who has yomi for me

December 11, 2017

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that still gets eight hours of sleep in a 24h period. 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory Giveaway58 - Tragedy as a Service"Jon (@ferociousj), guest co-host Jen (@jennifermarie), and special guest Casey work out a new business model before going deep on technological improvements to candy/booze infusion science."Casey actually has a boatload of good/hilarious/intriguing ideas, so we're going to try to get her back on the show reasonably quickly.You can subscribe using:Apple PodcastsRSSStitcherGoogle Play MusicYou can also just go to the website to play or download episodes:https://ideafactorygiveaway.simplecast.fm/Instant Band Night 2This is your one-month warning that the second Instant Band Night is coming. In case you missed it last time, Instant Band Night is a thing that happens where I take over a small music venue: 

  1. The stage has a drum kit, guitar, bass, keyboard, and mics.

  2. We draw names out of hats to make instant bands that get 10 minutes in the green room to plan an 8-minute set.

  3. A hat-drawn artist will also take the stage alongside each band to draw their gig poster on a meeting room easel pad.

If you're in the Bay Area on January 11th and enjoy fun, get over to the East Bay Community Space:507 55th St (@ Telegraph)Oakland CA 946098p$5 doorBYOBThere are details and FAQs on Eventbrite and Facebook if you're into that sort of thing. 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Questions instead of rambles. I'm looking for: 

  • Solo cello music along the lines of the Bach cello suites

  • Solo violin material from a good Russian composer

Who's got something for me? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.There's a game you've probably read about by now called Universal Paperclips where your goal is to make as many paperclips as possible. You start making them by hand at first out of wire you have to buy yourself, but soon you get automatic paperclip-making machines and a robot to get the wire for you. Soon you build computers that work on increasingly complicated projects as well as strategy engines for faster paperclip-making machines and better marketing schemes to sell the paperclips so you can buy more wire. There are a lot of processes to manage: you need to make sure the computer processors are gaining creativity, the investment apparatus is making money, the robot is buying wire, the strategy engines are generating yomi (whatever the hell that is), and of course, that the clipper machines are making paperclips.*I'm finding that being a dad at this stage is mostly about managing processes. Mavis makes the food that keeps Quentin alive and takes care of herself. I maintain a great many of the processes necessary to support these endeavors: 

  • Preparing breakfast and other meals

  • Changing a lot of diapers

  • Loading and firing the dishwasher

  • Keeping the sink generally clear at all times

  • Washing the breast pump parts

  • Prepping Quentin for travel

  • Running the very occasional outside errand

  • Doing or sorting laundry

Note that I'm not for a single yoctosecond trying to say that I do all the work, or even half the work. The work is hard (if not impossible) to quantify in many cases, and there's a lot of it. But these, at least, are the things that I can: 

  1. Identify as tasks or processes

  2. Spot when they need to be run and haven't happened

  3. Run them more or less immediately

This is advice that I got from my excellent friends Mark and Joy, who have twin boys (and who also made us the very prescient gift of a 36-pack of microfiber automotive wipes, which we've used extensively): always be processing. I got what they were saying at the time, but hot damn, it really is fucking useful. I assume Quentin will start generating yomi any day now.* Spoiler for the game: Eventually you create machines capable of harvesting matter of any kind and turning it into wire to make paperclips out of; in the end, you create swarms of self-replicating drone factories so sophisticated and powerful that they convert the available mass of literally the entire universe into paperclips. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • Here's one where the headline can speak for itself: If the US treated women more like Norway it would be $1.6 trillion richer. 

  • Are we to conclude from this graph that Outrage Tweets don't do anything except make ourselves feel better? Probably? 

  • After hearing so much about accidentally building bias into AI, it's good to know somebody's actually doing something about it. 

  • How much do smartphones affect our brains? No, really? 

  • I forget just how old Voyager 1 is; NASA managed to fire up its maneuvering thrusters after they'd been dormant for just a year shy of my entire goddamn lifespan up to now. 

  • Is this Tatooine? Are we going to be living on moisture farms now? Is that what's happening? I just want an answer one way or the other. (This is a very cool technology BTW) 

  • Back to form with Atlantic reads for this week: a pretty good meditation on why Trump supporters who say they're not racist think they can do it with a straight face. 

  • Official findings are that the Charlottesville cops deliberately fucked up their response to the racist rally in August. Great. What are the odds we see real results from this report? (Rhetorical; don't @ me) 

  • Google made a cardboard AI camera, because of course they did. I kind of love this. 

  • While I'm relieved that someone's making communal housing for the people getting mildly fucked by the tech economy in San Francisco, I would be more relieved if someone else were doing the same for the ones getting more intensely screwed over. 

  • Just in case anybody was going to send me this article about the blue tarantulas that live inside trees, you don't have to. 

  • Your gloomy Vox read for the week is The case for normalizing impeachment. It's long, but worth it. 

  • So if these worms' hemoglobin turns out to be safe to use in humans, how are we going to extract it at scale? Why do I imagine just putting a bunch of them in a blender and a centrifuge? 

  • This is amazing: a neural network can learn to translate between two languages without any kind of dictionary if it's got a sufficient amount of source material. 

  • It's time to read a super-detailed paper on artificial, fluid-powered muscles designed on origami principles, everybody. 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumHello Kitty Shotgun, In Praise of Those Who Follow 

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.