what do you mean "call me this summer"

August 22, 2022

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that just added two more podcasts to its listening queue as if free time is somehow expanding 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayIn the back half of 2022 I hope to recover enough energy to restart some hobbies, and this podcast is on that list. Until then, you have over 150 episodes in the back catalog to amuse and delight, including an experimental tabletop RPG and a couple of Star Trek fantasy drafts that I would quite honestly and happily make into a whole 'nother show if I had the time!Someone out there has left another incredible review, btw: thank you from the bottom of what remains of my heart. Should anyone else feel inclined to make my day (and Besha's too, probably?), you can drop your 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 at the usual place with the knowledge that it will add at least 5HP back to our health stats.Instant Band Night 16: SWEETJust a little over two weeks remain until the next Instant Band Night, and if you've never been, now is the time to attend a friendly party where musicians who've just met form bands on the spot. Nobody's forced to play; you can just come watch. See something new every five minutes! One of the links below will tell you literally everything you need to know. EVERYTHING.Sept 86p$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.You may or may not already be aware that I was a Yearbook Kid in high school (shoutout anyone else reading who can relate), and I still have the ones I helped contribute to from 1995-97, smack in the middle of that heady decade. There's a vast, deep mine of personal nostalgia in there whose precipice I can feel myself teetering over, but glancing at some of the signatures in my '95 one, I was struck by a few that left their phone numbers and/or exhorted me to call them over the summer. Tell me if I'm wrong: in this day and age I think something like this would be construed as an invitation to connect romantically. Right? Did I fuck this up? I'm prompted to wonder this only because I discovered, years after the fact, that someone I knew in high school who was extremely cute harbored a raging crush on me for a while that I knew absolutely nothing about, to the point where she once called me pretending to be someone else who she thought I'd want to talk to more (this person in fact annoyed me tremendously, and that particular phone conversation was a real mystery to me at the time). Trying to look at that era with this knowledge in my head threatens to render a lot of activity in new and intriguing lights.*But back then, phones and calling were literally all we had â€” there was no texting, no DMing, a very crude and rudimentary internet, and email barely existed. Landlines were it: if you wanted to hang out with someone, this was how you had to arrange it. You had to call their house. These were just friends who wanted to stay friends, I think, and even now my failure to hold up my end of the implied bargain stings. I know this is how it always goes, but it sure feels like it shouldn't; some of these people were goddamn amazing. You know what, that's the precipice of nostalgia calling to me, and I'm going to resist the temptation for now to hook a bungee cord to my waist and dive in. You're welcome!!!I cannot promise I won't take the plunge some other week, though. You've been warned.* That incidence of obliviousness is nothing — nothing!!!! — compared to the biggest romantic near-miss self-own I ever perpetrated, possibly the dumbest mistake made by any single adolescent human being in the year 1994, but I will tell that story later. Or never???? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin's first week of transitional kindergarten (TK) went well, with some adjustments for the new environment and people. He told us at one point he doesn't like school as much as being at home playing, which admittedly is pretty hard to beat. This seems normal. He went into his classroom today without any noises of protest, though: promising! He always seems to have had fun when we come to pick him up, which is even more promising.Speaking of pickup: one thing about TK is that it stops at 145p, which astute readers will note is well before 5p, the end of the typical workday for adults. The city of El Cerrito has us covered in the form of an aftercare program that picks kids up right from TK and brings them to a clubhouse-sort-of-building immediately adjacent to school grounds where kids can continue to play and do activities until their parents come to get them anytime before 6p. But! Aftercare didn't start on the same day TK did. In fact, aftercare's first day is today, the following Monday, which is the day I'm typing this. All last week we just picked Quentin up from TK at 145p and brought him straight home; today at 405p I still haven't left, and it feels eerie. Free .......... time? Is something I might have some more of in the coming weeks or months?? This feels like a trick. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • No matter what the CDC says, stay home for the full 10 days if you develop symptoms of the rona, 'cause odds are good you're still infectious at day 5. (Imperial College London) 

  • Judging from how it's done during elections in other countries, the misinfo on TikTok is going to be fast, furious, and largely unmitigated, so buckle up. ($NYT) 

  • On the other hand, the effect of social media still pales in comparison to cable news, which is not a good thing. (The Conversation) 

