that's too many teeth

September 19, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's finally made a linktr.ee and is wondering if it should also include an email address; dare I? is that something we're doing again? 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayIn the back half of 2022 I hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast is 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 17: GO TIMEI don't say this lightly: you have to come to the next Instant Band Night. It's the November one (add it to your calendar now!), which means it's the one where we get a cake and sing happy birthday to Quentin. No, he won't be there, but we'll take a video!!If you don't already know 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, fucking incredible.🎶🎸 IT WILL SOON BE TIME TO PARTY 🎸🎶🎶🎸 IN WHATEVER WAY YOU LIKE BEST 🎸🎶Nov 106p$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.(This week in this section I'm going to let you see a side of me that you maybe don't see a whole lot, I dunno. I wrote it while pretty angry and I don't know that I endorse this position officially now, but it sure felt good to get out at the time. I'll let you get to it.)I guess there's nothing the feds can actually do to punish Ron DeSantis for his cruel stunt with a couple planeloads of Venezuelan migrants — who are people, you smug, callous fuck, not pawns to deploy in your Wannabe Trump Game for 2024 — so I would like to know what we think it would cost to hire someone to release hungry savannah wildlife into his house at 2 in the morning. I think watching Ring footage of Ron DeSantis getting torn apart in his living room by hyenas would be a balm to my soul, and I know I'm not alone. Sure, the cost would be astronomical, but my point is that there is a number. And yes, I'm aware that there's a potential disconnect between me being mad about Ron DeSantis using people as game pieces while simultaneously pondering the logistical costs of having him eaten by African plains predators, since after all he's a person too, I will propose to you the following: no the fuck he isn't, specifically because he's a sadistic asshole whose cruelty demonstrably affects multiple innocent lives.Ask yourself: is there any virtue to cruelty? What benefit does cruelty provide to anyone at any level of society? I submit that it's one of maybe a handful of basic human qualities that we do not need in any way, shape, or form. We're all complex individuals with a myriad of emotions and drives within us that shift and moil and fade and grow at all times, sure. But if we accept that, we need to also accept that there are easily identifiable trends and averages that can be observed within an individual: this person is generally happy, that guy's kind of a saddo, that one over there needs to calm down around new people. Most of the time, Ron DeSantis is obviously just a fucking asshole who gleefully perpetrates cruelty at scale, which means we just don't need him around. OF COURSE it's not a good idea to just murder the guy, so let's just reintroduce some appropriate animals to the equation and let nature take its course. He's down in Florida, maybe it'd be cheaper to get some gators in the mix. I'm just talkin' here. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.About a week and a half ago, Quentin brought home something I'm just going to call The Sniffle, because that was the only symptom he showed: a runny nose that was so productive he had to leave school early and stay home the next day so he could blow his nose every ten seconds and feel sad about how sore his nose was getting (Aquaphor helped, don't worry).Toward the end of its tenure in his body, The Sniffle jumped to Mavis and got her too, plus it added a sore throat and kind of a crummy feeling. COVID tests were uniformly negative throughout for both of them.Then Felix caught The Sniffle, and it produced a strange oscillation where sometimes he'd have a runny nose and sometimes a fever, but no other symptoms, and then he started having an occasional cough. Over the weekend he started feeling especially crummy, which was dismaying until we discovered it was prrrrrobably due to the three molars emerging in his poor little mouth. So for the last 24h he's been on an alternating chain of painkillers, and he had to sleep in our bed next to Mavis so he could cry and be soothed without awakening Quentin. (I actually enjoy sleeping on the couch, which is what I did for a lot of The Sniffle and I think it saved me from catching it 🤞🎃) Today he had to leave daycare early because his fever came back, and we discovered his canines are also coming in. So that's where we are for the week, just so everyone knows!!! 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Holy shit, they made a movie out of How To Blow Up A Pipeline, and it's good! (Motherboard) 

  • Decarbonizing the energy system by 2050 would save the world $12 holy fucking trillion goddammity dollars. Basically, the old models that told everyone the transition would be too expensive turned out to be full of shit because clean energy costs dropped way farther and faster than anyone predicted. (U of Oxford) (Paper) 

  • Utterly predictably, Launch House sounds like an absolute shambolic mess from top to bottom. (Vox) 

  • According to a recent survey, maybe a fifth of us have trouble sleeping at night because of, well, the state of the world. (Ohio State U Wexner Medical Center) 

  • The Scientists have invented a face mask that can detect the presence of viruses like the rona in airborne droplets within about ten minutes. (Cell Press via ScienceDaily) (Paper) 

  • The founder of Patagonia has given the company away to an initiative dedicated to fighting climate change. Not too shabby. (CNBC) But don't forget MacKenzie Scott's still out here making moves!! (Robb Report) 

  • A guy who used to work on Google Deepmind has what I'm going to go ahead and call some sobering thoughts on the likelihood of a misaligned AI making moves that could doom us all. (Motherboard) (Paper) 

  • What are dogs paying attention to? Can we use an fMRI to find out? Will the videos used in the investigation be extremely endearing? TIME TO FIND OUT (Emory U) (Paper) 

  • "The Spectacular Collapse of CryptoKitties, the First Big Blockchain Game" (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The Scientists have run the numbers, and it looks like we could feed an additional billion people without farming any extra crops if we adjusted what we fed our livestock instead. (Aalto U) (Paper) 

  • A lot of us out there seem to be experiencing deaths close to us lately, so this piece from an end-of-life doula on how to make the most of your time here now might hit pretty hard; be warned. (Vox) 

  • How do you make the perfect toy? (The Walrus) 

  • AI tools have now gotten good enough that The Scientists can more or less design brand new proteins from scratch, which: holy shit. (Nature) 

  • Looking back on history and comparing psychological profiles, it kinda seems like narcissistic presidents tend to keep the US in wars longer than ones who don't. (Science Alert) 

  • Judging from their vocal patterns, it's at least in the realm of possibility that there exist seven distinct clans of sperm whales in our oceans right now. (PhysOrg) 

  • Speaking of whales, we need to stop "disposing" of their bodies when they beach. (Hakai) 

  • The Scientists are making progress getting corals to spawn more than once a year, which is good because it's not looking great for coral in general out there right now. (Anthropocene) 

  • Like the idea of a tattoo but hate needles and/or pain? Some Engineers have invented a way to essentially print a tattoo made of ink-filled microneedles onto an adhesive patch that goes on painlessly. I know it sounds wild; the paper has a ton of pictures. (Georgia Tech) (Paper) 

  • Surprising no one, the TSA isn't only useless and terrible, it's a garbage place to work. (The Verge) 

  • "4 Truths and 4 Lies: What the Latest Census Data Says About Perceptions of San Francisco" (SF Standard) 

  • Everybody's gun-shy about solar reflection geoengineering through atmospheric particle dispersal, but what if we just tried it over the poles? It would help keep them cold, and also (very important) pretty much nobody lives there. (IOP) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have created a machine learning model that can take a bunch of 2D images of a cell and create a 3D model. (Washington U in St Louis) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumSome Clay Asshole, Maximum Enjoyment Factor(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.