Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that should probably take it a little easier on the caffeine free Coke Zero maybe
You'll Like This
Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.
Instant Band Night Returns In May
I've had to come to the conclusion lately that there's just too much on my plate to continue managing Instant Band Night, but the good news for you the reader is that a new team of bright and capable people (led by an Instant Band Night volunteer who should be familiar to anyone who's been to one the last few years) is already working on putting the May installment together! Watch this space for more concrete news as it gets closer!!
Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU
I'm cooking up some new weird little guys for the shop already, but did you know there are now enough purchases for the reviews down at the bottom to constitute some lovely little reads? It's nice beyond description to know that these things I'm making have found homes with the right people. Go have a look; eagle-eyed viewers may notice a new bunny has snuck in there.
Idea Factory Giveaway
I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after four+ 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.
I haven't tried to advertise it because it's truly a hobbyist project, but if you know of a construction site near you that has machinery little kids would enjoy watching, I suggest adding it to the map on Construction Near Me. Eagle-eyed readers may notice something new: with the help of ol' Claude, I was able to get the site to pull and display construction permit data for six US cities. You can use the price slider in the filter window to get rid of all the piddly little remodels — the default setting is to display anything above $5M. I think there are at least two cities where this doesn't work because the cost data isn't published, but it definitely works in San Francisco and Seattle. Holy shit, a permit got issued for a 7-story casino in Chicago for over half a billion??
#dadthoughts
Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.
Not a lot for this week; another cold took hold in the house just before the weekend and I feel like I've been dancing between the microbial raindrops, so to speak. Let's hope I managed to stay sufficiently dry??
Fascination Corner
I read a lot of newsletters; here are some links that caught my eye.
"AI Job Loss Research Ignores How AI Is Utterly Destroying the Internet" (404 Media)
We could double the amount of wind energy being produced in the US without increasing its footprint simply by replacing the old wind turbines with rad new ones. (Anthropocene)
The Ryugu asteroid sample return mission contains all five of the nucleobases that make up RNA and DNA, which matches what we found in the Bennu sample. Does that mean maybe all the asteroids have them? What's that imply for the origins of life here on Earth?? (Science Alert) (Paper)
Somewhat predictably, OpenAI's mental health advisory council is reeeeeally not a fan of the proposed "adult mode" for ChatGPT, figuring (correctly) that the risks of it becoming a "sexy suicide coach" are unacceptably high. (Ars Technica)
Afroman emerges victorious from one of the stupidest lawsuits of all time filed by perhaps the dumbest cops to ever raid a man's home for pretend reasons. (CNN)
Some Chemical Engineers have figured out a way to make graphene (the Incredible Wonder Material You Won't Believe Has So Many Different Uses) out of discarded peanut shells, and they do think the process is scalable. (U of New South Wales Sydney) (Paper)
Doctors wholesale cut a guy's lungs out of his body and connected him to a machine that kept him alive for a full 48 hours until they could find a set of new ones to replace them. What?!?!?! Do not click on that paper link unless you're ready to see some surgery pix, btw. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)
Let's all put our heads together and think of a reason why maybe international travelers aren't super excited to come to the US for the World Cup this year?? NYC's hotels for those dates aren't even booked at the same level as last year when there was nothing special happening. (The City)
The Scientists think they've got a handle on how mosquitoes track us down, which has some hopeful implications for how we might design better mosquito traps. (Georgia Tech via Science Daily) (Paper)
Conservators have spent a cool $7M fixing all the problems with Fallingwater that Frank Lloyd Wright either didn't see or didn't care enough to design out the first time. (The Art Newspaper)
What's it like to play a patient on The Pitt? (The Ringer)
Oh hell yeah: here's an interactive website that lets you play around with the terms of the Drake Equation and see how they affect the estimate of alien civs in the galaxy we might be able to talk to. (Drake Equation)
Speaking of which, The Scientists have helpfully highlighted a bunch of exoplanets we should maybe look at first in the search for alien life. (Paper)
Epoxy resins are super useful but impossible to recycle and come with a big carbon footprint. Some Chemical Engineers have invented a bio-based, recyclable version that's actually stronger!! (Anthropocene) (Paper)
Parker Molloy argues convincingly that Kat Abughazaleh's campaign — even though it didn't win — should be a model for all Democrats going forward. (The Present Age)
At least we got a superbloom in Death Valley this year. (Colossal)
Everyone worried about humanity doing a Snowpiercer can relax just a bit: industrial bug farming just doesn't seem to have taken off for a variety of reasons. (Undark)
Unfortunate that it's on Substack, but you should probably send this to everyone who wants to know how "AI" made us destroy that school in Iran; it didn't, actually, it just made a convenient scapegoat. (Artificial Bureaucracy on Substack)
New evidence suggests life on Earth recovered much faster than we thought after the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs. (UT Austin via Science Daily)
The Scientists think human evolution might have reached a new stage where culture drives change faster than genetics. (U of Maine)
That said, good ol' natural selection still seems to be working just fine: the residents of the Puna de Atacama plateau appear to have evolved an ability to process arsenic over a few thousand years. (Science Alert) (Paper)
Once you hit 50 it would probably be a good idea to get the shingles vaccine, looks like. (American College of Cardiology via Science Daily)
Nothing deep here, just some pictures the Jimmy Dubs took of a nebula that looks a lot like a brain. (NASA)
A Fictional Thing
Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.
A band and their album
Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash
(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:
Photo by Evie S on Unsplash
Reader Martha is pretty sure "You Want This Or Not sounds to me like Squeeze, Cosi Fan Tutti Frutti."
I still could use some more submissions to build out a notional Reader Submission Month for band/album/artwork combos! Feel free to send something in; just tell me how you want to be credited!
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. If you received this as a forward and would like to subscribe yourself, you can do it at this page right here (which also has the archive)!
