Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that is, on some level, always thinking about sculpting and finishing more weird little tardigrades

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 27: JULY, JULY

HAPPENING THIS THURSDAY

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.

Short one for you today, really just a question: if you see a car with a bumper sticker on it that says, and I quote:

HONK IF YOU LOVE SNOOPY OR ARE INSANE

Do you honk or not? Because who doesn't love Snoopy and/or feel insane in this, the year 2024??

#dadthoughts

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

This week is all short ones, folks:

It's still an in-flight project so I can't really report fully on our attempt to adjust Felix's bedtime jack-in-the-box routine; I will say we've gotten his count of emergences down significantly, and he usually falls asleep maybe 45m after we say goodnight. So there's been progress!!

Quentin is growing — we probably should ditch the car seat soon and move to a booster? I guess?? I need to read the carseat manual. Parenting: There's Always Something To Research.™

Fascination Corner

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

• Sort of hard to argue with: "The End of Liberal Institutionalism: Excessive belief in institutions is a proven failure." Look, here's the meat of it, but the rest of it is equally valid: "Pretending that the American system is robust enough to withstand Donald Trump and this Supreme Court and that all we need to do is vote and get back to decorum in Congress is a stupid and discredited idea and the more that the leadership of the Democratic Party voices this rote bullshit the less they deserve to be followed." Yes, he does have some proposals on what to do now. (How Things Work)
  

• It is actually extremely hard to prove whether owning a pet is good for you or not. (Undark)
  

• Some Engineers have built a bionic leg with a neural interface that's doing great in initial testing with below-the-knee amputees. (Nature)
  

• The Scientists are pretty sure the organic compounds found on Mars are the result of sunlight breaking down CO2 in the Martian atmosphere eons ago, which gets us one step closer to figuring out where life in our solar system came from in the first place. (U of Copenhagen) (Paper)
  

• "Conservation and economic development go hand in hand, more often than expected: An analysis for more than 10,000 protected areas found simultaneous progress in both conservation and economic development in about half." (Anthropocene)
  

• In possibly the least surprising news you'll read this week, a new paper coming from Google itself warns that The Machine makes it easy to generate plausible-seeming bullshit in a truly dismaying variety of ways. (404 Media) (Paper)
  

• Speaking of The Machine, Ed Zitron's got a good writeup on the latest surprisingly pessimistic report on the potential of AI from Goldman Sachs, of all places. (Where's Your Ed At)
  

• Based on research into theoretical quasicrystals, The Scientists have either created the worst or best maze ever, depending on how you want to look at it. (Science Alert)
  

• I promise this is the last one of these I'm going to put in this week's edition: "Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They’re not acting like it. If the stakes of the 2024 election are as great as the party says, there’s no excuse for inaction." (Vox)
  

• Hey, at least Rudy was disbarred! Eat shit, Rudy! (ABC News)
  

• The Scientists have figured out how to separate polyester from natural fibers, which would be huge for the vastly underperforming field of textile recycling. (~$MIT Technology Review) (Paper)
  

• Mountain-climbing dumbasses have been turning Mount Everest into a frozen garbage dump for decades and it's going to take a truly obscene amount of effort to clean it up. (NPR)
  

• I need to read the paper to see the methodology on this, but according to a new study, hot people tend to drink more but have fewer problems with drugs, teen pregnancy, self-esteem, etc. O....kaaaay? You know what, let's just read the paper. (Norwegian SciTech News) (Paper)
  

• This may only be true for the UK, but in a lot of cases, those flights we're taking could be train trips instead, which would go a longer way than you'd think toward reducing emissions. (U of Leeds) (Paper)
  

• Speaking of reducing emissions, here's where we are on decarbonizing all the other sectors of transportation while we're at it. (Knowable)
  

• I've only read the intro thus far and it's already excellent: "ChatGPT is bullshit" (Paper)
  

• BuT tHe EcOnOmY iS dOiNg GrEaT: "About half of Americans can't afford a summer vacation: A new survey found that a majority of Americans had to forgo a summer vacation thanks to the high cost of living" (Quartz)
  

• The Scientists have run some tests and concluded that H5N1 can be inactivated by pasteurization. (American Society for Microbiology) (Paper)
  

• I know I've posted before about this particular attempt to teach The Machine emotions, but now they've got it watching body language through the form of dance, which is just a fascinating choice. (Max Planck Inst for Empirical Aesthetics) (Paper)
  

• More nuclear wessels (seriously): there are already tons of nuclear subs out there and they've been running fine for decades! Reactor design has come a long way, and making nuclear-powered cargo ships would cut emissions drastically. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• This week's Culture Study read is an interview with the author of an intriguing-sounding crafting book. (Culture Study)
  

• Just watching people act biased toward a particular group can unknowingly instill the same biases in the viewer, at least according to one study. (U of Amsterdam) (Paper)
  

• A subset of superyacht owners are starting to realize their ridiculous luxury tubs could also be used for scientific expeditions when they'd otherwise just be sitting idle. (Bloomberg)
  

• The oldest artwork we know of has been discovered in a cave in Indonesia. (PhysOrg)
  

• Boston has beaten us to the punch, but there's still time to one-up them by putting googly eyes on all our trains. (Jalopnik)

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:

Reader Steve wants you to know that "The 90 Minute Gift is a single, somehow-104-minute-long track that was one guy's personal FruityLoops track they started when messing around with it in like 2002. They found it on an old hard drive during the early pandemic and just got around to "finishing" it. There's like 12 samples used total, all default to the software, and it's somehow both structureless and yet completely boring from start to finish."

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.