seeking cranberry in highly specific and possibly esoteric forms

December 18, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that acknowledges the Great Avar's eldest daughter but does not discuss her 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Instant Band Night 24: NEW YEARS BALLReal talk: It's time to put on that outfit you think is "too fancy" and come rock everybody's shit. Play in a band if you want, or just watch and have a goddamn great time! Bear witness to the most concentrated and joyful burst of musical creativity in the entire Bay, hands down, and bring a few friends along!!January 11 20246p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (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 YOUIt's 2023 and there's no reason you should settle for a boring garden, potted plant, or living space! You could have a little statue of a crazy-colored tardigrade, a little guy to hold your last fruit, a Star Trek buddy in a party hat, or an Ediacaran life form right now. Take a look and consider some clever ceramics for you or a friend — I hear it's gifting season???Idea Factory GiveawayI 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.Who do we know that works for Canada Dry? Anybody? I need to know whether a zero sugar version of Canada Dry Cranberry exists or not. Unsurprisingly, this was difficult to ascertain simply by googling: I did get a result for a Zero Sugar Canada Dry Cranberry, but it was on fucking Kroger's website, which as a northern Californian is not a useful avenue. Also, it doesn't seem to exist on Canada Dry's official website, but neither does their zero sugar regular ginger ale, which I have definitely encountered and consumed out there in the real world. Is Kroger's just dreaming this up or does it actually exist on a shelf out there somewhere?I've actually seen appallingly little (which is to say none) of the regular Canada Dry Cranberry out there on the shelves this holiday season, which I find disturbing. I discovered recently that the Sprite people make a zero sugar version, which I don't care about, but then I discovered even more recently that they make a "Winter Spiced Cranberry" zero sugar version, which I do, at least enough to buy a 12pack of it. It is: pretty good?? Let's put it this way: it's good enough that I find myself wanting a can of it right now after not having had any in the last couple days. This might be a sign that I should buy a small stockpile. I've already got a hoard of Caffeine Free Coke Zero out in the garage, mainly because there seems to be only one Safeway in the entire region that sells it and even that's not really an ironclad guarantee.Look, in this life you gotta have little treats. And since my prediabetic ass can't really have the candy or cookies or sodas or french fries that it used to, I have to take 'em where I can get 'em.* Zero sugar sodas still don't feel entirely healthy, but I feel better about drinking one of them occasionally than I do about power-chugging soda by the sixpack or stress-gobbling an entire tray of Xmas cookies like I want to!! This is what maturity is, right??* A test of my A1C after over a year reveals that it hasn't budged at all, which in one sense is good: it's not getting any worse despite the fact that I do occasionally cheat with homebaked goods here and there. I could probably even make it go down if I added exercise to my day, which I'm going to fold in slowly so as not to stress my aging, decrepit skeleton. I inherited a rowing machine from some good friends, and after the first few times I used it, I got the kind of achiness that made me wonder if I was becoming ill until I remembered that I'd simply been exerting myself. I should stretch more, huh? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.When it started raining the other day, Quentin told me it was raining "cats and dogs," whereupon I looked out the window and noted that it wasn't really raining that hard — a light drizzle at best. Quentin took this in for a moment and then amended his assessment to "it's raining kittens and puppies." You know what, bud? Absolutely.I woke up this morning to find the rain + wind going extremely hard and woke Quentin up at the customary hour with the news that today it was raining "tigers and wolves," to which he readily agreed upon viewing the intensity of the weather. Right now as I type this, it's bucketing down again, but Quentin's at winter break day camp,* so I'll have to ask him if he saw the rain this afternoon and how he'd rate it. Further updates as events warrant.* Thank you, City of El Cerrito Rec Dept for your dedication to keeping my child out of the house, engaged, and amused!!!!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The results from that Machine-powered chemical synthesis robot aren't exactly thrilling The Scientists. (Nature) 

  • You love to see it: that "carbon absorption through ground-up basalt on farmers' fields" idea is getting a big test. (Ars Technica) 

  • It's not just for covid: "long flu" is also a thing. (Washington U in St Louis) (Paper) 

  • Did you know llamas have extremely powerful, very tiny antibodies? The Scientists are looking into llama "nanobodies" (seriously) and discovering that they can neutralize lots of different human norovirus strains. (Baylor College of Medicine) (Paper) 

