is that even how light works

December 23, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's getting ready to eat its body weight in Xmas ham and does not apologize to you or any other 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week; we decided to take a break for Xmas. New episode next week, though! WATCH OUTYou have only one chance to be the first person to ask us a question in the form of a 5-star review: head on over to ye oldynne Apple Podcastes and leave us that ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ before dropping a question in the review, which at least one of us will do our best to answer in as entertaining a fashion as possible!Instant Band Night XIV: Starting 2020 Off Right💥 THREE WEEKS OUT 💥⚡ PREPARE TO ROCK ⚡🤘 SEEMS LIKE WE MIGHT NEED TO BLOW OFF SOME STEAM 🤘FaCeBoOkOr just send your friends this link:http://bit.ly/instantbandnight14 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Our Xmas tree is strung with lovely LED lights that come in the following colors: 

  • Red

  • Purple

  • Green

  • Orange

  • Yellow

If all the other lights in the house are off, though, the light that gets thrown onto the wall of the living room furthest away seems to average out to blue. Am I nuts? Or is this just the result of all the wavelengths interfering with each other? If I were sufficiently motivated, I'd look all of these up and see what their average is, but I'm afraid it might turn out to be something totally nonsensical, and then where'd we be? As a culture? It seems safer for all involved if I just leave it alone. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Mavis went to see a production of the Nutcracker a few days ago with her sister and nephew right after lunch (it was an afternoon showing), and when she came into the kitchen to say goodbye, Quentin said "Mama go see Christmas." This, despite the fact that at no point have we explained or really even talked about 

  • The story of the Nutcracker

  • Santa

  • The concept of Christmas in general

He helped us decorate the tree, of course, but that's about as far as our explanations went: we decorate the tree because it's Christmas. I think literally everything else he's learned about the entire season must have osmosed into his mind from elsewhere, which is fascinating and kind of spooky to witness. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • You shouldn't have to be amazing at your job, says Drew Magary, and he's right. (~$Medium) 

  • Actually, speaking of Drew Magary, this year's Hater's Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog went up on Vice since Deadspin, well, you know. (Vice) 

  • We shouldn't be so quick to dismiss the "maybe it's aliens" option from explanations of things, says Harvard's astronomy department head. (Nautilus) 

  • Researchers have invented a way to do contactless ultrasound imaging with lasers. (MIT) 

  • Well ...... yeah. "A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure" (New Republic) 

  • These maps of America's next 100y are ...... something. (CityLab) 

  • It's interesting how those rosy predictions of what the internet would do for civilization back in the 90s turned out to be the exact opposite of what ended up happening, but I would love, love, love to see if anyone has tracked down the people who actually made those predictions to see how they're doing, like, psychologically. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Why are some groups of chimps in West Africa throwing rocks at very particular trees and shouting? (Science Alert) 

  • Well, fuck: whoever wrote the initial equations for predicting hurricane strength didn't take something called phase transition into account, and now that we've corrected for it, it turns out warmer water makes hurricanes much more destructive than we realized, which isn't great because [gestures at climate change]. (NYU School of Engineering) 

  • I admit to not being a bad enough dude to understand 100% of this experiment, which seems to have implications for creating an entire network of quantum computers? (NIST) 

  • This is going to sound fully fucking insane, but data seems to suggest that having a dog when you're a little kid can significantly reduce your risk of developing schizophrenia later on in life. Yeah. (Johns Hopkins Medicine) 

  • It turns out producing organic compounds with a bacterial stack is tricky to scale. What if you could just boost production from whatever yield you've got by 1000x? (Wash U School of Medicine, St Louis) 

  • This is old, but I don't think I caught it the first time around, and it is a literal must-read: "How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation" (BuzzFeed News) 

  • I both do and don't think it's a good idea to invent soft robotic insects that can survive a hit from a flyswatter or shoe. (EPFL) 

  • Did you know osmotic power generation is a thing? You can generate power with ............. osmosis??? (Cell Press via Science Daily) 

  • I don't know which review of Cats to link you to, so here, have the io9 one and this other one by a David Farrier that's been rendered in Watchmen panels for extra hilarity. (io9) (imgur) 

  • Aw yiss, it's the best science images of 2019! (Nature) 

  • Just a heads-up that an early version of the power loader suit from Aliens has now been built. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Content moderation is still hell. Still. Are we going to be reading this same fucking article year after year? (The Verge) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe 24 Preludes, For the Last Time, No 

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.