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You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.

Instant Band Night 27: JULY, JULY

Instant Band Night 26 happened last week and if you missed it, I am very truly sorry because it was fucking excellent. The good news is that you can get your tickets to the next one in July right now, and you should because WHY NOT. Also, we're not doing it in September, so July will be your last chance to rock out (or observe some rocking out) until November rolls around. Why wait that long???

July 11 2024
6p
$10
East Bay Community Space
507 55th St 94609

(Eventbrite) (Facebook)

+ + T E L L + Y O U R + F R I E N D S + +
+ + S E E + Y O U + T H E R E + +

Surprising and Unique Ceramics For YOU

If you know somebody with almost aggressively whimsical taste, or just happen to be a person with an appreciation for playfully intelligent ceramics, then I know a very exclusive online store you should visit. Nerdy little totems for your garden or shelf! Ediacaran biota! Tardigrades with outrageous paint jobs! A fruit holder that you really have to see to believe! Get in there

Idea Factory Giveaway

I think it's probably safe to say the podcast is on hiatus after two+ years of inactivity, but I'm putting a link to its evergreen 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 podcast

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.

Nobody asked for a Gollum movie (Polygon). Okay? Nobody. There's no there there. There's nothing! There's a goddamn reason why it only takes up a couple pages in the Council of Elrond! Gandalf tells everybody "I figured Gollum might know something about the ring he held onto for forever, so I decided to go looking for him and took Aragorn with me." He doesn't even stick around to finish the search!! He fucks off to Minas Tirith to see if there's anything in their basement library about the ring! Aragorn ends up finding and dragging Gollum to the elves in Mirkwood — "He didn't want to go with me. It was really bad. He bit me a lot" — the end!! That's your fuckin' Gollum movie. Andy Serkis, we like you but this is too much, man. Don't do this to yourself. Give us a 20m short about what happened to the guy you played in Andor. Or I would take a limited 2-episode series. That's way more interesting. Please man, there's no need, you ain't got to be Gollum again.

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.

Felix's bedtime is officially (for now at least) a stretch of time that starts around 715p and can go for up to two hours afterward. To be clear: 715p is the target time for closing the bedtime ritual; everything that comes after is Felix Emergence Hours. Sometimes — sometimes!! — has legitimate requests for us:

A huggy
I need to pee (false)
Put the jammies on Little Bunny
I need to pee (true)

Other times it seems like he's just opening the door and walking out to make sure we're still in the house or something. I have absolutely tried to tell him at bedtime that we're not going anywhere and he can just stay in bed and sleep, but he cares not for empty words; only actions will do. Something our parenting coach would like us to try is to simply pick the kids up earlier from school/daycare so they can have more Concentrated Parent Time™ before we begin the evening, which usually looks like:

515p Kids arrive home from being picked up
516p Dinner is served
(Dinner can take a while depending on what's going on)
(Post-dinner playtime can and does usually happen — usually — but is sometimes curtailed by snack)
630p Snack
645p Bedtime ritual begins
715p Lights out

We may begin to experiment with a 430p pickup time. And when we say "we" I mean "I" — I'm going to be the one doing this and corralling the kids. Will it work? Results may take a while to make themselves apparent. I'll let you know, I guess??

Fascination Corner

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

• A new version of the Machine-based AlphaFold can predict not just the structure of proteins, but how they interact with other molecules, which is kind of handy if you want to design drugs. (Nature)
  

• Sperm whales might have a language. They at least seem to have a common alphabet of click-phonemes, which The Scientists have recently identified. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• Really? "Liberals and Conservatives Differ on Climate Change Beliefs—But Are Relatively United in Taking Action: Global Experiment Reveals Surprising Common Ground in Environmental Activism" (NYU) (Paper)
  

• Watch this NASA simulation of what it would look like to plunge facefirst into a black hole. (NASA)
  

• I was linked to this old (2022) article about what it's like to see live shows now, and I have to know: is it any better? (Paste)
  

• Game theory provides an interesting strategy for making The Machine's answers more accurate. (Quanta)
  

• If cows become a living reservoir for H5N1, we should start ringing pandemic alarm bells now. (Nature)
  

• The Scientists are looking for Dyson spheres and they say they've found 7 decent candidates out there. (Universe Today) (Paper PDF download page)
  

• We've all heard about how fast mantis shrimp can punch; why haven't they all punched each other into oblivion? It's all in their tails. (UC Santa Barbara) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists are working on a fascinating broad-spectrum vaccine that can protect against an entire subclass of viruses instead of just one strain. (The Conversation)
  

• Some Engineers have come up with a big list of questions that need answering if we're going to make robot farming work. (U of Bonn) (Paper)
  

• Where'd all the water on Venus go? The Scientists think they've figured it out. (U of Colorado Boulder)
  

• The Scientists have mapped a piece of human brain about the size of half a grain of rice down to the nanometer in all its ridiculously complex glory. (Harvard)
  

• A functionally extinct oyster reef off the coast of Adelaide was successfully restored in only a couple of years. (U of Adelaide) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers built another one of those snake robots out of independent, origami-inspired submodules. (Princeton)
  

• The Scientists surveyed Munich residents to figure out which animals are most welcome in cities (or at least Munich in particular). (TUM) (Paper)
  

• Spitting cobra venom is incredibly nasty, and there's been no effective treatment for it until now. (Lancaster U) (Paper)
  

• The Jimmy Dubs may have spotted an atmosphere(!!!) around a lava planet 41ly distant, currently designated 55 Cancri e. (NASA) (Paper)
  

• "What makes people annoying?" (Guardian)
  

• Some Engineers have created shockingly effective sound-suppressing curtains out of a thin sheet of silk with piezoelectric fibers embedded in it. (MIT) (Paper)
  

• Adjuvants make vaccines work better, but the most effective one is insanely expensive to produce; The Scientists crammed 38 genes from 6 different organisms into a yeast cell to get it to make the same stuff for way, way cheaper. (UC Berkeley) (Paper)
  

• Sometimes wisdom is just knowing when to let the intern cook: a high school student helped bring a tossed-off Hail-Mary idea about identifying insect neurotransmitters to reality. (Janelia) (Paper)
  

• The response to Apple's new iPad ad where a hydraulic press contemptuously crushes everything that makes life creative and interesting was so universally dire that they actually issued an apology. (CBS News)
  

• What is it about swarms of things that attract technological solutions? Some Engineers worked out a way to remove microplastics and bacteria from water with swarming magnetic microbots. (ACS) (Paper)
  

• The Scientists have taken a stab at figuring out how the built environment affects the plants around it, which is going to be more of a thing as climate change heats up the world. (Oak Ridge Natl Lab) (Paper)
  

• Some Engineers have designed an electrode the width of a single human neuron that can be implanted without corroding over time, which would be very useful for vision implants. (Chalmers U of Tech) (Paper)
  

• New York and Dublin are now linked through an always-on streetside video portal, and it's going about as well as can be hoped. (Guardian)

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.

A band and their album

(I remembered a formula for making fake album covers that involves searching for a random appropriately licensed photo and then applying your best Graphic Design Skills to the result; let me know what you think this band/album sounds like, because your answers are always incredible)

New Music Roundup

Last week's band/album was:

Reader Avery is pretty sure this is "some kind of sacral nerve haunting music. Perhaps the intro is just some waterfall noise ASMR nonsense and idk… the greatest hits of any musician who has been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Maybe Toccata and Fugue in D Minor to close it out."

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.