medicine: it works

June 14, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that fervently hopes Trader Joe's never discontinues the chili lime almonds, for the good of civilization as a whole (or least the immediate preservation of the part of civilization that exists in a one-mile radius around me) 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI'm hoping to get the next episode edited this week, so let's just hope there are no surprises in store for us over the next six days.I hear all the cool kids are going to our Apple Podcasts page and leaving ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews. That's just something I've been told.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberHalf of America's adult population has been vaccinated. Pencil 11/11/2021 into your schedule and if we're all very good and lucky, 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+ + g e t   y o u r   s h o t   / /   l e t ' s   d o   t h i s + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Still not a lot to talk about here yet, but watch this space for a hard-hitting sock-related update sometime soonish. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Following last week's hospital adventure, we did in fact bring Quentin home late Tuesday afternoon and he's doing great.We have to give him three medications every day: 

  • A liquid form of Pepcid, which protects his stomach lining against the steroid and is apparently tasty (thank you pharmaceutical companies that create products with small children in mind)

  • A liquid blood pressure medication that's also tasty (blessings be upon its makers as well)

  • A steroid pill that we have to crush up and hide in a spoonful of chocolate pudding

Since chocolate pudding is incredibly delicious to Quentin, he has thus far not complained, and we may hope this state of affairs continues for the next 4 weeks.I can definitely tell you it's working in that his swelling is visibly diminishing day by day -- his face is shockingly different. Also he needs to pee roughly every 45m, which makes sense: as his kidneys start to behave themselves, his bloodstream's osmotic balance is restored and the fluids formerly occupying his tissues get converted to so much pee, especially at night. He's got extra-absorbent overnight diapers and even a backup pad in there, but let's just say there've been two nights thus far where even these measures did not serve. On balance, this is good -- we really want those fluids out of his body -- it's also just a little inconvenient. Just a little. I'll take it over the alternative any day!! Putting a second backup pad in his night diaper did seem to help; I wonder if we'll need to go up to three.I seriously cannot convey to you the extent to which his face has changed; his eyes look enormous to us. We can't tell if it's just that he was swelling up very gradually for a long time and now it's a shock to see it all properly drained away, or if he's somehow getting older? I hear that's a thing that happens to kids?? They age??? Further updates on this astonishing discovery as we gather and collate more data. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Your Atlantic must-read for the week is this one about the origins and broad aims of the four Americas that currently exist: libertarian idiots, "Smart America," MAGA chuds, and the new woke kids. Frustratingly, he doesn't talk about how to get them to unify, but it's fascinating reading all the same. (~$Atlantic) 

  • In this, the year of Luigi 2021, "Social media influencers are burning out and feeling bad" is a tale as old as time. I would love one that goes something like "Social media platforms rein in their chum-bucket algorithms to give creators a semblance of pacing and comfort" instead; platforms, get on that. Thank you. ($NYT) 

  • A single enterprising 22yo got caught bilking MAGA dipshits out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by impersonating Trump and his idiot family. It could not have been hard. Why aren't there more? (Mediaite) 

  • Huh. A bunch more fast radio bursts have been mapped, and weirdly, they seem to correspond with a universal megastructure made of dark matter. (Vice) 

  • Some scientists think we could pull carbon out of the ocean by turning it into literal stone. Sure? (Hakai) 

  • Cheetah tails help them maneuver, but not because they're heavy (they're not) -- it's because they're fluffy. It's an aerodynamic thing. This has applications for robot design. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Google decided to try using a machine learning system to design a machine learning chip, and it ended up doing the job in six hours -- work it would take a human months to accomplish. (The Verge) 

  • I'm not the only one who finds it a little creepy when microorganisms that are literally thousands upon thousands of years old are thawed out and just start going about their business again like it's fuckin' nothing, right? (Science Daily) 

  • Oooooh I don't know if I liiiiike thiiiiiiiis: it's possible to write an algorithm that reads your brain's responses to stimuli, matches them with other peoples' data, and predicts how you'll respond to new stimuli with a fair degree of accuracy. (U of Copenhagen) 

  • I forgot about the friendship paradox! (Santa Fe Institute) 

  • Watching the trailer for this game (embedded in the article) might make you cry a little: it's a Sim City-type deal called Terra Nil where you rejuvenate a wasteland into natural splendor, then clean up the technology you employed to do it and leave it pristine. (Polygon) 

  • A nonzero part of whatever determines your popularity appears to be genetically inheritable. (Rice) 

  • "Why People Keep Falling for Fake Twitter Drama" (Vice) 

  • There's a gang of elephants wandering across part of China for seemingly no reason. (BBC) 

  • It's at least possible that a truly outrageous number of rogue planets are out there drifting between the stars, and while they might not be able to support life, their moons might. (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • Snapchat filters are fucking up our self-image; maybe the answer is to get real weird with it. (NEO.LIFE) 

  • The brain isn't as stable as we like to think it is. (~$Atlantic) 

  • A strange principle of fluid dynamics allows a small robot to traverse walls and ceilings with nothing but a flexible, vibrating plastic disc. (IEEE Spectrum) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumJail Boyfriend, The Answer is Always Cornbread 

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.