Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that got food poisoning from a lunch salad weeks ago and still hasn't built back quite enough trust to get back on the spinach wagon

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.

Instant Band Night 27: JULY, JULY

It's next week! Forward this immediately to 5-10 of your friends and let's goooooooooooo

Instant Band Night mixes music and spontaneous creativity to create a one-of-a-kind event that's almost unbelievably joyful to either participate in or just show up and watch. I'm not kidding; it really is just ..... like that. We're taking a break after July, so if you haven't been able to make it this year thus far, this'll be your last chance until November. I promise you nothing less than an explosion of jubilance in the form of music that will surprise and delight you every few minutes. Who could say no to that!!

July 11 2024
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 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 YOU

Update! Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: go check it out!

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.

If you were in high school in the mid-late 90s, you might know what it means when I say I have tickets to see Soul Coughing at the Fillmore in a couple months. Soul Coughing!!!!! Who ever thought they'd get back together?!?!?! No, I'm serious, there was a problem in that band, a Problem more like, that I still haven't really delved into; Mike Doughty wrote a book about it a few years ago that I'm sure is well-written but I don't know if I personally can handle. Maybe one day. Anyway: they're doing a whole-ass reunion tour in the early fall, and even now I'm hyperventilating at the prospect of seeing that rhythm section back onstage in this, the year 2024.

One of my biggest musical regrets is the day I looked around, realized I don't own a device capable of playing a cassette tape, and simply tossed my entire tape collection. That was an incredibly stupid idea. The mixtapes alone! Those things were love made manifest, folks: acts of true and deep affection from treasured friends, playlists that might not be possible to replicate in the here and now even if I had the cases onhand. I also had a set of concert bootlegs — yes there was some Dave Matthews Band in there — particularly of Soul Coughing shows that to my knowledge (and yes I've looked) just never made it onto the internet. Hey, if you're reading this and you've got a show from the Black Cat made somewhere around 1995-98, let me know!! If you somehow have the show from CMU around 2000: are you a time traveler?? Can I borrow your vortex manipulator for just a second???

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.

Mavis and I went on a little mini-getaway over the weekend just the two of us, a thing we were lucky enough to do because we have family and friends who can watch our kids for a couple days; thank you a thousand times to everyone who helped out and/or put themselves on standby!!

One of the things the kids did while we were gone was visit Indian Rock Park in Berkeley, which I stumbled upon solo one evening a couple years ago looking for a place to sit and eat my burrito. It's great, and they had a great time, so much so that they demanded to be brought back the next day. Felix in particular has been telling us as best he can in his nearly-3-year-old way about the big rock and the cavern and the hole(?) and the deep water(?) — something that I'm finding entertaining at his age is his total willingness to fabulate extra elements onto conventional stories about things he's done or encountered in the course of his day. Adorable! Would recommend.

Fascination Corner

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

• Moderna's working on a combined covid+flu shot that works better than either of 'em separately. Sounds good to me! (Nature)
  

• We've been living a lie!!!!!! The Great Red Spot on Jupiter that we're seeing now is new, not the same one first seen in the 1600s!! (Ars Technica) (Paper)
  

• "Has Facebook Stopped Trying? Facebook has been overrun with AI spam and scams. Experts say Facebook has stopped asking them for help." (~$404 Media)
  

• China's lunar probe has returned samples from the far side of the moon, something no one's ever done before. (NBC News)
  

• What even is intelligence, anyway? (Aeon)
  

• The Scientists have made an attempt to pinpoint the exact kind and degree of schadenfreude necessary to maximize fundraising: think "psychology of dunk tanks," basically. (UC Riverside)
  

• All that yelling finally persuaded NYC's weird shitty mayor to restore funding to the libraries. (Gothamist)
  

• What will your city's climate feel like in 60 years? Turns out El Cerrito, where I live, will be pretty much like Pomona is now if emissions stay at the same levels. You can find out for yourself with this map. (Future Urban Climates)
  

• Yet another recall for the Cybertruck, possibly the easiest way to tell who the dumbest person in your town is at a glance. (The Verge)
  

