would the epistemologists in the room please stand up

December 16, 2019

Welcome to Corgi-Class Starship, the newsletter that still really wants to spend at least one night sleeping under the Xmas tree for no clear reason other than that it's bizarrely comforting 

You'll Like This

Update(s) on thing(s) I made or somehow helped to bring about.Idea Factory GiveawayNo new episode this week and we're taking a break for Xmas next week, but believe me, we're still cooking up more. You've been warned! The Kitchen is always active.You have only one chance to be the first person to ask us a question in the form of a 5-star review: head on over to ye oldynne Apple Podcastes and leave us that ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ before dropping a question in the review, which at least one of us will do our best to answer in as entertaining a fashion as possible!Instant Band Night XIV: Starting 2020 Off Right🦝 ONE MONTH OUT 🦝💋 GET YOURSELF READY 💋🐍 INVITE YOUR PALS 🐍FaCeBoOkOr just send your friends this linkhttp://bit.ly/instantbandnight14 

Medium Ramble

Skippable if you're in a hurry.Am I wrong to continually appeal to any notional philosophers out there for some kind of solution to the Fox News problem? There's an entire sector of the US population who believe strongly in lies -- actual made-up bullshit with no basis whatsoever in fact -- and it seems extremely difficult to get them not to do that. They're convinced they know true things, and they manifestly absolutely do not. Isn't epistemology the branch of human inquiry devoted to knowing how we know things? Shouldn't there be a neat conceptual crowbar we can use to pry these peoples' minds loose from the Fox News deathgrip? Or is this a psychologist problem?I'm starting to wonder if we were meant to be this connected to each other at scale without serious moderation. Or if there should be some kind of test administered every few years to assess each person's capacity to be fooled by Breitbartesque nonsense, and dial down their ability to see or publish to social media accordingly. That'd work, right? 

#dadthoughts

Also skippable if you're in a hurry or don't care. No judgment.Something we wanted to teach Quentin early on when he started to use language meaningfully was the importance of using "please" to ask for things. It would usually go something like:Q: Pickle!US: Can you say "please"?Q: Pickle please!US: Yes! Good asking, kiddo!US: [gives Q a pickle]An unforeseen consequence of this practice some months hence is that now Quentin's requests come in the form "[Pickle] please good asking!" Which, y'know, is true -- that was technically good asking -- but it gets us into slight trouble when he asks for things we can't or won't deliver, like fruits that don't exist in the house because they're out of season, or cookies. Our usual response is something along the lines of "That was good asking, buddy, but we can't give it to you because [reason]," which he seems to accept. I just wonder how long it'll be before the "good asking" construction gets dropped from the formula, because it's pretty damn adorable. I simply wanted to record it here for posterity. 

Fascination Corner

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

  • The sunlight at the top of very tall mountains is hideously strong and we forgot to account for that in our ice-melting models. (Science Alert) 

  • Shopping on the internet is now torture because we've created a tyranny of perfect information. Just read the URL of the article when it appears. (Vice) 

  • Researchers have been able to accurately reconstruct the sounds of words told to monkeys just by reading their neural activity in the proper area. Frankly, I'm amazed this is possible given the comparatively low resolution of the implant (96 channels); I assumed there'd need to be, like, hundreds for that to work. (Brown) 

  • Did the #MeToo movement work? Is it too early to tell, is the follow-up question I want to ask. (Teen Vogue) 

  • Why aren't whales any bigger than they are now? It might sound like a strange question, but at least it has what seems like a definitive answer. (Science Alert) 

  • This might burn your last free Quartz click, but it's worth it: "How to talk about climate change like Greta Thunberg" (~$Quartz) 

  • Does the law of conservation of energy hold up when you start to really examine it at the quantum level? Do you really want to know? (Nautilus) 

  • My friend, former housemate, and previous podcast guest Patrick has put together an educational AR submarine/ocean lab that's really something to see; here's a link to a tour that you should really click on. (OLLIE) 

  • Let's let the headline do the talking on this one: "Millenials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back" (538) 

  • The first autonomous cross-country freight delivery has just been accomplished. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • The earliest story ever told is on a cave wall in Indonesia; it's 44,000 goddamn years old. Yes, there are pictures! (Nature) (this is by far the messiest-ass link I've ever put in here, but I think it might be necessary to be able to open the article, which would otherwise be paywalled) 

  • Replacing all of our windows with solar cells would be a really good idea, except for one problem: you can't see through the fuckers. But wait: if you punch a bunch of tiny holes in 'em, you can, and they'll still function. I guess it sounded too obvious to work until somebody tried it? (Cell Press via Science Daily) 

