the trifecta of tiredness

September 26, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's hanging onto the end of stonefruit season with a steely, unwavering grip 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Ignite SF #15I'm giving a talk at the next Ignite event in San Francisco! Ignite Talks are great: you get 5 minutes, and your slides advance automatically every 15 seconds. This'll be my first one, but it's gonna be a doozy.Discount code: IGNITESPEAKOctober 117p447 Minna St 94103Idea Factory GiveawayIn the back half of 2022 I hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast is on that list. In the meantime, you can find its 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 17: GO TIMEI don't say this lightly: you have to come to the next Instant Band Night. It's the November one (add it to your calendar now!), which means it's the one where we get a cake and sing happy birthday to Quentin. No, he won't be there, but we'll take a video!!If you don't already know what Instant Band Night is, imagine a great party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. If you play music, you can be one of 'em, and if you don't, you can just watch. It is, and I'm not exaggerating here, fucking incredible.🎶🎸 IT WILL SOON BE TIME TO PARTY 🎸🎶🎶🎸 IN WHATEVER WAY YOU LIKE BEST 🎸🎶Nov 106p$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.I don't think I've got anything for this section this week, folks; see #dadthoughts for the trifecta of tiredness that visited itself upon us 🤪🤪🤪 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.This past week House Sung Gruver has been reeling from a combination of the following factors, which arrived in a sequence so tight they were basically right on top of each other: 

  • The Sniffle that Quentin brought home

  • Felix's body deciding to bring forth six (6) teeth at once

  • A case of RSV that somebody (possibly Quentin??) brought home that got everybody but me somehow*

We went through what seemed like at least three full-size boxes of tissues; the sound of identical coughing from three different sources in one room was sort of funny, even. Daylight started to appear over the weekend. It's gonna take me a second or two to recalibrate. I think that's all I got for you this time! How was YOUR week??* RSV can incubate for a few days, so it's possible I may not be out of the woods yet, which will be hilarious if it forces me to miss plans to attend a twice-postponed wedding 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Ed Yong, y'all. "One of Long COVID’s Worst Symptoms Is Also Its Most Misunderstood: Brain fog isn’t like a hangover or depression. It’s a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard." (~$Atlantic) 

  • If we're going to keep making EVs, we need to get better at battery recycling or there's going to be a Problem. (Knowable) 

  • "Progressives have welcomed migrants. Now they need to house them." (Vox) 

  • Some Engineers have demonstrated a proof of concept for using microscopic "robots" to cure pneumonia in mice. (UCSD) 

  • This is honestly a relief and long may it last: "Corn Kid Is Doing Just Fine" ($NYT) 

  • Looks like we can blame boomers for the high school literary canon. (The Conversation) 

  • The Scientists have worked out a formula for plastic that biodegrades fantastically in seawater, which would be great news for, you know, all the life that lives there. (UCSD) 

  • It's ........ possible evolution itself could save the coral reefs, IF we give them enough time to get used to the warmer waters we're creating. (Rutgers) 

  • The James Webb took a really great near-infrared picture of Neptune that shows off its rings. (NASA) 

  • Unsurprisingly, The Scientists have crunched the numbers and the tweaks the aviation industry is making to try to be more carbon-friendly are not enough. (Nature) 

  • Trying to figure out whether a self-driving car can see you when you're trying to cross the road is hard and dangerous; know what would make it easier? A big goddamn pair of robotic googly eyes! NOT KIDDING (U of Tokyo) 

  • The Scientists think there's a strong possibility the subsurface ocean of Enceladus (remember?) could contain phosphorus, a vital ingredient for life as we know it. (Southwest Research Institute) 

  • Survey says buying a house doesn't make you as happy as you think it will for as long as you wish it would. (U of Basel) 

  • Sometimes the ocean's mysteries are ineffable and awe-inspiring, and sometimes you get one that looks like a product you might use to clean a kitchen or bathroom fixture, and you know what, either one is honestly still pretty good. (Science Alert) 

  • Uhhh: just 20% of PhD-granting universities supplied 80% of the professors in tenure-track jobs for the last decade. Quoth the article: "'Is the system a meritocracy?' asks Daniel Larremore, a computational scientist at UC Boulder who is a co-author of both papers. 'In peer review, no; in the spread of ideas, no; and in faculty hiring, surely no.'" (Nature) 

  • A recent experiment shows wolves are capable of forming attachments to humans, which is something we always thought happened after the whole domestication deal. (Stockholm U) 

  • The Scientists have created a software tool that's been scanning the human genome for weak points that are especially vulnerable to mutation, and it's come back with interesting results. (Cold Spring Harbor Lab) 

  • Some Engineers have built drones equipped with 3D printers that can build and repair structures while flying, which would be great for fixing tall or hard-to-reach parts of buildings. (Imperial College London) 

  • Should we bring back town squares? Seems like a nice idea, doesn't it? (Governing) 

  • The Scientists have made a really excellent class of nonstick surface using modified silk proteins, and while it's unclear to me whether any of them would survive the heat of cooking, they're still useful in other places. (Tufts) 

  • Parts of the sea floor are littered with naturally occurring and highly convenient lumps of metal; we really want to send robots down there to hoover 'em up, but how bad would the resulting plume of silt fuck up the surrounding environment? Some Engineers did a test run that's by no means definitive, but it is interesting. (MIT) 

  • Sea turtle poaching is down, y'all! (Nature) 

  • The Scientists have discovered new non-sugar sweeteners that've been hiding in citrus this whole time. (U of Florida) 

  • I think this got brought up here somewhere before, but now the city of Brussels is actually letting psychiatrists in its biggest hospital literally prescribe "go to a museum and look at some art for free with a few pals" for people suffering from depression, stress, or anxiety, which kind of rules if they can keep it COVID-safe. (Guardian) 

  • We just don't have a lot of antifungal treatments waiting in the wings, but what about metal compounds? What about 'em? (U of Bern) 

  • Some Engineers have built an underwater camera that uses sound both to power itself and transmit data wirelessly. (MIT) (Paper) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some characters you might meet in a fantasy or sci fi storyQraskinLordimus MutaneJeremy Killfinger(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me who these people(?) are, 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.