Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's now beginning to doubt the foundation of its math abilities

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.

Instant Band Night 29: NEW YEAR'S BALL AGAIN

You've got at least one fancy party outfit in your closet that you haven't worn in a while: it's time. Or rather, it will be in three Thursdays. Because we're kicking 2025 off with an explosion of musical creativity in our most fabulous clothes!! We all deserve to have at least one source of unalloyed joy in our lives that cannot be touched, do we not??? Also, for real, it's going to be a fucking blast if the last 28 of these are any indication, and it's time! to! make it happen!!! Come play onstage or just be in the crowd for a new debut of a brand new act every five minutes or so; there's nothing else like it in the entire Bay and possibly the world??? Send everybody you know the link, put on your red shoes (metaphorical or otherwise), and let's fuckin' do this

✨🪩✨
Jan 9 2025
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

(Eventbrite) (Partiful) (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 YOU

Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: there has never been a better time than now.

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.

Nothing for this section today; merry Xmas Eve to those who celebrate and let's all take a collective deep breath together.

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.

Operation Banestar concluded successfully on Thursday, just under the wire. Someone check my math on this, because I don't know that I believe it:

In total, I've filled the following bins full of cleaned Legos:

Two bins x (20 x 5 x 12) inches == 2400 cubic inches
Seven bins x (14 x 5 x 9) inches == 4410 cubic inches

2400 + 4410 == 6810 total cubic inches

Divide 6810 cubic inches by 12 == 567.5 cubic feet

But that's ......... fucking absurd. That'd be a cube 8 feet on a side packed full of Legos (the cube root of 567.5 being roughly 8). Okay, wait: I didn't actually fill all of these bins completely full — let's say they're 2/3 full. Right? 2/3 of 567.5 would be 378.3 cubic feet of Legos instead, which ........ still works out to a cube at least 7 feet on a side. Even if the bins are only half full — and I fucking know they're not — that would instead be 283.75 cubic feet of Legos. That's a solid 6.5-foot cube of Legos. That'd be taller than me by a foot. That's so many fucking Legos. Surely that .......... surely that can't be right?? Somebody tell me what happened!!!!

Fascination Corner

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

• Fuck is going on over in New Jersey? Does anyone want to revisit that paper on the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis, perhaps my favorite science-adjacent read of the year? Hit me up and I'll send it to you. (Vox)

• Oh, we've always just been stone-cold savages, huh. (U of Oxford) (Paper)

• For the last wholesome thing we're going to get in 2024, the Cookie keychain is almost too on-the-nose. (xoxo Gossip Giancaspro)

• New data from the Jimmy Dubs suggests exoplanet Trappist-1b might — might!! — have an atmosphere, although it's nothing you or I would find breathable. (Max Planck Inst for Astronomy)

• The Scientists have run the numbers and it looks like humans think at a speed of about 10 bits per second. Ten. (Caltech)

• Early tests of a nature-derived filter for microplastics are incredibly promising. (Science Alert) (Paper)

• Despite its seeming ubiquity a couple decades ago, you don't really hear much about string theory these days, but now The Scientists think they've found some math that backs it up. Maybe??? (NYU) (Paper)

• Correct (and a good read): "Dropout Was The Best Streaming Service Of 2024, And It's Not Even Close" (SlashFilm)

• The US Army Corps of Engineers in the SF Bay has a ship called the Raccoon whose whole job is to tootle around looking for marine debris to pick up with its crane; I feel like this would be a dream job for several kids I know. (Oaklandside)

• When people know they're being watched, they can detect faces faster, but that's just one effect of surveillance, and The Scientists want us to watch out (heh) for other involuntary, unconcious shit going on in there. (UTS) (Paper)

• Many of these are very basic but everybody's gotta start somewhere: "The best advice we got in 2024: 12 small ways to improve your life in the new year." (Vox)

• The Machine appears to be capable of a limited but fascinating form of trickery. (TechCrunch)

• An $800 emotional support robot for kids is getting bricked once the company dies, and I rate their mealy-mouthed chances of open-sourcing the server tech before they turn out the lights at about 15% tops. Companies like this shouldn't get funding without a solid, demonstrable exit plan. (Ars Technica)

• More fun mall conversions!! MORE!!! (Sherwood)

• Some Engineers have invented a method for 3D printing with concrete that involves injecting steam and CO2-laden industrial byproduct gases while you lay it down; not only does it sequester carbon, it makes the concrete stronger? Okay!! (Nanyang Tech) (Paper)

• Person-to-person transmission still isn't happening, but the first severe case of H5N1 in a human has now been reported. (CDC) When human transmission does happen, those goddamn raw milk idiots are going to be patient zero; just brace yourselves now. (Science Alert)

• N-negative time?? (Science Alert) (Paper)

• Soccer — at least at the World Cup level — is getting faster and more pass-heavy. Does that also mean it's finally exciting to watch oh ho ho SHOTS FIRED (U of New South Wales) (Paper)

• New research suggests the best way to deal with narcissists is to get them the fuck out of your life, which probably works OK in regular interpersonal relationships, but what are we supposed to do about [points at the White House]? (Ohio State)

• Blessed be: the 2024 Hater's Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog is here. (Defector)

• If you're swimming long distances and you want to maximize distance, physics says you should go about three body-depths down to avoid making waves that waste energy; turns out every animal that needs to do this — be it bird, mammal, or reptile — already knew that. (Swansea U)

• The Scientists have sequenced the genomes of regular and extra-strength bedbugs to see why the latter ones are so fucking hard to kill, and it turns out they're crammed with mutations that make them almost 20,000x resistant to the usual anti-bedbug insecticide. (PhysOrg) (Paper)

• Some whale species might actually live about twice as long as we thought — like up to 150 or so. (The Conversation) (Paper)

• TiMe To StArT JaiLbReAkiNg ThE MaChiNe i GuEsS (404 Media)

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 and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know 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, which I think is mostly pan flutes over surprisingly heavy dubstep-quality beats; what do you even call that as a genre?

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. If you received this as a forward and would like to subscribe yourself, you can do it at the bottom of this page right here (which also has the archive)!