the bunny saga concludes

August 09, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that should probably be trying to get a little sleep right now 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayThe new episode still isn't ready, but I am getting better at parenting two kids, so you know: silver linings?There are exactly 38 people who will be chosen to board the alien cruise liner headed on an incredible tour of the galaxy's twenty thousand or so most interesting systems. Why not join them by leaving a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on our Apple Podcasts page? That's the rubric the aliens are using to choose their passengers. Just so you know.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.The IPCC report on climate change is grim, but there is hope if we take action fast enough. I'm just going to put this here on the table and walk away, though: someone somewhere is going to put together some relevant truths, which are 

  • A relative handful of corporations are responsible for 70+% of carbon emissions

  • The names of those corporations are not hard to find

  • Neither are the names of their leadership: executives, board, etc

  • The total number of humans involved would probably fill an auditorium

I'm just saying: somebody -- maybe a lot of somebodies -- are going to do the math and come to the conclusion that weighing that particular auditorium's worth of those very specific people against the future habitability of this entire planet is a relatively simple act. It might -- just might!!! -- be within the best interests of those people to start making extremely different decisions very quickly. This is just a thought I'm having, and if I can have it, so can somebody else with fewer scruples about the sanctity of a certain kind of human life. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Pursuant to last week's missive: the purple bunny has been found. We have one of those POANG armchairs from Ikea that I got about a billion years ago* that always has a little sheepskin rug (also from Ikea) draped over the back; the purple bunny was behind the rug, jammed into the angle where the seat of the chair meets the back. The weird part is that this rug tends to creep down the front of the chair's back all the time, so I'm constantly -- constantly -- resetting its position and exposing the exact place where the purple bunny was found. I do it at least once a day, if not 3-5x, and yet the purple bunny was lost for at least 48h. What the hell? No really, what the hell?In other news, we're still trying to figure out Felix's witching hour behavior. It descends after his ~9p feeding and goes until midnight or 1a: despite near-constant napping in his bassinet during the day without tending, he suddenly becomes dissatisfied with it and needs to be held more or less constantly. The cycle goes:A. Hold FelixB. Felix falls asleep while being heldC. Put Felix in bassinetD. 60sec of peaceE. Felix awakens!!BACK TO AI thiiiiiiiiiiink we've maybe managed to crack it in the last couple of days, which is to modify step B slightly toB. Felix falls asleep; hold Felix for another 5m (minimum) while he sleepsThis can result in stretching step D to somewhere between 1-4h depending on how you time it and some other combination of factors yet unknown. I did this last night while I watched the second half of the new Suicide Squad** and it worked; I tried again tonight, which is the whole reason I'm able to type this out now. Maybe I should try getting some sleep while I'm at it. Wish me luck!* Despite the impression I get that lots of people think Ikea constitutes some kind of Baby's First Adult Furniture, this chair has held up for years in absolutely fine shape and seems to show no signs of suddenly collapsing into a pile of sawdust or whatever.** It's good, btw. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • David Brooks has a (perhaps unsurprisingly) sobering take on how the "bobos" broke America. (~$Atlantic) 

  • "What Delta has changed in the Covid pandemic — and what it hasn’t" (STAT) 

  • Hyenas have left a mind-boggling treasure trove of bones in an old Saudi Arabian lava tube that date back seven millennia. (Gizmodo) 

  • Who would like some DATA on Coachella performers through the ages? (@JacksonLanzing on Threadreader) 

  • Dogs seem to have a rudimentary ability to tell when people are lying. (Big Think) (Paper) 

  • We spend a lot of worry on supervolcano explosions, but there are seven (7) spots around the world where just a regular-sized volcanic eruption could fuck things up for us bigtime. (U of Cambridge) 

  • We've known for a while that buildings take up 3/4 of the electricity produced in the US, but how exactly do we make them more efficient? One recently-published study has the details. (Anthropocene) (Paper) 

  • Pew Research has put up a calculator that purports to tell where you fall in the global class set (high income, middle, etc). (Pew) 

  • I feel like this isn't the first time we've heard about how useful biochar is for carbon capture, but what the hell. (U of New South Wales Sydney) 

  • Museums have been doing some thinking about how to preserve and represent the pandemic to future generations. (Knowable) 

  • There are microbes that live in the rock at the bottom of the sea, but up to now it's been hard to extract them for study; a team of scientists have figured out a new method to do it, which could be useful for assaying similar exoplanetary environments. (Bigelow Lab) 

  • Incidences of depression are lower overall in big cities, probably because it's easier to form larger social networks when you live in one. (U of Chicago) 

  • A single genetic tweak to rice and potato plants made them super productive and drought-resistant. (Anthropocene) 

  • I don't know that I buy this meditation on whether technology is making us somewhat worse as people, but that could just be down to not wanting to accept its premise because I use technology a lot. (Vox) 

  • Astronomers may have spotted an exoplanet in the habitable zone of its star, L 98-59; there's also another planet in the same system that might have a subsurface ocean. (ESO) 

  • An Olympic sports photographer explains how he manages to pick and edit shots from the thousands and thousands he takes a day. (PetaPixel) 

  • This is admittedly a tiny sample size (n=1), but artificial coral reefs might take over two centuries to get good. (Hakai) 

  • Here are some interesting thoughts on economic degrowth. (Ryan Avent on Substack) 

  • Good to see the ol' University at Buffalo at it some more: this time we're talking about accelerating the healing of burn wounds with something called "photobiomodulation," which frustratingly is never explained properly -- I think it involves shining a specially-tuned laser on the burned surface? (U at Buffalo) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some Federation starship classes and names that an online neural network gave me after I fed it two lists of canonical onesLifetime-class USS Tuesday's Smart BusZephyr-class USS Basque RoverLeonardo-class USS Awesomenauts Casino Resort 

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.