in which we hold scientific publishing ACCOUNTABLE for once

January 09, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's going to have to prepare psychologically to take down the Xmas tree this week 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I will recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. 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 18: RECHARGE🎉 IT'S THIS WEEK 🎉Come celebrate the new year and whatever that means to you onstage with some new musician friends or in the crowd with your fellow audience members! You don't have to be a musician; you just have to like having fun.We'll see you Thursday; bring a few pals and let's see what we're all capable of!!Add it to your calendar (venue address and all) by clicking here.In case you need a refresher: Instant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot to play a song they'll write in 5 minutes. If you play music, you can be one of 'em, and if you don't, you can chill and watch. I absolutely guarantee you've never seen anything like it.🎼 MUSIC! 🎼🚀 COURAGE! 🚀✨ CREATIVITY! ✨January 12 20236p$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 don't have anything here for you this week; come to Instant Band Night if you can, or send a few friends the link. It's right here: https://bit.ly/instantbandnight18Except wait I do have somethingI need to report an 8-year-old failure of scientific editorial process on the part of the Royal Society. I no longer remember how I ran across this, but in 2014 The Scientists put a hamster wheel out in the wild to see if non-lab animals would run on it, which: yes. Here's the paper.BUT ALSO: some slugs used it?? There's even a picture! So tell us about the slugs!!! The paper does tell us that an unspecified number of snails apparently used the wheel, but they couldn't figure it out — causing "haphazard rather than directional movement of the wheel and were therefore excluded from the analysis." But I guess the slugs did figure it out? And yet there's nothing about the slugs! How many were there? How fast did they go? Slugs were the second-highest fraction of species to use the wheel and yet there's nothing in the paper. Nothing!!! Royal Society, you fucked up. You fucked up. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Last Wednesday was the day Felix figured out walking is good and fun and should be done all the time. We've got a toddler on our hands now, I guess, although he's still a baby to us until he verbally tells us he's not himself. Should he choose to disavow baby status before then, he is required to submit a notarized copy of Form 10B (CA variant) to his parents, doctor, and licensed insurance representative in triplicate. That's how it works, people!!!** There is one alternative indicator, which will be: whenever the top of his head stops smelling good. Quentin definitely is Just A Kid Now, but Felix still has baby head smell. Parents know what I'm talkin' 'bout. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The new XBB1.5 flavor of covid is more transmissible but no more severe. You got your bivalent booster, right? (~$Atlantic) 

  • "Why C-SPAN’s Camera Work Is Suddenly So Interesting", written during the Kevin McCarthy shitshow. (Vice) 

  • The FDA just made it possible for pharmacies to sell abortion pills (with a prescription); no idea how long this'll last before the Republicans try to kill it, but it's nice to see right now at least. (BBC) 

  • Reading this writeup on the stuff big tech companies have conceded to European users because of EU regulations might make you mad about the way shit works here; this is the correct reaction. (Brookings Inst) 

  • The cops killed a record number of people last year, just FYI. (Vice) 

  • Some Engineers at Caltech have successfully launched a demo version of that whole "put a solar array in space and beam the power back to Earth with microwaves" concept and will begin testing it soon. (Caltech) 

  • Our olfactory neurons may be deliberately calibrated to cut off when the concentration of odor molecules they're reading goes above a certain threshold, which seems counterintuitive! (UC Santa Barbara) 

  • Everything we buy is actually getting worse and here's why. (Vox) 

  • Hello? Is you? You think much about ethics? You like to argue about the AI? You want input from developers? You seek concrete recommendations, yes? Is paper. Is interesting! You read now! No charge! Read now! (Paper) 

  • The Scientists are worried that as the planet warms up, burying carbon at the bottom of the ocean may not work as well as it oughta thanks to bacterial metabolisms revving up. (Rice U) As if that's not bad enough, The Scientists also think global warming might severely fuck up the circulation of extremely important deep ocean currents, which maybe doesn't sound so bad but would actually be an enormous disaster. (UC Irvine) 

  • It turns out all the plants that grow in NYC absorb an astonishing amount of its carbon emissions, according to the latest measurements. (Columbia Climate School) (Paper) 

