the time of the shriek has come

April 12, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's once again saying Black Lives Matter. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawaySince I'm shifting to a monthly schedule, I figure I might as well keep the last-published episode in this section for a week or two longer. I make the rules here!!!153 - Props To You, KookyJon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Amy explore a fabulous assortment of notions for consumer products, services, and education.Let's not mince words on this point: all of our guests are great and I would gladly have them on again at any time, but what Amy brings to this show cannot be easily replicated, which makes her a singular and valuable resource not just to the makers of this show, but to the nation at large.Someone out there did it. I don't know if it was one of you or not, but we're now up to 36 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts. If it wasn't you, well: why not?Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberNow that proven vaccines exist, let's wait til November and hopefully -- hopefully! -- 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* * s t a y   h o m e   / /   s t a y   h e a l t h y * * 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Jesus fuck: a survey of New Zealanders asking if there were any positive aspects of lockdown for them revealed something that I'm just going to have to sit here and think about. (U of Otago) 

“Many people reported that kindness and helping behaviours became more common over this period. They described an ‘old fashioned sense of community and caring … that was not apparent before lockdown’.”

Can you fucking imagine. What would it be like to live in a country where this was the response? Instead, I'm here in America, where half the population has been poisoned by Fox News brainworms and I daydream daily about what to do with the people here who didn't fucking mask up. I personally advocate discommendation for all of them. It'll be fun: every time we find one, we form a circle around them and do this, and from then on, they're no longer a part of our society. We don't work with them, we don't talk to them, we pretend not to hear them when they speak. When someone mentions their name, we act like we smell a fart. When they walk into a room, we point and yell "What is that THING doing here?" There need to be consequences for what they did, and if they're not going to be punished by catching the rona and suffering, then by fuck, we need to create the suffering for them. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin is in the process of discovering the now-measurable gap between the thing he wants to do and his capability of executing it.This can take the form of the somewhat reasonable: he put together a wooden toy construct that he wanted to use as tongs to pick other objects up, but the parts just weren't meant to bend that way, and he couldn't do it.It can also be completely impossible: he wanted to pick up more than 3 bowtie pasta pieces simultaneously with his toddler fork, but they were just too big and his fork was simply not designed to handle that load, nor could he have come close to fitting the resulting mouthful into his mouth in any case.When this gap becomes apparent, he screams; by now he's discovered how to do the hypersonic shriek that all tiny children deploy eventually, and I wish it had not been so. I'm glad he doesn't do often, and that he doesn't do it repeatedly, but holy good god is it loud. This capability is not news to any parents out there; I just wanted to register the milestone with y'all. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Fewer Americans than ever are avowed churchgoers these days, and itʻs sort of plausible to posit politics has replaced religion for a lot of us. (~$Atlantic) 

  • "We Have All Hit a Wall: Confronting late-stage pandemic burnout, with everything from edibles to Exodus." ($NYT) 

  • When faced with decisions involving a lot of selections, how do people choose? (Ohio State) 

  • Experts weigh in on when we can resume all the things we used to do in the long-ago. (The Verge) 

  • Waste from paper and pulp mills can be used in road construction instead of going into landfills. (U of British Columbia Okanagan) 

  • Instead of looking at star ratings, analyzing the emotional content of reviews for something is a much better predictor of how good it is, which is something you need an AI to do, but still. (Northwestern) 

  • Why isn't the Republican party trying to rebrand after 2020? The answers are both predictable and disappointing. They're predictapointing! (538) 

  • At least we can take solace in the fact that white supremacists are a bunch of fumblefingered dumbfucks who can't do anything right: look at how these "White Lives Matter" rallies went. (NBC News) 

  • Listen. Sometimes my tabs get out of hand, and as a result I no longer have the contextual writeup for this paper, which I think is about how nighttime scuba divers with a wildlife photography hobby can help researchers get a look at larval fish that they wouldn't otherwise be able to get their hands on. (Paper on BioOne) 

  • Shock of shocks: Brexit is not going well. (CNN) 

  • Scientists researching beetle mating behavior have tried smearing female chemicals on things like glass beads to see if male beetles would try to get it on with them (they did), but then they wondered whether 3D-printed models would work better. Science! (SU) 

  • Looking at the results of this study along with my own experiences thus far as a parent, there could be a sea change underway in fatherhood: dads might be starting to employ traditionally masculine traits like competitiveness -- consciously or not -- toward becoming better dads. (Ohio State) 

  • At least one college professor wonders about whether applying Mario Kart principles to social and economic programs would be beneficial, but has nothing to say about where the blue shell fits into his otherwise at least interesting-sounding metaphor. (BU) 

  • Ivy League schools talk a lot of noble bullshit about trying to make their elite education truly open to all qualified applicants. Why don't they just clone themselves? ($NYT) 

  • NASAʻs going to try a new kind of ion thruster on its Psyche mission. (Ars Technica) 

  • Child care could be so much better if we just paid people properly. (Vox) 

  • The number of billionaires went up by 30% during the pandemic. (Recode) 

  • Some German researchers have worked out a way to use injection molding to produce glass objects, which is potentially huge if they're recyclable, which I couldn't tell one way or the other. (U of Freiburg) (Video with subtitles) 

  • Self-driving cars might work better and faster if we tried modeling them on fruit fly brains. (Northwestern) 

  • In case you haven't already noticed in the last few weeks, I'm now a definite fan of the way Mackenzie Scott does philanthropy; here's an interview with someone who received one of her grants. (Slate) 

  • Chemists keep finding new things to do with beer waste, and we should be paying attention. (ACS) 

  • There's no actual way to tell when someone is lying. (Knowable) 

  • There are microbes deep within the Earth that appear to have had the same genetic makeup for millions upon millions of years, which is wild. (Bigelow Lab) 

  • American cities should be more colorful. (Next City) 

  • Extremely adorable experimentation seems to suggest dogs are capable of jealousy. (Assoc for Psychological Science) 

  • What in the hell is going on with muons these days? (Quanta) In case you missed it a couple issues ago, they found something fucky going on with quark decay and muons at the Large Hadron Collider. (Imperial College London) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some bandsGround Level DiaryGiant DogRudy, Party of Four 

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.