the case of the missing plus

April 08, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter whose author wishes brother Gene a happy birthday from across the continent; dear reader, if you're looking to buy a house in the DC area, I know a guy. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway104 - Guitar Center for Women"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Kelly (@enthusiosity), and special guest Alicia (@aliciaostar) excavate some elegant ideas for online dating, compelling stories, and useful websites & businesses while also musing on kissing instruction."I came very close to naming this episode "The Case of the Licker," and if you want to know where that comes from, you're gonna have to give this one a listen; fortunately, it's fucking great.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 10Almost exactly a month out!http://bit.ly/instantbandnight10Nobody has weighed in on the issue of whether to outlaw covers or not, and I'm still strongly leaning in favor. As my buddy and steadfast Instant Band Night supporter/attendee Aaron once put it, having bands attempt to write a song in such a short amount of time "is so high-pressure that it becomes low-pressure," which was a beautiful way to put it. If you're covering a song, on some level you're running a comparison, nahmean? But if everybody's just trying to slap something together and they've got, like, ten seconds to do it in? And they all know it? It frees everybody from judgment. I'm just sayin'. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.You might need a second to get into the rhythm of this piece, which is written in what I've privately come to call "Tumblr voice," but it's good/heartbreaking. Here's the question I want an answer to, which I think I've asked before, but fuck it:Fox News and its pals have found a way to weaponize fear and frustration and the resulting racism into an unstoppable epistemic bludgeon capable of disabling not just compassion, but raw verifiable fact. 1. Is there no counterweapon??? 2. Is it not even possible to construct one???It may be a bad sign that I don't even know what such an antidote would even look like. I would like to believe there's someone out there working on this -- maybe several someones -- but who would that even be? Wouldn't it be great if it turned out there were a bunch of different university working groups and think tanks churning away on the Fox News Problem and they wrote a big report detailing all kinds of brilliant counter-strategies together? As long as I'm daydreaming, I'd like a pony. Thanks in advance! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.So Quentin's fully walking now for real, which is a thing. He takes a spill every now and then, but he's doing great. Something else he's realized he can do is climb. At least a little. We have one of those Ikea POANG armchairs with the ottoman, and a few days ago he just hauled himself right the fuck up on top of it and sat there. He did it multiple times. Even stood up once or twice. I was, of course, sitting right there poised and ready to catch him with catlike agility, but he never fell, and I was able to coax him to ease himself off the top in a safe, legs-first manner every time.But, I mean ............. I'm not going to be able to watch him literally every single second, right? He's going to keep climbing? We have a friend in Baby Club whose kid learned to walk amazingly early and just zoomed around the house climbing everywhere: she did fall off the couch or whatnot a few times, but her dad was sage about it: "She's finally learning to fear the edges," he said. I vividly remember Quentin taking his first and only header off the edge of our bed some time ago, partially cushioned by a shark.* Since then we've been extremely vigilant, and he's been fall-free, but part of me wonders at what point he's going to learn to fear the edges. Let's be clear that I vastly prefer an injury-free Quentin to all other alternatives, but it's a thought I can't help but think. My guess is that now that he's walking and upright, he knows what it is to fall, or at least will become much more familiar with the concept of falling as his walking XP increases, and concurrently perhaps his awareness of the edges of things will grow. I hope!!* Unrelated sleep tip: if you sleep on your side, it's good for your posture to hug a big ol' pillow, and these sharks are perfect for the job.The Missing Object of the Week is the plus sign from our set of fridge magnets, which included numbers and a small set of mathematical operators. Thus far I've rescued several letters from under the fridge, a few of which were retrieved with the use of an improvised paper tool that I may have to reconstruct if he throws any more under there before I can block that whole zone off. The plus sign was not among them. The most I can definitively say is that it's not under the part of the fridge that my phone flashlight can reach, which is pretty far in, nor is it ...... any other place in the house. We'll see if it ever turns up, I guess?? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Here's a surprisingly entertaining and horrifying ant story. (Esquire) 

  • Ooooooh, this ain't good: just like overuse of antibiotics gave us drug-resistant bacteria, rampant fungicide use has created fungal infections that are incredibly hard to fight. (NYT) 

  • Sitting out in nature for about 20m reduces your stress levels, but what if it's too hot out, or there's bugs? The press release actually links to the paper itself, but it was too long to read, so I don't know if that was accounted for in the study design. (Frontiers in Psychology via EurekAlert) 

  • Am I the only one here who's never heard of the cyclocopter, because that is a truly bonkers design. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • Instead of asking kids what they want to be when they grow up (bad, wrong), ask them what problems they want to solve (good, right). (Quartz) 

  • Every year until Quentin came along, I would go to San Diego Comic Con to help some friends of mine run a booth, and I feel like I've never been able to explain what it is to anybody outside the field (i.e. anybody who isn't already aware of SDCC, or possibly anybody who isn't already aware of webcomics); this brief oral history sort of illuminates it, but honestly, it could be longer. (The Verge) 

  • Scientists computer-generated a bacterial genome and constructed the DNA molecule, but haven't tried to actually grow the organism yet. At this point they might as well, right? (ETH Zurich via EurekAlert) 

  • They Had It Coming: a worthwhile longread on the college admissions scandal from someone who was effectively on the front lines. (Atlantic) 

  • Floating cities: we're gonna need 'em, so we might as well try to design vaguely plausible ones. (Fast Company) 

  • There are 19 satellites up there that the Air Force can't identify; a surprisingly interesting longread. (The Verge) 

  • Deep learning helps robots learn to slice vegetables. Sure! (VentureBeat) 

  • Do I agree with Douglas Rushkoff that our devices are ruining our lives? Am I going to have to read this book? (Vox) 

  • Millenials aren't drinking as much as everyone else, but they have other ways to party. (Atlantic) 

  • Police body cams don't work as well as we think they do. (Vox) 

  • Honestly, I'm kind of in favor of this co-living model getting big, as long as it actually makes life affordable for people. (Fortune) 

  • Cuss trifecta:

    • We're never getting rid of conspiracy theories. (538)

    • Especially if it turns out to be true that smart people are more susceptible to fake news, at least initially. (Guardian)

    • And we really need to get old people digitally literate, like, goddamn immediately. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • You have to read this press release about a new kind of airplane wing MIT engineers have cooked up yourself. Hey, guys? If this thing is designed to be assembled by "a swarm of small, simple autonomous assembly robots" under ideal conditions in some theoretical future, how about telling us whether it can be assembled by a team of determined humans tomorrow afternoon??? (MIT) 

  • The numbers behind the current ongoing frogpocalypse are seriously pause-inducing. (Atlantic) 

  • Google’s constant product shutdowns are damaging its brand. See you at the crossroads, Google Reader; never forgotten. (Ars Technica) 

  • Here's a reasonably illuminating longread about that prom photo with the kids who threw the sieg heil; I say "reasonably" not because of the quality of reporting, which is excellent, but because there's nothing truly surprising in there, either. (BuzzFeed News) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some new and exciting words I put together out of the letters on the fridgeCROXTAPHFLUNEBRASTUVINE 

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.