PEREGRINE PULP

I'm constantly contacting encyclopedias and other educational sources and their authors after discovering them publishing wild errors. Constantly. And almost universally people confirm they do not care about their stated mission or the subject of their life's work and have nothing to say nor, thusly, of course, are they willing to rectify the situation. Finding that to be the case is, somehow, surprising every time. TO THOUGHT CO. - "A premier reference site with a 20+ year

Thank you for participating in the 2026 Census (and multiple choice citizenship test). The information you provide is not used to produce statistics. As such, nothing here can help communities, businesses, and governments plan services, develop programs, and make informed decisions about employment, schools, public transportation, hospitals or any other damn thing. Your answers are inherently confidential. And you can be sure Peregrine Pulp makes no use of existing sources of

WHAT ARE WE SEEING? I’m watching doctors, nurses, and epidemiologists, as well as science communicators and folks in the news business, offer flatly wrong, wildly misleading, or just seriously outdated information about hantavirus and the outbreak cluster they are struggling to contain. This is really the vast majority of all the medical professionals I can find, particularly those invited on the news. So many, certainly all serious professionals responding seriously, are not

When attempting to write about the city of Victoria I couldn’t help but delve into the history of the place. Doing so inevitably resulted in diving into who arrived here and from where they came, something far more messy and complicated than you might imagine. Then, far enough down the road into discussions of ships from Spain and Russia (with crews from Asia, Oceana, the Americas, and Africa) plying the west coast of North America, it seemed worth mentioning the history of t

All in the same week: The public learned that America's hatemongers were, for decades, being financially supported by the Southern Poverty Law Center. And they learned specifically that the white supremacy rally in Charlottesville (which resulted in dozens of injuries, three fatalities, and millions in damages) an event that looks like the cornerstone of the Democrat and their supporters' playbook for the last decade) was likely staged, or at least made possible and amplified

Imagine you’re driving in your truck with your nephew, towing a camper through California’s Los Padres National Forest in the hills between Bakersfield and the sea. You’re on amphetamines and been sipping whiskey as you drive (it’s 1965). Nearly to LA, you stop along the side of the road in the Sespe Creek Wilderness for some air. There you start a little fire to keep warm. The fire quickly gets away from you. (“Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”) It builds into a tremendous

There’s this local MD I like and whose research and publications I follow because of his good work on some issues I care about. Today he was curiously highlighting a new study about fluoride and noticing that there was never any serious question about its safety. I responded by asking for comment on evidence for the value of fluoridating the water supply to prevent tooth decay? The information I’ve been working with, and have written about at length in the past, comes from th

A couple of months ago I was noticing how it looked like both Republican candidates in the California governor race seemed far more popular than any of the legion of Democrats they were up against. The leading Democrat candidate to this point was a fellow who made a previous presidential run: Eric Swalwell. Swalwell, a former prosecutor and current Congressman for California, since 2013, was endorsed by Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Hakeem Jefferies, and 20 other members of cong

Researchers at Apple recently showed frontier AI models, the newer specialized variants explicitly designed for more complex reasoning tasks (from OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, Meta, Anthropic, etc) are unable to do basic math — and the way they demonstrated this would look devastating if I was someone arguing for the coming tech revolution and the utopia it promises to usher in. What the team did was use a set of grade-school math problems called GSM8K, a favoured AI math bench

Parasitism has to be one of the most interesting aspects of biology. You may have come across the better known fungal , worm , or single-celled protist parasites who control the minds of their host for their own purposes. Lesser known are the parasitoid wasps . But with them, if you don't know, you can mostly erase from your mind what you think of when you think of "wasp". Many of these are no bigger than a grain of sand and others are only about the size of a sesame seed. T

I don’t really want to discuss the current conflict in Iran. That’s being beaten to death by the uninformed and otherwise by those who’ve only ever failed to make any accurate predictions about any conflict in my lifetime. Alas. What has been entertaining, however, has been taking note of how contradictory the accounting seems, and from every vantage point on nearly every aspect: from what is happening and to whom, why, and what the inevitable outcome will be. Every bit of it

I was just checking in on the flooding in Hawai'i when I thought to look up how bad the last hurricane season was in the US. To my surprise, there were zero landfalls in the United States or its territories in 2025. Doesn't that seem weird? Well, what's actually strange is if you, like myself, thought that was unusual. Based on my total ignorance and misperceptions, I assumed this was a radical departure from the norm. Nope. Happens all the time. About one year in four sees

Dr Paul Ehrlich, the American biologist (an entomologist specializing in butterflies) and Stanford professor, just died at age 93. As expected, through social and traditional medias folks are all a twitter with condemnations and demonizations , most of which read to me as some kind of weird revisionist history. As we love doing, people look back with hindsight and proclaim the future was simple and obvious and, as a result, perfectly predictable. And to get there they preten

I was just writing about a new study looking at problems with and universality of AI sycophancy. Another similar study was posted last week to the Computer Science section of arXiv, looking at AI hallucinations. The results are just as staggering. With the persistent problem of large language models fabricating their own facts, the researcher was considering the reality that "the most common and critical applications of LLMs in the enterprise is answering questions grounded

People love bees. Most folks are particularly enamoured with those colony bees who gift us honey but who make up just 5% of bee species and tend to neglect the far more numerous solitary variety comprising the overwhelming majority of bee diversity . But how many bee species are there? Of course it is very difficult to estimate the number of unknown organisms. What we do know is that to date we've identified something like 2.1 million total species. And somewhere on the orde

In their ongoing attempt at self-immolation, the once-relevant press is at it again. WHAT HAPPENED On March 7th, aspiring killers (two young men, US citizens living at home with their parents in the leafy suburbs of Pennsylvania) deployed a pair of IEDs (containing materials that would have them designated as weapons of mass destruction) at a public gathering on the street in front of the home of the New York City mayor. The gathering was overwhelmingly attended not by protes

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. Some folks 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: they will do so when they know you're making a serious error or even with the knowledge that you are harming someone else. Perhaps obvio