kanban for democracy

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that might have to go in on a new three-pack of socks, judging by the way holes keep appearing in the heels of its existing ones for some reason 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayBONUS: Buck Mustang's Real Non-Scam MAGA Show For Real MAGAs Or Whatever (MAGA)"Your host BUCK MUSTANG (who's DEFINITELY NOT Jon Sung) is back for another REAL episode of HARD-HITTING MAGA FACTS that you can only get HERE and ISN'T A SCAM, where did you hear that, SUBSCRIBE NOW and don't forget to SUPPORT OUR REAL SPONSOR who's REAL and NOT A GRIFT so you can TRUST IT and JUST BUY SOME (BUY A LOT) to support MAGA TRUTH!!!!!!"I couldn't stop thinking about the idea of a podcast deliberately engineered to appeal to MAGA dumbshits by someone who really, really wants to run a cheap grift on them but can't quite muster the energy needed to disguise his weary, bottomless contempt for his target audience. I give you: Buck Mustang and the podcast he can't even bother to namedrop properly.Perhaps that means now is the perfect time to give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating in Apple Podcasts?? There's only one way to find out!!!Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberNow that proven vaccines exist, let's wait til November and hopefully -- hopefully! -- we'll see you all at the next Instant Band Night.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.The good folks at this website have put up what they call a "litigation tracker" collecting all of the criminal and civil cases aimed at Trump. (Just Security) But I've suspected for a while that we -- as in we, collectively, us, the people opposed to Trump and all the Republicans committed to his bullshit, but especially those of us here in good ol' Silicon Valley -- could do better.There's a vast panoply of project management toolsets out there purportedly aimed at making projects easier: tasks can be tracked and managed as calendars or gantt charts or arrays of friendly-looking cards or high-powered spreadsheets or whatnot. Important milestones can be highlighted, subtasks created, dashboards automatically spun up to show the big picture and etcetera. I'm not a project manager, but I've certainly been part of projects that have been project-managed with a variety of tools, and it seems to me like a small team with big ideas and sufficient access to journalists who are tracking all this shit could make us a dashboard of Republican Bullshit To Watch that would be tremendously useful.

• Maybe it could stripe GOP nonsense by vertical (voter suppression legislation, gerrymandering efforts currently underway, anti-LGBTQ tolerance measures, etc) or by location (here's all the stupid shit they're trying to pull by state, city, district), and color-code it by progress made or likelihood to pass or whatnot.

• Picture each "project" with an attached list of subtasks, important dates to keep in mind, emails of officials to hammer, groups to support or boycott, that sort of thing.

• Imagine a way to track views on projects, so the dashboard could surface under-viewed efforts and flag them for attention: "this police budget in Ruraltown, KY is about to pass" or "candidate opposing State Senator Racist Fuckface in CT needs more support" or whatnot.

Maybe this is a pipe dream, or maybe the marketing for shit like Trello and ClickUp and Airtable has been way too effective. Maybe that. We won't know until someone tries to build it, and I'm not the guy to do it; I'm just the loudmouth who wants to see somebody try. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.One of the teachers at Quentin's little preschool told me when I came to pick him up that Quentin is becoming what passes for popular among tiny children, in that some of their parents report his name being spoken at home. There's about 9 of them between the ages of 3-5, with the variations in cognitive ability that would imply, so I'm not out here proclaiming my beautiful son WILL BE KING OF THE PROM or anything, but there's still something sweet about it, provided it's not because of, like, infamy (if he were misbehaving, I'm sure we'd hear from a teacher). Quentin has favorites, too -- he likes to tell us frequently about Andrew, who's obsessed with dinosaurs. I wonder if the other kids are telling their parents about Quentin, who loves construction? One of the newer kids has a stuffed bunny of the same make/model as Quentin's, except it's very light teal in color. Quentin insists it's green; I saw it as blue. We're both right, probably. 

