the goblin speaks

July 05, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that thanks Spotify for finally removing Joe fucking Rogan from my "Podcasts we think you'll get hooked on" tiles 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway155 - The Algorithm Did It"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Amy discover some fascinating ideas for stories and consumer products while considering a heretofore-unexplored new venue for gambling."We come up with a lot of taglines for this podcast whenever we record with Amy and I'm all about it. Also listen around the half hour mark for a moment where we all pause to take stock of something that truly seems like a huge opportunity in the convenience beverage market.Podcasts thrive on ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ reviews; this is just how it is. Why not nourish a podcast today?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.Anybody else out there having a much more halting, fitful exit to your de-hermiting than you thought? I'm what you might call a fairly social person, and I was sure I was  _R E A D Y_  to start seeing all my friends and hug everyone until my arms fell off, and yet: this has not happened. We can attribute some of this in varying measures to: 

  • The fact that the pandemic is still very much not over yet for large swaths of the world

  • Everyone (QUITE UNDERSTANDABLY) has varying levels of comfort around who to see and hug

  • A not inconsiderable portion of my energy goes to maintaining my family and also preparing for the baby

But is that all of it? Fuck if I know. What I do know is that I didn't really have any plans for the 4th of July, which in times past usually involved at least one BBQ or two, to say nothing of Juplaya festivities in what feels by now like a completely different era of my life. But so yeah: no plans. And I knew I wasn't up to hosting something. Neither did I look particularly hard for something to do. It felt: weird? But also I was fine with it? Mixed feelings: not a fan.A tweet from my friend Arlette made me realize that a big slice of this nasty-ass cake is that everyone's just socially out of practice: I feel this in my soul and I don't like it. I was very social pre-pandemic, and now an outsize portion of my mind is taken up with trying to determine to what extent I'm just lurching around like a zombie goblin, gurning and blurting off-putting nonsense at people I ACTUALLY MISSED VERY BADLY. It ........ could be? ......... that another (large?) part of this de-hermiting hesitancy is some subconscious desire not to inflict this -- [gestures at self] -- this whatever-I've-become upon my pals. 😬😬😬 Gotta admit I don't love that. Also not sure how to fix it. Part of me is aware -- or at least hopes -- that this is an overblown fear, that I'm probably not putting as much "deranged escapee from a locked basement" energy into the world as I think; in fact, if literally everyone else is also feeling the same way, at least we're all in this crappy boat together. Right?? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Got a book recommendation for you.If you've got a kid 3 or older, put a copy of It's Only Stanley by Jon Agee on your shelf. We picked this up from the library and Quentin was absolutely unable to contain his laughter the first dozen times we read it. The rhyme and meter are good enough that you won't get sick to death of it, and the drawings are great -- Agee has what I might call a Mignola-esque economy of line that really works for the story. You both can and can't read the expression on Stanley's face: is it a sort of essential doggy blankness or the Zen mastery of a true flow state as he moves with swift and total dedication to achieve his goal? You decide, folks: you decide. Or maybe your kid will. It's great. Get it. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "Nowhere Is Ready for This Heat: The Pacific Northwest is melting now, but all across America the infrastructure we have was built for the wrong century." (~$Atlantic) 

  • No evidence exists for the oft-made assertion that your smartphone is making you dumber. (U of Cincinnati) 

  • Data seems to suggest that we're more mentally resilient than we think in the face of a pandemic. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Your non-Atlantic must-read for the week is about how a coalition of 17 researchers from multiple fields agree that our understanding of the global effects of social media on a societal scale is so bad that we need to consider it a "crisis discipline." (Recode) (Paper) 

  • Turns out we could be blasting used lithium-ion batteries with ultrasound to recycle them more efficiently. (U of Leicester) 

  • That UFO report is somewhat disappointing, but we probably should've expected that. (Slate) 

  • "Why does it cost so much to build things in America?" Hint: it's the fucking NIMBYs. (Vox) 

  • This browsable index of aesthetics includes galleries for each example; I'm not competent enough to judge whether they're accurate, but it's goddamn fascinating all the same. (CARI) 

  • Scientists are trying to figure out a rubric for predicting how animal and plant species will weather climate change (if at all), and they've hit upon something called "ecomechanical modeling" that looks interesting. (UC Riverside) (Paper) 

  • Dead links on the internet increase the further back in time you try to go; the author of this article likens it to rotting, which: why not. (~$Atlantic) 

  • We all know one of the big problems with making lab-grown meat is that it seems you need a scaffold of some kind to put the cells on so they'll grow right. Turns out you can use decellularized blades of grass. (U of Bath) 

  • What are some concrete steps that could be taken to eliminate cops like Derek Chauvin from police workforces? (Brookings Institute) 

  • There could be tons of Earthlike worlds orbiting binary stars that we're just not seeing from here, since the usual method of detecting exoplanets when they occlude their host stars doesn't work with binary systems. (NOIRLab) 

  • Here's an account of a fascinating project using literature to try to predict geopolitical conflicts. (Guardian) 

  • I'm putting this here mostly because I used to drive past this house every day on I-280 and wondered what its whole deal was. (AP) 

  • Why's it so hard to reduce plastic waste? Here are twelve (12) reasons. (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies) Scientists are thinking really hard about how to design a circular plastics economy, though. (U of Delaware) 

  • Generational memory loss comes in different forms, the most recognizable of which certainly being the "kids these days" effect, but there's another one that's contributing to us fucking up the planet. (BBC Future) 

  • Relocating chinchillas away from a gold mining site turns out to be surprisingly complicated. (Undark) 

  • "By Now, Burnout Is a Given" (~$Atlantic) 

  • Research continues into creating deployable folding structures that are reliable and easy (there's video). (Harvard School of Engineering) 

  • I love an oral history; here's one for T2. (The Ringer) You know what, fuck it, here's one for Independence Day. (Hollywood Reporter) 

  • The, uh, the military has been taking a serious look at bringing nuclear microreactors to its forward operating bases because the cost of fuel is high (both in dollars and convoy casualties), but this particular solution seems ........... way riskier??? (Physics Today) 

  • A science YouTuber and a physics professor made a $10K bet over the performance of a propeller-driven car design that the latter was sure violated the laws of physics; turns out no. (Vice) 

  • Here's an interesting approach to housing homeless people. (KQED) 

  • It doesn't sound super scalable given that it's made of gold and palladium, but a catalyst that sounds like it can make hydrogen peroxide from pretty much just water and electricity disinfects the water 10 million times better than standard industrial methods. (Cardiff U) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumSingle Camera Edit, We Fly to You with Death In Our Eyes 

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.