where'm I headed, folks

December 04, 2023

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that's trying to figure out its next move, literally (see below) 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Instant Band Night 24: NEW YEARS BALLIf you missed the last one, I am genuinely sorry for you, but not to worry: you can come to the next one, and you can wear something you feel goddamn fabulous in. Come participate or simply witness the most concentrated and joyful burst of musical creativity in the entire Bay, hands down, and bring a few friends along, why not!January 11 20246p$10East Bay Community Space507 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 YOUIt's 2023 and there's no reason you should settle for a boring garden, potted plant, or living space! You could have a little statue of a crazy-colored tardigrade, a little guy to hold your last fruit, a Star Trek buddy in a party hat, or an Ediacaran life form right now. Take a look and consider some clever ceramics for you or a friend — I hear it's gifting season???Idea Factory GiveawayI 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.The Mailchimp people are killing Tinyletter in a couple of months, so I need to find a new home for this thing. Likely it'll end up being Substack just because I don't think there's anything else out there for free; Buttondown costs above a certain number of subscribers, so that's out. Does anyone have any suggestions? I'm aware the Substack guy is a buffoon and would rather not go there if there are alternatives, but I genuinely am not sure they exist. Let me know if you have an idea! 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.A short one this week!Quentin's 6-year checkup was today and all is well; interestingly, if he continues to grow at the same rate, the line he's on projects a strong likelihood that he'll end up taller than Mavis and me. I wonder if Felix will do the same? There's literally only one way to find out and it's completely inevitable, it's just ....... slow. I want to know now!We're getting into Holiday Card Season and that means trying to wrangle the family for a picture of some sort. Wish us luck?? 

Fascination Corner

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

  • It was more or less already happening because renewables are cheaper, but 56 nations have agreed to phase out coal-driven power plants, although there was no hard date set. (AP) 

  • "We’re Living the Reality of the Pandemic’s Simplest Math: Sick season will be worse from now on." (~$Atlantic) 

  • The first geothermal power plant in the US is operational. (Canary Media) 

  • All that plastic garbage in the ocean is starting to comprise its own ecosystem that The Scientists are calling the plastisphere, and we really need to be keeping an eye on it. (Nanyang Tech PDF press release) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have identified a new kind of recycled fertilizer that kind of rules? It's not scalable right now, but they sure think somebody oughta look into it! (U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) 

  • A Machine-powered robot is advancing the field of materials discovery. (Nature) 

  • Okay, so nations around the world are having a hard time convincing people to be parents, but have we considered (beyond the fact that it's an expensive nightmare to have children) that maybe there are enough humans on the planet overall or what? The article doesn't talk about that angle very much, which I think is telling. (Vox) 

  • The first test flight of a commercial airliner using sustainable jet fuel has been successfully executed by Virgin Atlantic. (BBC) 

  • Nobody likes making the sustainable choice; this would be a good place for policy to step in, according to The Scientists. (Ruhr U Bochum) 

  • If you remember back when The Scientists made little "cellular robots" out of frog cells, they've done it again with human cells, an application with real medical promise. (Tufts U) (Paper) 

  • Some Engineers have come up with a way to involve crowds of everyday people in training robots to do useful tasks. (MIT) 

  • The same Scientists who are trying to bring back the woolly mammoth are also working on the dodo. (CNN) 

  • Anybody out there we know get Lil Durk'd? (Motherboard) 

  • I can't believe it took this long for someone to have this idea: mixing agar with ground-up organs helps The Scientists study the bacteria that grow inside them. (U of Michigan) 

  • Have a fascinating longread about the integration and design of brands both fictional and real into movies, with a lot of sumptuous close-up examples from the Barbie movie and some recent Wes Andersons. (It's Nice That) 

  • The Scientists want to make sure nobody out there is making any big decisions after pulling an all-nighter. (U of Ottawa) 

  • Some pathogens are literally brute-forcing their way into cells, more or less bypassing the immune system entirely. (Indiana U) 

  • To the best of my ability to understand it, Some Engineers have been inspired by the tail flukes of whales to investigate something they call "wave-devouring propulsion" for seagoing ships, and it looks promising! The paper is entertainingly crammed with highly technical jargon, so that's fun, too. (Cranfield U) (Paper) 

  • A cave in eastern Finland called the Devil's Church turns out to have specific acoustic resonance properties that makes rituals conducted therein seem extra weighty. (U of Eastern Finland) (Paper) 

  • Dolphins have electroreceptors! (Science Alert) (Paper) 

  • A recently-discovered planet is way too big for its star, an anomaly that's throwing off The Scientists' whole idea of how planets get formed in the first place. (Penn State) 

  • Ball milling shows up once again as a weirdly effective way to make something useful, this time a liquid?? It's a coating for toilets that renders them too slippery for bacteria to get a foothold! (ACS) 

  • The Scientists have been puzzling over a discrepancy in measurements of the Hubble constant, but a new modified theory of gravity might be the key to explaining it. (U of Bonn) (Paper) 

  • Genetic studies indicate bees evolved venom before stingers. (Goethe U Frankfurt) (Paper) 

  • Research shows that one way to stay on-task is to set little microgoals for yourself. (U of Texas at Arlington) 

  • The Scientists are doing their best to save those hilarious giant green ground parrots from extinction. (Knowable) 

  • "Your Amazon Order Of Reusable Metal Straws Is Currently On Its Way Via The Most Ecologically Devastating Route You Could Imagine" (McSweeney's) 

  • Fucking hell: chinstrap penguins get 11 hours of sleep, but they do it through four-second microsleeps that happen over ten thousand times a day. Does that sound ......... good? (Paper) 

  • A six-planet system orbiting star HD110067 is moving in a pattern The Scientists call a "resonant chain," which is pretty goddamn cool-sounding. (U of Bern) (YouTube animation) 

  • Some guy with birdlike feet was wandering around the Triassic 60M years before birds showed up. What? (PLOS via Science Daily) (Paper) 

  • The Scientists have figured out how certain cyanobacteria came to use a variant of chlorophyll to harvest near-infrared light instead of green, which has some promising implications for the search for alien life. (Queen Mary U of London) (Paper) 

  • I was originally linked to it via Twitter, but nobody needs to go there these days; here, have a video of a husky with an Italian accent. (TikTok) 

  • Some Engineers have demonstrated a method for cheap networked robots to successfully check a pipe for defects using acoustic wave sensors. (U of Bristol) (Paper) 

  • Because I've never left Tumblr, I've already absorbed a nonzero amount of knowledge about the amazingly unhinged perfume reviews on Fragrantica, but it's time the rest of you were alerted. (Dazed Digital) 

A Fictional Thing

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

Photo by Yauheni Hancharenka on Unsplash(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:

Photo by Lena Polishko on UnsplashNo reader interpretations came in for this one, which I imagine as a spare, understated four-piece rock band with a husky-voiced lady singer and a Spoon sort of vibe. 

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.