in which the Tooth Fairy has some help

June 26, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's sitting on a Bluesky account it made, but hasn't had the wherewithal to start finding and following people again 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe possibility that we may return to podcasting cannot be mathematically excluded!!!! In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 21: MIXERSummer is officially here and that means it's time to ring it in with an explosion of musical creativity!!!! Come play or come watch; either way it'll be something you've definitely never seen before, and really, aren't new experiences what we're after here??July 13 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  T E L L   Y O U R   F R I E N D S  + ++ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + +Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOUNew stuff alert: there's a bunch in the Etsy shop right now! Brilliant little statues for your garden or home! A place to put your fruit! A little buddy to hold your garlic! It's all happening! 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I'm putting this in here so I can be held accountable: I miss my friends and I need to get out and see them more. So I'm going to try to make lunch plans with at least one per week — possibly two??? — and actually follow through. If we're pals and you're reading this and we haven't hung out in months, watch your inbox!! Or just reply to this if you want! We're gonna do something soon. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin lost his first tooth this past week, one of four that the dentist prophesied would be coming out sometime in the nearish future.* Celebration!! Except that I've long suspected that the traditional under-the-pillow method of summoning the Tooth Fairy would be absolutely unworkable in our current house: the door to the kids' room makes a loud and utterly unavoidable paint-on-paint SNAP whenever it opens — which is actually useful for detecting when Quentin leaves his room unauthorized, so I haven't tried to mitigate it at all — rendering any kind of stealth approach useless.Instead, I've created the Tooth Fairy's Liaison, a friendly little guy with a dish who's perfectly happy to stand on the kitchen counter in an out-of-the-way spot and hold whatever teeth need to be held until the actual Tooth Fairy arrives to make the swap. We've settled on those gold dollar coins as the Tooth Fairy's primary means of wealth transfer, and Quentin was mildly but visibly impressed. A++ would combine my pandemic ceramics hobby with parenting again!!In Felix news, he caught another cold at the start of last week that took him until roughly Saturday to shake, so now he's more or less back to normal and full of beans. His daycare's still on vacation, though, so it's up to me to amuse and corral his boisterous little self. Week two! Let's do this!!!! (His daycare comes back online after July 4)* His frontmost top and bottom teeth, according to the x-rays, the loss of which it is said will probably produce a temporary lisp. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Almost everyone who's made net-zero pledges is all talk and no walk. (Nature) 

  • As the world gets warmer, the danger of fungal infections also rises; what are we doing about it? (Inverse) 

  • Yet again — again!! — The Scientists have demonstrated a method for creating sustainable liquid fuel, this time using ambient CO2 from the air, plastic waste, and the power of the sun. (U of Cambridge) (Paper) 

  • We keep building more reservoirs, but they're not filling as fast as we thought they would. (Texas A&M) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have identified a new flavor of depression that afflicts over a quarter of currently-diagnosed patients, and the usual medications don't help it as much. (Stanford Medicine) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have made real progress with an app that turns a smartphone into a thermometer that can tell if you've got a fever with no additional hardware. (U of Washington) (Paper) 

  • What if the internet isn't a massive town square at all, but a citywide sanitation system? (~$Atlantic) 

  • Given the mind-boggling enormity of their datasets these days, machine learning would be incredibly useful for biologists, but it's hard to learn and use; The Scientists aim to fix that by releasing a machine learning platform specifically for biologists with no experience. Its capabilities sound wild!! (Wyss Inst) (Paper) 

  • Advertisers these days (or at least in 2021) were using some wildly specific terms to label audience segments; take a look for yourself. (The Markup) 

  • Some Engineers have found a nice way to recover heavy metals from treated sewage sludge. (RMIT) 

  • Today I learned the common ancestor for all eukaryotic life on this planet is a group called the Asgard archaea. (UT Austin) (Paper) 

  • Even the CEO of Volkswagen admits touchscreen controls in cars are terrible and stupid. (Jalopnik) 

  • We inhale about a credit card's worth of microplastics a week. Where's it all going? (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have built a team of robots that work together to make maps of places they've never visited before, a crucial skill that's still in its relative infancy. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • If we're going to have flying cars, we need to worry about wind gusts around tall buildings. (RMIT) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists report a faint correlation between regular napping and maintaining the size of your brain as you age. (University College London) (Paper) 

  • Saildrones? Saildrones. (Ars Technica) 

  • I went in with some friends on a Dropout subscription and, having devoured all available seasons of Game Changer, pronounce it incredibly worthwhile. Get on it!! But if you must read about it first, go ahead. (IndieWire) 

  • A new company claims to have cracked the problem of scaling stem cell production. (proto.life) 

  • I'm not gonna tell you which parts of this are wrong or right for me; just gonna leave it on the table and walk away whistling. "The Dad Canon (Circa Now)" ($NYT) 

  • The Scientists have come up with a fascinating new definition for what constitutes life and the signs thereof that's useful, flexible, and efficient. (Science Alert) 

  • Wanna know who it's so hard to build self-driving cars? We don't even have good simulations for everyday human drivers. (U of Leeds) (Paper) 

  • Spotify sure doesn't seem to have any idea what to do with all those podcasts and podcast companies it bought, huh? (The Verge) 

  • The guy who thought ‘Oumuamua was an alien spacecraft is dredging a very specific part of the ocean floor looking for what he theorizes may be hard evidence of an interstellar alien probe. (Motherboard) 

  • A study of a couple hundred students asked to limit their social media use to half an hour a day reported drops in anxiety, depression, loneliness, and FOMO (unsurprisingly). (Iowa State) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers think they've cracked a design for an electric motor that's got a pretty wild power:weight ratio. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The Scientists are looking into recovering precious raw materials from wastewater (Argonne Natl Lab) (Paper) 

  • Here are 25 Disney movies ranked from most to least faithful to their original source material. (Polygon) 

  • When we experience pain, brain waves briefly wash over our neural tissue in patterns that differ from person to person just like fingerprints. (U of Essex) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

Photo by Yohan Marion on Unsplash(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Photo by Ivan Maljarenko on UnsplashNo reader interpretations came in for this one; looking at it again, I think this is the first and only album in an abortive attempt at a genre called "Mars rock." No other data is available. 

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.