now comes the fever (again)

June 05, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that both can and can't believe the school year comes to an end this week 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life sometime in 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 podcastInstant Band Night 21: MIXERWe've already sold some tickets to Instant Band Night 21, if that tells you anything. If you've never been, there's never been a better time to start! Come play some music with friendly strangers for a wildly receptive audience, or just be part of said audience and bear witness to creative genius several times in a row!! Mark your calendar now just to be sure you don't miss it! We've got at least one idea in the works for something you've never seen before!July 13 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 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 YOUI've finally put up an Etsy shop where you can find some of my sculptural output; the announcement at the top of the page and the About section at the bottom really encapsulate the entire vibe, so I advise checking it out for either of those if nothing else. Watch this section for new drops, or just follow the shop. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I've got nothing in the tank for this week, folks; Quentin's mystery fever (see #dadthoughts below) seems to have made the leap to Mavis and I think it's trying to colonize me. Will it succeed? Only time will tell. I can tell you the links section this week is out of control, so you've got that to look forward to! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Two weekends ago, Felix brought home some sort of mystery fever that depressed his appetite slightly and did nothing else; he also passed it to Quentin, but by the time Monday rolled around they were both over it, and after the requisite 24h stay at home, they were back to their activities on Wednesday.This past Saturday the mystery fever came back for a second round with Quentin, this time slightly more intense with worse appetite effects, but again nothing else (snot, cough, sore throat, etc all absent). I'm typing this at 1052p on Sunday night: Quentin woke himself up about a half hour ago having barfed up all his dinner. I didn't wake Mavis, just went to work stripping the bed and pillow. There's a towel in place on the mattress, and another one wrapped around his pillow, and a bowl by his head in case he needs it; the bedding has been stain-sprayed and soaks in a bucket in the tub. His favorite bunny was also a casualty, unfortunately, and the affected areas have been rinsed and sprayed; I may scrub those and try to just let the bunny hang out in the tub next to the bucket, since the wisdom of soaking it overnight seems questionable. The stuffing, right? Doesn't seem like a great idea.I'm not sure whether the barfing is some fun new stage of the mystery fever, or if it's the half bottle of water Quentin apparently chugged at some point prior; I'm leaning toward maybe? the latter? because he's had some more water in small, cautious amounts (and some ibuprofen) that he's kept down without incident; I'm watching him on the monitor as I type, fidgeting and rolling around. Go back to sleep, bud!It is now 1140p and I'm pretty sure he's asleep; I should go to bed too! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Ahem. "How should journalists cover Pride in states that have passed anti-LGBTQ+ laws?" (Poynter) 

  • A lot of weasel words got inserted into the latest draft of the global pandemic treaty, and it was probably The Corporations' fault. (Nature) 

  • There are eight planetary systems The Scientists have identified that make all this [waves around] function and we're over the limit on pretty much all of them, but if you take fairness and justice into account, we're blowing it even more badly on seven of them. Out of eight. (AP) (Paper) 

  • "The Moral Case for Working Less: We shouldn’t work less simply because it allows us to be better workers. We should work less because it allows us to be better humans." This is what all the machines are supposed to be for!!!!!!!!! (~$Atlantic) 

  • The Scientists have concrete recommendations for us all on how to cut plastics pollution. There's a whole report! (U of Portsmouth) (Report) 

  • <The Wire voice> El Niño comin'. </The Wire voice> (Vox) 

  • We're not imagining it: our allergies really are getting worse. (NPR) 

  • The AI people are once again trying to sound the alarm about AI. Again! Kinda weird that they don't just shut all the development down if they think it's so damn dangerous. (TechCrunch) 

  • The Scientists used a machine learning model to identify a new compound that specifically and lethally targets a dangerous bacterium that causes a lot of hospital infections. (MIT) But why stop there! The Scientists also taught a neural network to make up new drugs and figure out how to create them, and it did great. (Ohio State) 

  • There are some interesting experiments happening in the creation of third spaces in San Francisco right now. (SF Standard) 

  • The Scientists say restoring coastal ecosystems — planting a shitload of mangroves and seagrasses — would not only remove carbon from the atmosphere, it'd help de-acidify the ocean, which would be great news for corals. (Georgia Tech) (Paper) 

  • Why is getting kids into summer camp like this? (Bloomberg gift link that I hope still works) 

  • Downtown San Francisco is not the burnt-out post-apocalyptic wasteland Fox News types want you to think it is, but it's also not ......... super great, either. Here are some interesting artsy ideas for what to do with it. (SF Standard) 

  • The Scientists have run the numbers and curbside recycling is actually a pretty decent climate investment. (Anthropocene) (Paper) 

  • Giant heat pumps are becoming a thing, maybe, at least in Europe? You love to see it, folks. (BBC) Back here in the US, Energy Star is considering decertifying central heating and air for houses altogether in favor of heat pumps. (Heatmap) 

  • If we're going to make hydrogen for clean energy, The Scientists think we might be able to store it in coal formations, which sure would give all those coal miners everyone's so concerned about something to do. (Penn State) 

