in which highly specific nomenclature is contemplated

August 17, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that thanks whichever storm god is responsible for this temporary reprieve in our Bay Area heatwave. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway145 - A Crimped Whelk"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Arlette (@arletterocks) discover some deluxe notions for technology, as well as a surprisingly wide range of personal adornments."Arlette returns for another high-quality installment; how do you know it's high-quality? Three words that will make more sense to you after you've listened to it: "Tactical Polly Pocket."Not only did someone out there bring our total number of ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Apple Podcasts ratings to 33, but we garnered a new review from yet another unstoppable superhero -- our thanks eternal to you and your entire house!! Why not join the ranks of these incredible humans and etch your name indelibly into the halls of human achievement? What else were you going to do with the next few minutes??? Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberIt seems laughable to try to throw Instant Band Night without a proven vaccine in place. Let's see what's up in November 2021.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook* * 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.Let's look at it through the lens of The Good Place for a minute.One of the central binding threads of the entire show is how the characters approach their answer to the question "What do we owe each other?" It's good; it's very good.Assume the question has an answer. For the sake of argument, let's say the answer is something along the lines of "To treat everyone with humanity." Okay, good. There's an answer.But! Now there's a new question, isn't there?Q: What do we do with the people who refuse to honor this? Who actively refuse and even treat the question (and those who would ask it) with deliberate contempt? Do we owe these people anything? These specific people. Do we?I have a vague fear the Medium Ramble is just going to keep doing this until someone connects me to a moral philosophy professor. (does anyone out there know a moral philosophy professor) 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I don't know what you call this stage, but it's the one where we're reading a book and Quentin wants to know the name of everything on the page. Not what it's called -- that's a dolphin, that's an anglerfish, etc -- no. He wants to know their names. So we've been making up names for fish. And animals. And in the case of one Todd Parr book, shirts??? Some spreads have too many fish -- we can't name all the minnows in a school -- so there are some clone groups sprinkled in there because there just have to be.At no point have we tried to maintain continuity between reading sessions, because how could you. But there are some emergent rules:

  • Everything has people names

  • Aim for an even split down gender lines

  • Try as hard as possible to include all the cultures you can think of

In practice, this ends up sounding like: "That's Eddie. This one is Bethany. That's Paola. All those fish are named Chidi. That one is Yolanda. That's Hyun-Lee. That's Rachel. These three fish are all named Charles. This one is Hitomi." It's fun, but I think I could use more names, and I'm definitely only as good as my own cultural exposure. Send me some names you like! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Winter's not gonna be a good time rona-wise, folks. (Stat) 

  • We have everything we need to decarbonize our energy grid by 2035. The writeup on Vox is interesting, but the actual handbook is electrifying (ha) reading. (Vox) (Handbook link) 

  • Android devices now constitute a massive earthquake detection network. (Ars Technica) 

  • Take that neck gaiter study with a big ol' grain of salt, folks. (Slate) 

  • Those social justice slideshows really are all over Instagram; here's why. (Vox) 

  • Boogaloo bullshit is still all over Facebook. (Vice) So is holocaust denial content. (Guardian) 

  • As a quirky economic indicator, the "lipstick index" no longer works. What are some other ones that might? (~$Marker on Medium) 

  • Here's a quick analysis of what enabled South Korea's stellar response to the rona and if there's anything we can adapt for ourselves (short answer: one thing out of three, in a perfect dreamworld). (CU Denver) 

  • I just discovered the following things in rapid succession: Andrew Bird is on Instagram, he has an extensive library of videos in his IGTV tab, he owns at least one 5-string violin, and now I'm unreasonably tempted to try to track one down, despite the fact that I get mine out literally a single-digit number of times per year. ("Action/Adventure" on Instagram) 

  • Let's all imagine a future where the bricks we use to build things are also storing power for us. (Washington U in St. Louis) If not that, then how about upcycled plastic bottles? (UC Riverside) 

  • Scientists looked at how coffee stains form to work out a seemingly great method for printing electronic circuits. (U of Cambridge) 

  • Evidence mounts for a salt water ocean under the surface of Ceres. (Space) 

  • The Army is figuring out drone swarms. (US Army blog) 

  • In a couple centuries, digital bits will outnumber all the atoms in the planet. Okay. (AIP) 

  • Sea otters are inadvertently helping to restore much-needed seagrass in an estuary near Monterey. There are plenty of pics. (Guardian) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumHard Hat Area, It Was the Best You Could Do 

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.