on the proper dissemination of crucial information

February 08, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wishes it knew where these surprise knots in its shoulders are coming from 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayFate keeps interfering with the recording of new episodes, which may be a sign that when the podcast comes back, I should consider a monthly schedule instead of biweekly. Decoder Ring can do it, why not me?Listen. I know I keep asking folks to go into our Apple Podcasts listing and give us that good good ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating, but I cannot apologize because it works. We're at 35 ratings now! What if it keeps going up?? I promise if it goes up to 50 ratings by next week I will stop asking for a full month.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberNow that proven vaccines exist, let's wait til November and hopefully -- hopefully! -- 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* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.We got into this in episode 143 of the podcast, but it's worth mentioning here: there should be a website that lists all the furry animals that exist and tells you whether or not they're soft. Because it turns out that neither wombats nor koalas are snuggly: they're wiry, even Brillo-pad-esque. What other betrayals of nature exist? Bears? Are bears soft? I have a friend who says bears must be soft, that's why we made coats out of their fur back in the day -- but I wonder if we just shot bears a lot because they're big and scary, and making coats out of their fur was just the best thing we could figure out to do with their carcasses afterward. Pandas -- are pandas soft? What about red pandas? Lions? My buddy Frank told me once that he pet a tiger and it was weirdly sticky, but I've wondered ever since whether he just met a weirdo tiger. Anyway, it's 2021 and we deserve this information. It doesn't even have to be a website, it can just be a Google spreadsheet that somebody updates periodically. Firsthand accounts from zookeepers and naturalists only. In the case of Australian animals, firsthand accounts from Australians!! We can get this done, people. We have the technology. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.On Mondays Quentin gets a little boisterous at his tiny Montessori preschool when it's supposed to be naptime, which can be a distraction to the other kids. The teachers haven't told us this is a capital-P Problem per se -- they're trained professionals with years of experience and they have strategies in place to mitigate his effect on others when the sillies descend upon him* -- but the situation is making me consider how to instill just, like, a baseline level of consideration in a 3-year-old. Or if that's essentially a fool's errand? He's a bundle of joyful enthusiasm and energy and his attention span is, you know, a 3yo's kind of attention span. We're not exactly letting him run rampant at home doing whatever he wants 24/7, but the kinds of things we're trying to persuade him to do or not do are reasonably easy; "keep quiet so the other kids can sleep" is, I think, a fairly advanced concept for him to hang onto for long stretches of time. We've got a video course for parents we're walking through that may touch on this, so I don't know that I need advice yet; I just wanted to note this is something my brain is chewing on.* The fact that it seems to happen on Mondays but fades as the week goes on is an indicator (to me at least) that he's just excited to be there after the weekend and see the other kids, which is simultaneously sweet and heartbreaking in the pandemic era. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Have a free Atlantic read: there was basically no flu season this year, something that I vaguely expected might happen. (Atlantic) 

  • This one isn't free, but it's very good at capturing the immense frustration at the current rumor-based vaccine distribution system we've got going instead of something coherent and good. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Biden wasn't able to completely abolish ICE, but he definitely seems to be out to hamstring their ability to terrorize immigrants. (Texas Tribune) 

  • Another report confirms that so-called "anti-conservative bias" on social media is a myth, and not even anecdotal evidence holds up under scrutiny. (The Verge) 

  • How about that: some good, actionable-sounding recommendations for the Biden administration on how to deal with the poison misinfo currently flooding every channel of our lives. ($NYT) 

  • I, uh ...... huh. The US Navy has patents for completely weird-ass UFO technology for which they might have at least partial working models? Or something? There's a short version (Vice) and a long version (The War Zone), the latter of which is almost 8mo old, but still. 

  • In case you were wondering: "Hygiene Theater Is Still a Huge Waste of Time" (~$Atlantic) 

  • Have an encouraging profile of the new head of the CDC! (Vogue) 

  • Smartmatic sued the fucking shit out of Fox News, their odious on-air personalities, Rudy, and Sidney fucking Powell; I wish it would go faster than the estimated 2-5y, but I'm just happy it happened. (CNN) 

  • Someone found an ammonite fossil with the soft parts intact; the pictures are interesting, because I definitely wouldn't've been able to pick that out. I guess that's what "expert knowledge" is for??? WHO KNEW ($NYT) 

  • "The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship: There’s a reason you miss the people you didn’t even know that well." (~$Atlantic) 

  • Nearby solves a problem I found myself wondering about from time to time. Looks like the Oakland version's been up and running for a while now, even! (Keep Oakland Alive) 

  • You can make a robot that senses odors if you just chop an antenna off a moth and connect it to the processors. (IEEE Spectrum) Insects may already be working on collective revenge: bees colonized an office while the workers were away for the pandemic. (~$Quartz) 

  • The number of hate groups has gone down, but that's probably just them going underground where they're harder to track; one downside of deplatforming. (Recode) Also, their believers have already infiltrated existing mom groups. (SFGate) You know what, just read this one about how white supremacists use soft power. (Lawfare) 

  • 538 has an interesting breakdown of Super Bowl commercials across the ages. (538) 

  • F-fungal construction materials??? (The Verge) 

  • Here's a longread on current efforts to restore the mobility of paralyzed people with brain implants and wearable tech. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The military is taking steps to at least start figuring out what's going on with extremists in their ranks. (CBS News) 

  • The longer you live and the bigger you get, the more your risk of cancer goes up: more time, more cells that could go haywire. Elephants live a long time and they're huge. Why don't they get cancer? (U at Buffalo) 

  • Vanity Fair has an interesting piece about Madeleine L'Engle and a Black Panther named Ahmad Rahman who corresponded for decades and never met in person. (~$Vanity Fair) 

  • Researchers have basically solved the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident by using animation code from Frozen to simulate avalanches. (IndieWire) 

  • Even if it does prevent or just slow down aging, I'm still not putting hookworms in me. Hookworm-derived proteins, maybe. (eLife) 

  • There's a new blue pigment out there! ($NYT) 

  • Researchers have found a way to simulate mammal brains using commercially-available desktop PC hardware instead of supercomputers. (U of Sussex) 

  • Why does food stick to nonstick pans? (AIP) 

  • Some frogs might be protected by their own skin microbiomes from the fungal apocalypse they're trying to weather. (Microbiology Society) 

  • Recyclable! Plastics! Are! Possible! Can we get this shit going at an industrial scale immediately or what. (U of Groningen) 

  • The French are trying to cut down on e-waste by making it easier to repair electronics. (BBC) 

  • Scientists in Arizona have been strapping body armor to bugs and letting them fight each other to see how and why their onboard weapons have evolved the way they do. (U of Arizona) 

  • If you're going to tell the world you've figured out how to make printable thermoelectric generators, maybe tell us how much power your printable thermoelectric generators can harvest? Just, you know, an idea. (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumA Good Man Doing Bad Things, The Eternal Christmas Spirit 

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.