welcome to Liminal Week

December 27, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's learned the true meaning of preschool winter break 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayAll right, look, maybe it's time to hope for something like a New Year's Miracle that free time will suddenly appear out of nowhere. IT COULD HAPPENIf just one of you clicks over and gives us another ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Apple Podcasts rating, that would bring us to 44, which I think we can all agree is a number with some symmetry. Who doesn't like symmetry? Monsters, that's who.Instant Band Night 15: Probably In MarchWe're definitely rescheduling, but now it might not be March, depending on when that vaccine data for kids under 5 shows up. I'll update the event pages as soon as I know something. (Eventbrite) (Facebook)+ +  r e t u r n i n g   i n   2 0 2 2  + ++ +  h a n g   i n   t h e r e  + + 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.I know all the reasons this particular holiday season seems to have slipped past me in the literal blink of an eye -- the ol' proportion of life:time passing ratio, the fact that we're coming up on Year 2 of Pandemic Stasis, the general hectic day-to-day of life in a house with a toddler and a baby, the accelerating expansion of the universe because I'm sure that somehow has to factor in, etc -- but none of those change the fact that it happened and I'm mad about it. I therefore submit to you that the holiday season should be extended at least into the end of February to compensate for the speed of its passage. Are we agreed? I'm glad we could all come to this meeting. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin was not in fact disappointed by the bulldozer he got on Xmas morning. He hasn't mentioned a backhoe once, even! So we can call that a success. In fact, the whole of Xmas was overall a big hit, so we feel pretty good about it.I don't have a whole lot else for you; every day has been a weekend around here thanks to his preschool taking two (much-deserved) weeks off, so we're well into week two and I've had what feels like ten minutes of total free time. Which is absolutely absurd because we've definitely managed to bring Felix's bedtime a few hours earlier; I think I'm just feeling the Extra Kid Time lately. Felix still sometimes wakes up around 9p, but he can be coaxed back into dreamland fairly effectively with a nursing session, and hopefully that bump will smooth itself out eventually. Teaching kids to sleep: always more complicated than you thought. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • "You’re vaccinated and boosted. How should omicron affect your plans?" This one's free, it turns out, folks. (WaPo) 

  • It's been real fuck Joe Manchin hours around here, but it turns out not even the coal miners are with him, either. (UMWA) 

  • Testimony from a guy who went undercover to infiltrate the Florida KKK says they've got their hooks in plenty of places we'd really fuckin' rather they not. (AP) 

  • As much as I liked it, there were moments in the Denis Villeneuve DUNE where I wasn't able to make out what the hell the people onscreen were saying. Turns out that's been a thing for a while. (Slashfilm) 

  • You may have read it already, but just in case you missed it like I did, here's the 2021 Hater's Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog; bless us every one. (Defector) 

  • If social robots are supposed to be for The Children, why not let actual kids design them? (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Maybe we don't need to be dissecting the internet every picosecond of every day to try to divine new trends. (Vox) 

  • This is an old one but I missed it when it went up: "Why Are Right-Wing Conspiracies so Obsessed With Pedophilia?" (Mother Jones) 

  • Evidence of what actually causes lightning to form has been recorded for the first time in history. (Quanta) 

  • Just .01% of the people buying Bitcoin control a whopping 27% of the total supply, which should tell you something about its actual utility in reducing inequality or whatever the crypto people say decentralized cryptocurrency is supposed to do. (Gizmodo) 

  • This isn't the first time we've seen this, but it's always interesting to see life thriving in the coldest, darkest places we can think of to explore on this planet. (Science Alert) 

  • The reference genome we use for studying human genetic variations is just from one person, so ............ that isn't great. The Scientists have been working on a tool to fix that problem, though, which is nice of them. (UC Santa Cruz) 

  • Current hard drive technology can only get so small, and we're going to be bumping up against that limit any day now. A new way to pack huge amounts of data into tiny spaces involves building nanoscale magnetic hedgehog spikes. Okay! (Ohio State) 

  • This is actually a good piece on the problem with Louis CK now. (Slate) 

  • Gentrification appears to be strongly correlated with a shift among residents in one of the key personality traits psychologists can measure for, at least according to one study. Huh. (U of Cambridge) 

  • The Juno probe didn't actually literally record sounds from Ganymede -- the famously airless vacuum of space being a big factor -- but the magnetometric data it picked up does become interesting when converted to sound, which is a legit analysis technique The Scientists do actually use. (Science Alert) 

  • How do animals make decisions so quickly? Evidence seems to suggest they break everything -- everything -- down into a binary choice. (University of Konstanz) 

  • The Scientists have been wondering whether all the black holes in the universe formed instantly after the Big Bang, which would explain where all the dark matter is; they're hopeful that observations from the soon-to-be-launched James Webb space telescope will provide the answer. (U of Miami) 

  • Oh dear god: 100M years before the dinosaurs, millipedes the size of cars roamed the surface of the Earth. Take comfort that our air doesn't have enough oxygen to support anything close to that size now. (U of Cambridge) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumYou Are Compost, We Don't Make the Rules Here(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think this band/album sounds like, 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.