seeking a Sol system subsurface sea sojourn

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, your weekly peek as far inside my head as physical law allows. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Today is a good day I think for revisiting an idea discussed in episode 32 of Idea Factory Giveaway with Kelly and Audra: "Coffee Cereal."* It's a morning breakfast cereal product that's designed to have not milk poured into it, but coffee. Hot coffee. (It's more like Coffee Instant Oatmeal, now that I think about it.) This way, you can have your breakfast nutrition and your morning caffeine in one delicious, sludgey bowl. I'd originally envisioned it as being something heavily chocolate-flavored, like very robust Cocoa Pebbles, but that's just because I think coffee tastes terrible; the only way I've ever consumed it is either as a mocha or with enough cream and sugar to turn it into a marshmallow. But are there other flavors that Coffee Cereal could employ? People like pumpkin spice coffee, but there's no pumpkin spice cereal (that's going into the idea vault right now for some future podcast guest to discuss, btw). Why not Pumpkin Spice Coffee Cereal? Aren't peppermint mocha lattes a thing? Who's to say a Mint Chocolate Chip Coffee Cereal wouldn't be great? And to all the skeptics out there who think this might be too much sugar or whatever, look: this product is targeted solely at the people who are already putting coffee in their bodies anyway. How much worse could Coffee Cereal be? Someone get me on the phone with the product people at General Mills; let's do this.* I want to put a plug in right now for the back catalog of IFG: there's no real continuity to speak of, so you can listen as far back as you like or cherrypick interesting-sounding episodes/guests at your leisure. 

Fascination Corner

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

• Making surfaces truly antimicrobial is harder than it seems (which means dangerous, hello selection pressure), but it turns out almost nothing can survive on a doorknob made of pure, compressed salt. A future where we start making all public doorknobs and handrails out of salt sounds cool from a purely epidemiological perspective, but what do we do when people start licking them?

• The Chandra Observatory detected an explosion in a faraway galaxy that was 1000x more intense than all the stars in that galaxy put together. They don't really know what could've caused it. Sleep tight, everyone!

• Someday I want to meet the heroes at Bloomberg who sat down and definitively proved once and for all that there's been way more chasing than racing in the last few Fast & Furious movies, along with more -- so much more.

• Okay: it's clinically possible to use a virus to insert new genes into human brain cells and reprogram them into becoming, say, dopamine-producing neurons. Which is cool (especially because scientists see a possible Parkinson's treatment in this), but now I'm imagining a doom scenario where the virus propagates throughout neural tissue unimpeded, shutting down thought in favor of pure dopamine production. Call it "the Bliss Syndrome." Someone get an outline for a three-book trilogy and a movie treatment on my desk by the end of the day.

• When the fuck are we going to Enceladus, is all I want to know. Ditto Europa. And doesn't Ganymede also have a subsurface ocean? In all seriousness, I would love a longread (or more like a constantly-updated video series paired with a regular column in Wired, as long as I'm daydreaming) about NASA's 2020 Europa mission: what are they sending, how are they getting it there, what's its current status. I need to know.

Looky Here

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway36 - Baking Bad"Jon (@ferociousj), Kelly (@enthusiosity), and Jon's wife Mavis hit upon the ultimate food truck, a new paradigm for the sport of basketball, and a subscription food service that really does need to happen."It's been so long since any of us played checkers that we actually forgot the rules, which is kind of impressive, given that there were three of us.https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/episodes/66511-36-baking-badYou can also subscribe using:iTunesRSSStitcherGoogle Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/ 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumHigh-Calorie Friendship, This Was My Idea All Along 

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.