Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that needs to finish season 2 of Star Trek: Prodigy but is having a pretty good time all told

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

Plenty of time remains for you to check your plans and mark your calendar for the 14th of November in this, the year 2024! It's going to be the last one of the year, which means it's going to be special. (To be perfectly honest, they're all special, but that's just because every band that takes the stage is newly created five minutes prior and wonderful surprises abound) Shine your partyin' shoes and put them carefully in the closet next to your rockin' outfit, 'cause they're gonna see some use in four months!!!

Nov 14 2024
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

(Eventbrite) (Facebook)

+ + T E L L + Y O U R + F R I E N D S + +
+ + S E E + Y O U + T H E R E + +

Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU

Update! Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: go check it out!

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ 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've got nothing for this section this week, truly; plenty of interesting links down below, though!

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.

Mavis has a very mild cold (not covid, we tested) that seems to mostly manifest as a slightly scratchy throat and a bad combo headache/fatigue that's set in almost immediately after dinner the last two nights running, so I've been landing the Kid Playtime/Bedtime Plane solo. Here's a lesson I want to impart to you:

• Say you're at the park

• It's two blocks from home, probably an 8-10m walk

• You're already 5m behind schedule to go home and start handwashing so snacktime and bedtime can happen vaguely on time

• You've packed up the toys you brought

• Felix wants to go on the big swing

• You do not have time to go on the big swing; see above re: schedule

The lesson here is: just fucking go on the big swing for a minute or two.

• I did not do this

• I insisted we all go home

• Felix had a shrieking meltdown and I had to carry him two blocks with a piercing omega-level screech going off in one ear every 1.5sec

• Mavis had to get out of bed to help calm him down

• Quentin helped defuse the situation with strategic deployment of the word "buttcheeks!" which resulted in a hysteria-related difficulty a few minutes later, but the effort was noted and appreciated at the time

I could probably have avoided this by simply taking Felix on the big swing and swinging him for long enough to be satisfied, which given his attention span would probably have been no more than 90sec. Learn from my mistake.

Fascination Corner

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

• Holy shit, the CrowdStrike thing, holy shit. Wow. At least two entire QA orgs out there right now — CrowdStrike's and Microsoft's — are probably looking into witness protection, or at least they oughta be. (CBS News)
  

• The covid summer surge is real. But why? Flu only surges in the winter; what gives? (Scientific American)
  

• Hamilton Nolan has some strong words for the Teamsters president who just endorsed Trump [spit]. (How Things Work)
  

• Some Engineers built a robot dog whose mission is to walk around the beach and clean up cigarette butts with vacuums attached to its feet. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• The Scientists are working on a way to cloak healthy cells and expose only cancer cells to devastating chemo, which I probably don't need to tell you would be a much better way to do chemo. (Ars Technica)
  

• How to spot a deepfake: check out the reflections in their eyes. If they match? Real. If not? [Romulan voice] It's a faaaaaaaaake!! (Royal Astronomical Society)
  

• "The electric utility screwing over Texans: CenterPoint wants customers to pay to climate-proof the grid—all while pouring millions of customer dollars into climate delay." (HEATED)
  

• Not only have The Scientists found bacteria that can destroy a specific set of PFAS, they've identified the enzymes being used, which means they can probably be reengineered for other forever chemicals. (UC Riverside) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists think they've found blood biomarkers that can predict the likelihood of transplant rejection, which would be an amazing thing to have onhand for anyone who needs an organ transplanted. (Westmead Inst) (Paper)
  

• (This was written before Biden stepped down from the race but is still relevant because I want to see how smoothly these people pivot now that Harris is the candidate) Politicians who continue to stump for Biden as though absolutely nothing is wrong with him or his candidacy are sacrificing their credibility in a way that feels meaningful, beyond the usual "my esteemed colleague Ted Cruz" type of lying that we're used to hearing. (How Things Work)
  

• The Scientists would like us to consider duckweed as a future food source. (The Conversation)
  

• Home Depot's got more Halloween guys on offer this year than just the big skeleton (which is also getting an upgrade), but I dunno; does anyone else think they should've just stuck with the one thing, or does it make sense for them to diversify? Is anybody really going to buy a werewolf from them? (The Verge)
  

• There's a brewing civil war between The Scientists over whether we should try geoengineering or if it distracts from the actual problem of solving climate change. (~$Science)
  

• I'm not much of a camping guy, but I might accept camping in a fire watch tower. (Axios)
  

• Should we decide to try to terraform Mars, The Scientists have identified a plant that might have very little trouble growing there right fuckin' now. (Science Alert) (Paper)
  

• We found a cave on the Moon! Next step: build a base in it, maybe? (BBC)
  

• The Scientists think they've found the places in the brain where creativity gets sparked. (U of Utah)
  

• I love that animal behavior physics is a real field of study. (Knowable)
  

• The Scientists want to be able to track polar bears but are looking for alternatives to the radio tracking collars; little guys that stick to the fur seem like a good idea. (U of York) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have invented a soft implant that has the potential to prevent endometriosis(!!!) while doubling as a contraceptive. (ETH Zurich) (Paper)
  

• Pablo Escobar may have permanently altered the Colombian ecosystem with his stupid hippos. (Smithsonian)
  

• That said, it looks like human activity can sometimes be good for biodiversity if we tread lightly. (U of York) (Paper)
  

• A new study shows that boys who grow up in environments with particularly rigid ideas about Gender tend to respond aggressively when their masculinity is threatened, which is neither good nor surprising, honestly. (NYU)
  

• Speaking of, The Scientists calculated a Gender Inequality Index across all 50 US states and came up with some interesting (albeit dispiriting) correlations. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper)
  

• Using good ol' CRISPR/Cas9, The Scientists were able to restore hearing in adult mice with genetically-inherited deafness, hinting that it might be possible with people someday. (NIH)
  

• "Will Religion Survive Alien Contact?" Don't worry, atheists, there's plenty in here for us to chew on too. (Supercluster)
  

• The seemingly intact body of a member of the rarest whale species in the world washed ashore in New Zealand. (NZ Dept of Conservation)
  

• Let's all learn about the gallium anomaly. (Quanta)
  

• Ants got tiny brains, yeah? How come they travel so far and don't get lost? Some Engineers are using ant methods to give tiny robots with eensy memories a way to navigate reliably, and it's fascinating. (Delft U of Tech) (Paper)
  

• It's Spicy Takes Week over on Polygon and you know what, I like it. "Free George R. R. Martin from The Winds of Winter: If he doesn’t want to write it, I’m not gonna make him. It’s fine. I’m fine." (Polygon)
  

• The Scientists wonder whether consciousness may have emerged to facilitate social interaction. (The Conversation)
  

• I'm sorry, there are how fucking many rogue planets out there??? (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• Welp: we already knew this, but ransomware attacks work. (CNN)
  

• This is very good: "The unexpected poetry of PhD acknowledgements" (Australian Natl U)

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.

A band and their album

(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:

Alternate universe music critic Steve says:

I reckon that album is a beautiful assemblage of bleeps and bloops and loops and drum patterns, intricate without being sterile. It's no good for driving to or listening on a nature walk, but if you've got time to really listen to it it's very rewarding.

I also reckon Sewer Technology is three people with a fractious working relationship, but they're all three back together and pulling in the same direction on this one (you can tell by the cheerful yet determined mathematical hyper shape).

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.