Fascination Corner

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

• We passed half a million dead from the rona the week of the 21st, which means that Trump and everyone who stood by him should no longer know even a single yoctosecond's peace from now until whenever their miserable, worthless lives are over. (Vox) The rest of us can acknowledge that on some level, all of this [points generally at everything] is ........ grief. (Vox) 

• The Atlantic has a take on when things might finally go back to something resembling normal: basically the end of this year. (~$Atlantic) If we can somehow avoid these five mistakes we keep making; if you only click on one article, make it this one. (~$Atlantic) 

• Here's how to prevent an argument the next time you need to figure out where to get dinner from. (The Conversation) 

• Texas has proven that all of our infrastructure needs to be revamped now that the effects of climate change are starting to really make themselves known. ($NYT) To that end, here's an old but interesting article asserting that a global supergrid is technically feasible. (IEEE Spectrum) 

• Textbook example of why we need this goddamn dashboard I was talking about: don't take your eyes off the Republican fuckers in Georgia. (538) 

• Here's a good interview on all sorts of topics with a vaccine specialist. (Vox) 

• Old, but interesting: researchers took a look at phone data to see if it bore out Dunbar's number. (Arxiv) 

• It seems like an increasingly bad idea to let Zuck and Joel Kaplan continue to be in charge of something as far-reaching as Facebook with so little oversight, given what they seem to be allowing right-wing shitheads to get away with. (BuzzFeed News) 

• I'm just gonna let the headline do the talking on this one: "Extremist Brains Perform Poorly at Complex Mental Tasks, Study Reveals" (Science Alert) (PDF of Paper) 

• In what will surely be a contender for one of the least-surprising conclusions ever to be reached, it seems your likelihood of following pandemic guidelines correlates extremely sharply with how much you believe in Trump. (Ohio State) 

• First food stalls, now transportation: an extremely fancy chariot was just unearthed at Pompeii. (NPR) 

• Drew Magary makes a convincing argument that "We Are Living In The Shitposter Economy". (Defector) 

• Concrete can soak up CO2 at twice the usual rate if you add titanium dioxide to it. (Anthropocene) 

• Some people who went too far down the right-wing nutjob rabbithole managed to get themselves out, and they're trying to help others do the same. (NBC News) Wish them luck, but a bunch of experts who've had to witness QAnon up close conclude that it's more of a religion than a political movement, and will be hard to expunge. (Vox) People who deal with cults aren't even sure they have a lot to offer, help-wise. (Undark) 

• Why is there more matter in the universe than antimatter? Some scientists think they may have stumbled onto the answer while fiddling with quantum computers. At least I think that's what's going on. (Los Alamos National Lab) 

• Researchers have completed a promising double-blind Phase I trial of a bacterial therapy for eczema. (UCSD) 

• AI keeps surprising us; I guess we should just hope that the surprises continue to be benign ones? (BBC) 

• The Air Force is already looking for a replacement for the F-35. (~$Forbes) 

• Two teens discovered four new exoplanets. (CNN) 

• Good: we're not collectively imagining how badly our allergies are acting up lately. Bad: it's because of climate change. (Science Alert) 

• There is, quote, "an impressive overlap between where fossil fuel jobs are now and where renewable energy generation could be." Hint, hint. (Brookings Institute) 

• It's dumb to imagine trying to live on Mars with the current level of technology we've got and think it's going to be any kind of great thing, for various definitions of "great." (~$Atlantic) 

• Engineers have designed an underwater gliders without propellers that could theoretically operate independently for weeks or even months at a time to study the ocean. (Purdue) 

• Something I've literally never thought about that made me go "huh" when I saw the article: dinosaurs seem to only come in two sizes, small and BIG -- where are the medium-sized ones? (Science Alert) 

• Costco raised their minimum wage to $16/hr. (NPR) 

• There's a chance we're all going to catch a bunch of minor colds when our kids go back to school, since none of us have really caught much of anything while we've been isolated and our immune systems are a little out-of-date. (STAT) 

• Let's grow fish on the moon to feed future astronauts! (Hakai) 

• A new survey has an interesting insight on the differences between the quote-unquote moral compasses of atheists and believers, generally speaking. (Science Daily) 

• Glowing tattoos are theoretically possible. (University College London) 

• A small test group of patients with spinal cord injuries were treated with their own stem cells and showed promising improvements. (Science Alert) 

• Please have a very fun little short story about what to do when your grandmother transfers her consciousness into a spacegoing vessel. (Nature) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumUnscheduled Demolition, This Is What We Pictured 

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.