• Synthetic biology is a vast and exciting field, which makes it (unsurprisingly) hard to teach; The Scientists have cooked up a great scheme that should probably become the standard sooner rather than later. (Northwestern U) (Paper)
  

• The Machine can tell your race just by looking at a chest x-ray, which is both impressive and scary, but it seems to then use this information to take bad shortcuts to wrong diagnoses, so Some Engineers are looking into ways to make it not do that. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• Now that's what I call a goddamn amazing trilobite fossil. (U of Bristol)
  

• The Scientists think it would be a good idea to search for planets that exhibit signs of artificial greenhouse gases; their theory is they'd be great for terraforming, but they could just as easily be an indicator of another civilization that's exactly as inept and self-destructive as our own, right? (UC Riverside) (Paper)
  

• Anne Helen Petersen is writing a book on friendships and she's already got some great material. (Culture Study)
  

• Pointing to actual evidence for something we all kind of intuit to be true, The Scientists published a study I would really like to be able to read (damn paywall) that indicates opposite-sex couples tend to date and marry counterparts of comparable attractiveness. I wonder if this means dating out of your league is incredibly difficult in practice or just not even attempted in the first place? (U of Florida)
  

• Trying to watch and study how plant roots grow is a massive pain in the ass; The Machine does a great job, though. (Lawrence Berkeley Lab) (Paper)
  

• Basketball-sized meteorites blast down onto the surface of Mars just about daily according to new seismic data, which is ........... concerning. From a safety angle. You know? (ETH Zurich) (Paper)
  

• An outgoing personality is not as good a predictor of whether someone has a lot of close relationships as their ability to recognize faces. (U of South Australia) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers built a proof-of-concept mechanical computer that can store data using plastic kirigami cubes instead of semiconductors, which is even more interesting than it sounds because the cubes can have more than a binary amount of possible states. (NC State) (Paper)
  

• The asteroid sample from the OSIRIS-REx mission contains phosphates that make The Scientists think it might've originally come from a wet planet. (NASA) (Paper)
  

• All right, yes, fine, I'll do it: just going for a damn half-hour walk five days a week can help manage lower back pain, according to a new study. Okay!!! (MacQuarie U) (Paper)
  

• Slow-release ketamine tablets have performed pretty well in a new depression trial. (U of New South Wales Sydney) (Paper)
  

• It seems dancers are less neurotic than people who don't dance. Have I mentioned lately that I love the Max Planck Institute's whole multifaceted deal, which includes the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, a real place that exists? (Max Planck Inst for Empirical Aesthetics) (Paper)
  

• See, look at this: The Scientists in another metaphorical wing of the good ol' Max Planck are trying to build a mathematical model that helps explain procrastination. (Max Planck Inst for Biological Cybernetics) (Paper)
  

• Multicellular life may have arisen during the big planetary ice age The Scientists affectionately refer to as SNOWBALL EARTH. (Santa Fe Inst) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers have built a Machine model that could help electrical grids become effectively self-healing. (UT Dallas) (Paper)
  

• The widespread idea that the residents of Easter Island committed "ecocide" by using the place to death is itself dying an evidence-based death. (Columbia Climate School) (Paper)
  

• Griffins almost certainly weren't inspired by Protoceratops fossils. (U of Portsmouth) (Paper)
  

• Would it be insane to try powering passenger flight with microwave power beamed from the ground? Almost certainly, but it's still fun to think about. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• The Scientists wonder whether it's possible farming could be a carbon sink. (Nature)
  

• Some Engineers have demonstrated a 3D printer that can work in different materials to print something that incorporates plastics, metals, and semiconductors(!!) all in one go. Hot damn, that is wild as hell!! ((U of Missouri) (Paper)
  

• A writer at 404 paid someone on Fiverr to stand up an entire automated article-stealing "news" website for less than the cost of a PS5 and came to some conclusions. (~$404 Media)

A Fictional Thing

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

A band and their album

(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:

No reader interpretations came in for this one, which I think is a band comprising dudes with beards who all hold down day jobs as scientists; the sound is wrung-out but crunchy rock, something like The Wrens but if their singer was actually intelligible and mostly wanted to write lyrics about ecological collapse.

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.