  • This sounds nuts and I don't have the access to read the paper, but uh: scientists think they've figured out a set of equations that let you predict all sorts of things about theoretical life forms just by knowing how big they are when they become independent and how big they are when they're considered adults. That sound you hear is me scratching my head. (U of Arizona) 

  • It's technically possible to convert plastic into useful formic acid with a vanadium catalyst and plenty of sunlight. Great! Let's fucking scale it up! (Nanyang Tech) 

  • If you grew up near a lake or river that occasionally turned brown for what seemed like no reason, have no fear: the Swedes have figured it out. (Lund U) 

  • One of the big hurdles to functioning wetware technology -- little brains that run our technology instead of silicon chips -- is the difficulty of growing neurons in the shapes we want. Scientists at the University of Illinois have demonstrated a technique for growing functioning neurons from stem cells in fully human-directed formations. (Grainger School of Engineering) 

  • Sure, you can sequence all the DNA in your microbiotic soup, but that'll just tell you the species that are there. Run a pattern-matching algorithm on it, and you'll start to get a picture of the various groups of species present, and if you can do it all repeatedly over time and sample different areas, you might just be on your way to a comprehensive map of your whole microbiome, buddy. (Drexel) 

  • Something I just found out about that manages to be both pleasing and horrifying: the CIA doesn't like it when drone strikes create civilian casualties, so they've started using a missile that doesn't have an explosive warhead; instead, it has pop-out knives that butcher anything inside a roughly 3-foot radius, which is nasty as hell, but better than a 600-foot kill zone. (Popular Mechanics) 

  • Did you know that style of illustration that seems to be everywhere these days has a name? I didn't. (AIGA Eye on Design) 

  • Another one of those things we've always heard and kinda hoped wasn't actually true turns out to be backed up by data: the clothes you wear have an effect on how others perceive your level of competence. (Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs) 

  • In the process of testing a couple new anti-Alzheimer's drugs on mice, scientists discovered they also appear to slow down and even reverse some of the effects of aging on brain tissue at the molecular level. Uh, what? (Salk Institute) 

  • This design for a soft robot gripper is insanely metal: it uses magnets to melt parts of itself while other magnets pull it into shape, and then cools into a locked position to grab or lift things. (Georgia Tech) 

  • I'm disappointed that this article about developing new designs for armor based on mollusk shell didn't include a full-body artist's rendering. (Virginia Tech) 

  • In the "interesting but sort of unsurprising if you think about it" category, scenes of "justified" and "unjustified" violence in movies provoke completely different neural responses. (Annenberg Public Policy Center) 

  • If you haven't already seen and scrolled though the entirety of this deep sea explainer, set aside some time very soon. Also, I have questions for the thick-billed murre. AND THE EMPEROR PENGUIN, WHAT THE FUCK (The Deep Sea) 

  • Speaking of the sea, what are these mystery holes at the bottom of it? (Science Alert) 

  • Gentle electrical stimulation is a valid medical technology with a lot of applications, but getting the electricity into the body is a problem: electrodes have to be stabbed or invasively implanted into their target areas, which involves a lot of cutting and slicing that nobody wants. Injectable liquid electrodes that harden into stretchy, conductive tendrils have just been invented, which solve that problem handily. Let's check back in a couple years once they've been tested on people, though. (IEEE Spectrum) 

  • Making existing neighborhoods slightly denser would solve the housing crisis without triggering an apocalypse. (Curbed) 

  • There's a startup trying to actively work out the various kinks of microdosing, which I know in theory is a good thing to attempt, but I can't help but feel it's slightly ridiculous, too? (Fast Company) 

  • Oh thank fuck, someone's actually designed a space junk removal mission ........... for five years from now. But still. Still!! (Science Alert) 

  • I'm having trouble wrapping my head around this one for some reason (the reason might be that the writing isn't as precise as it needs to be): DNA is a high-density information storage medium, yes. But how do you ........ embed it into glass beads? without destroying it? because glass? [makes a "furnace" motion while gesturing toward non-fireproof nucleic acids] The 100-bit "barcode" thing also doesn't make sense if they're storing a lot of information? Anyway, this story's about storing data inside the fabric of everyday objects themselves using glass beads that somehow magically contain DNA, which is cool if real, but someone fell down hard on the explanation end. (ETH Zurich) 

  • Scientists figured out where that shoal of pumice that's slowly approaching the Great Barrier Reef came from! (Geomar) 

  • Conscious consumerism is stumbling; here's why, maybe? (Fast Company) 

A Fictional Thing

Something made-up that somehow suggested itself to me and which I could not escape.A band and their albumLiving Snake Tattoo, The Problems are Real Though Their Causes are Not 

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.