the mystery of the one weird pill-taking trick

May 03, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that deeply resents the fact that saddle-style sandbags for weighing down objects are like $20 apiece; I guess there's still time to learn to use a sewing machine, huh 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway154 - A Measure of Absolute Flakiness"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Will (@will_sargent) discover a dizzying array of concepts guaranteed to advance dating, not to mention society at large, in brilliant and unexpected ways."A truly astonishing set of circumstances prevented us from recording these episodes with Will, but because we believed in ourselves, we persevered: behold the fruits of our delayed but no less invigorated labor!!!!!You know what the best part of my day is? It's for about ten seconds from when I pull up to the internet to when I get to our Apple Podcasts page. Because I think maybe I'll get up there and I'll knock on the door and there'll be more than 36 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts. Not 3000, not 300, not 200. Just 40. Maybe 50. I don't know much, but I know that.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberHalf of America's adult population has been vaccinated. Pencil 11/11/2021 into your schedule and if we're all very good and lucky, we'll see you all 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.I'm betting you've taken a pill or two in your life. Have you ever wanted the pill to not get stuck to your tongue? Or just wanted to avoid having to taste that nasty little weird brick of chalky nonsense in the first place? I have the solution: put the liquid in your mouth first. Don't worry about it dribbling out while you put the pill in. How much liquid do you really need, anyway? Just slosh in a little swig and hold it for the .05sec it'll take to pop the pill in there. And then you can swallow it all right away. Boom!! Done!! This shit works. It may not sound like a huge change, but I promise you the difference is night and day.The weird thing about this technique is that I definitely learned it from someone else, but I have no idea who or when. For years, it's been loosely associated in my mind with my good buddy and college roommate Adam. But when I brought it up recently, I discovered the reason why, which is that I taught it to him, and it unironically made a huge actual difference in his life -- pill-taking of any sort used to stress him out, and now he can wash down any number of pills without batting an eye. Clearly I had this information at some point in my mind before it faded to a mere association. But now a tiny and utterly banal mystery remains -- who taught this Ultimate Pill-Taking Knowledge to me, then?? -- which will never, ever be solved, because (as has been demonstrated) my memory is complete and utter garbage. I just think that's fascinating in a small, quiet way. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Last week was Children's Book Hate Club, so I feel like I should balance it out by talking about books I've enjoyed reading to Quentin, but I really only want to talk about the Brambly Hedge books, which I already did back in January. Seriously, look into these if you've got a kid around 3 or older. At 3, they'll be way beyond your kid's reading level, but not their comprehension, and the drawings are endlessly fascinating.What else.I got close but never actually tipped over into becoming truly weary of reading The Gruffalo or Room On The Broom. Good stories, good rhymes, fun to read aloud. Would endorse.The Corduroy books don't rhyme, but they're also weirdly fatigue-proof.Really what it boils down to is "Can you stand to read this book out loud eighty billion times?" and it turns out that's a tough line to walk. The writing has to be very good, somehow fun to read, or a combination of both. Good art can sometimes carry the whole thing if the writing isn't quite there, but that's rarer. Now accepting nominations for other good ones, that this knowledge may also be shared. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Well, that's .......... that's a problem. (a computer security problem) (a big one) (UVA) 

  • Here's how Pfizer makes their vaccine! As a literal direct beneficiary of the process, this was a fascinating read; the sheer number of doses derived from a single bag or bottle of precursor is fucking staggering. ($NYT) 

  • "Biden’s Betting On Public Support To Push His Agenda. Polls Show His Big Spending Packages Have It." (538) 

  • Will the pandemic force us to tackle economic inequality? Probably not, but let's look at how it would help anyway. (Nature) 

  • YouTube disinfo is an especially pernicious and draining brand of brain poison. (NPR) 

  • There, uh, there might be 14 stars made out of antimatter sprinkled around the galaxy. (Science Alert) 

  • New word alert: "cheugy" ($NYT) 

  • Sea sponges are supposed to be sessile animals, but scientists have spotted sponges at the bottom of the Arctic ocean that are leaving trails behind them that suggest motion. The hell are they doing down there? (Alfred Wegener Institute) 

  • Sustainable industrial networks that mimic natural food webs are possible to design and build! (Texas A&M) 

  • Google's efforts to fix open-plan offices post-pandemic seem faintly ridiculous. Can we agree that open-plan offices were a bad idea and just go back to cubicles? How about that? (The Verge) 

  • In order to work better with collaborative robots, consider giving them the ability to make puppylike poses, or as the researcher puts it, "zoomorphic gestures." Remember the robots that helped Tony Stark in his garage in the first Iron Man movie? That, basically. (IEEE Spectrum) (Paper) 

  • We can probably all agree that there shouldn't be unlimited human population growth forever, but how do we start talking about it in a way that doesn't turn super ugly? (Oregon State) 

  • This poor bastard spent $200K trying to open an ice cream shop in San Francisco and got nowhere. (~$SF Chronicle) 

  • Did you know Birmingham had an extremely rad real-life Batman for a while? (Birmingham Wiki) 

  • We should be putting solar panels on our airports. (RMIT) 

  • Observations seem to indicate male sperm whales make friends with each other and bro down for years at a time. (Hakai) 

  • What ............. what would this place have looked like if construction had actually been finished??? (Architectural Digest) 

  • Vertical wind turbines actually work way better than the usual ones. (Oxford Brookes U) 

  • "Russian man 'trapped' on Chinese reality TV show finally voted out" (Straits Times) 

  • Corn farming produces an absolutely stupid amount of waste; let's turn it into activated carbon filters. (UC Riverside) 

  • It may not sound like it from the title, but trust me that this is extremely hilarious (content warning on the bloody "face" that appears at the end): "Just Following Up On That Creepy Message I Wrote In Blood On Your Bathroom Mirror" (Clickhole) 

  • Stable coral cell lines have finally been cultured for scientific research. (Okinawa Inst of Science & Tech) 

  • It's 2021 and there's enough computing power to try simulating city traffic to see if fuel/carbon emission savings can be boosted. (~$Scientific American) 

  • "American Politics Now Has Two Big Racial Divides" (538) 

  • Just combine your solar panels and sheep grazing land already. (Oregon State) 

  • I don't know if Zoom's "immersive view" is a super great idea, but at least it's different. (The Verge) 

  • A company called Pickle Robots has built a robot they call Dill that can unload a realistically-packed truckful of boxes up to 2x faster than a human. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Fish sticks are surprisingly sustainable?? (Hakai) 

  • Scientists are working on a way to use bacterial biofilms to capture microplastics. (Guardian) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumNeon Skeleton, In the Realm of the Nightmare King 

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.