Positron Aerospace Propulsion

April 29, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that wants to know if everyone else out there in North America is having a truly staggering allergy season this spring or what? 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway107 - Spaceships, Karate, & Videogames"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Yoz (@yoz) dig up marvelous ideas for music, parties, waiting room literature, and the raising of children along with two great San Francisco locations for a band(?) photo shoot."I'm honestly kind of tempted to do a deeper dive into the magazine idea to see if it'd be viable, even if it's just for a one-off limited-edition issue.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcatcher of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal).Instant Band Night 10✨🎶🎸 HAPPENING NEXT WEEK 🎸🎶✨Instant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. You absolutely do not have to get onstage to be welcome -- just come have a drink and watch! Details are right here, and as with all Instant Band Nights, please invite everyone you can think of -- just forward them this email, or send them the link! If you're on Facebook, here's an event you can use for maximum convenience. It's gonna be great; we'll see you there. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Now that the US Navy has drafted guidelines for reporting UFOs (Politico) -- because apparently it's happening so fucking often that pilots are mad there isn't an official escalation path for it -- I wonder if we're ever going to see the resulting data patterns. The sheer fact that this is even happening is blowing my mind a little, but maybe it shouldn't, given the article I'm sure we all read in 2017 in the New York Times about the Advanced Aerospace Threat and Identification Program (I even linked it in this very newsletter).If you follow one of the other links from that Politico article, you get a list of the titles of the research papers funded by the program (PDF link). There's some wild shit in there (tag yourself, I'm "Aneutronic Fusion Propulsion I" or its sequel "Aneutronic Fusion Propulsion II"), but what I also find odd is a bit in the introductory letter to the Senate Armed Services Committee explaining that all of the items in the list are available to Congressional staff on their closed network except "Field Effects on Biological Tissues" and -- very weirdly -- "An Introduction to the Statistical Drake Equation," though those were apparently available upon request. What the hell? I'm not a conspiracy nutcase, nor do I want to be, but why wouldn't an intro-level paper to the Drake Equation be made available to literally anybody who wanted it? You can look the Drake Equation up on Wikipedia, for fucksake. I would love to know the reasoning for that one. (Actually, I lied: I think I'm tagging myself "Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions.") The new question is: how much of a pain in the ass is it to file a Freedom of Information Act request for all of these papers, because I think they'd be extremely entertaining/interesting reading. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.A partial list of Quentin's current active, intelligible vocabulary: 

  • Book

  • Milk

  • Up

  • Duck

  • Bunny (pronounced "money")

  • Hug

  • Bye

  • Ball

  • Sun

  • Raining

  • Water

  • Toes

  • Mommy

  • Daddy

I'm sure I'm missing several, which is why this is a partial list. He's been using "pee" as some kind of all-purpose question-word, I think; he points at things in his board books and says "pee? pee? pee!" It's pretty good. Having a kid is pretty good, everybody. I don't know if you've been told this information. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • There's been a lot of justified grumbling lately about the environmental costs of fast fashion, so it's nice to see that someone has at least sort of figured out t-shirt recycling. (Fast Company) 

  • Here's a very long but absorbing read on the effect "Fixer Upper" has had on Waco. Yeah, that Waco. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Do we need even one more article or thinkpiece about how bad open office design is? Don't we all know by now? There's got to be money somewhere on the table for a company that figures out a quick, cheap way to design and deploy cubicles in modern office spaces. (Atlantic) 

  • There's a nonzero chance Abigail Disney is a real one. (WaPo) 

  • How would a Thanos-style 50% wipeout actually affect life on Earth? (Smithsonian) 

  • Good news for anyone out there who doesn't like brushing their teeth (or just read John Varley's Steel Beach at some point in their life): plaque-killing microbots might be a thing at some point. (UPenn press release) 

  • According to a recent genetic survey, there are almost 200k species of viruses in the ocean, 90% of which don't fall into any known taxa. What are they up to? Wouldn't we all like to know?? (Quanta) 

  • Twitter's been pretty decent at purging ISIS content from its platform, but not white supremacist hate speech. That's a deliberate choice, made in part because if they did, they might wipe some Republican politicians in the sweep, which would make them look bad. [world's tiniest violin.gif] (Motherboard) 

  • In case you needed them, here are some good hard numbers behind student debt cancellation as a concept. (The Week) 

  • Maybe we don't actually need lidar for self-driving anything. (Gizmodo) 

  • Vox proposes a code of conduct for spoilers. 

  • It's messy in a lot of ways, but science has now developed a technique for reading speech impulses directly from the brain. Yeah! (TechCrunch) 

  • If you're going to build blimplike unmanned aircraft that essentially flies by breathing(????), why use helium? Why not go for hydrogen if it doesn't risk any lives? (BBC) 

  • Ol' Zuck's attempt to modernize learnin' ain't goin' too well out there, no sirree. (NYT) 

  • Climate change doesn't get the news coverage it deserves, given how large of a problem it is, but there's something up at The Nation that amounts to a position paper on how to address it going forward. It's a fiery (heh) read. 

  • There's a minor league baseball event happening this year that's resulted in incredible one-off logo designs. (The Inventory) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumHOMO MAFIA, The Best Defense 

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.