the baddest asses in the ocean

April 22, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that exhibited an almost superhuman amount of restraint in not making a special trip to Walgreens or Target looking for half-price post-Easter Starburst jellybeans and Cadbury eggs; admittedly, there are still Sweet Tarts candy hearts from Valentine's Day in the house. I either have a candy problem or I'm turning into a children's storybook villain. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway106 - COWSTALKER(???)"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Alison Haislip (@alisonhaislip) dig up excellent notions for filmed entertainments across multiple genres along with a culinary education idea of unknown origin."I'm glad Alison agrees with us on the issue of green apple Skittles; why the hell are they green apple when lime was already perfect? Also, we do a little delve into the inner workings of reality TV.If you haven't yet, subscribe by searching "Idea Factory Giveaway" in your podcatcher of choice (and let me know if it doesn't pop up). If you're already there, feel free to leave a 5-star rating and a nice review (it helps; algorithms, etc, you know the deal).Instant Band Night 10Instant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. You don't have to play an instrument or be musical to attend -- you can just come have a drink and watch! Details are right here, and yes, you can invite your friends. In fact, I insist that you do -- just forward them this email, or send them the link! If you're on Facebook, here's an event you can use for maximum convenience. It's gonna be a Time, and you should be there to see it! (I suppose I should note this only applies if you're in the San Francisco Bay area or know a bunch of fun people who live there, which I'm betting is a lot of you) 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.The entire original purpose of this newsletter was to inform people when new episodes of the podcast went up, so it seems fitting to talk a little about this interesting little tidbit from the U of Texas: To Stoke Creativity, Crank Out Ideas and Then Step Away. That's pretty much been the model for me since roughly 2007ish, when I started writing down every idea that came into my head the moment I had it and then never did anything with 99% of them.* After building an archive of over 800 in the intervening dozen years, I have to say I'm pretty pleased with the weird mountain I built, and I'm glad I'm still doing it. I remain firmly convinced that everybody reading this could build an equally tall, equally weird mountain if they took up the habit, and I would love to see them. I've got a buddy coming into town in the back half of the summer who's kept up some version of this practice, and we're going to trade lists and put him on the show, so be on the lookout for that in, like, October or somethin'. As Louis Pasteur once said, "Chance favors the prepared mind," which honestly also sounds like something Batman would say, too.I'm getting off-track here. What I really wanted to get at was that the ethos behind this idea-capturing process of mine has now been validated by at least one study to be useful in a general sense, so now there's really no excuse not to do it. It's even lower-friction now than when I was doing it in 07 -- these days I have a running note on my phone/Evernote that periodically gets copy/pasted into a spreadsheet. The only two things you need to be even vaguely rigorous about are: 

  • Write down whatever your idea, theory, question, etc is the moment you have it or as close thereto as you can get.

  • Write it down in a form complete enough to make sense to you a decade later (trust me on this).

Keep this up for a month or two and you'll be hooked on it enough to never stop. At least, that was my experience. Good luck to you.* Hence, at the risk of repeating myself, Idea Factory Giveaway, where I bring friends in to look through the pile for anything interesting, entertaining, ridiculous, or potentially lucrative for the listener to theoretically pick up and run with, should the fancy strike them. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Last week's mystery has been definitively solved: a friend of mine knows a speech therapist/linguist who told her that sibilants followed by plosives are actually kind of hard for babies to say, so they drop the "s" from words like "spoon" ............ or "spins," which is where "pince" comes from. How about that!I ordered something from the excellent folks at TopatoCo last week, and packed in with it was a sticker bearing the image of the company mascot, Topato Potato, which I placed on my laptop. Quentin has decided that Topato Potato is shaped like a friend: whenever he spots the sticker, which is often because my laptop sits in the living room on a stand positioned at one end of our couch, he jabs a finger at Topato and says "Hi!" repeatedly, and it's almost unbearably adorable. It's also incredibly hilarious if you know anything about Topato Potato, which if you weren't reading Wigu 15 years ago I don't know if I can help you, but the gist is that Topato would make an amazingly poor role model for a toddler. I can't help but wonder, given Quentin's reaction to the sticker, whether there's a market out there for Topato Potato plushies. I'm just talkin' here.The Missing Objects of the Week are still the same: the + sign from his fridge magnet set, and a yellow wooden railcar with big, friendly wheels. At this point I'm willing to entertain theories about pocket dimensions and spontaneous wormhole generation. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • There's a company out there calling itself Arrakis Therapeutics. They don't appear to manufacture a life-extending spice that also grants spacefold powers in high-enough concentrations, but they are working on small molecule medicines that bond to cellular RNA to alter its function, which is arguably just as interesting. (their website) 

  • They always say to follow your dreams, but. (Popula) 

  • No more boys in bubbles! (Axios) 

  • America's about to have a real problem in the form of lots of infrastructure work that needs doing and nobody around to do it, which is even worse than it sounds, considering that these jobs pay better than retail. (Brookings Institute) 

  • A prototype wearable device designed to literally filter metastatic cancer cells out of the bloodstream has been built. It doesn't work at human scale yet, but holy hell. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • I think I put something similar in here last week, but here's another angle on the effort to make plastic garbage something we won't have to live with for the next eleventy billion years (Vox), which is good because the bans don't really have the intended effect (NPR). 

  • So-called "urban wastelands" turn out to be pretty good bee havens, which makes sense when you think about it. (Anthropocene) 

  • Lots of graduation and other inspiration-type speeches these days seem to exhort students to "make an impact." Is that ........ bad? It turns out: yeah, maybe! (Pacific Standard) 

  • The sheer number of questions raised by this experiment to revive pig brains could fill my entire next issue. I'm not gonna do that to you, but know that I could. (Vox) 

  • It's not your imagination: restaurants are too damn loud. But at least the people who run them are starting to take notice. (Eater) 

  • Uh: it's possible to create economic models based on concepts from physics? And they ...... work? What? (Complexity Science Hub press release) 

  • One way to avoid organ rejection during transplants would be to 3D print new organs from your own tissues and stem cells, which sounds like a fucking wild sentence to say out loud, but the first steps have been taken, and you can read the full paper right now if you want. (Advanced Science via Wiley Online Library) 

  • We now have AI that can beat humans at Dota 2, or cooperate successfully with them (it's a 5v5 team game). (OpenAI blog) 

  • Everybody needs to shut the fuck up about the "shrinking middle class" -- its size matters way less than its condition. (Brookings Institute) 

  • Results from the NASA twin study are in; this article even has a link to the paper, which is awfully nice of everybody. (Smithsonian, Science) 

  • Here's where The Kids are finding music these days, I guess???? (Guardian) 

  • Of course there are trends in gardening tools; this year's craze is an ancient Korean hand hoe called a homi. Now you know. (Quartzy) 

  • Holy shit, the Stratolaunch plane works. (The Verge) 

  • Observations indicate that the baddest asses in the seven seas definitively belong to orcas over great white sharks, despite the fact that whales technically don't have asses. Yes, we know they have vestigial leg bones, but them shits ain't visible from the exterior. If anything, I'm prepared to admit whales have an internal ass at best. (Monterey Bay Aquarium) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumRarest Fox, Too Good for the Earth In Its Current State 

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.