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Lords:
Topics:
- 1:58 The unreliable narrator in songwriting and/or songs where the POV character is a jerk
- 15:20 No one should live in this city (whatever city you're in edition)
- http://myxo.css.msu.edu/
- 38:51 Toddlers have incredible memories and if you put something somewhere once because you were lazy they'll remember it goes there forever
- 43:20 Kaz asks: You guys talked about simulating people's voices, and I'd like to point out that there's been a lot of progress in this area. Take a look here for some examples: https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/speaker_adaptation
- 55:48 ANTS
- 1:03:39 Pokemon Stay (the opposite of Pokemon Go): what's happening to outdoorsy AR games these days.
Microtopics:
- Staying inside and definitely being totally sane.
- Being on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack but not being Seepage.
- Driving people away from you and writing songs about how they're gone.
- Betraying the concept of music by putting it in advertising.
- Singing about the fish you're going to eat.
- Listening to music for a decade before realizing it's horrifying.
- Being deeply obsessed with an art form others explicitly disregard.
- An eight year old singing a pop song about sex.
- Assuming that a song written in the first person is autobiographical.
- Writing a song about cheating on your wife and everybody assuming you're endorsing it so you write a last verse that's like "/s"
- The last verse of "I Want Your Sex" being about how George Michael doesn't really want your sex.
- Putting together a choreographed dance routine to "I Want Your Sex" at summer camp.
- Whether Dad Jr. has anything to say about it.
- An angry crowd proclaiming that Jesus is a slut.
- The Robert Browning poem where he evidently thought "twat" is an item of nun's clothing and rhymes with "bat."
- Describing the white whale as obsidian and ebony because you don't have the internet and can't look up what obsidian means.
- A beautiful desert with amazing food where you have scorpions in your house.
- A microwasp stinging your hand leaving a patch of cell death that lasts for almost a year.
- The dirt being impossible to dig in so there are no storm drains and when the monsoon comes the water rises up to your windshield.
- The front door's doorknob being too hot to touch in the summer.
- The process of getting into a car when it's 118 degrees outside.
- Sedona being much more livable than most of Arizona because it's in the mountains.
- Growing up in Oklahoma where it's incredibly hot during the day and cools down two degrees at night.
- Going tide pooling where there are dozens of species of snail that
- A subtropical jungle with stunningly beautiful coral reefs where all the wildlife is lethal.
- Going tide pooling where dozens of species of cone snails are extremely interested in your death.
- A fish that looks like a rock in a stream that will kill you if you step on it.
- Encountering a dozen lethally venomous animals every time you go to the beach.
- Living in the Bay Area where we have programmers.
- Resenting programmers but getting along with them really well.
- Getting a tech job and having to practice your self-compassion.
- Repping the city in the world with the biggest economic disparity.
- The power company shutting your power off because they can't be bothered to keep the lines clear of trees.
- Discerning the different kinds of plants that are burning in a brushfire by smell.
- Being performatively off-put by brushfire smoke that smells different from brushfire smoke in your hometown.
- Cheese scarcity in Okinawa.
- Whether or not you're allowed to bring suitcases full of cheese into Japan.
- If Gandalf really liked cheese.
- The Scottish guy who sells cheese in Okinawa for $100 per kilogram.
- Long grain rice connoisseurs in Japan importing basmati from California.
- Being unable to export farming and food preparation processes because your are getting assistance from local microbiomes.
- Japanese laws restricting rice imports so they don't corrupt the local rice microbes, but they don't give a shit about the cheese.
- RNA sequencing the brine from a batch of pickles that turned out really well.
- Celebrating the 69,000th generation of your yeast culture by posting "nice" on Twitter.
- Toddlers learning a lesson far too well.
- Telling each other stories from the spreadsheet of all the ways machine learning has failed.
- Breaking land speed records by falling over really fast.
- Reassembling Barack Obama's audiobook into a story about a demigod with the head of a dog who recreates the world after the apocalypse.
- Reality now being more ridiculous than your satire from four years ago.
- Spending a lot of time trying to identify birds.
- The basis for discussion of whether something is something or isn't something else.
- Convincing the people with the money that your field of study will eventually help somebody some day.
- The growing sense in the world that maybe not all progress is good and maybe we should skip out on some knowledge.
- The number of lines of code it takes to destroy society.
- Doing science because there is a trust that some day someone will want to know your results.
- Wanting a place to have a conversation about anything other than Elon Musk's kids name.
- Starting a podcast and never talking about anything depressing.
- Trying to transplant your neighbor's leafcutter ants into your own yard because you are a field biologist who can't go outside.
- Being waylaid by ant stings because you are allergic to wasps.
- Ants biting you with their mandibles, but only to hang on so they can sting you like wasps because they're technically in the wasp family.
- Ants being around long after humans are gone.
- Filling an ant colony with lead because humans will get more value out of a model of an ant colony than the ants get out of being alive.
- Filling an ant colony with jello and having a tasty dessert.
- Ending up in an ant lab and doing ant things.
- Studying the effects of climate change on Pokemon.
- The exchange rate between Pokecoins and Bitcoins.
- Coordinating Pokemon Go raids on Nextdoor.
- Asking Pokemon Go players if they're registered to vote and they answer that they're doing a raid when that doesn't tell you whether or not they're registered to vote at all.
- Trying to avoid the Audubon society losers at the ornithology conference.
- Birds permitting you to identify them even though they could easily fly away.
