T-minus one week

July 12, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that is now officially on its last Trader Joe's chocolate orange; may it last until the 2021 holiday season commences (it won't last) 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI had high hopes to get the next episode out before the impending arrival of Baby Lime (see below), but that ............ may not happen. The podcast will be going on a little baby time hiatus, more than likely, but IT WILL RETURN.In the meantime, you can do your part to keep it fed and watered by supplying some ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews, which you can definitely do because you're all nurturing, loving people. Facts.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberGet your goddamn shot! Then and only then you can pencil 11/11/2021 into your schedule; if we're all good and vaccinated, we'll be able to see each other at the next Instant Band Night.Facebook event's still there in case you (like me) can't yet escape the vortex of Facebook+ + g e t   y o u r   s h o t   / /   l e t ' s   d o   t h i s + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.This past weekend we did some more de-hermiting: saw not one but two different groups of friends, even! And it was delightful. I'm hoping to do some more of this in the one (1) week left until Baby Lime arrives (see below), but maybe I should also be banking sleep in anticipation of said arrival. You do what you can with what you have. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.We're at T-minus one (1) week until the scheduled arrival of Baby Lime. Literally scheduled: it's a C-section appointment. Because we're not doing that 3-day induction dance again, which longtime readers may be aware was a bit of an Experience. So next week we're headed to the hospital and hopefully Baby Lime will make his entrance the same way his big brother did, albeit with much less of a preamble. I say "hopefully" only in the sense that I'm hoping he won't decide to show up early and wreck all our carefully-laid plans, but given that Quentin was a week and a half late, the current thinking is that he won't be in much of a hurry. Did I jinx this by typing it out loud here?Even if he does show up early, we're ready. (We're also ready to road-test the name we chose for him; funnily, a nonzero number of people think we're actually naming him Lime, having perhaps forgotten that our fetal moniker for Quentin was Lemon.) We've got all the stuff: there's a co-sleeper, and clothes, and diapers. There's a pump, and all its parts and several bottles have been sterilized. There's a baby monitor with a frankly ridiculously good screen. There's a fuzzy purple bunny that's been charged up with love by a big brother who's going to learn how to be a big brother. There's two parents who are ready to meet this little guy. There's a lot to do out here, but I'm going to savor just for a second the odd liminal sensation of waiting for yet another whole new phase of my life to begin. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Red states are doing much worse than blue states vaccine-wise -- much worse. Have Republicans in office considered what they're going to do if another, deadlier pandemic sweeps the nation and all their voters refuse to get their shots? (Vox) 

  • Pair that with this head-scratcher: the percentage of people who've reported that they're "thriving" reached a 13-year high in 2021. Yes. I don't know either. (Gallup) 

  • Iceland's four-day work week study was a huge success! Hint hint (BBC) 

  • On the opposite end of that particular spectrum, Facebook is building a company town on the Peninsula. (AV Club) 

  • Here's an interesting piece about how the UK government made some ......... uncharitable assumptions about human behavior that didn't work out so well during the pandemic. (The Conversation) 

  • Research seems to indicate we're not hobbling our immune systems by being too clean and hygienic. (University College London) (Paper) 

  • Student debt forgiveness: it's a good thing! Where are we on that again? (Washington Monthly) 

  • According to a massive crowdsourced study, YouTube's recommendation algorithm is still hot garbage. (TechCrunch) 

  • Constructed wetlands turn out to be the best way to clean agricultural runoff before it hits streams and rivers. (U of Kansas) 

  • The water plumes blasting out of Enceladus contain methane whose presence can't be explained by any known geochemical process. Which means: maybe microbes are doing it?? Maybe??? (U of Arizona) Also, NASA has actually put some money into the search for alien megastructures. (Supercluster) 

  • The Danes have discovered a great new load-balancing algorithm that reduces energy consumption at server farms by a surprising amount. (U of Copenhagen) 

  • Experiments in mice show that psilocybin can stimulate the growth of neural connections lost in depression. (Yale) As long as we're in there, ketamine -- or even just light flickering at 60Hz -- seems to restore neural plasticity in mice for a while. (IST Austria) 

  • On the one hand, I agree that just picking up those polymetallic nodules at the bottom of the ocean beats the heck out of tearing the living earth open in search of metals, but on the other, part of me just knows there's some unforeseen hell to pay that we'll all think was obvious from the get-go once it's too late to turn back. (Axios) 

  • There's no other way to put this: Parkinson's disease produces a smell that's detectable long before the symptoms appear. (~$Discover) 

  • This probably isn't surprising, but: fake meat and real meat have different nutrients. One isn't worse than the other, they're just metabolically different and we need to accept it. (Duke) 

  • The Danes have also figured out how to make artificial mucus, which is actually a medically valuable discovery. Every day we get closer to Mass Effect's medi-gel, people. (U of Copenhagen again) 

  • What's behind impulse buying? Click this link and find out!!! (U of Wurzburg) 

  • The Kepler telescope appears to have found four new rogue planets wandering around the center of the galaxy. (Royal Astronomical Society) 

  • Scientists working with mice seem to have accidentally discovered a way to kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria without using antibiotics by giving them an enzyme inhibitor that it turns out supercharges their immune systems; they thought it'd do the opposite. Ha! (Johns Hopkins) 

  • Remember the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Yeah. Where'd all the oil go? The oil? That spilled? Where'd it all go? (JSTOR Daily) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumSmack-Talkin' Grandma, A Survey of Bastards 

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.