tearfully thankful but appopriately wary

November 25, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that acknowledges Spotify for refreshing its various curated playlists while also knowing that it has no time to listen to them. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway129 - A Tubular Falafel"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Ken unearth a wealth of choice world-saving notions for food, government, and entertainment of various sorts from each others' idea files."Another guest with their own (utterly goddamn delightful) idea file! Hell yeah!! Also, something that only occurred to me in the editing is that when we were trying to figure out the country's five dominant fandoms, we completely forgot about Harry Potter. Surely that's gotta be up there, right?Something I want to start doing that only occurred to me now: taking questions from listeners in the form of 5-star reviews! If you've got a question for us, go ahead and leave us that ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and feel free to drop a question in the review, which at least one of us will do our best to answer!Instant Band Night XIV: Starting 2020 Off RightWhat's Instant Band Night, you ask?✨😎 All your questions are answered here 😎✨This will be the best way to mark the start of a fresh new year; I absolutely guarantee it. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I realize that my sense of time isn't what it used to be, both due to Trump time dilation and the simple fact that my brain perceives the days/weeks/months as passing more quickly because of the whole proportion thing, but how in the fuck is it Thanksgiving week already? In case this is useful, or if you somehow need to reconstruct my personality from my writings many years from now because of something in the future that happens, here are My Essential Truths of Thanksgiving: 

  • Pumpkin pie should not be freestyled. Only the extremely experienced or highly trained should be out there messing around with different pumpkin pie recipes; 99.9% of the time, people should just stick to the recipe on the Libby's can. 

  • Once you've found a stuffing you like, do not deviate from its formulation unless absolutely forced to, and yes, "a stuffing you like" can definitely just be Stove Top. There is no need to go fancy with stuffing if you don't have to. 

  • Cranberry sauce that comes from and is shaped like a can. Sorry. This is just how it is. Have the other stuff on the table if you must, but the can stuff is mandatory.

Now that you've read them, these statements constitute immutable law in all municipalities, annexed territories, and pertinent alternate realities. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.I don't know how else to put it: we seem to have hit a real sweet phase with Quentin right now. 

  • He likes to tell us "I love you Mama" or "I love you Daddy" 

  • He doesn't do it constantly, but we've heard him tell other inanimate objects he loves them, or people he knows who aren't in the room (or even in the house) 

  • Sometimes when one of us is lying on the floor for some reason -- stretching, etc -- he'll go get a blanket and his stuffed animals and try to cover us up and tuck us in ("Daddy resting") 

  • He likes to help us pick up his toys and put them away before we put him to bed

I don't have a good conclusion; Quentin's just the sweetest kid alive right now and we are 1000% fully aware this is perhaps the quintessential definition of a luck-of-the-draw type situation -- "Thankful, Loving, In Awe, But Also Aware This Could Take A Real Turn Tomorrow" is how I would best summarize my feelings on the matter currently. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The Republicans are hijacking the impeachment proceedings to create soundbites for their bullshit alternate universe where Trump can do no wrong, and the depressing part is that the data seems to indicate it's working, at least on Facebook. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Here's an interesting design for a Europa rover that hugs the inside surface of the ice and rolls along it. (Science Alert) 

  • Teach tiny AI-powered software bots to play hide & seek and then let them play millions of times, and it turns out they'll invent interesting strategies and even tool use. What else might this approach be good for? (Quanta) 

  • Big superstar cities are starting to recruit less and less talent compared to smaller upstarts, which: finally. (CityLab) 

  • The molecular mechanism by which we humans may someday be able to generate our own electricity (like electric eels or Spider-Man villains) has been identified. (National Institutes of Natural Sciences via Science Daily) 

  • Hoo boy, gonna let the headline do the talking on this one: "The Conservative Establishment’s Nightmare Is Only Just Beginning" (but not in a good "liberal ideals are winning" way, more of an "insane white supremacist shitbirds are coming home to roost in the structure these political conservatives built" way). (Washington Monthly) 

