Pasteur had the right idea, folks

December 14, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's just collecting other peoples' Spotify playlists to mine them later for goods 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayStill on hiatus through the end of the year, but here's a question for you: have you started keeping an idea file of your own? Do you want to be on the podcast? Drop me a line, 'cause I'm curious.Help me close out the year at more than 33 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts, and I promise you will receive entry into the afterlife of your choice when the Great Beyond comes calling. This goes double if you leave a nice review. I don't make the rules.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberIt seems laughable to try to throw Instant Band Night without a proven vaccine in place. Let's see what's up in November 2021.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.I think we can all agree the Xmas decorations are making it extremely cozy around here, which is why I'm going to propose that we simply leave them in place until winter is over. Can we do that? Let's all agree to do that. The only people we have to really get on board with this plan are the decisionmakers over at our sanitation services, who set the deadline for tree disposal. I want to keep this tree up for the maximum possible time. This is the only case where an artificial one would admittedly have come in handier, huh?As an addendum to this proposal, I would also like to put forth the notion for Xmas 2, which will take place the day more than 50% of the population has been vaccinated, and Xmas 3, which will be on the day we've gotten damn near everybody -- should Xmas 3 coincide with actual Xmas 2021, we can just fold the one into the other. These Xmas sequels will be more or less identical to the original holiday, just with more opportunities to give a gift to someone we might not have gotten to last time, because nobody has the time or energy right now. "I'll get you at Xmas 2," we'll say to each other in a couple weeks, and perhaps we'll even be able to follow through! WHO'S WITH ME 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I'm writing this on Saturday night, December 12: today Quentin told us he's scared of the dark! Fortunately, we've had a nightlight ready to go for literal years. This ceramic dog has sat in his room since he was born, and he liked to watch it light up every now and then, so he's already familiar with it and its powers. Chance favors the prepared mind, friends. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Kind of hard to argue with: "In 2020, Disinformation Broke The US" (BuzzFeed News) Relatedly, numerous Facebook employees who've quit say the company deliberately avoids taking action on hate speech. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Being able to make eye contact with robots is probably going to be crucial to developing a good relationship with their kind going forward. (Tampere U of Applied Sciences) Especially if they're going to be encouraging us to gamble. (U of Southampton) 

  • Thanksgiving was a goddamn covid clusterfuck; has it taught us anything about how to handle Xmas? What do you think? (~$Atlantic) 

  • Mental health references in rap lyrics have more than doubled in the last two decades. (UNC) 

  • [taps mic] Wearable sleeping bags like this one seem like the true best option for outdoor hangs during These Unprecedented Times™. (Strategist) 

  • Designing beautiful, complex glass facades for buildings has been computationally challenging; engineers put a neural network on it, and now they've got a tool that can do the job easily. (IST Austria) 

  • The Christchurch shooter was radicalized on YouTube, unsurprisingly. (The Verge) 

  • Do we need tone indicators for written language? ($NYT) 

  • Here are some predictions about cities in 2021. (~$Atlantic) 

  • This article gets progressively wilder as it goes on, and that's saying something for a piece titled "Researchers develop unique process for producing light-matter mixture". (U of Minnesota) While we're here, take a look at this proposal for a new fundamental building block of the universe based on tiny fragments of energy, which sounds kinda bonkers to me. (The Conversation) 

  • We all know the pandemic has been hell on wheels for medical staff, but bioethicists have also been having a rough, rough time. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Here is your one (1) heartwarming "something I did during isolation" story. It's a doozy, especially if you're a parent, so fair warning. (Thread from @saysthefox on Twitter) 

  • There's a vast network of fungal fibers linking all the trees in a given forest; does that make them all a single superorganism? ($NYT) 

  • Historically speaking, every time humans show up on a continent, all the big animals get wiped out. So why are there still big animals on the Indian subcontinent? Apparently this question has also been brought up about Africa, but this paper is about the Indian ones. It's interesting! (Yale) 

  • Spike Trotman has a great analogy for how the boomers fucked us all. (brief thread from @Iron_Spike on Twitter) 

  • 3D printing super strong metal parts has been a tough nut to crack because, well, they crack a lot. A team at UC Santa Barbara seems to have solved the problem. (UCSB) 

  • Good Florida Man news. (CNN) 

  • Our brains seem to process fact words differently from words expressing possibility. (NYU) Dogs, on the other hand, may not even be able to process every single sound in individual words. (Science Alert) (Paper) On the other other hand, dogs seem able to recognize other dogs on sight, even if they're very different-looking dogs. (Thread from @DrBenKatz on Twitter) (Paper download link) 

  • Your mood seems to have an effect on how much you trust smart devices. (Stanford) 

  • Here's another idea for how to get through this pandemic winter. (Vox) 

  • Just in case you missed it, there's drone footage of the Arecibo collapse. (The Verge) 

  • Stay with me for this one: there are some kinds of problems that even supercomputers are very bad at solving in a timely manner. Y'all remember the slime mold that solved the Traveling Salesman problem? A Japanese researcher figured out how to make a computer circuit that mimics amoeboid behavior, and thinks it has broader applications. How about that! (Hokkaido U) 

  • What's our charitable giving activity been like for 2020? (Vox) 

  • The first step toward a universal flu vaccine has been taken. (Mount Sinai) 

  • AI can help develop new mathematical models for ecology. (U of Helsinki) 

  • Assuming the engineers can figure out a way to make them last, we could see reasonably efficient spray-on solar cells become a thing. (Anthropocene) 

  • An increasing percentage of Americans are waking up to the fact that the stock market is basically just a bellwether for rich people's yacht money instead of an indicator of how the economy is doing. (CNBC) 

  • Okay, the mass of all human-made stuff now outweighs all life on Earth, but what does that ........... mean, though? (Science) 

  • We should start considering the possibility that this year has scarred us in ways that will take a minute to show up. (Guardian) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumBackup Chocolate, All Kinds of a Mess 

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.