nobody needs that much toilet paper, c'mon now

March 09, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes you, specifically, health and long life 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week; instead, I suggest you use the time to figure out how to give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating in Apple Podcasts. You're a smart person, so I bet it won't take you very long.Instant Band Night 15: NUMEROLOGY🤘🎸🎶 !!THURSDAY!! 🎶🎸🤘We're all feeling anxious; let's work it out onstage or on the dance floor. If we take some simple precautions, it'll all be fine.😎 Common surfaces like tabletops and handrails and the door to the green room will be swabbed with rubbing alcohol🎃 All attendees will be directed to the three sinks for immediate handwashing upon entry✨ Bands will be directed to wash hands before AND after their performances⚔ In lieu of physical contact greetings, the Wakanda Forever salute will be highly encouragedAll details are at this handy link:http://bit.ly/instantbandnight15It's also on Facebook if that's where you are* * t h e r e ' l l   b e   c o o k i e s * ** * w e ' l l   s e e   y o u   t h e r e * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I don't have a lot to say in this one, it turns out, other than stay safe, don't fuckin' panic-buy toilet paper, and wash your hands (you filthy animals). 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We're planning to attempt the Potty Training Weekend at the end of the month. Need to re-read the book. Maybe buy some plastic sheeting??? Any advice or tweaks to the method are tentatively welcomed!In other news, the Crib Crew has seen a new addition to its ranks: the stuffed Totoro that Mavis made for Quentin when he was born. It was very fast: he asked for Totoro by name one night while being put to bed, and that was pretty much that. It's not like I was gonna argue with him!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • There's math that indicates the spontaneous emergence of the nucleotides necessary to build RNA somewhere in the universe (like, say, our part of it) is (or was) physically inevitable. (U of Tokyo) Here's the paper. (PDF) 

  • It looks like methane capture from livestock manure is starting to become economically interesting? (E&E News) 

  • Jesus Christ: you can make a cheap solar cell with shockingly good efficiency if you just stack the motherfuckers on top of each other. (U of Colorado Boulder) 

  • Extremely stupid criminals keep snitching on themselves in the form of social media. (~$Quartz) 

  • Here's why we're embarrassingly bad at building public transit in this country. (Vice) 

  • Why are we conscious? Like: why does a certain arrangement of matter give rise to consciousness? Really, though? (Nautilus) (if you've been a reader since January, you might remember another article on this topic, but seriously: what a fascinating question) 

  • You may have read the tweet, but I beg you to read the full story. (It Just Gets Stranger) 

  • Three years ago, researchers at Rice invented UV-activated molecular nanodrills capable of targeting specific kinds of cells and boring holes in their membranes to kill them, which on its own is nuts enough, as it would provide us with an unstoppable way to kill bacteria that are resistant to conventional antibiotics if we could figure out how to activate them while they're inside a body. (2017) It turns out those nanodrills can also do a murder on multicellular organisms if there's enough of them, or at least injure them very badly. (2020) 

  • How big a house do you really need, from a true sustainability standpoint? Someone did the math. (New Jersey Institute of Technology) Here's the full paper. (PDF) 

  • There are a million reasons to salute Elizabeth Warren's presidential run; one of them is that according to Bloomberg's own staffers, she's the one who definitively took him out (also, lots of said staffers were running their own grifts while "working" for him, which is separately delightful). (The Nation) 

  • This article about another new bactericidal compound that's been discovered (not halicin) just made me realize that I don't know why it's not just called an antibiotic, since that's what it does, and the text doesn't explain why either. Still: interesting! (Simon Fraser U) 

  • Ever wondered how they actually go about drilling down to those sub-Antarctic lakes? (includes a brief but somehow arresting video) (Michigan Tech) 

  • I admit I have not had quite enough sleep to understand what makes this new proposal about quantum-entangling black holes to test their information destruction capabilities useful. (Quanta) 

  • Lego did better as a business this year, at least in part because the classic stuff sold better -- "a spaceship" instead of "some highly specific Star Wars nonsense" or whatever. (Reuters) 

  • Do tiny children all over the world acquire language the same way or what? (Stanford Magazine) 

  • If you stop to think about it for a second, it seems incredibly stupid to talk about economic growth forever without acknowledging that our physical planet has a literally finite amount of resources. Is it even possible to be prosperous without expanding? Of course it fucking is. This is a good read, y'all. (~$New Yorker) 

  • Having said that, there's a growing sense that consumers are actually getting tired of consumption. (Fast Company) 

  • We could make batteries out of potassium that are just as good as lithium-ion, as long as we essentially bake them overnight while they're charging. (RPI) 

  • Earth was probably a water world when life got going. (Iowa State U) 

  • Scientists have invented a new technique they call CRISPR-HOT to tag genes they want to study. (Hubrecht Institute) 

  • Bees can count? (U of Cologne) 

  • Want to have a chuckle at the ingenuity of robotics engineers faced with a very interesting challenge? Yeah you do. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Those science class demos that really bring the concept home work just as well in video form as the live in-person variety, it turns out. (Harvard Gazette) 

  • Who'd like a tiny electric car you can rent for roughly $22/mo that doesn't require a driver's license and tops out at about 28mph? Citroen's gonna find out, at least in Europe. (The Verge) 

  • In case you're wondering if I'm up for more journalistic flagellation of House Neumann for the WeWork fiasco, let's be clear that I am always up for more journalistic flagellation of House Neumann for the WeWork fiasco. (Bustle) 

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 onesCataclysm-class starship USS NighthawksEnglish Navy-class starship USS Dragon SimulationsSonic the Hedgehog-class starship USS Ashley 

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.