  • Hey, it actually is possible to instill a sense of ethics through education! (Notre Dame via Science Daily) 

  • It's not just humans: animals also go through an idiot teenager phase. (Greenwich Time) 

  • You'll theoretically be able to turn yourself into compost in Seattle starting a couple years from now. (ArchPaper) 

  • Does learning about the words that other cultures have for concepts of happiness help increase your own? (Vox) 

  • A lot of industrial processes require heat, which in turn needs fossil fuels (a LOT of fossil fuels) to generate it. But what if you could just aim concentrated sunlight at that biz instead? (Science Alert) 

  • This doesn't .......... fill me with absolute joy: MIT has built an AI that can beat people consistently at an online version of The Resistance: Avalon, which is one of those Werewolf-style hidden role games. (MIT via Science Daily) 

  • Starlink is already fucking up astronomers' shit, and the whole thing isn't even up yet. Elon. Guy. Can you calm the fuck down. (Science Alert) 

  • Fewer Americans are moving than ever, and it's apparently a mystery. Here, I'll solve it for you: nobody has any money + rent and the price of home ownership are increasing == why would anyone move/where the fuck would they move to? ($NYT) 

  • My alma mater doing us all proud: it turns out that trash talk can negatively impact your gaming performance even if you know it's coming from a goddamn robot. What I would love to know, though, is to what extent the wording matters; it sounds like all the comments were pre-written by a real human. What if you hooked the robot up to a neural net and let it try to come up with its own insults? Would completely insane-sounding trash talk still be harmful or what? (CMU via Science Daily) 

  • Sugars essential to life have been found inside meteorites. (NASA) 

  • Why shouldn't we turn to the sea for new bacteria to mine for antibiotics? Have you seen how big it is? (Friedrich-Schiller-Universitaet Jena via Science Daily) 

  • I fully realize this might make me sound like an insane person, but one of my only personal takeaways from The Mote in God's Eye was the toilets the aliens invented that had an absolutely frictionless inner coating, so they never needed water to work. Why do I bring that up? No reason. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • Whoooooooooo wants to see a map of Titan? (Ars Technica) 

  • Results from the mass shooting study are ............. unsurprising, quite honestly. (Vice) 

  • Actually, speaking of those, CMU researchers have figured out a way to triangulate the location of a shooter from three smartphone video sources. (CMU via Science Daily) 

  • There's an updated dog/human age formula, but it involves using ln, which I only vaguely remember from school; I like that it lends the whole process an air of truly scientific complication (wait til you read the justification for the reformulation). (Science Alert) 

  • Water vapor is shooting out of Europa's surface! Water vapor is shooting out of Europa's surface! (Futurism) 

  • AI analysis has led to the discovery of more giant Nazca line drawings, which is interesting in and of itself, but the speculative use that the researchers have dreamed up for them is hilariously picayune-sounding. My guess is that we're looking at the remnants of a bygone civilization's version of Burning Man, no more, no less. (Science Alert) 

  • Someone invented a device that can convert low-grade industrial waste heat into electricity! (U of Hong Kong via Science Daily) 

  • In order to simulate a future with autonomous cars and robot curbside pickup, one researcher picked 13 people and assigned them chauffeurs for a week to see how their car use patterns changed. Spoiler(??): they used their cars way, way more, which ............... isn't great. Yes, that's a tiny study, but still. Still! Anyway, this piece goes into interesting detail on what they think constitutes good vs bad vehicle use, and how to mitigate the latter (maybe). (Jalopnik) 

  • How much energy do we really need? Turns out: less than we think. (Intl Institute for Applied Systems Analysis via Science Daily) 

  • ALERT: there was a study done almost three years ago that seems to indicate dogs have preferred genres of music, and they're ....... surprising. I don't know if this means you're also required to get that dorm-room "Bob Marley LEGEND" poster for your house or not. (BBC) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumBig Purple Enemy, All The Courage of Our Convictions 

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.