in which all is well for at least half a second

October 10, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that was not able to resist the siren song of those cinnamon brooms they've got outside every Trader Joe's and now the front porch smells like Official Fall Scent™ 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Ignite SF #15I'm giving a talk at the next Ignite event in San Francisco! Ignite Talks are great: you get 5 minutes, and your slides advance automatically every 15 seconds. It's actually tonight, and it's already sold out, but I think there's going to be a livestream that'll be recorded? Watch this space.Idea Factory GiveawayIn the back half of 2022 I hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast is on that list. In the meantime, you can find its 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 17: GO TIMEI don't say this lightly: you have to come to the next Instant Band Night. It's the November one (add it to your calendar now!), which means it's the one where we get a cake and sing happy birthday to Quentin. No, he won't be there, but we'll take a video!!If you don't already know what Instant Band Night is, imagine a great party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. If you play music, you can be one of 'em, and if you don't, you can just watch. It is, and I'm not exaggerating here, fucking incredible.🎶🎸 IT WILL SOON BE TIME TO PARTY 🎸🎶🎶🎸 IN WHATEVER WAY YOU LIKE BEST 🎸🎶Nov 106p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I've got nothing here this time around, as I'm busy trying to cram my Ignite Talk into my memory. It shouldn't be hard — 5m, 20 slides, how difficult can it be? — but I'm running into a problem where memorizing it is also making me slightly sick of it, which can't be good for delivery, can it? How do theatre actors do this? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.The back half of last week saw the kids return to their school and daycare situations with no apparent complication, praise be to all the gods above and below. I've now just jinxed myself by mentioning it. That's how it works!!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • There's a rona surge coming our way that we could stave off or at least minimize if everyone got their goddamn booster. Get your booster!!!! (Ars Technica) 

  • Dare we allow optimism into the building??? "The Climate Economy Is About to Explode: A new report suggests that the Inflation Reduction Act could be even bigger than Congress thinks." (~$Atlantic) 

  • A survey of about 7100 people suggests the pandemic fucked us up mentally. (Science Alert) 

  • Not even the people at Meta building their stupid version of the metaverse like it enough to use it. (The Verge) 

  • The Uvalde school district has put its entire police department on suspension. Frankly I'm wondering how these motherfuckers are still mobile. Shouldn't the entire town hate their fucking guts? And it's not as if it would be hard to find out what they look like. (Texas Tribune) 

  • Some Engineers have invented what looks like ready-to-go industrial-scale devices that can turn CO2 into commercially useful chemicals onsite. (U of Waterloo) 

  • Laughing gas might be a viable exoplanetary biosignature. (UC Riverside) (Paper) 

  • Here's a longread on human composting. (The Verge) 

  • When you're faced with a closing window of opportunity — nearing the end of a trip, say — odds are good you'll lean toward doing something familiar rather than try something new, and now we have some idea why. (American Psychological Assoc) 

  • The Scientists have once again discovered yet another enzyme capable of breaking down plastics, this time at room temperature at neutral pH. HINT HINT HINT (Guardian) 

  • It may be old news that acts of kindness can help your own physical and mental health, but now there's actual concrete advice you can follow, too. (The Conversation) 

  • Some Engineers have invented a small, cheap device capable of harvesting energy from a light breeze and turning it into enough electricity to power a sensor. (PDF from Nanyang Tech) 

  • What would it actually look like in geopolitical terms if we made contact with an alien civilization tomorrow? (Universe Today) (PDF of paper) 

  • What makes an ecosystem stable? The Scientists have boiled it down to just two metrics: how many species exist, and how strongly they interact with each other. I'm getting a weird sense of deja vu on this one, but I don't have the time to comb the archive right now. (MIT) 

  • I don't think I need to watch it, but we now have direct video evidence of orcas teaming up to kill great white sharks off the coast of South Africa that suggests they're passing the practice on to their fellow orcas who haven't yet learned how. (ESA) 

  • Here's what actual robotics experts think of Tesla's humanoid guy. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The Scientists have built a machine learning system that can make predictions about volleyball players' next moves with about 80% accuracy after digesting an unspecified amount of game footage. (Cornell) 

  • Instagram tourist traps turn out to be a low-level but utterly inescapable existential nightmare. This one's worth quoting at length: "Rather, what’s most disturbing about being in Positano is the knowledge that you have been suckered, and the realization that just because you have the means to go somewhere does not mean that you are owed anything more than the experiential equivalent of flying Basic Economy. To be in Positano as a middle-class person — someone who can afford to travel and take time off work but not, say, afford to buy real estate in the city where they live — is to feel like an idiot for believing it could have been any better, or that being there is actually a benefit to the lives of the people who live there." The whole thing's worth reading. (Vox) 

  • A small study that I nevertheless would've loved to be involved in discovered that petting real dogs as opposed to dog-sized stuffies has a measurably different impact on the prefrontal cortex. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have made the earth-shattering conclusion that warm, affectionate parenting during the teen years can help build strong relationships when they become young adults. Also they have actionable advice, which is a lot more useful. (Penn State) 

  • The more user and critic reviews for a movie on Rotten Tomatoes overlap topic-wise, the likelier it is to do better. (U Notre Dame) 

  • Literal therapeutic videogames for the elderly have been developed and tested with super interesting results. (UCSF) 

  • Okay, fine, empathizing with the opposition can help you make your case in a political argument, but I just don't know if I can do it. (Assoc for Psychological Science) 

  • Astronomers have found a pair of stars that orbit each other every 51 minutes; one of 'em is eating the other one, unsurprisingly. (MIT) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumJessica's Purse, Brunch for Homeless Clowns(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.