on the precipice of year three

November 11, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's trying to savor its remaining unwatched episodes of Bon Appetit's "Gourmet Makes" videos, hoarding them like precious jewels. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway128 - One Person's Utopia"Jon (@ferociousj), acting co-host Kelly, and special guest Katie reveal a marvelous panoply of ideas for TV & movies and ponder the possibilities of teaching empathy iself."Let's be clear that even though I didn't address it at the time, I am 1000% in favor of more Justin Lin involvement in future Star Trek projects, especially the one(s) we touched upon in the episode.Something I want to start doing that only occurred to me now: taking questions from listeners in the form of 5-star reviews! If you've got a question for us, go ahead and leave us that ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and feel free to drop a question in the review, which at least one of us will do our best to answer!Instant Band Night: Lucky 13✨✨ THIS ✨✨🎸🎸 THURSDAY 🎸🎸🎶🎶 !!!!! 🎶🎶Music!Friends!Cake!😎💜⚡ We'll see you there, right??? ⚡💜😎 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Mavis took a much-deserved multi-day trip to New York to see her cousin and some friends and just generally chill the fuck out for a little bit in one of her favorite cities in the world, a move that I heartily endorsed. In practical terms, this meant solo parenting Quentin, although not really -- I had amazing backup from my in-laws and a couple of extremely excellent friends. When you solo parent, you don't leave the house once the kid goes to bed, which actually worked out great for me, because that meant I got to sit around and watch Star Trek Voyager reruns. I'll tell you something now: if you ever run into someone who professes to be a Trek fan but reflexively and sincerely denigrates Voyager in your earshot, you have my permission to dismiss their opinions in the realm of Star Trek as a whole without further consideration. Yes, VOY has its flaws -- what show didn't? -- but I still think of it as The Fun One, home to some (but not all) of my top ten episodes of all time. Plus, they held onto the Good Uniform for the entire run of the show. If this were a press conference, I would be stepping down from the podium immediately after delivering that last sentence -- thank you -- thank you to God and Jesus and my family, thank you to all the fans, I will not be taking questions at this time, thank you -- no further questions. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.This week, Quentin turns 2. It's been two years already. Two! That's insane. I realize that we now know why time feels like it moves faster when we get older, but that's still, like, damn. I guess this is the year where we potty train him, and start to do some research into the whole preschool thing, and who knows what else. In many ways I feel like we've climbed a mountain just to get here, and there are still further peaks to go -- but having done this much climbing already, we've built up some experience. I'm trying to ride a thin line between optimistic and cocky, because we've also been ridiculously lucky up to now and I fear that our tolerance for actual childrearing drama is not what it would've been had we had to do more work, work that we've seen other parents do. Quentin's not a particularly picky eater (at least up to now). We never had to sleep train him. What are we going to do if potty training is actually difficult?? Here's where grainy footage from an alternate universe-me would probably go, wild-eyed and bushy-bearded, yelling about a cosmos where the Borg are everywhere and every surface is smeared with poop. Fingers crossed, everybody: year three!!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Vocational training for tech! It's a thing! That works! (Politico) 

  • Wanna watch a "heavy lift" ship lift a cruise liner out of the water? Yeah you do. (Maritime Executive) 

  • Just looking at images of icy Arctic landscapes in VR seems to decrease the physical pain response. (Imperial College London via Science Daily) 

  • If you want to know what the online politics troll farm is going to try next, pay attention to the misogynists first. (~$Quartz) 

  • There might not actually be such a thing as "noise" in brain signals. (Quanta) 

  • Speaking of brains, it looks like our bodies literally wash them while we sleep; what I want to know is what exactly drives these waves. How do they physically happen? From what I can understand of the original paper, I think it has something to do with blood flow, but I could very well be wrong. Bodies, people! They're a mystery! (Science Alert) 

  • Long-term data storage is an interesting problem with interesting solutions, like this glass-based one! (Ars Technica) 

  • If you haven't already, "The Death of the Rude Press" is mandatory reading. (New Republic) 

  • I just learned about a cliche in science roughly ten seconds ago that essentially states "new ideas only advance because old-guard scientists who oppose them die eventually." Turns out the data kinda backs this up. (Undark) 

  • Here's a nice longread about ocean exploration drones. (Outside) 

  • Evolutionary algorithms might actually be better than deep learning, y'all. (Quanta) 

  • What in the motherfuck: it's possible to etch nanoscale patterns into metal that make it damn near impossible to sink in water. (U of Rochester) 

  • Americans really, truly work too damn much for too little, and we shouldn't have to. (People's Policy Project) 

  • I admit that even though I have a kid, I'm still not great at talking to them. Here are tips. (Lifehacker) 

  • If you never fail, do you really learn anything? It turns out failing 15% of the time seems to be somehow optimal. (U of Arizona via Science Daily) 

  • Literally any amount of running seems to be correlated with lower risk of early death. Huh? I mean, it makes sense intuitively, but still. (British Medical Journal via Science Daily) 

  • The percentage of CEOs ousted from their companies for ethical lapses is increasing with time, which seems to indicate that boards are getting more watchful and less tolerant of bad-boy bullshit, albeit somewhat slowly. (Yahoo News) 

  • Stop trying to raise successful kids; how about kind ones instead? (~$Atlantic) 

  • Here's an interesting and straightforward read on both vertical and horizontal inequality (the latter of which I didn't know there was a name for) and how to address 'em. (Brookings Institute) 

  • The first trial for a brain chip implant to help fight opioid addiction is underway. (TechCrunch) 

  • For Halloween, NASA made a couple galleries of exoplanets where some truly freaky shit is happening (there's one that has windstorms of glass shards moving at 5400mph); one gallery features a couple of planets for which they made horror movie-style posters, while the other gallery shows maps of the planetary systems themselves. Hell yeah. (Poster gallery) (Map homepage) 

  • There's free houses in a quaint little Italian village for anyone who wants to move there and fix 'em up. (CNN) 

  • Businesses don't actually give a shit about the incentives local governments try to use to entice them; here are some ideas for better ones. (Brookings Institute) 

  • Call me nuts, but for some reason I was already convinced that the universe is essentially a sphere, albeit an expanding one. But I guess that's a new and controversial idea? (Quanta) 

  • "What a Tour of an Amazon Fulfillment Center Reveals." (~$New Yorker) 

  • Engineered wood makes it possible to build structures with a theoretical negative carbon footprint. (CityLab) 

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 onesYun-class starship USS WallaceAlbatross-class starship USS It's a Small WorldVolleyball Central-class starship USS Advertising 

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.