the BunnyWatch protocol

December 19, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that really needs to wrap some presents VERY SOON 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayI haven't lost hope that I will recover enough energy to kick the side of the podcast machinery and get it rumbling to life in early 2023. In the meantime, you can find the show's 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 18: RECHARGEJanuary 12! It's only a month away! And it's gonna be great! You should come join us, and bring a friend or two. You can add it to your calendar (venue address and all) by clicking here!In case you need a refresher: Instant Band Night is a party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot to play a song they'll write in 5 minutes. If you play music, you can be one of 'em, and if you don't, you can chill and watch. I absolutely guarantee you've never seen anything like it.🎼 MUSIC! 🎼🚀 COURAGE! 🚀✨ CREATIVITY! ✨January 12 20236p$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.How in the fuck is it already Xmas on Sunday. Yes, I know the sensation of time moving more quickly as we age is theoretically a function of unit time over total lifespan and all that jazz,* but holy shit, December didn't so much pass by as it ran away from us at top speed. Not to mention we're all still dealing with the temporal discombobulation that we've all more or less started to take for granted since month 4 of the pandemic. I think I said this last year, but I would like to renew my call for an extension to the holiday season through the end of February. Just keep your lights up. Leave the menorah out. Keep your tree watered or whatever you have to do. I said keep your lights up. We can all carry each other through to March; we owe it to ourselves. Don't we?* I forget where I read this, but the basic gist is that a month feels longer to a little kid because it's mathematically a larger portion of their total life lived thus far than the same month would feel to (for example) a 43-year-old. Kinda makes sense, right? I've decided to fold it into my belief system until a better explanation comes along. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Felix's absolute favorite stuffy in the whole world is a small lavender bunny that Quentin chose for him before he was born. He loves this bunny with his entire heart. It's adorable, but also creates a bedtime situation: if Felix loses physical contact with this bunny at any point during sleep, odds are good he'll wake up and start to cry. This is a problem because he sleeps in the same room as Quentin. Quentin seems to have developed a temporary defense against this by simply sleeping through the initial stages of Felix's crying. Sleep is not a perfect armor, however, so the odds of Quentin waking up increase the longer Felix cries. And Felix will keep crying until he happens to flop or roll in the correct direction to find his bunny — yes, there's a nightlight active in the room and the bunny is theoretically visible, but Felix seems to spend this half-awake state with eyes closed and is thus reduced to tactile input. Sometimes — sometimes! — he blunders into his bunny and quiets immediately. Other times he does not, and often that's when he'll sit up in his crib and really start to scream.The tension I experience here is the result of several vectors that do not align:🐇 Do I wait and see whether Felix finds the bunny himself?⏰ For exactly how long do I want to risk Quentin awakening?😑 If I go in there and return the bunny, am I training Felix to simply wait for me instead of looking on his own?The rule of thumb that we've more or less established is that Felix can have about a minute or so to flop around and try to find his bunny; after that, odds of parental intervention go up sharply. This has been your briefing on BunnyWatch. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • If you somehow still know someone who denies the efficacy of masks, reading this will probably prepare you for all their dumbfuck counterarguments. (Single-page collected thread by @jeffgilchrist) 

  • The Scientists are working on RSV vaccines, and they might be ready by the middle of next year. (Nature) 

  • "Sam Bankman-Fried Arrested Immediately After Saying He Wouldn't Be Arrested" (Motherboard) 

  • Uhhhhhh: The Scientists have demonstrated a method for turning the leaf of a succulent plant into a solar cell. (American Chemical Society) 

  • It looks like the Nazca were way busier out in the Peruvian desert than we thought. (Science Alert) 

  • The FBI's hate crime stats are off because a shitload of police departments haven't bothered to report anything, which is: suspicious. (CBS News) 

  • The Scientists up in Canada crunched some numbers and discovered the people who get into severe traffic accidents are 3x more likely to be unvaxed. Sounds about right, tbh. (Vice) (Paper) 

  • The folks trying to grow fish meat from cell cultures are aiming to replicate the extremely fancy high-end cuts of sushi first, which is an interesting strategy. (Vox) 

  • I've never heard of a single one of these influencers — which I guess makes sense since I'm not a stocks bro — and I find it fascinating how these apparently vast subcultures can bloom in every corner we're not actively scrutinizing just to be fodder for grifts. (NBC News) 

  • The Scientists are testing transfusions of lab-grown blood cells. (Science Alert) 

  • Conferences are trying to up their in-person experience game now that so many of us are working from home, but uh: pandemic??? still exists???? (Vox) 

  • As more of these thinkpieces pop up, I either think they're onto something or somebody is trying to push an agenda forward. But who would stand to benefit from the death of social media? B.....blogs?? Theories welcome. "Social Media Is Entering Its Flop Era: Instagram is dying, Twitter's imploding and TikTok is for a certain kind of person. Where does that leave us now?" (Vice) 

  • Two exoplanets circling Kepler-138 might be mostly water, except they're way too close, so they might be ....... steam? And some kind of magical high-pressure superhot water? (U of Montreal) 

  • Enjoy this fascinating read on how The Scientists are investigating extremely rare plant species that cling to Hawaiʻian cliff walls with fancy drones. (Reuters) 

  • Trump's hilariously shitty NFTs are even dumber than you thought. (Gizmodo) 

  • "Toward a unified theory of “millennial cringe”: Remember when “epic bacon” was the height of comedy?" (Vox) 

  • Intermittent fasting keeps coming up as a way to get metabolic conditions like diabetes under control. Something for me and my prediabetic bloodstream to consider, maybe once the kids are older and I don't need to eat breakfast to fuel the morning for an entire house? (Endocrine Journal) (Paper) 

  • Here are Nature's picks for the best science images of 2022. (Nature) 

  • Some of The Scientists who study the ocean need to identify and count the shells of tiny foraminifera, which is highly tedious at best, so they've built a proof-of-concept robot that can do it for them and released the designs for free. (NC State) (Paper) 

  • The Coca-Cola corp uses data from those Coke machines with the touchscreens to decide which new flavors to release officially, which explains where that orange vanilla Coke came from. (Food Dive) 

  • One of the Vox guys is wrestling with the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and what it says about effective altruism as a concept. (Vox) 

  • The Scientists are wondering whether we're getting further from nature, both literally and figuratively. (German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers are working on figuring out how swarms of simple little guys can essentially self-organize to exhibit smarter emergent behaviors. (Penn State) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumGoddard Family Crisis, The Rapid Ascent of You and Me(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.