let's just make it past Wednesday, y'all

January 18, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's finding tiny joy in the early-career Sesame Street appearances of people now famous for wildly different roles; I see you, Giancarlo Esposito as camp counselor Mickey! 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNot gonna lie: our ability to record new episodes has been somewhat hampered of late by the absolute fucking nonsense going on in DC; in this, at least, we may be assured we're not alone. New recordings will happen soon. Soon!One thing you could do that would be extremely nice and low-effort would be to just head over to Apple Podcasts and put a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating in for the show. Many thanks in advance.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.Just kind of holding my breath until the inauguration. I don't like admitting it because it feels like doing so gives the lunatics some measure of power, but eh. Realistically, the QAnon idiots and everybody who genuinely believes the election was stolen are going to be around for a long time, and we need to figure out what to do about 'em sooner rather than later. The trouble is, I haven't read a single thing that suggests the work that would need to be done to deprogram them is at all scalable, which is also a problem that we're going to have to admit exists. I don't have anything hopeful to put in here unless someone wants to try dumping MDMA into their water supply and hoping some really good backrubs do the trick? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.For a while now, there's been an interesting exploit we've been able to use on Quentin's behavior, namely that he has a strong desire to do a lot of things himself, and gets upset if we do them for him. There are a lot of times where this is just plain inconvenient -- as you can imagine, a 3yo isn't necessarily the fastest or best at doing things -- but it also provides a useful shortcut when he's being even slower.Me: Come upstairs, bud, it's time to pee in the toilet!Q: [drags himself over very slowly]Me: C'mon, pal, it's pee time!Q: [continues to drag himself over very slowly]Me: OK, well, I'm going to put the toilet seat on the toilet myself, then!Q: [suddenly remembers how to move]For a while now I've been wondering whether the window on this particular shortcut might close at some point. A few days ago I had to call my own bluff on this exact scenario and put the toilet seat on the toilet before he got upstairs: he had a li'l meltdown that was about a 5 on a 10-point scale, so I think/hope it's still valid for a little while yet. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Let's get all these in up front:

    • "The Capitol Rioters Weren’t ‘Low Class’: The business owners, real-estate brokers, and service members who rioted acted not out of economic desperation, but out of their belief in their inviolable right to rule." (~$Atlantic)

    • Pair that with some hot takes from Capitol cops who aren't ruling out the possibility that actual members of Congress were in on it. (BuzzFeed News)

    • The Feds are taking it seriously. (CNN)

    • Facebook, meanwhile, is showing ads for military gear next to insurrection posts. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Scientists have taken a page from the kombucha book to grow useful living materials. (MIT)​

  • Imagine for just a moment a beautiful world where all the stupid bullshit Trump's tried in the last two months to save himself from being booted out of office instead ends up being the explicit cause of his financial ruination via civil lawsuits. I said imagine it, not fully believe in it! But still: beautiful. (Business Insider) 

  • Data seems to suggest furious exercise in literal four-second bursts can be beneficial. ($NYT) 

  • Someone remind Biden he can actually get a lot of shit done, please. (Vox) 

  • Vulture explains why we're all into sea shanties now. And if anyone wants the chorus my brain cooked up to a Parks & Rec-themed "Wellerman" rewrite, just let me know. (~$Vulture) 

  • "Yes, the Pandemic Is Ruining Your Body: Quarantine is turning you into a stiff, hunched-over, itchy, sore, headachy husk." (~$Atlantic) And don't rush out the door the instant you get your shot, btw: the actual post-pandemic "return to normal" is going to happen in stages. (Vox) 

  • Scientists are warning that we're underestimating the ghastliness of the future we're creating for ourselves. (Flinders U) (Paper) 

  • Well, we're slowly turning the ocean into carbonic acid, but the octopuses might be OK for a while. (U of Chicago) 

  • The city of New York -- whose elite Trump has always desperately wanted to be loved by -- is telling him in no uncertain financial terms to go fuck himself, and it's beautiful. (NPR) 

  • Here's a great read on RNA vaccines and the future thereof! (Nature) 

  • Theoretical calculations indicate that if we make an AI smarter than us, not only would we not be able to control it, we might not even be able to tell it's there at all. (Max Planck Institute) (Paper) 

  • The Trump administration made good on their efforts to put parts of the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge up for lease to oil companies for drilling, but the actual sale didn't go great: almost nobody showed up. Ha! (Alaska Public Media) 

  • Where do animals go? No, think about it for a second: how far do they roam, really? The answer is we barely have any goddamn idea. But there's an incredibly ambitious project involving 5-gram tracking devices and a receiver bolted to the ISS that might give us a real look at some extremely interesting data. ($NYT) 

  • Coralberry plants make a compound that's potentially useful for medicine, but can't be easily cultivated; turns out there's a soil bacterium we can grow in bulk that does it, too. (U of Bonn) 

  • "What covering heavy metal taught me about spotting Nazis" (Columbia Journalism Review) 

  • Remember those lithium ion batteries that kept exploding? Someone's worked out a way to build a safe one with seawater. (U of Houston) 

  • Drew Magary tested that stupid pandemic helmet so you don't have to. (SFGate) 

  • Making babies in space is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone thought. (NEO.LIFE) 

  • Why use crude oil to make plastic when you can get it from wood instead? Praise be, the press release even specifically mentions the scalability of the process!!!! (U of Bath) 

  • Telegram is trying to get rid of its Nazis. (TechCrunch) 

  • Here, have a map of 18,000 asteroids relative to the planets as of the turn of the millennium. (Eleanor Lutz) 

  • Image recognition AI works faster when it's been modified to work more like how a human visual cortex operates. (Georgetown U Medical Center) 

  • Fuck yeah: 250 people in the publishing industry have signed onto a letter vowing not to give any Trumpites book deals. (Publishers Weekly) 

  • Uhh: a couple of physicists think it would be possible to generate energy from the zone near a black hole at 150% efficiency? ? ???? (Columbia) 

  • Give a bunch of different people a group of objects to categorize and they'll come up with a bunch of different systems. Weirdly, if you group them together and ask the groups to do it, the systems start to look more and more samey the bigger the groups get. (UPenn) (Paper) 

  • Renting "a person who does nothing" actually makes sense to me at this point in the pandemic. I don't know what that says about me or the pandemic. (The Mainichi) 

  • I just want to pause for a second and note that we live in a world where "pocket-sized DNA sequencers" are not only a thing, but that scientists have figured out a way to make them nearly error-free. (U of British Columbia) 

  • Did someone say "self-organizing swarm of robot fish"? Because somebody made a self-organizing swarm of robot fish, and it's pretty dang interesting. (Harvard School of Engineering) (Paper) Speaking of robots helping to explore the ocean, the good folks at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute successfully deployed a trio of autonomous robots to track and study oceanic microbes. (MBARI) 

  • If one of its rotors gets knocked out, a drone could stabilize itself with the remaining ones by using visual info from onboard cameras. (U of Zurich) 

  • Meanwhile over in Japan, they're blasting plankton with a "heavy ion beam" to make mutants that grow faster so they can feed fish better. And that's not the only work they've been doing! Get on their level!!! (RIKEN) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumDICKBABY, The Needs of the Many 

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.