something nobody wants practice with

February 13, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that needs a robot to just make the quinoa for me or else I'll just forget and eat something less healthy for lunch instead, day 4 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I'll recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 podcastInstant Band Night 19: SOLARInstant Band Night's in three weeks. You know this already, I'm sure, but you can and should be there even if you don't consider yourself a musician: every band needs a crowd, and this one is maybe the best in the Bay. Tell your pals! All the info you need is below, including links to event pages with a description and FAQ if for some reason you're just now finding out about Instant Band Night and want to know what it is:March 9 2023 (click to add to your Gcal)6p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook) (Partiful)+ +  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  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Warning that this one's about an actual real-life tragedy that occurred in my sphere last week.Jen Angel was a friend of mine. I met her through Mavis (in a sense, I met Mavis through her and a conversation they had around a dinner table one night), and she was great. Instant Band Night and all/any of the joy it's produced in the lives of others would never have existed had I not known her (she used to live next door to the venue). The amount of sitting and staring into space that's gone into the typing of those previous three sentences, parentheticals and all, has been ........... significant. Ever since the pandemic started, I've sworn I could feel my brain starting to ossify, finding myself groping for the right words more and more in ways I'd never before experienced, but this is a thousand times worse. Even this! Look at this! Trying to explain what's going on in my head, to memorialize a friend, and all I can do is babble about myself. Mostly I think it's a self-protection mechanism, because if I try to look too hard at the hole Jen's death leaves in the lives in so many people who knew her so much better, it doesn't bear thinking about; it's like staring into a bright sun of grief, blinding and painful. Don't look at any social media post replies or read the comments under news articles about this, btw; some of them are ......... disheartening. The statement from her loved ones (quoted in the article) is worth reading, inasmuch as it feels like it comes from Jen herself. I want to thank her for it — for everything! everything!! she made the desserts at our wedding! she had an amazing ancient dog named Toby! she was fucking hilarious! — but of course I can't do that. I have to settle for the possibility that wherever she is, she knows, and hope that's enough. We all want to live in a world where our friends don't die, but it turns out the flipside is that when they do, you don't have any practice at mourning them and it's just messy, messy, messy. I don't know how to end this, either. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I think Felix is starting to grasp the concept of choice. At least, that's the only explanation I can think of for:👀 Indicating that he only wants to eat exclusively banana/peach mum mums for his meals if they fall within his line of sight🤬 Getting BIG MAD when we must refuse this course of action and instead offer him other foodsFortunately, the strength of routine seems to have protected breakfast from this problem, but we'll see how long that lasts. His ability to communicate his desires is increasing by the day, and yet it's still hilariously adorable to ask him a question and get a clear "Yeah" back.PRESS-TIME UPDATE: Well, it looks like Felix has hand/foot/mouth. The butt business that we thought was just a particularly yeasty diaper rash is getting some incipient company on his hands, and there's a sore in his mouth that seems to be giving him only intermittent trouble. Amazingly, he's still got his appetite, and today at least he was in a buoyant mood; may it last him through the rest of it. I'm just crossing fingers that it's the same strain Quentin got four years ago so that none of the rest of us catch it; we're washing hands a lot around these parts. So that's fun!!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • It's at least sort of encouraging that most Americans can tell that the Republicans are the pricks to blame when it looks like the government might shut down over budgeting concerns. (538) 

  • Seems fine (sarcastic): "Amazon Is Now a 'Para-State' Governing Global Commerce, Researcher Says" (Motherboard) (PDF of report) 

  • According to the Census Bureau, natural disasters at least temporarily displaced 1.4% of the US population last year. (E&E News) 

  • What actually makes people care about the environment? We at least have the answer for Europeans. (International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) (Paper) 

  • The Ted Chiang New Yorker piece on ChatGPT really is as good as everyone says. (~$New Yorker) 

  • Data suggests The Young People would really rather work for companies that they think are operating sustainably. (Gallup) 

