what else is out there in the desert this week

November 23, 2020

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that needed three (3) strings of Xmas lights to properly decorate the gigantic bush outside and feels pretty good about it, honestly 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week; next week there will be. After that, we're gonna go on a bit of a production hiatus, but we will return.Seriously, though, my birthday's coming up and if you wanted to commemorate it quietly, you could just pop on over to Apple Podcasts and give the show a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ rating or a lovely review; you don't even have to tell me you did it.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.Weirdly, I don't have a lot for you here this week, except to say: give yourself a break right now. Take 15 minutes and go read or have a cup of tea or something. Anyone gives you shit, tell 'em to take it up with me. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Quentin can sort of count up to about 16. He always skips 13 and 15, so it's kind of a tossup (an adorable tossup). Let's say he can reliably count to 12. Back when he was learning to count to 10, there was a number he also always skipped that I weirdly cannot remember off the top of my head (I'm going to blame this on pandemic brain), but it was also funny as hell.Also, he's learned the alphabet song and likes to sing it spontaneously, which is amazing, but he hasn't fully absorbed the difference between J and K, so his version just has two Js in the middle. It's very good!Speaking of songs, he's definitely learning some at his little Montessori school that neither Mavis nor I have any experience with, and hearing him sing them to himself from time to time is magical. His little mind! I have no other words. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • This next surge is a bad one: stay home. Here's a free Atlantic click. (Atlantic) 

  • Who else out there read The Forge of God by Greg Bear? Just .......... you know, just askin'. (Guardian) 

  • "Facebook Knows That Adding Labels To Trump’s False Claims Does Little To Stop Their Spread" (BuzzFeed News) 

  • This week's must-read from the Atlantic is about a historian with some ....... let's just say dire predictions about the next decade or so. (~$Atlantic) This firsthand account from someone who already lived through a coup as stupid as ours has been is also highly instructive; if you've got a Medium click left, burn it now. (~$Medium) 

  • I'll be honest: I have zero faith that the Trumpite sect could be counted upon to meet us where we are in "Rebuilding the Good Society". (Democracy) 

  • Having a diverse group of thinkers (impulsive and deliberate) leads to better, quicker decisions. (Florida State) 

  • CARDBOARD OFFICE (@AgentRedSquirrl on Twitter) 

  • How does microplastic pollution spread? (Princeton) 

  • Bots are getting better at conversation, it would seem. (Vice) 

  • Most of the people moving out of San Francisco are going to .......... Vegas???? (Public Comment) 

  • Why does bad information spread so well? This article lays it all out. (~$Scientific American) 

  • Engineers are working on an autonomous drone boat that can identify and snitch on illegal fishing operations. (Hakai) 

  • The rona may have soured our culture on the Kardashian media empire. (~$Atlantic) 

  • Things that don't exist! (This X Does Not Exist) 

  • Put down the blunt for a sec: the color I see and the color you see do trigger the same areas of the brain. So odds are pretty good that the blue I see is the same one you do! (Cosmos) 

  • Are there truly no better options for dealing with epistemic exhaustion (aka the reason you feel so bad after all your doomscrolling)? (The Conversation) 

  • Increased CO2 in the atmosphere is very gradually turning the ocean into carbonic acid. There's evidence kelp forests might help slow it down, but kelp can't be everywhere. Can it? (Stanford) 

  • "The World Is Never Going Back to Normal: Other countries are learning to live without America. Biden can’t restore the pre-Trump status quo." (~$Atlantic) 

  • "Curved origami" can make interesting flexible robot limbs; there's a video linked in the article that explains the concept pretty well. (Arizona State) 

  • You know what, speaking of robots, there should be a robot registry. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • The Kids These Days are editing themselves into the Harry Potter movies on TikTok, because why not. ($NYT) 

  • Your interesting and totally unvarnished longread for the week is this one about how society calculates the value of the lives within it. (n+1) 

  • Relatedly: our brains were maybe not meant to be at Pandemic Stress Levels for this long. (Slate) 

  • There's a couple of WWII shipwrecks off the North Carolina coast with a bunch of big predatory fish living in them. How'd they get there? What are they eating? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Ecological Society of America) 

  • Scientists have worked out a way to recycle some kinds of batteries that might not only be sustainable, but ........ profitable?????? (Ars Technica) 

  • Machines need to learn causality next if they're gonna do anything useful. (IEEE Spectrum) Weirdly, there have been some surprising advances in just showing them how to do things. (USC) 

  • Why does it seem like there are more conspiracy theories (and conspiracy theory adherents) now than there were a few years ago? (Vox) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumMothchild, My Love is Fucking Delicious 

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.