thoughts and prayers, just of a different kind

October 05, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that now has a second monitor and (not having had one for a long time) couldn't think of anything else to do but throw Tweetdeck onto it, which ......... probably isn't the smartest thing in the world to be doing 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway148 - The Internet of Creep"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Gary Tyrrell (@fleenguy) reveal some stupendous ideas for space travel, consumer products, stories, and a way to finally acknowledge the awesome among us."As always, Gary delivers. Also, I feel like I'm in fairly exalted company, having had (some time ago) an idea along the same lines as something Becky Chambers put into one of her books.We're still at 33 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts, but you know what, I get it if you've had other things on your mind this week. Seriously.Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberIt seems laughable to try to throw Instant Band Night without a proven vaccine in place. Let's see what's up in November 2021.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.As you can imagine, I am extremely heheh concerned for the heh health of the hahahaha President and hahahahaha wish heehee wish for hahahahahahaha HAHAHAHAHAHA AAAAA HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAWatching the rona spread through what I can only hope and pray with all my heart is the entire upper echelon of the Republican party is so incredibly delicious to me that I can feel life flowing into my body. Those evil fucking assholes lied their stupid fucking faces off telling everyone it wasn't a big deal and making fun of people wearing masks and COST US 200,000+ LIVES and now they've been breathing it into each others' bloated, shitty lungs and finally, finally they feel fear. I love it, I love it so much, I feel so good! Their fear feeds me! Their fear is so delicious to me I feel like Pennywise the fucking Clown from Stephen King's It, and I'm going to dance like a *M*A*N*I*A*C* on the graves of any and all of these colossal fuckshits if they actually do die. I mean it. If they die and get buried in a place I can access with my physical body, I will take pictures of myself dancing on their graves before I leave this plane of existence. I sure hope there isn't a line, but you know what, I'll be okay if there is. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.One of Quentin's big entertainment activities this evening was to run between his room and ours shouting "Bushels of fun! Bushels of fun!" I have no idea where he picked it up from. It's delightful.A short sampling of some other quotes of his that we had the presence of mind to write down:

  • Last December we went to Fairyland to see their holiday light setup, and he said to us "We saw a lot of Christmas there."

  • Observing the Kitchenaid doing its work sometime in April, he observed with delight "It's a little dance! It's the song of the mixer!"

  • Lastly, from June: "Daddy is BIG Jon Sung!"

Language in the hands of a developing mind is an incredible thing. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • I have actual pity for the people doing real work at the White House, who are well inside the rona blast radius of that big stupid dumbfuck. (~$Atlantic) 

  • The Norwegians have some advice for us when it comes to winter lockdown. (Guardian) 

  • "Journalism must show Trump as he is, not seek normalcy" -- haven't we been yelling about this since 20goddamn16? (Columbia Journalism Review) 

  • A combination of solar and hydro power could deliver 40% of the world's electricity. (E&E News) 

  • What's the plan if Trump tweets that he's won the election? Spoiler: this is an op-ed that sketches out a possible response, not, like, something more definitive. Which would've been nice. Somebody come out with a real plan please ($NYT) 

  • People are getting hurt at the robot Amazon warehouses in greater numbers than we were led to believe. (Reveal) 

  • Taking in this entire longread about TikTok houses in LA is equivalent to staring a lesser Lovecraftian chaos god directly in the squamous, rugose eyeholes. (Vox) 

  • Hhhhhhuh: our model of what a thinking, feeling being looks like is based on certain fundamental assumptions that may not hold true for a machine intelligence. What if we're literally surrounded by AIs already and don't know it? (Nicholas Carr blog) 

  • Fungus leather? Fungus leather. I assume Jeff VanderMeer has already been alerted. ($NYT) 

  • The surface of the moon is a somewhat more industrial radiation environment than we thought; our moon houses are going to need thicker walls -- but not too thick, or they'll start to emit secondary radiation from cosmic ray interaction that'd defeat the whole point of 'em in the first place. (AP) 

  • Researchers have figured out a way to join two plastic-digesting enzymes together into one chimera tha can do the job 6x faster. (U of Portsmouth) 

  • "Vaccine Chaos Is Looming" -- this one's free, folks. (Atlantic) 

  • There's a case to be made that the Anthropocene actually started thousands of years ago. (Aeon) 

  • Initial results on a study of fecal microbiota transplants to cure C.diff look real good! (American Gastroenterological Association) Speaking of which, doing the same for C-section babies after they're born gives them microbiomes more like babies born the usual way, which I understand intuitively, it's just kinda gross-sounding because it has to be done orally. Yes I know they're not literally making babies drink poop. (U of Helsinki) 

  • How do cells "know" where to go in order to start the wound healing process? (Austria Institute of Science & Technology) 

  • A majority of people between 18-29 are now living with their parents, breaking a record not seen since the Great Depression. (BuzzFeed News) 

  • Stay with me on this one: it's a good idea to put "riparian buffers" between farmland and streambeds made of grasses and swamp willows, because it's a natural way to remove pollution. Could farmers also harvest those grasses and swamp willows from time to time to sell for biofuels and make a little money without changing the environmental benefits? Turns out yes! (Penn State) 

  • Slowly but steadily, work on assistive exosuits is being done. (Vanderbilt) 

  • Study says having pets helps buffer stress and loneliness during isolation. (U of York) 

  • Instead of paying so much attention to R0, we should be thinking more about the rona's k value. (~$Atlantic) 

  • A genetic factor in mice that goes dormant when they're adults can be reactivated to provide newborn-level healing abilities. Humans next, I imagine, until we basically arrive at Wolverine from the X-Men. Right? (Washington State) 

  • It might be a better idea to drink your coffee after breakfast as opposed to before, for metabolic reasons. (U of Bath) 

  • You know how sometimes you like something because you chose it and not the other way around? Babies do it too. (Johns Hopkins) 

  • Laser pulses can be used to make materials behave like other ones in surprising ways (superconductivity, for example), but only for as long as the pulse lasts. Still, that might be useful! (Quanta) 

  • Robots are increasingly ubiquitous thanks to the rona. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Clubhouse: still a shitshow, and now trying out anti-Semitism for funsies. (Tablet) 

  • The Brits are trying to herd some whales out of a particular sea lake in Scotland before a military exercise gets underway; they're concerned the sonar pulses will mess the whales up, which is simultaneously both true and thoughtful. (BBC) 

  • Here's some advice for breaking QAnon believers out of the prison they've built for themselves. (Guardian) 

  • THERE'S MORE SUBSURFACE WATER ON MARS THAN WE THOUGHT (Nature) 

  • This isn't what I'd call a particularly surprising Trump take, but it is well-written. I'm glad I didn't watch the debate and just decided to read articles like this instead. Fucking hell, remember when the biggest headline about Trump was what an asshole he was at the debate?? (~$Atlantic) 

  • Five African gray parrots at a wildlife park in England taught each other to cuss and then never stopped. I should note that there's no video. No version of this article I've seen anywhere has video of these cussin' parrots, which is the only thing I want to see when I read it. (Lincolnshire Live) 

  • This might be the Most Miraculous of the Miracle Uses For Graphene that I've yet encountered: producing electricity out of basically nothingness. (U of Arkansas) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumPussy Cushion, The House of Unworthy Notions 

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.