where does anything come from

April 05, 2021

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that will give a shiny dollar to any dev working at Spotify who can put a STOP SHOWING ME THIS STUPID BULLSHIT button over the picture of Joe fucking Rogan on my "Shows to try" row in the web version 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawaySince I'm shifting to a monthly schedule, I figure I might as well keep the last-published episode in this section for a week or two longer. I make the rules here!!!153 - Props To You, Kooky"Jon (@ferociousj), Besha (@besha), and special guest Amy explore a fabulous assortment of notions for consumer products, services, and education."Let's not mince words on this point: all of our guests are great and I would gladly have them on again at any time, but what Amy brings to this show cannot be easily replicated, which makes her a singular and valuable resource not just to the makers of this show, but to the nation at large.Someone out there did it. I don't know if it was one of you or not, but we're now up to 36 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ ratings in Apple Podcasts. If it wasn't you, well: why not?Instant Band Night 15: Gone Til NovemberNow that proven vaccines exist, let's wait til November and hopefully -- hopefully! -- we'll see you all at the next Instant Band Night.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.This is your regular reminder that David Roth is unfuckingtouchable; for this edition, please behold a simple, brutal truth of anti-mask, anti-vax dumbshits that we're probably never going to be able to overcome. 

"For these people, having to do something other than whatever they want to do, at any moment and for any reason, really is a much more urgent threat than sickness or death; to be without the agency to make the same stupid non-choices, every day, is not fundamentally different than being killed, because making those facile choices is for them what it means to be alive."..."But for all the convoluted and cosmetic suspicion of the politics and the opacity of their oafish paranoid patois, this all resolves to the precariousness that all those false choices are designed to obscure—to the suspicion that it is unfair and somehow wrong that any element of their all-important personal convenience might be contingent upon or even related to anyone else’s, and to the fear that their holy ease will be threatened by some other greater responsibility."

The whole thing's over at Defector -- "Private Choices Have Public Consequences" -- and it is absolutely 100% worth your time. 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.If Quentin's home and awake when one of us leaves the house to go run an errand, he always requests a hug and a kiss from the departing person. I was just about ready to go on a daytime Target run and headed upstairs to his room, where I knew he and Mavis were playing. There was a blanket and some pillows on the floor, and as I gave him his hug and kiss, he informed me that they were about to start "pretend sleeping" and Mama would have to go downstairs along with me.* Sure thing, buddy. I went back downstairs and started putting on my shoes. I was almost done when suddenly Quentin came barreling downstairs, which was a surprise move. He threw his arms up and declared "I woke up in the middle of the night to give you a hug and a kiss!" Which he proceeded to do. It was very good, y'all. I don't know how we ended up with a kid this good. I mean, I know we're baseline good people and I think we do a pretty decent job modeling a loving relationship for him, but this was out of hand. I need to remember this when he becomes, in the words of Bill Watterson, a hulking, surly teenager before I know it.* This is how he does "pretend sleep" -- he gets into bed or a bed-analog and instructs us to close the door and go downstairs. At some unspecified point, he either opens the door and comes down, or we're supposed to come back up and wake him up; deciphering the back end of this mode of play is still a work in progress. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Iʻm not sure whatʻs more astonishing: the sheer scale of this "pre-checked auto-donation box" grift from the Trump campaign, or the fact that it hasnʻt hurt Trumpʻs rep even a little bit with the people he fucking bilked out of MILLIONS. ($NYT) 

  • "The Fourth Surge Is Upon Us. This Time, It’s Different." (~$Atlantic) 

  • Here's some interesting data from a survey taken of Americans about billionaires. (Recode) 

  • "Y'all Going to Keep Wearing the Masks After This?" (Jezebel) 

  • Nature has a writeup on what it will take to vaccinate the whole world. (Nature) 

  • The Louvre put their entire collection online to look at for free. (Robb Report) 

  • Can I interest you in some century-old chocolates from the Queen? (CNN) 

  • Scientists at Stanford put the entire mRNA sequence for the Moderna vaccine on Github, and Moderna didn't stop 'em, probably because the vaccine is still extremely fucking hard to make. (Gizmodo) 

  • Playing with foam swords against a robot is the only way I want to exercise from here on out. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Absolute perfection: someone stole a Confederate monument from a graveyard and is threatening to turn it into a toilet unless the United Daughters of the Confederacy hangs a banner excoriating systemic racism from their own HQ. (Alabama dot com) 

  • A few BART stations are getting machines that print out short stories for riders to read. (KQED) 

  • Color-changing sutures that indicate infection! Invented by a Black high school student! (Smithsonian) 

  • Why do we think robots should rely on visible light like the rest of us meat-chumps to see things? (MIT) 

  • Depression appears to affect the way visual information is processed in the brain. (U of Helsinki) 

  • Researchers made a machine learning system capable of creating new functional proteins. (Chalmers U of Tech) 

  • Moderation of online spaces needs some rethinking. (Study Hall) 

  • How about simple robots with swappable shells that have different functions? (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Scientists would love to know what sort of impact really big trees will have on climate change when they die; the trouble is, nobody really knows what makes big trees die in the first place. (Smithsonian) 

  • Trust in tech has .......... declined somewhat lately, to put it politely. (Axios) 

  • If you remember those primitive "robots" made from frog cells, well, there's already a second-gen version. (Tufts) 

  • Why not: the Brookings Institute has an interesting-looking policy brief on "Identifying and exploiting the weaknesses of the white supremacist movement" (Brookings) 

  • Testing seems to suggest DNA can be sampled from the fucking air. (Queen Mary U of London) 

  • Take a look at this nutso-but-also-kind-of-cool design for smart glass. (SPIE) 

  • Did you know "meteotsunamis" are a thing? (NOAA) 

  • There might actually be two kinds of narcissism, one of which could be a behavioral indicator of psychopathy. (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • So not only are cone snails deadly beyond all reason, they're sexual tricksters, too. (U of Utah) 

  • Solar adoption in California's been great, but now it's producing a problem where the people who've installed panels (who largely tend to be richer) are effectively getting a discount on their power that poorer people aren't. Figuring out a fix is the next step. (E&E News) 

  • Researchers have developed a "MasSpec Pen" capable of analyzing a small range of meats and fish to verify they're what they say they are within seconds. (ACS) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumGoat Prophet, I Advise Decapitation 

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.