Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that voted days ago and is just going to find the correct playlist and stare off into the middle distance until needed

You'll Like This

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

Instant Band Night 28: LATER

It's NEXT GODDAMN WEEK and I'm betting we're gonna need to blow off some steam one way or another, so let's fucking GOOOOOOOOOO 🎵😎🎵 As always, there's no requirement to get onstage — if you don't feel like rocking out, just show up and bear witness to the most concentrated explosion of joyful musical creativity you can cram into your eyes and ears! Ticket link (including handy FAQ) is right here (as well as below) for convenient forwarding to your top-tier friends.

Nov 14 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

Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: there has never been a better time than now.

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 read a thing somewhere — might've been on WaPo — on "how to deal with today" that basically went something like this:

• Allow yourself to feel hope for most of the day

• At the very end, give way to the certainty that Trump will win

In theory, this means

• You've spent most of the day not being too stressed out

• Should Trump win, you've already felt it once, so the reality should be less of a crushing blow to your psyche

I dunno!!! Maybe?!? Here's what may be some more level-headed advice from a clinical psychologist. What I'm going to offer is this: imagine I'm next to you quietly putting a hand on your shoulder in solidarity with an expression on my face somewhere between 😐 and 😬, where we'll stand for as long as we both need. Hugs may be requested (I give extremely good hugs, five-star rating, many satisfied users) but are not required. We'll get through this.

#dadthoughts

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

Halloween went great:

• Quentin's friend Cleo lives on a street where they do a streetside parade format

• Everybody posts up by the sidewalk with tables and the kids walk up

• Nobody needs to go to a house

• All the kids had a great time

• So did the homeowners

• Felix got pretty tired so Mavis took him home

• The rest of us went to a different street that in years past has been kind of the Big Halloween Street: lots of decorations, candy galore, etc

• This year it was .......... less so: still some good decorations, but far fewer houses participated at all — more than half seemed dark

• The hell happened?

• Buncha party-poopers, honestly, what the fuck

• Still, both Quentin and Felix received plenty of candy, a haul beyond their wildest imaginings as far as I can tell (which given their extremely limited experience with Halloween is very precious and good)

• Whoever at Mondelez had the bright idea for Oreo two-cookie trick-or-treat packs is a fucking genius because the kids had never had an Oreo before (I know, I know) and they were a hit

• The grownup shark jumpsuits need a slit in the side for pocket access (Mavis's solution was simply to strap a cross-body fannypack on, which worked great)

• The Halloween decorations are going into a bin for storage and we'll see what happens next year

A good Halloween, folks, and we are glad to have had it; may they always be so.

Fascination Corner

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

• The Scientists say there are in fact multiple paths to our climate and sustainability goals; we just have to actually do the work. (Potsdam Inst) (Paper)

• Jaywalking's legal in NYC now. (Guardian)

• Everybody stop! Shut the fuck up! The Scientists put chloroplasts into hamster cells and were able to get them to photosynthesize for two days!!! (U of Tokyo) (Paper)

• You can't recycle carbon fiber parts. But what if? You could? With the help of fungus? (USC)

• The Scientists have invented a method of carbon capture that's a lot easier and more environmentally friendly. (Rice U) Some Other Scientists worked a different one out that turns the carbon into ethanol. (Johannes Gutenberg U)

• What's the most Canadian animal? Turns out: not the moose. (Simon Fraser U)

• Some Engineers have created an algorithm that helps determine causality, and it seems generally applicable to who-knows-how-many fields. (MIT) (Paper)

• The Scientists have come up with a way to identify narcissists in job interviews. (SFSU)

• I'm still rooting for cultured meats at scale because I'd love to divest from factory farming ASAP, so this new idea for sorghum scaffolding for cultured pork sounds great. (ACS)

• Two years ago, a pair of Black teen girls shocked the world of math with the announcement of a proof for the Pythagorean theorem that used trigonometry, something everybody thought was basically impossible. Now they've published a paper that shows ten ways to do it. I fully admit I don't understand it, but it's still great reading! (Taylor & Francis) (Paper)

• Black holes might be blasting out all the dark energy that's causing the universe to expand. (Science Alert)

