I was delighted to hear such a beautifully optimistic take on space exploration from Stacey Abrams’ in her interview with Kara Swisher on the Sway podcast.

After forty minutes of talking about voting rights and how to repair American democracy, Swisher took a hard left turn and asked, “Do you want to go in space?” Abrams’ response (hear it at the 43 minute mark or read the transcript) should be hung on the walls of NASA.

As if that wasn’t good enough, she went on to a completely earnest discussion of how Janeway is her favourite Star Trek captain.

I’ve always loved Star Trek: The Next Generation, but never had much time for the other flavours of Star Trek. Stacey Abrams may have convinced me to try out Voyager. How long could it take to catch up? There are only 172 episodes…

I heard a song near the end of episode 3 of season 2 of the show Search Party that stuck with me enough to look it up. It’s Circles by Prairie Empire. It reminds me a bit of the restrained guitar and vocals from The National. Recommended.

As for the show Search Party, I started watching on the recommendation from Jeff Cannata from the Slashfilmcast. For the first few episodes I just hated the characters, but I’ve been sucked in to their world. Such a bizarre show.

Just puttin’ a new video card in my gaming PC. No big deal.

I stumbled across this cover of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android by Ball Park Music. I have never heard of Ball Park Music before, but I was captivated by their surprisingly faithful cover.

Radiohead managed to make a few guitars, bass, and drums sound like nothing I’d ever heard before in Paranoid Android. Seeing it recreated in such an unassuming way makes me appreciate the original song even more.

Ball Park Music does a great job with the cover—particularly the vocals, but no one can recreate the sound of Johnny Greenwood on guitar.

I can remember listening to OK Computer when it first came out in 1997 and being annoyed by it on the first listen. It just sounded like a noise to me. After a few more listens it not only stopped sounding like noise, it turned out to be a collection of beautiful melodic pop songs.

Vaccination against COVID-19 is getting becoming more real and less of a vague hope as eligible family members and acquaintances are starting to get vaccinated.

This reminds me of a post I made in 2017: Selling the Flu Shot. My point at the time still holds up: If you want people to get a vaccine, don’t use photos of needles sticking in arms to promote it. No one likes seeing a needle sticking into an arm!

To their credit, the provincial government website doesn’t have any such photos on their pages about COVID-19 vaccination, but the CBC keeps using needle-in-arm photos in their coverage of the vaccine roll-out. Granted, it’s not the job of the CBC to sell the vaccine, but also, it’s up to all of us.

Oh, and don’t call it a “jab.”

The many variations of Mario Kart games have been among the most fun I’ve ever had playing video games.

One of the many mechanics that helps make the Mario Kart games great is how the game is designed to narrow the gap between stronger and weaker players. If you’re in first place, you get weaker power-ups. If you’re in last place, you get the best power-ups, including some that will help you catch up to the pack, and some that specifically target the leader.

The strongest example of this in Mario Kart is how racers in last place are often rewarded with the Blue Shell. This Blue Shell is a special power that when launched, skips over everyone until it knocks out the racer currently in the lead. Should that lucky last-placer end up in the lead, they’ll face the same danger.

Levelling the playing field doesn’t just improve the game for weaker players, it makes the game better for everyone. Since the object is to have fun and not just to win, even the best players benefit from the ways the game becomes more challenging for them.

Allow me a sharp change in direction.

Many of our problems stem from the gaps between the strong and weak, rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged. Closing these gap tends to improve things for everyone, including those who were starting at the top.

This isn’t a new concept in governance. This Mario Kart mechanic is used in social programs with tools like progressive taxation.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s surprisingly hopeful novel about catastrophic climate change, The Ministry for the Future, Robinson imagines a future in which wealth and income is capped at a multiple of the average. If you want to get paid more than ten times the average, you’ll have to drag everyone else up with you.

I would also like to see this gap-closing mechanic applied to social media. Imagine an algorithm that penalizes popularity and rewards obscurity with attention. You wouldn’t silence the popular. Rather, you would make the climb a bit harder for those with established audiences.

Such a system could make networks more welcoming, boosting new voices, while raising the level of difficulty for those with entrenched experience.

Let’s try tuning our systems to work against the seemingly innate gravity of wealth and fame. Perhaps this would help engineer an ecosystem of many moderate voices, rather that constellation of a few hyper-celebrities.

Update (April 15, 2021): Since make this post, I’ve learned that a researcher from Boston University, Andrew Bell, wrote an academic paper about using the Mario-Kart balance principles to help with environmental governance. Bell’s paper is also covered by Boston University’s research magazine.

I love this simple web tool that Joshua Tauberer built to show how an iceberg would float based on its shape: Iceberger.

All of the complexity is delightfully hidden under the surface. There’s no visual user-interface—you just draw. There’s no reset button, you just draw again. Lovely.

I was pleased to learn that Chris Murphy & Jay Ferguson from the band Sloan have a podcast for their record label, murderecords. The first episode features Chris & Jay speaking with Joel Plaskett about posthumously remixing and releasing songs from their mutual friend and musical collaborator, Matthew Grimson.

I hadn’t heard of Matthew Grimson, but hearing these three songwriters spend an hour talking about what Grimson’s music was to them struck me. It’s so easy to hear so much music now, that having a reason to listen more closely is a treasure.

A conversation like this managed to make me care about 25-year-old low-fi recordings from a mostly unknown songwriter. I’d love to hear more sincere and in-depth conversations like this around other recordings.

I was explaining to one of my kids what the Canadian Heritage Minutes were and it occurred to me: there could now be a Canadian Heritage Minute about how Canadian Heritage Minutes are part of our Canadian Heritage.

I enjoyed hearing my home province of Prince Edward Island make the list of other places one might like to live (even if only for two months of the year year) in episode 417 of the Accidental Tech Podcast (at around the 13m 30s point). Any other year, John Siracusa, we’d be glad to have you.