in which a great idea is had once again

February 07, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's happy to be back in its real house but has yet to put the office shelves back up 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe edit on the last episode we recorded is almost finished, but as you can imagine, moving back to your real house after having moved temporarily to a new house for almost a month while still managing a baby and a 4yo is not without its logistical challenges.As of the time of this writing, there are still 43 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings, plus howevermany wonderful reviews. You have the power to take us to 45 and beyond: you!!Instant Band Night 15: TIME WARPWe've all seen the news about the potential of vaccines for kids under 5 to emerge much sooner than we thought, but I'm not going to hold out hope until Quentin is physically sitting in a chair being handed a sticker. March is almost certainly off the table; May, then? How does May sound? (Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  r e t u r n i n g   i n   2 0 2 2  + ++ +  h a n g   i n   t h e r e  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I've talked before about how our TV's built-in Chromecast is set to display random selections from Google Photos albums I've specified. The thing I'm now finding out is that I'm getting sick of my pictures. So! I've created an album for my friends to just drop photos into. 

  • Art you like?

  • A meme you enjoy?

  • Good picture of you?

  • A cat you saw?

(The only real rule is that it has to be Safe For 4-Year-Old in case he glances at it accidentally, though generally we leave the TV off when the kids are awake.)I'm thinking of it as a Friend-Curated Museum of Anything & Everything. I've already admitted a few pals (or guest curators, if you will) into it, and from all appearances they absolutely understand the assignment. If you would like to join their ranks, let me know! This experiment has been a delight and it's only a few days old! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.The return to our real house, combined with what appear to be his first teeth attempting to emerge from his bottom front gums,* has disrupted Felix's nighttime sleep just enough that we can't really be in the bedroom with him, so for the time being we're sleeping down in the office, where there's a pull-out couch and a door we can close. Not sure how long we're going to keep at it, but my guess is we'll be here until his 10p wakeup is reliably eliminated at the very least. The office can be made surprisingly cozy, and we're mere steps away from the bathroom, which is convenient! Further updates as events warrant.* They don't seem to bother him all the time, even though we can feel and see a faint white line of tooth appearing? So we give him the painkillers when he seems to actually need them, but his demeanor is as carefree and cheerful as ever a shocking percentage of the time. It's either funny or dismaying how little I remember from Quentin's teething. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "The Coronavirus Will Surprise Us Again: The variant after Omicron could look very different from any yet." (~$Atlantic) I guess maybe pair that with this? "The future of the pandemic is looking clearer as we learn more about infection" (NPR) 

  • Friday's issue of Garbage Day has a good meditation on the dogshit garbage pile that Facebook's content team seems content to let fester; it's the first section, "Facebook Made Its Own World And Now It’s Stuck In It". (Garbage Day) 

  • For anyone else who's been having the climate jibblies, the good news is you're not alone; the bad news is they're real and happening for real reasons. ($NYT) 

  • This is just a really good comic. (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) 

  • Museums need someplace to store the art they're not displaying; what if the storage space also let people look at what was inside? (Architectural Digest) 

  • Pareidolia has a gender bias. Probably unsurprisingly. (Science Alert) 

  • Polar bears have moved into an abandoned weather station; yes there are pictures. (Guardian) 

  • "The NFT Ecosystem Is a Complete Disaster" (Vice) 

  • Research indicates it may actually be possible to fix The Algorithm. (U of South Florida) 

  • All the black holes we've known about up til now were only spotted because they were busy eating something, and the glow shows up for miles away. We've finally gotten evidence of a "rogue" black hole that's just sitting out there, not near any stars, not close enough to eat much of anything, just ........ just waiting. (Syfy) 

  • Why's it taken this long to try using human urine as fertilizer? (rhetorical) (Guardian) 

  • The Scientists have demonstrated once again a new carbon capture technology that appears to be extremely promising. (U of Delaware) 

  • Preliminary results seem to indicate bikeshare systems and mass transit actually complement each other. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) 

  • We assume that plants will spread to new habitats as the climate changes, but a new model tells us there might not be enough animals to actually physically spread the seeds around fast enough. Ruh roh? (Anthropocene) 

  • "The People Who Run This Country Are All Too Damn Old" (Vice) 

  • Quick tip: it's possible to zoom in/out on Google Maps on your phone with just one finger. Just double tap and hold, then swipe up or down. I didn't know this until today, so I'm gonna pass it on in case you didn't either! (The Verge) 

  • Delta's CEO wants everyone who's acted up on a plane to be put on the no-fly list and honestly, I'm for it. (Reuters) 

  • What even are TED talks? "Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED’s longtime curator, puts it, 'We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something.' And yet, TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned." (~$The Drift) 

  • Oh thank fuck: the February video guy hasn't milkshake ducked. (Daily Beast) 

  • A recent assay of benthic DNA points to the strong possibility that there's just a shitload of life down there that we've never seen before, even now, here, in this, the year 2022. (MARUM) (Paper) 

  • The whole "celebrities flogging NFTs" thing isn't a conspiracy. They just all exist on a stratum of society where everyone knows each other, and also what else are they going to do with all that money (rhetorical, derisive). (Read Max on Substack) 

  • An interesting mini-thread on Twitter led me to a couple papers I want to read and I thought you might too. (Ethan Mollick on Twitter) (Community Interaction and Conflict on the Web) (Does Transparency in Moderation Really Matter?) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumGirls With Arms, You Know You Feel It Too(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because now I'm curious) 

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.