it's taco time somewhere

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes there were a way to take back a mistaken Atlantic click so it didn't count toward my free articles for the dang month 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway142 - A Very Specific Kind of Meth"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Ken dig up a bundle of elegant notions for games, civic improvements, and a new cultural practice for the quarantine era."One of Ken's ideas is an amazing app but also just a new cultural practice for quarantine that we could start doing RIGHT NOW and it would be amazing. Seriously!If you already happen to be on Apple Podcasts, you could give us one of those  ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings and feel confident you've done at least one thing of unalloyed good today.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberIt seems laughable to try to throw Instant Band Night without a proven vaccine in place. Let's see what's up in November 2021.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook* * 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.Everything that's been true continues to be true, but this section's been a pretty heavy read as of late, and while it will no doubt return to weightier topics at some point, I have a comparatively petty complaint to register: takeout tacos need a better solution. There needs to be a container that can transport a taco upright with reasonable expectation that the ingredients won't go all over the place and that it won't fucking leak all over the bag. You ever get that taco juice in your paper takeout bag that puts the whole thing in danger of tearing its own bottom out?Hark ye now to the tale of my latest takeout taco frustration:ACT IIn which I order some tacos to go from a place. This place is delicious, but occasionally unreliable i/t/o the preservation of order-to-fulfillment information integrity. As has become habit, I check the bag before I depart and lo, the right number of foil-wrapped parcels are within the bag. I leave.ACT IIIn which I unpack the order at home and discover that my tacos and only my tacos are in fact wrong. This is a source of surprisingly great frustration to me, so I call the place and they check my receipt and realize that they indeed fucked up, and offer to replace them or give me a future credit. I happily take the replacement tacos, as the restaurant's not very far from me.ACT IIIIn which I pick up my replacement tacos without incident; cheerfully, even. I come home, park my car, grab the paper bag, and as I move to shut my car door, the bottom of the fucking bag rips open, my new tacos fall to the road, and one of them tears its own foil packet open and spills onto the asphalt a little.I made a sound of frustration that caused one of my neighbors (who happened to be out walking) to run over and see if I had injured myself. In the end I scooped up the spilled taco (the amount of direct road contact was minimal) and went inside and ate my dinner and it was delicious, but goddamn do I hate that entire bag/leakage situation. From now on I'm going to ask them to double-bag my to-go orders, as well as carefully inspect the bottoms of my bags for structural integrity before subjecting them to relatively high-G maneuvers, but I mildly resent having to do either of those things. There should be a to-go storage solution for tacos that mitigates this problem. Shouldn't there??As long as I'm burning off energy, how about you? If you have an absolutely petty quar complaint, please feel free to register it with me. Know that it won't be solved per se, but you'll at least have the satisfaction of knowing it was shared. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.It's possible that I've established by now how much Quentin loves construction vehicles and watching construction vehicles, so it probably won't surprise you that I've occasionally put him in the car and driven around trying to find construction for him to watch. We're lucky in two dimensions:

1. There's enough going on around here that we inevitably run across something

2. Being 2.5, he's still easily impressed; once we saw a crane truck with an auger strapped to the side of its boom (not being used) and he talked about it on and off for days afterward

But I can't help but think there's an easier way to do this than just driving around willy-nilly hoping to run across some road work or other construction we can see from the sidewalk. Quentin is surely not the only little kid who loves trucks. Hasn't anybody thought to build something like this:

• An app that lets users report construction

  • Location

  • Vehicles in use

    • backhoe

    • concrete mixer

    • skid steer/mini loader

    • etc

• App also has a map that displays reported sites and lets users filter for vehicles ("show me just the sites with a backhoe")

• Entries are color-coded for freshness (a week-old report of a concrete mixer should be treated with some doubt, right? what if the crew is done working there?)

  • A site reported today is green

  • Sites get progressively less bright as they age and disappear after n days (users can set n)

  • Existing sites can be refreshed by a new report ("yep, they're still there")

TO FURTHER ENTICE the many software entrepreneurs and venture capitalists no doubt reading this, you could also make it monetizable; users would have to pay to upgrade to be able to filter on more than one vehicle type, or for search, or who knows what else. I'm just sayin'.I need someone to build this app so I can use it; I'll accept shadow co-founder status in your new startup. 