  • The Verge has a mini article series on The Year Twitter Died that seems worth a look. (The Verge) 

  • Speaking of The Verge, let's not forget the best piece of printer-based journalism ever committed to writing. I know I've linked to it here before, but it's a classic and it deserves recognition. (The Verge) 

  • Imagine being the kind of person who burns down their entire highly promising career as a YA novelist before it even gets off its sparkling superpowered launchpad through a thoroughly unnecessary, ill-conceived, and poorly-executed review-bombing scheme. (Gizmodo) 

  • "Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore: Why you’ve probably never heard of the most popular Netflix show in the world" (~$Atlantic) 

  • The Scientists still can't get the Bennu asteroid sample case open, but the stuff that was stuck to the outside is more than they hoped to get for the entire mission, so that's nice. Also: it's apparently very weird! (Nature) 

  • A huge array of modern-era stromatolites has been found in the Atacama Desert. (U of Colorado Boulder) 

  • Sexism in science is fucking us over as a species and we need policy solutions to address it. (The Conversation) (Paper) 

  • This comes much too late to be of use to anyone who's already had kids, but The Scientists think they've zeroed in on the cause of morning sickness: it's a hormone made by the fetus called GDF15. (U of Cambridge) 

  • Some Engineers have built a proof-of-concept adaptive roofing tile that can lower energy bills year-round. (UC Santa Barbara) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have made a breakthrough in human-to-humpback-whale communication. (SETI) 

  • An orbiting telescope about the size of a cereal box called CUTE has been making important observations of "hot Jupiter"-style exoplanets. (U of Colorado Boulder) 

  • If you're going to read one thing about individual phenomenology, make it this one. I mean it! (Aeon) 

  • What your luggage sees when you check it at DFW. (Laughing Squid) 

  • There's a new startup working to commercialize a Machine-powered technology that can identify surface microbial contamination for food factories in essentially real time. (TechCrunch) 

  • NASA's been keeping the New Horizons probe busy ever since it passed the orbit of Pluto. (Ars Technica) 

  • The potential for juries to assign harsher penalties based solely on the way someone's face looks is high, but fortunately it can also be mitigated with the right training. (Columbia) 

  • Nobody likes uranium mining; how about we just pull the uranium atoms out of the sea instead? Sound good? (ACS) (Paper) 

  • This isn't what they call it, but The Scientists have effectively demonstrated Styrofoam II, the sequel to Styrofoam that's made out of cardboard waste instead! (ACS) 

  • "Is This How Amazon Ends? An open embrace of cheap foreign products has helped Amazon take over the world. It also might guarantee Amazon’s eventual obsolescence." (~$Atlantic) 

  • Pair that with this read from WaPo about bin stores, which I admit to literally never having heard of before. (WaPo gift link) 

  • The Scientists have mapped the human immune response at the molecular level, at least in T cells! (Gladstone Inst) 

  • I'm just linking to this story on the benefits(?) of workplace gossip because of the stock photo. Am I the only one who likes to imagine the backstory here? (Binghamton U) 

  • Whenever the next pandemic hits, the evidence is clear that we need to involve the behavioral sciences as early as possible, because wow. (Columbia) (Paper) 

  • "If you want something done right, do it yourself: the scientists who build their own tools. Three researchers who went out on a limb to bridge a gap in their field talk to Nature about how and why they went about designing their own, unique devices — and the challenges involved." (Nature) 

  • There could be as many as 17 other Europa-style exoplanets out there with a nice liquid subsurface ocean. (NASA) (Paper) 

  • Did climate change or people kill all the prehistoric megafauna? Right now the needle is swinging back in the direction of "people." (Aarhus U) (Paper) 

  • The biggest beaver dam in the world is half a mile long and creates a lake comprising 17 acres, but only one human has ever actually seen it in person at ground level. (Yale Environment 360) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their album

Photo by Saul Macias on Unsplash(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:

Photo by Imad on UnsplashNo reader interpretations came in for this one, which looks to me like an album of unfortunately forgettable Chill Lo-Fi Beats To Put On In The Background Of A Mid-Sized Dinner Party. 

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.