success on many fronts

November 14, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that can and will wander aimlessly through the Xmas decoration section of any Target just to absorb the vibe a little 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayAs we slide into the 2022 holiday season I still hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast remains on that list. In the meantime, you can find its 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 18: RECHARGEInstant Band Night 17 was great!! Not only did we get some truly astounding musical surprises from impromptu bands featuring highly creative band names and beautiful gig posters, I think we've finally nailed the format of the closing "everybody in" song. Musical experience. Whatever it is. It was fucking fantastic and you should come to the next one, which is on January 12 2023 (add it to your calendar by clicking here). Bring your friends.If you missed it or just plain forgot what Instant Band Night is, imagine a great party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. If you play music, you can be one of 'em, and if you don't, you can just watch. It is, and I'm not exaggerating here, a goddamn inspiration every time.🎼 MUSIC! 🎼🚀 COURAGE! 🚀✨ CREATIVITY! ✨January 12 20236p$10East Bay Community Space507 55th St 94609(Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  S E E   Y O U   T H E R E  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I don't have a whole lot for you in this section this week, but word to the wise if you somehow haven't already read The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell: watch the fuck out. Also, make sure to have the sequel handy immediately. Okay, have a great rest of the week! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin's birthday was on Sunday and I think we managed to pull it off:🥞 Specially-requested banana pancakes in the morning that he helped make (he loves to help Mavis make the batter) (really he loves to help her bake anything, it's very good)🎁 About a half-dozen presents after breakfast; he opened one beforehand and then told us he'd do the rest after he'd eaten — where he got this kind of personal restraint I have no idea🎉 A birthday party at a park that was really just a playdate + cake with a few extra adults, which turned out to be the exact amount of logistical lift we could handle (he got some extremely adorable happy birthday drawings and cards from his TK classmates, too)🍔 Special takeout dinner from the burger jointAt bedtime he told us "I love my birthday," so we're counting that as a win!Felix, meanwhile, manifested the mild stomach bug that daycare warned us was circulating; we went through five (5) pairs of pants in a day thanks to what I'm going to call "side blowouts." We attempted overnight containment with a larger over-diaper and kept him home on Monday; we expect he'll be home Tuesday, too, as daycare wants a 24h all-clear window, which makes a ton of sense. I'm not going to go into detail about the diaper rash he's experiencing, but let's just say we've been applying the necessary healing creams with a dump truck and a trowel.Felix has also become a fan of throwing his toys into places that are literally inaccessible to him: outside his playpen, behind the chair, under the couch. No idea what that's all about. He threw his beloved purple bunny out of his crib a few mornings ago; the screaming was truly next-level. As if to balance this out, there were a couple bedtime changings this week where he started telling us "Nigh nigh" with a smile, which we took to mean "Night night." It was almost too adorable to handle. Kids! They're a rollercoaster!!!!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • As it should be, word coming from COP27 is not exactly the rosiest in the world. (Al Jazeera) The Scientists agree we're going to overshoot 1.5°, but they're busy looking for the best ways to bring it back down fastest. (Pacific Northwest National Lab) (Paper) 

  • From time to time it's important to remember The Onion is still out there, because this one is great: "Man Who Lost Everything In Crypto Just Wishes Several Thousand More People Had Warned Him" (link) and this one is a single paragraph of pure murder, particularly the last sentence: "Smiling Fetterman Asks Oz If He’d Mind Slowly Repeating Concession For 5th Time" (link). 

