it's physical distancing not social distancing, goddammit

April 06, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's learning how best to recharge its personal battery day by day and swears it's getting slightly better at it over time. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway136 - Garbage ResearchJon (@ferociousj), acting co-host Kelly, and special guest Lily (@lilyrosesloane) ponder a truly splendid ideas for research, film, food, and a story concept worthy of an entire anthology.It's possible this was down to Lily's particular skillset, but we discovered depths to one particular idea that I absolutely did not know were in there. Also, our cookie slogans are the best cookie slogans.Holy shit, someone put us at 30 ratings in Apple Podcasts! Was it one of you???? Know that you are a hero. The rest of you could join whoever that was and drop us that ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating yourself. Join the pantheon of legend; what else were you going to do today?Instant Band Night 15: POSTPONEDIt's starting to look more and more like May 14 is probably an over-optimistic goal, but it costs us nothing to dream.And listen, if we do have to postpone 'til July, we will, and just imagine what a party it'll be!!!!It's also still on Facebook if you're there, too* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.This is going to sound like a complaint or a hacky-ass "ladies be texting" bit and I promise you it isn't: I just this week realized that Mavis is in a whole bunch of group texts that blow up her phone constantly. Me, I'm in .......... one, I think, and it has two other people in it. However: I'm also in a minimum of four non-work, entirely social Slacks with a lot of daily activity. That balances out, right?And now for an open letter to the developers of the Google Home app, which controls my Chromecast ambient displayFirst of all let me say that I very much appreciate the ambient display feature that lets me choose albums from my Google Photos that show up on my TV. It's great. Here's the thing: I need you to add a setting that lets me further customize the frequency at which certain albums are selected from. Just put a checkbox in each album's selection square that says[ ] Prioritize this albumCan you do that for me? Please do this for me. Because otherwise what ends up happening is the albums with the most photos tend to muscle out the one with less, and that is suboptimal for my purposes.I know what you're going to say: why not trim down the number of photos in the other albums so they match the small one, or simply cut the number of albums themselves? Fuck that, and fuck you. I've tried, okay? I've tried. I've whittled the set down to four albums that are absolutely essential to requirements and cannot be cut. Three of the four albums still have over 100 pics in them, and that's after many, many rounds of horrifically merciless hacking and slashing (one of them has over 200, but it's pics of my kid and I couldn't). The small album has 40, okay, and I need the ones in it to display more often. It's a collection of fun selfies my friends have sent me and it's delightful. Please fix this. Thank you in advance. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.In the past three days, Quentin has discovered the delight that is gathering every pillow and blanket he can lay hands on and requesting their addition to the crib along with many stuffed animals, so that he can flop around and play among them. Mavis has astutely noted this may be a reflection of the whole shelter-in-place thing -- one of his favored "pillow mountain" crib activities is to kind of wander amongst them and narrate/describe the different rooms or territories the various pillows or blankets represent (he likes to drape or arrange one particular blanket to make a waterfall or a river or other "water" feature). It's also extremely good and adorable.What else was I going to tell you about. Oh! For reasons known only to himself, the water cycle has become one of Quentin's favorite things to hear about. You know:10 In the sky there are clouds20 Sometimes the clouds make rain, which falls to the ground30 When it hits the ground, it collects into rivers and lakes and oceans40 Then the sun evaporates it and it goes up into the air, where it makes cloudsGOTO 10He's asked me to recount this at every meal and in one case before bedtime (sans the BASIC coding, naturally). And he wants to hear about it a lot. "Do again." Somewhere in the second or third retelling, I make sure to impart the fact that it's a cycle, so it happens over and over and literally never stops; he seems to find this mostly satisfactory. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Holy mother of fuck: Spain is rolling out a universal basic income, permanently, as a result of the rona. (Forbes) 

  • Burn one of your New Republic clicks on this. "Joe Biden Is Wasting a Crisis: A generation of Democratic timidity created a candidate unwilling to do politics in an emergency." Please for the fucking love of Christ can we get Warren back in the mix. (~$New Republic) 

  • What, uh ............ how is a bacterial species that lives on the literal bottom of the seafloor also turning up in the intestines of termites? I realize that's not the top line of this article, which is "this bacterium can produce all the energy it needs without bothering with oxygen," but still. (Science Alert) And actually, speaking of bacteria, some more news on the ones discovered hundreds of feet below the sea floor: they're packed in there as densely as the ones in our guts. The sheer bloody-minded persistence of life is weirdly awe-inspiring. (U of Tokyo) 

  • Celebrities are looking less and less good to us now that it's becoming clear how different their lives are from ours. (~$NYT) 

  • We could actually just go ahead and cover all the roads with that recycled tire stuff we've been covering playgrounds with; it'd be safer for everybody. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • Here's a good explainer on the whole toilet paper thing. (Marker on Medium) 

  • Scientists made little backpack computers and glued them to vampire bats to get a sense of how they're spending their time; yes, there are pictures. (Ohio State) 

  • We can only hope: "Coronavirus Is a Labor Crisis, and a General Strike Might Be Next". (Vice) Also in that vein: "After coronavirus subsides, we must pay teachers more". (Brookings Institute) 

  • The oceans may not be entirely fucked; it's at least theoretically possible to rebuild some parts of its ecosystems. (U of Queensland) 

  • Who would've predicted that Republicans turning Florida into a bureaucratic nightmare hellscape for poor people would go badly for them in this time of crisis? (Politico) 

  • This sounds like it must've been weird as hell: a couple on their honeymoon got trapped at their five-star resort by the rona with zero other guests and the entire staff still working. (~$NYT) 

  • "We Need to Start Tossing Money Out of Helicopters" (~$Atlantic) 

  • Bioethanol made from agave (which gives us tequila) might be better than the corn or sugar-derived versions. (U of Sydney) 

  • Well shit, now I'm convinced: here's ten other things we could be doing in space with the money we're proposing to spend on going to the Moon. (Ars Technica) 

  • Have we really been correlating increased living standards with fuel consumption this entire time? Well, thank fuck we don't have to anymore. (Anthropocene) 

  • Vulture asked some writers of beloved TV shows what their characters would be doing during this pandemic, and this one is worth burning a click on for the Tracy Morgan bit alone. (~$Vulture) 

  • Let's hope businesses learn their lesson from this whole thing; while we're hoping, let's try to choke back our despairing, cynical laughter for a few seconds. (Fast Company) 

  • There was a rainforest in Antarctica 90 million years ago. (Imperial College London) 

  • Who's got a spare $750K and wants to come to the bottom of the Challenger Deep for funsies? (Popular Mechanics) 

  • Accidentally introducing exotic animals into an ecosystem isn't necessarily bad; they might take up an ecological niche formerly occupied by an extinct one. (Anthropocene) 

  • This is something to think about given what we're doing to the sea level; it may look and sound sort of goofy, but tiltable concrete sunshades on our coasts could provide useful shade and defense against surging waters. (Princeton) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumGrinspoon, Just Do What Comes Naturally 

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.