  • Maybe check real quick to see if you're living in what's going to become the Extreme Heat Belt of the US. (Axios) 

  • Here's all the reading you need on that polio case that popped up in New York. (Vox) 

  • This has to be correlation and not causation, but it's an interesting one: historical rates of enslavement by county are predictive for gun ownership. (U Wisconsin-Madison) 

  • The math says putting a minimum quota on your corporate board for female representation has measurably positive downstream effects. Do it now! (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have worked out a way to make solar panels different colors with a negligible impact on their performance, which might make them more popular. Yes, there's a picture. (American Chemical Society) 

  • According to a recent study, congestion pricing for Manhattan south of 60th St would be highly beneficial, though that's no guarantee they'll actually implement it. (MTA press release) (Study executive summary PDF) 

  • NASA's convening a team to really start digging into UFOs. (Motherboard) 

  • The guys who are trying to bring back the woolly mammoth are also gonna try the thylacine while they're at it. Honestly, they should just do that one first; where are we gonna put woolly mammoths on a warming Earth? (Ars Technica) 

  • Looks like "non-nutritive sweeteners" still mess with your microbiome, which can affect your glycemic response. Great. (Cell Press via Science Daily) 

  • The Kids are out here fighting book bans. (~$Next City) 

  • If you're planning a road trip or are thinking about it, consider plugging a route into Make My Drive Fun and seeing what pops up. (Make My Drive Fun) 

  • The Scientists are trying to figure out how to identify people whose beliefs are most susceptible to change, and there's at least one variable they seem to have already flagged, which is nice. (Santa Fe Institute) (Paper) 

  • A literal 17yo has done incredible work on an electric motor design that doesn't use any rare earth elements. (~$Smithsonian) 

  • I absolutely cannot decide between feeling exasperation and a kind of contemptuous respect for the scale of the grift being perpetrated on the part of this QAnon idiot up in Canada who told her followers (she has followers?!?!) to arrest the cops. I swear if I had less of an internet footprint and about a gram less of gray matter in the zone(s) that govern whatever I have that passes for a conscience, I'd've already conned at least ten grand out of some subset of QAnon schmucks by now. (Vice) 

  • The first crop we plant on Mars should probably be alfalfa. (Science Alert) 

  • In this week's chemical cleanup news, The Scientists have developed an eco-friendly electrophoresis filter that looks like it can remove microplastics and sunscreen nanoparticles (which are bad news for corals) from water (DGIST), and a simple and inexpensive way to destroy the "forever chemicals" that are contaminating the rain. (UCLA) 

  • Trying to map the hottest and coolest places in a city turns out to be instructive. (~$Bloomberg) 

  • A small but interesting study shows that random acts of kindness are more impactful than we think. (UT Austin) 

  • I ..................... kinda want a human-sized dog bed now. (Twisted Sifter) 

  • Those moths with the skulls from Silence of the Lambs do some remarkably determined flying over long distances. (The Conversation) 

  • Anyone who listens to Nicole Byer's various podcasts knows she thinks the wigs on most movies are bad. Why are they like this? (Vox) 

  • Social media is helping The Scientists down in New Zealand keep track of the southern right whale population, which hasn't been doing so hot since we nearly killed 'em all. (U of Auckland) 

  • Making cities denser can make them better. Yes, really! (Aeon) 

  • Some Engineers have built a neuromorphic chip specifically for AI applications that uses way less energy, which could mean small devices may not need to offload their processing to some remote server somewhere. (UCSD) 

  • The rest of us who aren't already eating it should probably be looking into breadfruit as the climate continues to change. (Northwestern) 

  • Which animals are most vulnerable to climate change? (SDU) 

  • Machine translation is starting to become actually useful in a world where not every scientist speaks English. (UC Berkeley) 

  • The Scientists are trying to narrow down their guesses about what the structure of Europa's ice shell really looks like. (UT Austin) 

  • In yet another case of One Kind of Trash Could Be Useful For A Whole Different Industry, The Scientists have worked out a way to turn Regular Lignin into Lignin Suitable For Carbon Fiber And Other Stuff. (Wash U in St Louis) 

  • Who wants to go see this with me someday when we all have free time? ($NYT) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.Some bandsFull Dick ModeCLONESCAMThat Damn Sun(If you've made it this far, feel free to hit REPLY and tell me what you think one or all of these bands sound 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.