  • The Permian mass extinction was the most disastrous event of its kind in the history of the planet; new evidence suggests the recovery might not have taken as long as The Scientists thought. (Nature) 

  • I didn't know this was a thing and it was interesting to read: "Why Do People Keep Throwing This Bald Doll at Celebrities?" (Vice) 

  • Salps move more carbon into the deep ocean because their poops are bigger and therefore sink faster. Seriously! (Virginia Inst of Marine Science) 

  • The Scientists are starting to figure out how a plastic-eating microbe does its thing on a molecular level. (Northwestern U) 

  • If you like closure, being ghosted is pretty bad, but weirdly, you're also slightly more likely to ghost people in turn. (U of Georgia) 

  • Farmers who use commercial bumblebees need to start putting a "queen excluder" on the hive door — otherwise wild ones try to get in and take over, and the residents murder them immediately, which means fewer wild bumblebee hives out there. (Cornell) (PDF of paper) 

  • Hard data, not simulations, indicates EV adoption is already having some positive health effects in terms of air quality. (Vox) 

  • "Fungi and bacteria are binging on burned soil: Can microbes revive megafire dead zones?" (UC Riverside) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have invented an elastic material that's also impervious to liquids and gases. (NC State) 

  • If you're gonna read a Harrison Ford interview, might as well make it this one. (Hollywood Reporter) 

  • A five-year citizen science project collected 23,000 pieces of plastic trash from the Arctic and determined that they come from all over the damn world. (Alfred Wegener Inst) (Paper) 

  • Maybe pump the brakes on that whole "forest trees talk to each other through fungal networks" idea, everybody. (U of Alberta) 

  • I want to be clear up front that for many reasons I do not need or want this (if anybody out there is trying to do some long-range gift planning, the Galaxy Explorer is still a thing), but this Lego Rivendell set — which includes the entire Fellowship along with Elrond, Arwen, and at least one unspecified elf you could assume to be Glorfindel because why not — is still damn impressive. (Polygon) 

  • There's a dwarf planet out in the Kuiper belt with a ring around it that has The Scientists baffled. (Science Alert) 

  • A new study with n=3000 shows that a simple single-application coat of something called silver diamine fluoride prevented cavities in 80% of the kids who took part. (NYU) (Paper) 

  • "Can Cultured Meat Ever Be More Than a Science Experiment?" (NEO.LIFE) 

  • American cars need to stop getting bigger or we're not going to fucking have anywhere to park. (Motherboard) 

  • The Scientists are figuring out how big language models like GPT-3 can sometimes learn to do new things quickly without being explicitly trained on them. (MIT) 

  • "Why is every character suddenly an ‘antihero’ now? What happens when no one can call a villain a villain" (Polygon) 

  • Anyplace in the ocean that the sun doesn't reach is probably ruled by chemosynthesis, which makes sense if you think about it. (Monash U) (Paper) 

  • The math says there's no correlation between being super rich and being super smart; if anything, billionaires are likely to be a little dumber. (Linköping U) 

  • Some Engineers are trying to build better lidar without involving any moving parts. (Optica) 

  • Just fyi, that lunar dust idea for global cooling that's been making the rounds is basically the same thing as that giant blob of space bubbles idea I linked to a while ago. (U of Utah) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have successfully tested what's essentially a sun-powered water-purifying sponge that can soak up contaminated water and dribble out clean water in 20m, even on cloudy days. (ACS) 

  • Boomer dads are making life mildly miserable for realtors who just want to sell a damn house. (~$Curbed) 

  • The sea is full of ineffable mysteries, including (and I'm not kidding) "where did all these dead crabs come from?" (Hakai) 

  • Blue Origin has proven it's possible to make solar cells and wires entirely from lunar soil, or at least their simulated version of it. (Ars Technica) 

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 on Flickr and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know if you like this better or worse than when I just wrote them out and/or if you want to tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible) 

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.