Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes it had more excuses to write things down with this beautiful fountain pen recently received as an extremely classy gift

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 27: JULY, JULY

Instant Band Night mixes music and spontaneous creativity to create a one-of-a-kind event that's almost unbelievably joyful to either participate in or just show up and watch. No, really, you have to see it to believe it! July will be the last one for four months, so if you haven't been able to make it this year thus far, this'll be your last chance for a while. I promise you nothing less than an explosion of jubilance in the form of music that will surprise and delight you every few minutes. Who could say no to that!! Get your tickets now and tell your five coolest friends.

July 11 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

If you know somebody with almost aggressively whimsical taste, or just happen to be a person with an appreciation for playfully intelligent ceramics, then I know a very exclusive online store you should visit. Nerdy little totems for your garden or shelf! Ediacaran biota! Tardigrades with outrageous paint jobs! A fruit holder that you really have to see to believe! Get in there

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 been sitting here trying to work out how to communicate the visceral appeal of Rockport to you in writing and I think I just have to start, not knowing at all if I'm going to be even remotely successful. If only I were a poet.

Notes on the town of Rockport, Massachusetts:

• Absolutely nails the Quaint Little New England Town Vibe: the buildings are old, multivariate, immaculately kept while also still retaining some sense of age that I think must be coming through in their design

• There's a beach, a wharf, and the most often-painted building in the country ca. the early 1900s

• You kind of expect to see a grizzled fisherman in a cable-knit sweater come walking around the next corner even though it's the start of summer

• I mean it's a tourist trap but it's an artsy tourist trap: just about every storefront (and there are many, so many) is an art gallery, charming tchotchke shop, beach souvenir store, or some combination of all three

• So! Many! Shops!!!!

• You have to picture a somehow classier version of a beach boardwalk shopping drag, except five of them crammed into enough space for one, but it's so fun to walk down that you absolutely do not mind

• Also there's a lot of ice cream but not for me and the prediabetes demon

• I cannot help wondering what this place is like in the fall: crisp air, brisk ocean winds under heavy gray clouds, every storefront lit with buttery yellow light, hell yeah

• (Yes, I did ask: they do a lot of business in the Xmas season and I bet it's charming as fuck)

I was staying at a rental house maybe two miles out of town and we had plenty of food, so I never sampled any of the restaurants. Is the food in Rockport good? I was so spiritually concussed by the place that I'm not certain I'd've been able to tell if it was bad, honestly. Perhaps this will be a task for future me to suss out; I want to go back there at some point. Let's all go. I'll name a date and you can meet me there.

#dadthoughts

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

The new bedtime routine is that we complete the ritual sometime between 715-730p and for the next 30-90m, Felix gets out of bed every 2-8m. He doesn't even have requests anymore, he's just opening the door and walking out of the room he shares with Quentin.* Most nights he seems to fall asleep in the 830-9p range. And then he wakes up at 5a ready to party. Obviously I can't turn the lights on and get the day started, so I get out a couple bins of toys and encourage him to play quietly so he doesn't wake up Quentin (variable success on that, but Quentin also sleeps like a rock most of the time). We're engaging the services of a professional sleep coach, because we are tired and quite frankly fucking out of ideas. We've heard great things about this person; fingers crossed. Felix Go To Sleep Challenge Summer has begun.

* Quentin, btw, is usually asleep before the clock strikes 730p and is dead to the world until the morning. The boys: they're built different!!!

Fascination Corner

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

• The "millionaire's tax" they passed in Massachusetts worked amazingly well, hint hint everybody (WGBH)
  

• Motherfuck: even though we've made progress slowing (but not reversing) emissions, global temperatures are still rising faster than ever. (U of Leeds)
  

• "If Trump can be convicted, so can Big Oil" (HEATED)
  

• Some Engineers have created a chip-based 3D printer that does the light-cured resin thing and has no moving parts, which has staggering implications for flexibility and portability. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• The biggest study yet on universal basic income suggests a truly ridiculous return on investment if we just started paying everyone in the world regularly(!!!!!!!!). (U British Columbia) (Paper)
  

• Whooooooo wants to read all about the OceanGate dumbass and how he fucked up the build of his crappy sub that got him and four other people killed? (WIRED)
  

• Here, have a fascinating longread about the person behind a scrappy, successful Spanish-language newspaper operating in rural Iowa. (Columbia Journalism Review)
  

• If you have ever in your life known a dog, you owe it to yourself to experience the latest missive from Daniel Lavery on his dog's spiritual awakening upon discovering the existence of yards. (The Chatner)
  

• The Scientists are building a cellular-level picture of how flying through space fucks up the immune system. (Buck Inst) (Paper)
  

• Analysis of seven million political speeches cross-referenced with temperature data yields the conclusion that our brains no work so good on hot days, which could make problem since planet getting something hotter year over year bad times. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper)
  

• Conventional dart guns only have one muzzle velocity, which can lead to the dart not working at all or injuring the target animal; Some Engineers have built a prototype lidar-equipped electromagnetic coil gun that lands a dart with Nerf-equivalent force no matter what distance it's fired from. (Ohio State) (Paper)
  

• "Swimming Microrobots Deliver Cancer-fighting Drugs to Metastatic Lung Tumors in Mice". Now they just need to test it on bigger animals, and eventually people. (UCSD) (Paper)
  

• Just click on this. It's a map that tells you what the prices are at Taco Bell all over the country. (Taconomical)
  