Fascination Corner

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

• Our response to the rona has been so unbelievably crap that the EU is considering banning travelers from the US when it reopens its borders. Can't blame 'em, honestly. (Forbes) 

• Holy shit, it happened again. IT HAPPENED AGAIN (Guardian) 

• I don't know that I can recommend looking at this NYT visualization of the rona's initial spread if you value your composure, because all it will do is (a) enrage you (b) cement the notion that we're never going to get out of the first wave if we don't restrict travel within the US immediately. Which will never happen. So! An endless rolling boil of dips and renewed flare-ups until there's a vaccine, forever! ($NYT) 

• Petting a fuzzy robot that reacts to your input seems to reduce pain. (Ben-Gurion U) 

• I don't know if you know this already, but mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. Researchers have demonstrated it's possible to inject specific cells with new ones, at least in mice. (UConn) 

• Birds keep hitting power lines, but there's a much better way to keep them away than the weird spirals that I guess have been in use for a while. (Oregon State) 

• Here's yet another design for a low-cost, easy-to-assemble emergency ventilator for rona patients. I hope someone's keeping track of these, 'cause it seems like they're piling up, which has to be a good thing, right? (UCSD) 

• The Urban Institute issued a paper a couple years ago recommending how to un-racist a city at the neighborhood level and nobody paid much attention. Seems like it's time to revisit those ideas. (Urban Institute blog) (PDF of original paper) 

• We could install sensors in forests that monitor for fires and power them using nothing more than the movement of branches in the wind, which sounds almost unbelievably poetic. (Michigan State) 

• "What Parents Can Learn From Child Care Centers That Stayed Open During Lockdowns" (NPR) 

• According to Tim O'Reilly, VC is doing more harm than good. (TechCrunch) 

• Why bother making robot hands look like human hands when we can make them do so much more? (IEEE Spectrum) 

• I'm 100% in favor of this movement (can we call it a movement?) to rename Columbus, Ohio to Flavortown. (The Hill) Not only because of colonial history and Columbus being a total fucker, but also if you haven't watched it already, this nigh-classic bit from Shane Torres is a literal must-see re: Guy Fieri and the cultural treatment thereof. (YouTube) 

• Not gonna lie: I'm putting this book about food ingredient myths on my to-read list. (Undark) 

• Scientists are preparing to undertake some interesting-sounding research on animal behavior now that we're all shut inside. (Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior) 

• We assume the Amazons were just a legend, but recent digs have turned up Scythian women from roughly 26 centuries ago who were laid to rest heavily armed, so: maybe not? (Science Alert) 

• [inhale noise] No, really -- why are plants green, though? Like why green? Y'know? [coughing] What? Energy absorption? (UC Riverside) 

• "Parties — Not Protests — Are Causing Spikes In Coronavirus" (NPR) 

• One of the reasons we have trouble imagining delivery drones is that they'd actually have to fly significant distances while carrying something heavy, which if you've seen a quadcopter's battery life is a bit of a stretch. But how far would their range extend if they could hitchhike on top of public transit? (IEEE Spectrum) Also relevant: artificial neural networks can teach an AI to pull off some Poe Dameron shit with a drone in only a few hours of simulations. (New Atlas) 

• If you want to market something with a big word-of-mouth component, tap into "consumer arrogance" for maximum effectiveness. (Michigan State) 

• Lasers could make high-volume wireless underwater data transmission possible. (IEEE Spectrum) 

• Shoutout to the videogame pioneers who are working on making sword fights in VR better, because that means we're coming closer and closer to an era where we can battle Darth Vader virtually, lightsaber-to-lightsaber, as we were always meant to. (U of Bath) 

• Dolphins have this thing they've worked out called "shelling" where they'll chase fish into an empty seashell and then bring it to the surface and shake the shell into their mouth. Scientists have been trying to figure out how knowledge of the technique spreads -- turns out they're teaching it to each other, which means they're capable of peer learning. I mostly want to link to the study because holy shit, those shells are huge, it's like something out of a damn cartoon, what the hell (Current Biology) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some Federation starship classes and names that an online neural network gave me after I fed it two lists of canonical onesJetpack-class starship USS Chronicles of Capitalistic DynamicsNirvana-class starship USS Captain GingerNoam-class starship USS Kylie the Nighthawk 

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.