  • "Good job, internet: You bullied NFTs out of mainstream games: Or at the very least, made fun of them enough to keep us all from losing our grip on reality." (PC Gamer) 

  • Here's a good writeup on all the stuff the James Webb Space Telescope has helped us with in its first year; may there be many more. (The Verge) 

  • Vaccines aren't just for people: the USDA has granted approval for a vaccine for honeybees with what I think is a pretty elegant delivery mechanism to protect against something called foulbrood disease. (Guardian) 

  • If you were looking for a meditative longread from Sarah Marshall about our cultural fascination with true crime stories, you're in luck! (Believer) 

  • What is going on out there: Some Engineers in Switzerland have created a device that pulls water out of the air and turns it into hydrogen when you shine sunlight on it (EPFL), and meanwhile Some Engineers at the U of Michigan have made a solar panel that can turn existing water into hydrogen when blasted with sunlight, even at high temperatures. (U of Michigan) 

  • How come other animals are hairy or furry and we aren't? The Scientists are applying something I guess we'll have to call computational comparative genetics to figure it out. (U of Utah) 

  • This! Week! In! Plastics! The Scientists have figured out how to turn plastic waste into a promising form of charcoal. (UC Riverside) Elsewhere, The Scientists have demonstrated a device that can turn plastics and CO2 into industrially useful chemicals using solar power. (U of Cambridge) 

  • "The Ancient Wisdom Stored in Trees: What very old trees can teach us about life, death, and time." (Nautilus) 

  • Someone on Twitter linked to this paper in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases from 2015 that seems to show kids under 5 have some sort of virus (symptomatic or not) fully half the goddamn year, and if there are two kids in your house (regardless of age) at least one of them will have some sort of virus (symptomatic or not) for the same amount of time. WheeeeEEEEEeeEEEEEEEEE (Paper) 

  • We hear a lot about how the ancient Romans had magically durable concrete, but The Scientists have figured out exactly what makes it so magical. (MIT) 

  • Your Star Trek technobabble-adjacent term for the week is here: Some Engineers have worked out a new way to refrigerate things that they call "ionocaloric cooling." (Lawrence Berkeley Lab) 

  • "I Just Want To Start Lifting Weights Without Getting Red-Pilled" (McSweeney's) 

  • A study of 305,726 people across 57 countries shows that women are, on average, better than men at a test that measures "theory of mind." No country at all showed results where men did better on average than women. (U of Cambridge) (Paper) 

  • A London furniture restorer figured out what those dots in ancient cave paintings are for. (BBC) 

  • It's way too fucking early to start thinking about 6G, but what the hell: Some Engineers are already considering using the human body to harvest waste energy from theoretical 6G transmitters to power wearable sensors and such. (UMass Amherst) 

  • Maciej Ceglowski (he of the Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel) has begun to lay out a compelling case for not going to Mars. Seriously. Read it! (Idle Words) 

  • Work on a vaccine for malaria is still chugging along respectably. (U of Maryland) 

  • There's a truly wild-looking airplane design undergoing testing that Some Engineers hope will replace standard passenger jets someday. (Robb Report) 

  • "How to spot AI-generated text: The internet is increasingly awash with text written by AI software. We need new tools to detect it." (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • Some Engineers are wondering why we need to build boats that float completely out of the water at all when a half-sunk hull performs better. (Washington State) 

  • The Kids are shitposting on LinkedIn now. Does this mean I have to log in? (Vice) 

  • The Scientists think they've got a handle on a technique that can identify which genetic changes correspond to evolution in physical features over geologic timespans. Dang! (U of Würzburg) 

  • Fungi make all kinds of useful chemicals, just not in laboratory settings; The Scientists have finally figured out a way to prod them into it. (Rice U) 

  • Seems like this issue of the newsletter is packed with hardware-related news and I kind of love it: Some Engineers have miniaturized lasers with colors other than red, which is great news for a lot of different fields. (Columbia U) 

  • This one's from last year but it's funny: Australian ibises have worked out how to eat invasive cane toads by deliberately antagonizing them so they'll release their poisons, then picking them up and washing them off in the creek before devouring them. (ABC News) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumForest Fiction, The Choice of Persephone(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.