PEREGRINE PULP

I've been hearing whisperings of this for about a decade. The first time I came across it in a form for public consumption was in a discussion on the Making Sense podcast with guest Peter Zeihan . Since then, more "dissidents" and "controversial" voices have been coming out of the woodwork, or been highlighted, spelling out the math in different places. Whether you take it as sensible demographics or outlandish conspiracy theory, a narrative growing in popularity says ther

You've likely heard about or experienced the problem of AI tools being overly agreeable and flattering. Researchers have finally taken a serious look at it. A team of researchers demonstrated not merely that most of popular, state-of-the-art AI models will reliably lie to you and flatter you, tell you you're right when you are in fact wrong. And they will do so when they know you're making a serious error or even harming someone else. Perhaps obviously, this is why users lo

Back in 2019 I wrote about bison. I noticed that the numbers and circumstances commonly offered relating to the historic abundance and eventual disappearance of this species, who at one time thrived across nearly the whole continent but were rapidly reduced to almost zero, made little sense. If you’ve never come across it, the usual version of events deviates little from what is found on the US National Park Service website: Bison herds in the western United States were so m

We were talking about big numbers. She was saying how it's wacky how we talk about millions, billions, and trillions almost interchangeably. I was agreeing and noting how if you ask folks to point to the place where they think a million would land on a linear plot from zero to a billion, they commonly point to a spot somewhere in the middle of the line, about half way between a billion and zero, and rather far from where you would actually find: it right at the start next to

Like many other people, I’ve tried to stay as far away from this story as possible and for all kinds of obvious reasons. Until now, the lack of publicly available information, the hyperabundance of existing investigation and reporting, the wild conspiracies and sensationalism surrounding every aspect, as well as the nature and sensitivity of the related material has made this story deeply uninteresting. And yet, it’s looking evermore clear that this story, or murky constellat

When I was studying Environmental Communication (it was maybe a 200-level course in undergrad, back in the 2000s) we talked about the great problem with climate change, from a communication standpoint, being that it was so slow moving and effectively invisible. And one of the remedies to that was seen as the adoption of the highly charismatic and imperiled polar bear as a symbol. Famous commercials , investigations, news articles , documentary films , and TV series highlighti

It was just one more shocking revelation exposing my total ignorance of history and human behaviour. But it seemed like too much of an aside at the time I was writing my last book, and I’d already taken so very many provocative tangents. So I made no mention of it. CHATHAM When I was writing my book about this town I went looking for some of the street names I knew nothing about. I used to live on Chatham Street but couldn’t recall coming across a Chatham in my readings. The