Instant Band Night 10 is this week

May 06, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that hopes to see you at Instant Band Night 10 on Thursday; if you're not in the SF Bay, please send a group of representatives selected according to the guidelines laid out in the community bylaws. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway108 - A Slytherin With Ravenclaw Rising"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Alison Haislip (@alisonhaislip) reveal deluxe notions for nerd entertainments both magical and non, as well as a top-notch bourbon recipe along with a highly useful website idea generated on the spot."What kind of dog person are you, dear reader? Short hair or long hair on dogs? You know my preference if you've listened to this episode, but now I have to know, because Alison surprised me.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcatcher of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal).Instant Band Night 10✨🎶🎸😎 THIS WEEK, FOLKS 😎🎸🎶✨Instant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. You absolutely do not have to get onstage to be welcome -- just come have a drink and watch! Details are right here, and as with all Instant Band Nights, do invite everyone you can think of -- just forward them this email, or send them the link! If you're on Facebook, here's an event you can use for maximum convenience. We'll see if anyone else brings cookies, 'cause I'm gonna. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Today happens to be the birthday of one of my favorite friends from the internet, who I know reads this newsletter because she emailed me about something I put in it a few issues back. Happy birthday, Kate: you've always been great. I didn't mean for that to rhyme.Speaking of friends from the internet, here's a lovely coincidence: It's just plain true that if it weren't for the messageboard era of the mid 2000s, my entire life as I know it would be completely different from what it is now, and almost certainly worse. I bet I'm not alone in this, and now there's a book for us -- for our people -- being Kickstarted:BETTER THAN IRLIt's got a couple days to go and just needs a little push to get where it's going. You can help! I thank you, and your old handle from that messageboard you may not have thought about in a decade thanks you. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.One of Quentin's longtime favorite activities has been to sit in a lap and have a board book held in front of him so it can be read aloud while he turns the pages. We've been sticking to board books because the rigidity and chunkiness of the pages makes them easy for him to turn, and also because books with paper pages tend to have way more words, and our guess is that they wouldn't hold his attention. I also had concerns about him ripping the pages; babies! You know how it is! But we have some evidence that paper books might be safe around him? For certain values of safe?Quentin's current second-favorite thing to do at the table besides eat is flip through the "book" we keep there, which is just an issue of a local ad-supported organic food magazine Mavis picked up in the "free" section of a bookstore periodical rack. He loves this thing, or more accurately he loves to flip through it, bend the pages every which way, and occasionally (though not very frequently) attempt to chew its edges. He often requests it at the end of mealtimes, and I've found it's very handy for keeping him occupied while I clean the dishes and whatnot. It's clearly been beaten up, but it hasn't been destroyed to the extent I would've imagined after weeks of use.We have a cookbook shelf in an unavoidably Quentin-accessible part of the apartment, and lately he's taken to pulling cookbooks off it and flipping through them. I imagine their entertainment value must vary wildly -- some of them are rife with glossy, full-bleed color photos of carefully-plated meals, but at least one of them (a Cook's Illustrated compendium I got for a steal at the Half Price Books in downtown Berkeley) is just a giant tome sprinkled with occasional single-column grayscale illustrations; he seems to go for that one a lot, which at first brush is surprising given its heft:beautiful picture ratio. But I think I've solved it, maybe -- my current theory is that his entertainment here is mostly tactile in nature: I think he gets the greatest enjoyment from grabbing a hunk of book and letting the pages flutter down. I just wanted to register a moment of surprise at the fact that he handles them with such comparative gentleness, without ripping or tearing at them.The Missing Objects of the Week are an orange foam baseball and the + sign from his fridge magnet set (still). The 4 from his fridge magnet set somehow got shoved way, way back under the fridge, and its retrieval will have to wait until I have the time to unbend a coathanger and make a suitable tool, because damn. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Singapore is looking into building suburbs on rafts. (Hakai) 

  • We have two more Magic Use Cases For Graphene, folks! I swear there's a trillion dollars waiting for the team who figures out how to produce graphene at scale reliably. This time we have water purification (MISIS via EurekAlert) and lithium sulphur batteries (Chalmers U of Tech via EurekAlert). 

  • Good God in his mighty chair, the Fyre Festival idiot thinks he's writing a memoir that'll somehow validate his existence. (NYMag Intelligencer) 

  • I'm all for a future where robots literally climb all over a building for inspection purposes, especially if they can do it in a coordinated swarm. I mean why the hell not? (TechCrunch) 

  • A friend of mine just sent me this in answer to a question posed in episode 104 of the podcast, and it's goddamn fascinating. (Psychology Today) 

  • Solar cells based on perovskite crystals are hard to build because their structure is unstable. But if you add caffeine, suddenly everything gets awesome. What? (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • There's a paper out now that proposes fitting existing AC units with carbon capture devices, since they move a ridiculous amount of air through our buildings already; not only that, it says we might as well turn the extracted CO2 and water into fuel, which would effectively put a tiny gasoline-making* machine in every house and building that has AC. Huh. You can read the commentary in Scientific American if you still have clicks left there, or just read the paper itself. (SciAm) (paper)* The fuel in question might not actually be literal gasoline, but it'd clearly be a hydrocarbon of some sort; you get the idea. 

  • I'm just going to put this on the table and walk away: experimental evidence seems to suggest wolves are more charitable than dogs. (Motherboard) 

  • Gonna let the headline do the talking on this one: Capitalism is failing. People want a job with a decent wage – why is that so hard? (Brookings Institute) 

  • This list of the common triggers for digging out your smartphone and gazing into its sOcIeTy-DoOmInG cHaRyBdEaN wHiRLpOoL oF sOuL-sUcKiNg TeChNo-FuCkErY are actually fairly commonplace, but at least now we know for sure. (U of Washington press release) 

  • Biodegradable plastic bags only work if they're exposed to air; if they get buried or thrown in the ocean, they can still be viable three years later. (U of Plymouth press release) 

  • Do you remember a couple years ago when a new aurora-like phenomenon was observed and dubbed "Steve" by scientists? Did you know they made it into an acronym (STEVE) and just now figured out where it comes from? (American Geophysical Union) 

  • How about an interview with a literal candy inventor! (Atlas Obscura) 

A Fictional Thing

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

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.