Melissa & Doug callout email

March 29, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's resigning itself to the warming of Spring that will eventually give way to the dreaded Hot Weather 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway153 - Props To You, Kooky"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Amy explore a fabulous assortment of notions for consumer products, services, and education."Let's not mince words on this point: all of our guests are great and I would gladly have them on again at any time, but what Amy brings to this show cannot be easily replicated, which makes her a singular and valuable resource not just to the makers of this show, but to the nation at large.You know what, this time I'm not going to ask you to go to Apple Podcasts and give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating. I'm going to assume you've done it already and don't need reminding.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.I don't seem to have anything for this section this week. Rare??? To be completely honest, I saved all my smoke for the section immediately below, 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I've had this one simmering away on the back burner for literal months and now it's time to let everyone know. Take a look at these two sets of wooden toys. They look like fun for a little kid, right? Absolutely. And they are. Separately.Because they don't fucking interoperate.We thought it would be nice to get Quentin some toys he could mess around with using pretend tools and whatnot, and figured the "construction building set" would be a nice set of extra parts for his little toolbox. Well guess the fuck what: the wooden nuts and bolts in the toolbox set are just a little bit bigger than the fucking identical-looking wooden nuts and bolts in the construction set. The size difference is subtle enough not to be detectable to the naked eye yet large enough to completely prevent a part from one kit from being used in another. WHY. WHY IS THIS. It's the same fucking company!! Why would they do this?!?! What fucking process from design to production allowed this fucking bullshit to happen? Surely one of these sets preceded the other. Producing nuts and bolts that are just a little bit off from the other seems like it would be more work -- adjusting existing machinery, at the very least, if not outright retooling and building a whole new assembly line. Why not just run some off the same line and just put 'em in different fucking packages? I ended up having to take a Sharpie and put little dots on all the nuts and bolts (and tools -- both sets have a toy screwdriver, and even the fucking slots in the screw heads are slighty different fucking sizes) from one set, just so I'd at least know why something wasn't coming together. Either Melissa or Doug fucked up and I demand to know why. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Older Americans who've been fully vaccinated are fully ready to party. ($NYT) 

  • Facebook's internal moderation guidelines are an absolute fucking shitshow. (Guardian) 

  • Public trust in major institutions has collapsed; now what? (Vox) 

  • "Massless" energy storage is what happens when you integrate a battery into the structure of a vehicle instead of just slapping a heavy battery pack on it, and we might just get there one day. (Chalmers U of Tech) 

  • Evanston is about to start its housing reparations program for Black residents or the descendants thereof. (Chicago Tribune) 

  • Where do you put the sensors on a soft robot so it can move around and do its job? Get a neural network to figure it out faster and better than any human could. (MIT) 

  • I get the feeling these party house design tips will be useful to us in the medium-to-long-term future. (Town & Country) 

  • Scientists have worked out a way to turn wood! into! bioplastics!!!!! (Yale) 

  • The big boat blocking the Suez was costing $400M an hour in global trade. (BBC) 

  • Here's a map of where the most undiscovered species are likely to still be hiding. (Yale) 

  • It turns out "don't sweat the small stuff" is extremely key to maintaining your mental well-being, folks. (U of Miami) 

  • This method of space junk removal doesn't actually seem useful to me. It only works on satellites with a compatible docking plate? Really?? (NPR) 

  • Welsh bunnies dug up some ancient artifacts. (Guardian) 

  • Put solar panels over California's irrigation canals; the amount of water we could save on top of the energy we could generate is pretty damn astonishing. (~$High Country News) 

  • Read this interview with a zoologist who thinks alien life might have a lot of the same features ours does. Weirdly, no mention of carcinization. Perhaps under some pressure from Big Crab. (Quanta) 

  • Scientists have tested making cheap water filters from literal tree branches and they work great. (MIT) 

  • Recode has a list of "10 ways office work will never be the same" (Recode) 

  • Trail cameras continue to be great for wildlife research. (U of Utah) 

  • New York turns out to be popular with baby great white sharks. (Florida Atlantic U) 

  • Scientists at the ol' Large Hadron Collider have produced some quark decay results that don't line up with the laws of physics as we know them. (Imperial College London) 

  • Do ............ do octopuses dream? Am I going to avoid making a Cthulhu joke here? Okay, good. (NPR) (Paper) 

  • Here's more of a deep dive on Mackenzie Scott's impressive philanthropy for 2020. (Candid) 

  • US states with anti-union policies don't do as well economically compared to states that are friendlier to labor. (Cornell) 

  • For real this time: dolphins showed up in Venice. (The Verge) 

  • Looks like Enceladus's subsurface ocean has currents. (Caltech) 

  • NASA thinks it might be a good idea to fire fungi at an asteroid to make it into soil. The initial experiments sound worthwhile, anyway. (NASA) 

  • Why the hell NOT put a school inside a dead mall? (~$Curbed) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Blueberry Version, Opportunities for Growth and Disruption 

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.