  • The big Twitter meltdown question of the moment (which, for the purposes of posterity for this blurb, is Thursday Nov 10 2022) is "Does Twitter Have Any Employees Left Who Remember That The Company Is Under A Strict Consent Decree With The FTC?" (Techdirt) 

  • For no reason (cough), here's an old explainer on why insulin costs so much in the US. (Vox) 

  • Gen Z saved our ass at the polls, and this op ed from Teen Vogue argues that the Dems should actually listen to their priorities. Ya think?!?!?! (Teen Vogue) 

  • "The walls are closing in on Clearview AI: The controversial face recognition company was just fined $10 million for scraping UK faces from the web. That might not be the end of it." (MIT Technology Review) 

  • STOP WHATEVER YOU'RE LISTENING TO AND CLICK THIS. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has a live hydrophone half a mile down in the ocean and you can listen to it right now. As of the time of this writing, the whales are very chatty and it's fucking enthralling. (MBARI) 

  • Lots of young life scientists are headed straight to the private sector after taking one look at the "opportunities" academia offers. (STAT) 

  • If you'd like a diversion and you have 3 dice somewhere, why not try I Do Not Want A Mastodon. Honestly, the widget that pops up when you google "online dice roller" will do even if you don't have any handy. (@deathbybadger on Twitter) 

  • The Scientists are getting a handle on figuring out same-sex reproduction, but there are a lot of questions that need to be answered in the meantime. (NEO.LIFE) 

  • "Why Did We All Have the Same Childhood? Children have a folklore all their own, and the games, rhymes, trends, and legends that catch on spread to many kids across time and space." This is a very good article on an intriguing subject, and no it's not just the cool S thing! (~$Atlantic) 

  • The financial coring out of Alex Jones's entire hateful bullshit life continues to yield a nonzero amount of joy. (AP) 

  • [pounds fists on table] Lab grown blood! Lab grown blood! Lab grown blood! (BBC) 

  • Hey: you wanna see a virus move? (Duke) 

  • Results from Atlanta indicate that pollen's at its lowest between 4a and noon, and highest from 2-9p. Do with that info what you will! (ACAAI) 

  • Why do we measure world prosperity with GDP? No, really: it's a stupid metric. (Nature) 

  • The Scientists decided to try growing a batch of spinach in the CO2-rich exhaust air from a building's HVAC system and it boosted growth by 4x. Makes you think about the potential of urban rooftop farming a little!!! (Anthropocene) 

  • Trying to keep birds away from airports is a real problem, which Some Engineers may have solved with their robofalcon. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • No really though, why are there so many colds going around right now? (Nature) 

  • Going over some old footage of octopuses hanging out, The Scientists have discovered that they sometimes throw stuff at each other deliberately, which you don't really see a lot of animals doing. There's links in the paper to download the actual video files of octopuses choosing violence, which I recommend: they are hilarious. (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • If you needed to rescue someone in a hard-to-reach spot and couldn't get there right away, maybe you could keep them going by flying an edible drone at them. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The Scientists have done a little testing and the preliminary conclusion is that if you want to get people movin' on the dance floor, get ahold of some Very Low Frequency sound equipment. (Cell Press via Science Daily) (Paper) Speaking of dance: do ............ do rats have rhythm?? ???? (U Tokyo) (Paper) 

  • What caused the very first mass extinction? The Scientists still don't know, but they've at least narrowed down the proximate cause to "Something took a bunch of the oxygen away." (Virginia Tech) Depending on how you look at it, it's either funny or sort of ominous that a similar event probably caused the Devonian mass extinction too, except this time The Scientists are pretty sure they know how it happened: trees evolved roots. (Indiana U) 

  • Simulation shows that we could save a surprising amount of power if we let appliances across a whole neighborhood talk to each other and figure out when to turn on/off. (Anthropocene) 

  • I feel like I write a variation on this blurb literally every week; are all these technologies additive or not? Anyway, The Scientists have worked out yet another way to strip CO2 out of the air and convert it into industrially useful substances again (U of Surrey) 

  • We don't have words for smells. Yes, we all read that one Calvin & Hobbes strip (turns out it's two strips), but it's true: all our smell words relate to pleasantness or edibility. How do they relate to each other? (Stockholm U) (Paper) 

  • Look at this bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos entombed in a purpose-built sarcophagus for the next 10 millennia. (Guardian) 

  • Other sea life in the Florida Keys may not be doing so hot, but at least the sea urchins are fine?? (Florida Museum) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumCarnival of Murder, But We Hit Eject Hours Ago(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, because now I'm curious) 

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.