Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that put up the Xmas lights outside a few days ago and feels real good about it honestly

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.

Instant Band Night 29: NEW YEAR'S BALL AGAIN

We hereby resolve to kick 2025 off with an explosion of musical creativity and extremely good outfits because we all deserve to have at least one source of unalloyed joy in our lives that cannot be touched. Also, for real, it's going to be a fucking blast if the last 28 of these are any indication, and you've gotta get in on it!! Come play onstage or just be in the crowd for a new debut of a brand new act every five minutes or so; there's nothing else like it in the entire Bay and possibly the world??? Send everybody you know the link, put on that fancy party outfit, and let's do this

✨🪩✨
Jan 9 2025
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

(Eventbrite) (Facebook)

+ + 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 + +

Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU

Excellent new tardigrades! Chaos mushrooms! Plus the rest of the almost aggressively whimsical, playfully intelligent catalog you may or may not have come to know already, perfect for yourself or a highly discerning friend in your life: there has never been a better time than now.

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.

I originally put this in the Fascination Corner but it turns out I have too much to say about Aztec death whistles. (U of Zurich) Save the paper for later (Paper), put your headphones on, and come with me to the page where you can listen to the samples (Sound examples). What the fucking hell, they're ABSOLUTELY FUCKING HARROWING. Why weren't these considered wartime assets?? Give your entire army one of these and 30 seconds to blow on them, and every single one of your enemies would run into the fucking sea with all their armor on. The Scientists actually considered the "warfare theory" but based on archaeological context (and I suppose the conspicuous lack of historical legends about the Unstoppable Screaming Death Armies of the Aztecs Who No Man Could Look Upon Because of the Terrifying Sound They Made) concluded the death whistles were reserved for ritual use. Like maybe human sacrifice ritual use. No fucking shit

Can you imagine being the person who invented these things. What were they going for??? Was this something they just stumbled on, or were they in an incredibly bad mood that day and decided to invent the entire field of affective psychoacoustics just because??

Props also to the aesthetics: the death whistles look scary as hell, too. Like if I had created an object that made that sound, I would want it to look exactly the way the Aztecs made it. Damn. Just a stellar design from top to bottom. That said, I can already imagine a horror story where someone makes a big version of one of these things to use as a bong or something and ends up summoning an imp or a demon or an entire apocalypse.

Aztec death whistles!!! History's always got surprises for us, it turns out!!

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.

Quentin's birthday party was a success! I have a fairly hard-to-fuck-up philosophy about kid birthday parties that I think will serve us all until either he or Felix decide they want something more elaborate (who knows? they may never), but in general I am of the belief that

• Little kids don't care about activities

• They just want to run around with their pals

• Cake is very important

So I combine all of these into a streamlined engine of kid fun that goes:

1. Party call time is 10a

2. Juice boxes are deployed immediately

3. Cake is served at 1030a

4. Let everybody run around on sugar

5. Disperse for home or elsewhere come lunchtime

You don't need other snacks if you just serve the cake right away. And then everybody has fuel for at least the next hour or so! Adults will naturally trade shifts watching the kids roam in packs while everyone else catches up. The kids have a great time and the adults are only moderately exhausted; what more can you ask for??

Fascination Corner

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

• "Elite Acquiescence and Treacherous 'Normalcy' All Around Us: What are the reasons behind the pervasive tendency among ostensibly anti-MAGA elites to accommodate authoritarian power and preemptively signal compliance with Trumpism?" (Democracy Americana)

• The Scientists let The Machine chew on 300 billion bits' worth of bacterial and viral genomes and got it to spit out plausibly useful Cas9 variants, although it also hallucinated some bullshit that would never work; still, it's a great start — and they even tried to safeguard it from bioweapons developers by omitting attack sequences from the training set! (~$Science)

• Good times: have some pictures from a coffeetable photo book documenting the world's best artist-designed playgrounds. (Colossal)

• I say this about the recyclable plastics guys, but this is also true of the water-from-air guys: there's been like a dozen of these in the last year. Can you all get together and have some kind of race to commercial scaling or something? (NYU Abu Dhabi) (Paper)

• The National Bureau of Economic Research reports a correlation between legal weed and an uptick in the purchase of snack foods and sitting around on your couch instead of going outside. Even if this is real, is that super awful? At least that way we know where all the stoners are, which is: inside and self-evidently not hurting anybody else. (NBER paper download page)

• H5N1 is trying to bridge that cross-species gap, but thus far it hasn't been particularly dangerous, nor does it seem able to spread from person to person (yet). (Science Alert)

• Fuck: Hurricane Helene hit a factory in North Carolina that makes 60% of the IV fluids used in the entire fucking country. They're partially back online now, but there's no telling when full production will resume. (NPR)

