to clown or not to clown

September 09, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that kinda wishes it'd bought another box of those limited-edition Twinkies with the orange creme inside, because hell yeah it's delicious 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway122 - A Primarily Money-Based Theft"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Ben Ward (@benward) stumble upon amazing and mysterious ideas revolving around alcohol, food, and crime."This is the first episode we've ever done that seemed to warrant a self-generated disclaimer, so I think we did some excellent work here.👻👻 WHAAAAAT 👻👻Not only have we accumulated 24 5-star ratings in Apple Podcasts, there are two new extremely kind and excellent reviews! These people will be shouted out in the next recording session: this is my prophecy. But just in case it was one of you reading this now: thank you. Yes, even you, the mayo-liker. You're all goddamn great. We just need one (1) more to make it to 25 ratings -- WE CAN DO THIS. Or more specifically YOU CAN DO THIS. I believe in you!!Instant Band Night 12: The Dozenth🎶 IT'S HAPPENING THIS THURSDAY 🎶✨ IT'S GONNA BE GREAT ✨🎃 I DON'T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO TELL YOU 🎃📣 JUST CLICK THE LINK OR PASS IT ALONG 📣🤘 THANKS 🤘http://bit.ly/instantbandnight12 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Like a lot of us out there, I read a bunch of Stephen King as a kid, and I maintain that It is one of his better books. So when the first part of the movie came out in 2017, I went -- I'd read the book, after all, so how scary could it be? It turns out that sometimes -- sometimes!! -- the movie version of a story will differ from the book in ways that can be surprising. And now that the second part's out, I find myself confronting a number of conflicting instincts including but not limited to 

  • Now that you know how scary the first part was, you can kind of brace yourself for the second part

  • That trailer with the old lady is pretty much line-for-line what happened in the book version of the scene

  • Also you still have total knowledge of the baseline story, they didn't deviate from that too much

  • Aren't you curious to see how they depict the end?

  • 🤡🤡🤡

  • AaAaaAAAAAAaaAAAaAAAAA

So we'll see what happens. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin is almost able to communicate meaningfully to us when he's not feeling well. For the past couple days, his eating's been slightly off and his energy's flagged a little, and he's occasionally said "Mouth" in a way that made us wonder if his final molars are coming in. Readers, we're not entirely sure we can tell. Also, yesterday his nose just poured snot in a way that made me wonder if maybe this was all some kind of cold.* But then why "Mouth"? I don't think he has a sore throat, or at least he doesn't act like it. In any case, ibuprofen seems to help, and he eats enough that we're not worried he's going to, like, starve to death or somethin'. I'm looking forward to the day when he can string together enough words to tell us what's wrong in a way where we can actually be sure we're being helpful.* Side note: I'm now in that period of epidemiological suspicion where I keep self-assessing my personal state. Do I feel feverish? How's my appetite? Right now I feel fine, so fingers crossed, everyone. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Take a look at this video built from the still images sent by the Rosetta comet flyby mission! (Vimeo) 

  • Alaska has had a primitive sort of universal basic income in place for years, and it's yielded some interesting lessons around the politics it produces. (Vox) 

  • Drone racers pull off some Poe Dameron-level shit on the regular, and I can't help but think this should have applications in search/rescue or high-precision military ordnance delivery. This video is a particularly good example. (YouTube) 

  • Shit. There's a reason politically incorrect speech is effective. (Berkeley Haas School of Business) 

  • We should really consider growing crops under solar panels. (Ars Technica) 

  • Here's a fascinating lesson plan designed to teach students about implicit bias in language. (EdSurge) 

  • The rate of information conveyed across human languages is constant. How about that! (~$Atlantic) (Side note: The Atlantic is moving to one of those "you have 5 free articles remaining this month" models, so now seems like as good a time as any to denote which sources have something like that going on with $typographic $shorthand: ~$ denotes "semi-paywall" while $ will simply mean "paywall") (doubtless you figured that out already, but just in case) 

  • Speaking of language, squirrels eavesdrop on birds. (NPR) 

  • Let's all learn about informational gerrymandering! (Nature) 

  • Here's an interesting meditation on the apparent abandonment by The Youngs of what one might once have called the three pillars of American values: nuclear family, God, and country, and what they might be turning to instead. Makes sense to me! (~$Atlantic) 

  • Honestly, using machine learning to look for alien signals in the vast torrent of data we're recording seems like the only sane approach at this point. (Supercluster) 

  • I might have to add this book about the many-worlds theory to my reading list. (Nature) 

  • We can cut food waste in half by 2030. (Fast Company) 

  • Teaching robots to imitate us is the first step to getting them to do shit successfully on their own, which will be important whenever we send that Europa mission out. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Scalable radiative cooling is possible! (Anthropocene) 

  • The data on race and police shootings is starting to get analyzed, and spoilers: it doesn't look great, for a variety of reasons. (Nature) 

  • Your interesting longread of the week is this one on the intersection of transportation technology, our willingness to commute, and city size. (CityLab) 

  • Actually, wait, maybe your interesting longread of the week is this one on the battle(?) for the soul of Etsy. (Vox) 

  • Dammit, there are too many interesting longreads. Although this one might be more of a mediumread? It's about why we can't seem to get our housing shit together here in California. (Rolling Stone) 

  • What would it take to figure out what color dinosaurs were? (Nautilus) 

  • Whoa: the right kind of bacteria can help plants grow in salty soil, which will probably come in super handy when the seas rise. (Anthropocene) 

  • Are Uber and Lyft's business models just fundamentally broken in a way that means they'll end up folding? Eh, we had a good run of convenient car rides for a while there. (Jalopnik) 

  • Color me EXTREMELY SKEPTICAL that this space hotel will be up and running in six (6) years. (Hospitality Net) 

  • This one-quarter-bright personification of confident white mediocrity might finally experience a consequence somewhat proportional to his incredibly stupid actions and I want to see it all. Sadly, I speak of Jacob Wohl and not, y'know, Trump, but still, I'll take it. (Splinter News) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumThe Bestiary, The Dead are Done Dying 

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.