minor furniture upgrades

March 15, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that just wants to sit on the couch and watch Mythbusters reruns until this is all over 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI swear there'll be a new one next week. Now that I've said it, I have to do it; this is how it works! I also want to note that this is simple sheer laziness and inertia talking; it has nothing to do with the lovely guests with whom we recorded some great episodes -- I'm just a lump right now and I need to own that. no kill iOf course, this means the time is definitely now to give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating in Apple Podcasts and let everybody know they must prepare!!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.The pandemic really is breaking our brains. (~$Atlantic) I'm pretty sure I've lost somewhere between 50-90% of my ability to talk to strangers, which as a fairly high-level extrovert is goddamn disorienting. There's even a kind of awkwardness I feel when talking to people I know, which is its own kind of special mini-hell. Do we all agree that when we emerge from our cocoons, we're going to give everybody a pass for some set amount of time or number of interactions until we've ramped back up to where we were before? I don't know how long it's going to take me, either, and that also is a weird, weird feeling. You're feeling it too, right? It's not just me? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.For a variety of reasons involving the size of his room, the configuration of furniture therein, his growth relative to his crib, and the fact that we have a second kid on the way, we decided to make the move and start Quentin in a "big kid bed." We picked the extendable one from Ikea, set to the middle size. We told him about it beforehand, we let him pick his own comforter, we disassembled his crib (he "helped" take it apart), we put the new bed together in front of him (he mostly watched that), and because he's somehow the easiest kid in the world to raise, he was absolutely fine with the whole thing from jump. He loves his bed! My two favorite things about Quentin and the bed thus far:

  • At least once, Mavis has witnessed him climb into bed and sit quietly among his blankets and stuffies, paging contentedly through a book or two, completely unprompted.

  • With no crib walls in the way, we can now hug him goodnight, but sometimes he insists on hugging us back, and there is no more adorable sight in the world than seeing the mother of your child bend over to hug your kid as he lays in bed and watching his little arms come up and around her shoulders to hug her with his tiny hands.

Fascination Corner

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

  • The Democrats managed to get this much done; let's see if they can make anything else happen? Quoth the article: "That the Biden presidency has already exceeded many progressives’ (low) expectations is not cause for contentment; it is grounds for progressives to raise their expectations. Some things can fundamentally change." (~$Intelligencer) 

  • Tiny, cheap electric cars are a thing in China. (Rest of World) 

  • The bullshit way social media on the internet works might literally be contributing to the erosion of functional democracy; how to fix it? If you've got an Atlantic click to burn, make it this one. (~$Atlantic) 

  • A study of Singaporean college students yielded some trainable components of resilience that helped avoid burnout. Seems like it might be useful? (Yale NUS) 

  • Oooooof: here's a split-screen view of what your Facebook feed looks like depending on whether you're a Trumpite or not; it also does women vs men and boomers vs millennials. (The Markup) Then burn one of your free MIT Technology Review clicks on this: "How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation" (~$MIT Technology Review) 

  • Not every marine animal extinction was caused by some traumatic global event; at least one seems to have been down to the appearance of improved predators. (Florida Museum) 

  • There might be a reason why everybody's acting like an asshole lately. (Vice) 

  • Here's a writeup on a White House job I've literally never thought about before. (Town & Country) 

  • All right, how about an FTL drive that isn't anything Alcubierre-based at all? (Göttingen University) 

  • Turns out flies are pollinators, too. (Knowable) 

  • Once again, Mackenzie Scott makes every other billionaire look like a fool, accounting solo for 3/4 of the total Covid donations contributed by "high net worth individuals" last year. The report goes on to note "Her high-profile giving was notable not only for its scale but also its approach and relative transparency. Her large grants to 384 nonprofits in the U.S. were unsolicited and unrestricted, with an intentional focus on organizations working in areas of high poverty and high racial inequity and with low access to capital." (PDF of report from Center for Disaster Philanthropy) 

  • Has the pandemic changed how we're going to mark some of life's milestones? (AP) 

  • Researchers have come up with a dollar value for the contribution shellfish could make to removing nitrogen pollution from coastal waters. (Anthropocene) 

  • What is life? No, really. What is it? Is it a waste of time to even try defining it? Could be! (Quanta) 

  • Pre-fab houses are a thing in Japan, and they look pretty good. (Dwell) 

  • Read this extremely good and biting set of "instructions" on how to become a Silicon Valley Intellectual if you can stomach it. (The Baffler) 

  • Yellow penguin: the story. (Yves Adams) 

  • That one company still thinks they can make a space hotel happen in [checks watch] six years. Okay! (CNN) 

  • Parler's probably not coming back, which is a shame only because I still think I'd be able to execute an extremely lazy grift thereon if I had the inclination. (Yahoo News) 

  • The University at Buffalo just keeps doing things: this time it's a team of biomedical engineers working on rapid 3D printing in hydrogels, which can create organ-like structures with internal pathways and everything. (U at Buffalo) 

  • How about a device that turns your headphones into sensors powerful enough to monitor your heart rate? (Rutgers) 

  • I'm not even going to try to do better than this opening: "Every town, midsize city, or urban neighborhood has one, or, perhaps, a family of them: the nuisance litigants, the business owners who address zoning board hearings while visibly intoxicated, the parents who ruin PTA meetings by accusing The Polar Express of encouraging demonry. They are the regulars in the police blotter section of the newspaper, the ones who have been banned from multiple softball leagues for reasons that somehow involve child support. They are America’s local ding-dongs and loose cannons. And, increasingly, they represent the Republican Party’s interests in Congress." (Slate) 

  • Using a neural network, researchers have developed something called "tensor holography" that can render holograms with just 1MB worth of memory. (MIT) 

  • Making eye contact with people who aren't interacting much with an activity can improve their participation -- even if the "eye contact" is being made by a robot. (KTH) 

  • Cell-based meat might actually be a thing in about a decade? (Food Dive) 

  • A distant exoplanet orbiting so close to its sun that its atmosphere has been blasted away regrew a new one thanks to its noxious volcanic gases. (NASA) 

  • High emotional intelligence correlates with an ability to identify fake news, which probably isn't a big surprise to anybody but is still nice to see laid out. (U of Strathclyde) 

  • Engineers have used machine learning to create designs for quieter drone propellers that also work better. (RMIT) 

  • Quantum, uh, quantum biology might become a thing people can study with a straight face at some point. (Science Alert) 

  • When the cold came to Texas, people turned out in droves to save cold-stunned sea turtles. (NPR) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some Federation starship classes and names that an online neural network gave me after I fed it two lists of canonical onesMarshall-class starship USS RebelBetter Sails-class starship USS Ninai the Wooden SkulkerCaptain America: Civil War-class starship USS Waspsquest 

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.