• I demand the other side of this story about all the Hertz workers at the Syracuse airport just walking off the damn job. What was going on with management?? (Jalopnik)

• Sleep studies have been unsurprisingly and unfairly biased towards men this whole time, which is super stupid for the usual reasons, but also! it turns out women might literally have different sleep patterns from men! We found this out in the year 2024?!?! (U of Colorado Boulder) (Paper)

• The Scientists who won them say the Ig Nobel awards are good actually; makes sense to me. (Nature)

• Watching Congolese tribesfolk pass knowledge on to the kids in their community leads The Scientists to conclude this is probably how human children learned for most of our history as a species, and it sounds kinda great. (Washington State) (Paper)

• They say it's a conceptual "human washing machine" but you and I know this is just the first step to building the cockpit to EVA-01, which I don't need to tell you would have some ........ significant downsides. (TechCrunch)

• Everybody's heard of The Bloop, but I didn't know about the Bio-Duck until just now. (Acoustical Soc of America)

• Green tech uses a lot less raw material now than it used to, which is good news if you want to create a circular economy: one of the old solar panels can theoretically make a lot more than one of the new ones! Worth investigating!! (Sustainability By Numbers)

• The Scientists have been wondering "where the HELL is all the dark matter" for A While Now, but they think they might be able to prove where it is! The catch: we have to be pointing a gamma ray telescope at a supernova while it's cooking off; the time window is roughly 10 seconds. No big deal!!!! (UC Berkeley) (Paper)

• You want worldbuilding? You want a scifi hole to get lost down for a while? I present to you the natural history of Serina, a moon seeded with just a few bits of terrestrial life (including canaries) and then left alone for millions of years: literally wild! (Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds)

• There goes the last affordable house in San Francisco. (TechCrunch)

• If you're not already subscribed to How Things Work, you can fix that right now (and also read the latest missive). (How Things Work)

• TENS devices work on long COVID pain, says a new study. (UCLA Health) (Paper)

• According to the data, plastic bag policies that force stores to charge for them just make people buy more plastic bags. Great. (It could also be that this is the only measurable externality and we don't have a good way to quantify how many people started using canvas bags instead, etc) (Just sayin') (UC Riverside)

• Suppose you are The Scientists and you need to make complex networks of very tiny tubes for your work: how the fuck? What you do: grow plants and fungi in a mixture of glass nanoparticles and then bake it, roasting the organic matter away and leaving exactly what you need in pure glass. Genius, honestly! Yes there are pictures. (Kyushu U) (Paper)

• A truly massive dark energy study says Einstein's still got it. (Lawrence Berkeley Lab)

• We're going to need to rebrand "climate tech" into something that the MAGA chuds won't balk at, like "frontier tech" or "energy resilience" or "America-first Freedom Eagle food" maybe. (Heatmap)

• Evidence of an alphabet that predates the earliest known form of writing by half a millennium just popped up. (Johns Hopkins U)

• We already know political opinion can influence your choice of consumer products, but what's interesting is how hilariously unbalanced the effect is. (Linköping U) (Paper)

• Forget angel hair: The Scientists have invented nanopasta, which is no good for cooking but has promising applications in wound dressing and tissue regeneration. (University College London) (Paper)

• Manatees in Florida might actually be surprisingly recent immigrants. (U of South Florida) (Paper)

• The Scientists need to know when wildlife out on the savannah dies, so they put GPS sensors on a bunch of vultures and tasked The Machine with figuring out what they're up to, and that's how you make a "death detector": good to know. (Leibniz Inst for Zoo and Wildlife Research) (Paper)

• How do we form new habits and make them stick? (Trinity College Dublin) (Paper)

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 and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible)

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Alternate universe music critic Steve says "I reckon Highly Specific Impacts were a Nomeansno style hard-edged guitar band. Then they took a disastrous detour into ska punk. Lots of fans of their early stuff, we don't talk about the mid period material with the trumpets. Massive falling outs, original members leaving, members struggling with various addictions, there was an intra band knife-fight about the trumpets. They went on hiatus and everyone wrote them off.

"Now they're back, just the three founding members. Older, possibly wiser, gravelly voices and slower songs (and no fucking trumpets). It's an unexpected and unlooked-for gem."

Reader Lauren says "Ok hear me out: Highly Specific Impacts is not a band but an improv group. The Last Place You Died is an audio-only recording of one of their shows and maybe wasn't the best experiment into distributing the medium more broadly, but it has a certain charm if you give it a chance."

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. If you received this as a forward and would like to subscribe yourself, you can do it at the bottom of this page right here (which also has the archive)!