• I'm both disappointed and relieved that this writeup doesn't mention the 2003 movie THE CORE as a potential scenario we have to worry about right now vis-a-vis the actual core of the actual planet slowing down a little. (USC) (Paper)
  

• A new study shows that hybrid work is better for companies and workers all around; unsurprising but still important to prove. (Stanford) (Paper)
  

• In order to meet a bigtime ocean conservation goal, The Scientists have run the numbers and concluded that setting up a "conservation market" system would work best for everyone involved. (UC Santa Barbara)
  

• "Silicon Valley is finally making flying cars—and this guy bought one of the first" (SF Standard)
  

• The Scientists may have identified the place in the brain where paranoia lives. (Yale) (Paper)
  

• We need rare earth elements real bad to make all kinds of green tech, but as the name probably clues you in, they're rare; The Scientists have discovered eggshells are really good at trapping them, though, which is convenient for everyone involved. (Trinity College Dublin) (Paper)
  

• If you already know what the nine-point circle is, then nevermind, but in case you didn't, I have two links for you to read in sequence, because up until today, I sure as hell didn't!!! (Dinosaur Comics) (Wikipedia)
  

• Machine-generated accidental body horror! Get your Machine-generated accidental body horror here! (Ars Technica)
  

• The mystery of how shipworms are able to chow down on wood has confounded humanity for literal centuries, but The Scientists have an answer now: turns out there's a microbiome in there after all (for some reason they thought there wasn't for a long time). (UMass Amherst)
  (Paper)
  

• The Scientists built an instance of The Machine that not only detects prostate cancer better than a radiologist, but also cuts false alarms by half. They need to test it more, but damn. (Radboud UMC)
  

• Trust me when I say you really do want to read about the Excel World Championship in Vegas. (The Verge)
  

• Building a rocket engine usually takes months; an Indian startup 3D printed a working one in 72 hours. (IEEE Spectrum)
  

• Huh: what if dark matter isn't a thing after all? A professor out in Alabama has a theory that gravity can exist without mass, which is a fucking wild notion, but who knows? I sure don't! (UAH) (Paper)
  

• Obviously, but also aw fuck: "Interventions against Misinformation also Increase Skepticism toward Reliable Sources" (U of Zurich) (Paper)
  

• What does The Machine look like? No, really, what's its logo supposed to be? (TechCrunch)
  

• The Scientists have invented what they could credibly call a "living bioelectronic" device that incorporates friendly bacteria and conventional sensors to monitor skin conditions; worked great on mice. (Rutgers U)
  

• Drones have measurably improved the lives of some rice farmers in Vietnam who are using them to take better care of more rice while using less pesticide. (Hakai)
  

• Some Engineers have built a device mimicking the intelligent prey-detection capabilities of Venus flytraps using physical liquid metal logic instead of a computer chip. (Hong Kong U of Science & Tech) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists — using an experimental design you kinda have to read for yourself — have successfully mapped what appear to be the brain regions responsible for interpreting not just pleasure and pain, but (separately) how intense the sensation you're feeling is, regardless of whether it's nice or not. (Inst for Basic Science)
  

• If you're trying to keep your tweens' screen use under control, you gotta practice what you preach, says a new study. (UCSF) (Paper)
  

• Another good use for The Machine: counting crowd size at protests so you can call bullshit on inflated numbers. (Rest of World)
  

• The Scientists have come up with a mouth rinse that temporarily blocks the ability to taste bitter, which is a huge hurdle for lots of people when it comes to taking medicine. (Monell Center) (Paper)
  

• Balls: it looks like just putting a female voice on an AI teammate can bolster participation from actual human women in the room if they're underrepresented, which is a finding that's simultaneously interesting and extremely sad. (Cornell)
  

• Now boarding for the Becky Chambers Wayfarers universe: The Scientists have demonstrated a prototype low-power photosynthetic battery based on algae. (Concordia U) (Paper)
  

• Evidence strongly suggests elephants have names for each other — actual abstract names, not just the sounds elephants make (Jeff/Ashish/Elaine vs Honk/Blat/Snort). (Colorado State)
  

• Turns out giving kids cognitive control training doesn't actually produce any side benefits whatsoever, according to a new study. (University College London) (Paper)
  

• Inspired by the toughness of oyster shells, Some Engineers have hit upon a way to build things with cement that's way more crack- and break-resistant. (Princeton Engineering) (Paper)
  

• The benefits of failure are not only overrated, we might actually be lowkey damaging society by continuing to spread platitudes about 'em. (APA)
  

• When you stop to think about it from an environmental standpoint, it's weird that we throw salt all over the goddamn place just to melt our roads when they're icy; The Scientists have come up with some better, more eco-friendly options. (Osaka Metropolitan U) (Paper)
  

• Sometimes it just takes a sustained week of yelling: Adobe wants to clarify that they're not feeding anything their users make to The Machine after all. (The Verge)
  

• Optimistic people tend not to procrastinate as badly, according to a new study; now we just need to figure out how to change our mindsets. A trivially simple task!!! (U Tokyo)
  

• Some Engineers have demonstrated a way to give robots a sense of touch that really ups their garbage-sorting game, a task we would actually really love to offload to machines at the earliest possible juncture. (AIP)
  

• The Scientists are getting a better idea of what exactly goes on in what parts of our brain when we make plans. (NYU) (Paper)

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:

Reader Stuart S is pretty sure this album "is a prog band posing as an artificial superintelligence bent on creating the Iron Ass, which is clearly a Toroid Dyson Sphere (Dyson Belt?)"

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.