• I talked about The Scientists working on biochar to remove agricultural runoff waste a week or two ago, but this particular method would also recycle captured phosphorus as a slow-release fertilizer, which is win/win. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) (Paper)

• There's an insanely huge lithium deposit under Arkansas that could potentially supply the entire world's EV battery industry nine times over; the trick will be getting it out of there without fucking the land up. (USA Today)

• If we're going to believe anybody about a bipedal robot that can pick stuff off shelves and put them on another shelf all on its own without any kind of remote control teleoperation nonsense, it's probably gonna be Boston Dynamics. Yes there's video. (TechCrunch)

• Speaking of robots, Some Engineers have come up with a way to turn all the various kinds of training data for specialized robots we have into a more general system that can teach any robot how to do anything much faster. (MIT) (Paper)

• Things I didn't know: "The Unlikely Inventor of the Automatic Rice Cooker: A Japanese housewife’s experiments cracked the code of perfectly cooked rice" (IEEE Spectrum)

• RSV is bad! The vaccine works! More people need to get it!!! (URMC)

• The Scientists have worked out a design for uhhhh well, basically wearables for neurons? Individual neurons??? (MIT) (Paper)

• Hundreds of people showed up in Dublin for a Halloween parade that was hallucinated by The Machine and somehow spread around online; this one was relatively innocuous, but I can only imagine the nasty bullshit coming down the line for us all over the next few years. (Metro)

• Surprise!!! Shock!!!! ChatGPT Search isn't very good! (TechCrunch)

• On the other hand, The Scientists have made some important material improvements to the way AlphaFold works. (Linköping U) (Paper)

• The Scientists have stumbled on a new strain of cyanobacteria they immediately nicknamed "Chonkus" that could potentially help a lot with carbon sequestration; good for them. I would love a future where history textbooks basically have to credit an entity named Chonkus for helping to curb climate change. (Wyss Inst) (Paper)

• Some Engineers took a look at the feathers at the edges of bird wings and realized slapping some plastic flaps on the edges of plane wings would help prevent stalling and increase control. (Princeton)

• We all agree elephants are great, but farmers in Kenya are having problems with them raiding crops; turns out fences with beehives on them not only work great, but provide pollination bonuses. (U of Oxford) (Paper)

• The Australian Mint made real Bluey dollarbuck coins, and 63K of them were immediately stolen; looks like 40K have been recovered, though. (BBC)

• Huh: I think I covered back when The Scientists announced that Carolina azolla algae were nutritious, but testing whether it's toxic didn't yield results until just now, apparently? It's fine, btw, but I seriously hope the next set of tests are whether it's actually tasty in any way. (Penn State) (Paper)

• Fuck a tokamak: stellarators might be the key to fusion power. (IEEE Spectrum)

• The Scientists have come up with a way to prevent frost forming on flat surfaces, which would be incredibly useful for a wide range of applications if it didn't also involve using graphene, which as far as I know nobody's cracked mass production on; that last part is me editorializing, but c'mon. (Northwestern) (Paper)

• What if you never sort your life out? (Oliver Burkeman)

• Transcranial magnetic stimulation (putting your head next to a special magnet and letting it go woob woob woob at certain parts of your brain) seems to work great for depression, but can we accelerate the whole process? The answer seems to be: yes! (U of Cambridge) (Paper)

• On a species level, does being more social help? Pretty much, yeah. (U of Oxford) (Paper)

• The Scientists just recorded the largest mass predation event ever witnessed by humans. (MIT)

• Ghost jobs are bumming everybody out for good goddamn reason. (SFGate)

• Some Chemical Engineers have invented a new 3D printing material without solvents in it that could one day lead to biodegradable implants for people. (Duke)

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:

Alternate universe music critic Steve says "initially I didn't think the girl in the checked trousers fit with it, but now I think she's got the relaxed sprawl and slightly mocking expression of someone who could kill you three different ways without getting up.
"I think the music is Fugazi but with synths and a girl who can sing in tune, and the lyrics are declaring open season on the Bezoses and Shinzo Abes of this world."

Reader Lauren sums this one up as "Glassheart: the album that launched a thousand lesbian awakenings."

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. If you received this as a forward and would like to subscribe yourself, you can do it at the bottom of this page right here (which also has the archive)!