on the emergence of little garden buddies

April 19, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that truly hopes you're well right now as you're reading this, or that you're about to be. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawaySince I'm shifting to a monthly schedule, I figure I might as well keep the last-published episode in this section for a week or two longer. If you haven't listened yet, do yourself a favor and put it in your ears!153 - 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.The hour is nigh!! The time has come for you to fulfill the prophecy and join the ranks of the other 36 saints of the realm who have given us ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts! Go now!!Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberHalf of America's adult population has been vaccinated. Pencil 11/11/2021 into your schedule and if we're all very good and lucky, 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+ + g e t   y o u r   s h o t   / /   l e t ' s   d o   t h i s + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I've acquired a new hobby thanks to the convergence of The Great Pottery Throwdown on HBO Max, the existence of an extremely friendly and welcoming pottery a few blocks' walk from my house, the memory of some good work done in high school ceramics class, and the urge to make weird little pals for gardens and/or potted plants. Three major themes appear to have emerged; in no particular order:Chaos Tardigrades. These are just tardigrades with an extremely wild paint job. I can't explain them at all. I just like making them. The same is probably true for all of these, let's be honest, but the Chaos Tardigrades are especially inexplicable.Targs. These are Klingon animals that are essentially just a warthog with some extra spikes, at least according to my memory of their appearance in TNG. I haven't really standardized on the number of spikes. For some reason I think targs are especially well-suited for placement in a garden or a plant. Very unexpected. Speaking of unexpected, the last category isStarfleet Personnel With a Knife. This is where I really settle into my true milieu of "charmingly amateurish sculpture": it's just a Starfleet officer holding a knife. Not even a specific Star Trek kind of alien blade or whatever; just a knife. Put these guys in your garden. They'll guard your plants: they've got a knife. I think it's very funny and I just can't explain it at all. I've made Data, Worf, even a Deanna Troi who kind of has the shoulders of a linebacker that were beyond my power to correct (they're not done yet, which is why no pictures exist); I'm trying to avoid the temptation to make all of the TNG bridge crew, but I can feel myself losing this fight day by day.I want to give these to friends -- I feel like just about everybody I know either has a potted plant or a yard of some sort. But I've forgotten how to give gifts like this. Do I ask which one they want? Just spring one on them at random? They don't take up a lot of space anybody's using. Maybe I should think about this after I've made some more; I'm still settling into a rhythm of creation between the pottery's bisque and glaze firings, and it's always possible these first few (with which I'm extremely pleased) were just happy accidents. Let me know what you think. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin had his first sort-of-big booboo just before dinner: part of our backyard has a concrete patio, and he fell and gave himself a goose egg and a 1cm cut right between his eyebrows. Mavis stopped the bleeding easily and by dinnertime he was happily eating his grilled chicken and fries with a band-aid and some Neosporin. After talking to a doctor, we ended up taking him to an urgent care about 25m away to get the cut glued shut for better healing. I admit I was apprehensive about the disruption to his routine (the appointment was an hour past his usual bedtime), but once again I'd forgotten that Quentin is somehow the chillest kid in the world: the entire there-and-back-again operation went flawlessly and even now he's fast asleep in his bed. The sheer scale of our luck as parents has not ever escaped me for even a moment and surely never will. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Goddammit, "It’s Not Just Georgia: More Than A Dozen Other States Are Trying To Take Power Away From Local Election Officials" (538) Pair that with this writeup on Biden that's so good it almost certainly has to be off the mark in some way. Right? How could anything be good anymore? (~$Atlantic) 

  • "How to Fight Police Violence Beyond Just Posting About It" (Vice) 

  • Homestar Runner hit at the exact right time in our lives. (Polygon) 

  • One study seems to suggest humans are willing to trust an algorithm to do a task that seems best suited for a machine, but that could have Implications for our relationship to algorithms for more, uh, complex problems. (U of Georgia) 

  • Here, have a human playing piano for an elephant. (@RexChapman on Twitter) 

  • Scientists translated the structure of a spiderweb into sounds to create an eerie audioscape. (SciTech Daily) 

  • Museums and universities have all kinds of great collections of stuff, but bafflingly, there's no universal registry that shows who's got what. Not only that, physical collections need to be effectively digitized in case somebody throws 'em out. (NPR) 

  • What even is "state capacity" as a concept? I literally just found out about it, so definitely don't ask me; maybe read this. (Broadstreet) 

  • Google is doing serious damage to its own rep with AI researchers. (The Verge) 

  • France banned domestic plane flights that could be done by train in 2.5h, but don't get too excited: that's only five (5) routes. Still, it's a step in the right direction. (Ars Technica) 

  • Why are recipe sites the way they are? (Protocol) 

  • Our old magic friend graphene makes another appearance! Take the byproducts from recycling waste tires and turn them into graphene, then mix it into concrete: makes stronger concrete! (Anthropocene) 

  • "Surely We Can Do Better Than Elon Musk" (Current Affairs) 

  • A ditch full of wood chips could help cut down on nitrogen pollution from farm runoff, which is a big problem. (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) 

  • "America Has Pandemic Senioritis: Being so close (and yet so far) is a stress all its own." (~$Atlantic) 

  • The human/monkey chimeric embryo thing you've been hearing about is for trying to grow organs, folks. (NPR) 

  • Sure, why not: looks like combining math with basketball helps kids' motivation. (U of Copenhagen) 

  • According to a first-of-its-kind study that actually compares shrooms to real meds, they work at least as well as Lexapro, and might even be better. (STAT) 

  • Wearable tech powered by sweat. We were gonna get there eventually. (Tokyo U of Science) 

  • There's a weak spot in Earth's magnetic field that might be the fault of a big chunk left over from when another planet crashed into it and made the Moon. (Science Alert) 

  • Mindfulness has the potential to make you selfish, depending on the mindset you've inherited from your cultural surroundings. (U at Buffalo) 

  • Scientists have invented an antimicrobial coating that literally rips their cells apart, which is .......... kind of hard to evolve a defense for. I don't think this is the first of its type, either, which makes me wonder what the fuckin' holdup is. (RMIT Australia) 

  • Over the course of the history of the Earth, there were probably billions of T-rexes that lived and died, which puts into perspective just how rare fossils really are. (UC Berkeley) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumGIANT TOFU SNAKE, Don't Get Any On You 

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.