  • Fully 95-98% of the UAPs people are reporting turn out to be ordinary aircraft, but doing the math, at 50-100 reported sightings a month, that still leaves anywhere between a dozen and sixty aerial phenomena a year that we can't explain. Let the panel do its work!! (Motherboard) If you want another writeup on the briefing, I got you there too. (The Hill) 

  • There are places on the seafloor literally littered with lumps of metals that The Corporations are desperate to get at, but odds are good they'd fuck up a benthic ecosystem we know almost nothing about: a recent survey of the most promising target zone revealed over 5000 species previously unknown to science (Motherboard) (Paper), plus the database that supposedly keeps track of all this stuff is a barren, almost laughable junkyard. (Nature) 

  • "A Medieval Comedy Act Has Been Discovered in First-Ever Find, Researcher Says: With jokes about drinking and killer rabbits, the incredible discovery shows tropes of British humor stretch back centuries." (Motherboard) 

  • Could living in the suburbs vs the city impact your mental health? Sure looks like it, but there are complicating factors. (The Conversation) (Paper) 

  • A new study sure seems to show that people who think they're great at detecting bullshit are actually the worst at it! (Psy Post) 

  • It's wild to me that The Scientists don't already do this, but anonymized peer review of papers — especially a double-blind process — is amazing at removing biases that favor rich, English-speaking countries. (Nature) 

  • Should robots have rights or rites? My alma mater suggests a Confucianist approach to how we treat robots from a moral/ethical perspective might be the way to go. (CMU) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have discovered another organism that can break down PFAS "forever chemicals" — this time it's a couple of bacteria. (UC Riverside) 

  • Here are the current reputation rankings of the 100 apparently-most-visible brands in the US right now. (Axios) 

  • Actual forest fungal experts are pouring cold water on the whole "trees talk to each other through a network of mycelia" thing. (Undark) 

  • Huh: there actually are valid use cases for those absurdly long YouTube videos that don't show you anything, which I didn't even know were a thing until about five minutes ago. (The Verge) 

  • Plants don't have nerves, but they can still tell when something is touching them and when it stops. Weird, huh? (Washington State) 

  • Almost a quarter million people are driving around Maryland with license plates that inadvertently point to an online casino after someone forgot to renew a certain domain. (Motherboard) 

  • Your Existing Technology That Sounds Like Something From Star Trek for the week is: plasmacoustic metalayers. (EPF Lausanne) (Paper) 

  • A grad student at UC Berkeley launched a project to look for alien technosignatures coming from the galactic core. (SETI) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have been working on ways to edit the core structure of individual molecules atom by atom, and they're making incredible progress. (Nature) Speaking of atoms, who wants to see an x-ray of a single atom?!? (Ars Technica) 

  • Here's an interesting profile of a guy who's set up a frankly impressive business catering to the whims of the ultrawealthy. (Motherboard) 

  • Glacial ice is filthy with microorganisms, folks. (Aarhus U) 

  • Not every business needs to have a goddamn app and we shouldn't have to live like this anymore!! (Vox) 

  • What can you learn by taking pictures of the same rock for 33 years after one of the biggest oil spills in history? Click through to the slideshow; it's actually fascinating. (Hakai) 

  • "To have better disagreements, change your words – here are 4 ways to make your counterpart feel heard and keep the conversation going" (The Conversation) 

  • The Scientists think they've caught video evidence that octopuses can have nightmares. (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • There might be hundreds of millions of potentially habitable rocky planets out there orbiting dwarf stars. (U of Florida) 

  • The Scientists have found a naturally-occurring protein that can identify and separate certain rare earth metals from each other at room temperature without any organic solvents. Seeing as how this usually takes hundreds of steps with hideous chemicals, that's pretty damn good. (Penn State) (Paper) 

  • It's, uh ...... probably not a great idea? To eat giant isopods?? (CNN) 

  • Here's a good longread about being a server with other notions of what you wanted to do with your life; the takeaway quote is almost certainly "I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter." (Dirt) 

  • The subsurface ocean under Enceladus is blasting water 6000mi out into space at the rate of two bathtubs per second. How much water is in there?? Is it gonna run out? If there's no life in there, I'm going to be very disappointed. (Science Alert) 

  • This one is old but still interesting: "tattooing" apples! (Edible Geography) 

  • Am I the only one losing track of all the solar-powered fuel generators The Scientists keep inventing? When are we going to see these in action at scale? (Anthropocene) 

  • Your dog is eating grass for a simpler reason than you think. (The Conversation) 

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 on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

No reader interpretations came in for this one, and frankly I'm not surprised, as this one just seems to slide off the brain instantly. My guess — and of course it's only a guess! — is that we're looking at the output of one of those stomp-clap-hey bands that has at least three Guys With Beards in it. They tried to differentiate themselves by going a little nerdier than usual on their lyrics, and it didn't work; after a failed attempt to break into the college radio scene, they faded away and went back to their microbrewery jobs. 

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.