couple of you bump it up to a nice symmetrical 33?? I'm willing to be surprised.Instant Band Night 15: POSTPONEDProbably not on May 14, right? Can we agree that we'll look to July as the month we release all of our pent-up Instant Band Night energy? Can the East Bay Community Space even hold that much party within its walls?? I'll update the event date later, but you can still look at the very very good text if you want to just daydream about that day.It's also still on Facebook if you're there, too* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.If I wanted to: 

  1. Get ahold of a bunch of back issues of something like National Geographic

  2. Take out all the pages that had pictures of ocean fish

  3. Put those pages together into a simple pamphlet / magazine / lay-flat book

What would be a cheap and easy way to make that happen? Or would that be a crazy amount of work no matter how I wanted to slice it? Keep in mind that I have basically zero free time. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.One pee thing and one non-pee thing this week, folks.Pee ThingWe've gotten to the point now where this happens: 

  1. Quentin puts a tiny amount of pee into his pants

  2. He tells us he needs to pee

  3. We sit him on the potty

  4. He puts the rest in the potty

This is obviously better than putting all the pee into his pants, but still isn't ideal. We want to permanently replace that current first step with "Quentin realizes he needs to pee," which happens sometimes, but not reliably. After 3 pairs of pants went into the laundry this morning, we took to just sitting him on the potty every hour or so after his afternoon nap (he's demonstrated that he can go up to 3 hours without peeing, so an hour seems like a reasonable frequency); he wasn't a huge fan, but he did comply, and we did get some pee in there every time. Fingers crossed that this will just be an intermediate stage to that ideal first step.Non-Pee ThingIn an utterly inscrutable turn of events, Cozy Doggy has been demoted from the Crib Crew for reasons unknown. Sometimes during the day Quentin likes to play in his crib with a bunch of pillows, and for this duty Cozy Doggy (as well as other non-Crib Crew pals) is granted access, but he has definitely been kicked off the list for bedtime. In Cozy Doggy's place: Picard and Worf (!!!!!!!!!!) are now required to be present in the crib when night falls. All Starfleet personnel, report to bedtime stations; repeat, report to bedtime stations. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The universe may be expanding lopsidedly. If that's true, then our entire understanding of its structure might go right out the fucking window. What a time to be alive! (Scientific American) 

  • Trying to harvest water from fog with mesh screens is a valid idea, but some guys at Virginia Tech had an apparent genius breakthrough in the form of "what if you just got rid of the horizontal wires?" that resulted in a 2-20x improvement in yield. (Virginia Tech) 

  • You don't need to have an electrical/computer engineering degree to get the ridiculousness of this thread by someone who just wanted a functioning remote and went way, way, way down a truly madness-inducing rabbit hole. (Thread by @Foone on Thread Reader) 

  • The state of California is collectively saving $40M a day on traffic accident costs during this quarantine; it might go up to a cool billion by the time we're through. Holy fucking shit. (UC Davis) 

  • Highsnobiety ran a survey on its readership whose results may be of some interest. (HS) 

  • I clicked on this Twitter thread for the phrase "underestimating the athleticism of crabs" alone and was absolutely not disappointed in the slightest. (Dr. Sarah McAnulty on Twitter) 

  • Speaking of Twitter, one of Friday's main characters was almost certainly this fool; note the combination of his shitty take and his profile pic before you click on this absolute 400 octillion gigaton roast of a reply. 

  • Succinct: "The Answer to All of Your Social Distancing Loophole Questions Is No" (Vice) 

  • We're closing in on the answer to the question "if matter and antimatter were both present at the beginning of the universe, why didn't they annihilate each other completely and leave an empty void of nothingness -- why is there matter here at all?" Turns out: neutrinos. (Imperial College London) 

  • If we work at it consistently for three decades, we can unfuck the ocean. Just, you know, three decades of coordinated, concentrated effort. Internationally. For three decades. (Anthropocene) 

  • Here are the real food expiration dates, everybody. (~$NYT) 

  • What, and I must emphasize this very strongly, the fuck: researchers were able to induce mouse skin cells to transform into light-receptive rod cells suitable for transplantation into the retina without turning them into stem cells first. ??????? (National Eye Institute) 

  • I did not know this: the mahogany tree family has been around since the literal time of the dinosaurs. (U of Kansas) 

  • If a disaster happens and a bunch of volunteers show up to help, what's the best way to put them to work? (NC State) 

  • Here's a good read on how infectious disease has played a role in bathroom design. (CityLab) 

  • A fairly comprehensive-sounding study concludes that screens and tech and social media actually don't have an impact on kids' social abilities; if anything, there's been a slight improvement since the 90s. (Ohio State) 

  • Of course Australians and their nation of danger were the ones to figure this out: it's possible an opioid-free painkiller could be derived from molecules in tarantula venom. Yes, there's a picture of a rancho on the page. Just a heads-up there. (U of Queensland) 

  • Antivaxxers actually think differently than we do (they consistently overestimate the likelihood of negative events). (Texas Tech) 

  • Solitude is a skill and you can get better at it. (Vox) 

  • The countries with the best responses to the rona have been led by women; this is probably not a coincidence. (Fortune) 

  • What if ........... what if water is really two liquids mixed together? No, seriously. Chemists are asking themselves this question, because it would actually explain a lot. (Chemistry World) 

  • Brands are giving away some of their secret recipes thanks to the rona. (Vice) 

  • One writer found a paper on the resilience of flowers to be a comforting pandemic read. (Vox) 

  • Not only was 'Oumuamua not an alien probe, there might be trillions of them, at least according to one set of simulations (gravity does weird things, y'all). (UC Santa Cruz) 

  • The answer to the question "Why don't reporters just walk out of Trump's daily sewage-mouth bullshit session?" turns out to have many facets, some of them less comfortable than others. (PressThink) 

  • Thank fuck the Atlantic is making its rona coverage free, because it's very good: here's a look at what our near-term future has in store for us. (Atlantic) 

  • At least you aren't self-isolating in a literal ghost town? (NY Post) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some Federation starship classes and names that an online neural network gave me after I fed it two lists of canonical onesEmber-class starship USS SantiagoWaxian Empire-class starship USS BushelfunkPaladin of Wyo-class starship USS Fabulous Iowa 

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.