PEREGRINE PULP

We’ve never really known a lot about blue whales  ( Balaenoptera musculus ); yes, despite our long history near and on the sea, blue...

CONTEXT WHAT IS DOGE? Executive Order - ESTABLISHING AND IMPLEMENTING THE PRESIDENT’S "DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY " "DOGE Teams.  In consultation with USDS, each Agency Head shall establish within their respective Agencies a DOGE Team of at least four employees, which may include Special Government Employees" "Each DOGE Team will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney.  Agency Heads shall ensure that DOGE

After landing in Washington to start his second term, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency under a temporary contract government organization titled "United States DOGE Service" (a renaming of the United States Digital Service  created during the Obama administration.) Inaugurated through executive order , the stated purpose of this service is to eliminate excessive regulations, reduce wasteful and fraudulent federal spending, and modernize federal technolog

Much is being said about this US election and the folks coming to power. The only thing worth noting that I can spot, and something mostly ignored from what I can tell, is that many key Republicans and even lower level appointees are actually lifelong Democrats. Even their key supporters and consultants are not Conservatives but, by almost any metric, actually Liberals. Though I've seen and heard of some party flipping over the years, here and there, I don't think there has e

Nuclear power stations are like stars that shine all day long. We shall sow them all over the land. They are perfectly safe ! — Mikail Styrikovich in Ogonyok , 1980 The plants have safe and reliable controls that are protected from any breakdown with three safety lines. The odds of meltdown are one in 10,000 years. — Ukrainian energy minister in Soviet Life , 1986 I spent my mornings this week reading The Power of Nuclear: The rise, fall and return of our mightiest energy so

A 2021 study out of Denmark estimated the proportion of cases of schizophrenia associated with cannabis use in that country doubled in...

Previously, I’ve tried to understand the circumstances surrounding our local homeless and overdose catastrophes. And I’ve relayed my...

One famous finding from social psychology is that intergroup contact is the most highly effective tool for reducing prejudice. The more...

Maybe twenty years ago I was writing about the strangeness of finding myself labelled an ‘atheist’. To begin with, I argued that labelling others was a weird practice, and that gifting someone membership in a group that they themselves haven’t or wouldn’t was a mode of conduct we probably wanted to avoid. (No, I couldn't have imagined the era we were about to enter. And you can imagine my consternation.) But, if you still insisted, then it seemed to me like framing things in

A team of researchers from Conservation International conducted a survey in the heart of Peru during the summer of 2022. Their rapid assessment bulletin was just now published . In their report, Conservation International’s Rapid Assessment Program  team (a kind of biologist Special Forces unit, like the Green Berets but instead of suppressed rifles and thermal goggles they come carrying microscopes and PhDs in butterfly reproduction) revealed a remarkable diversity in Peru’s

I was perfectly happy to disregard the “drone” reports as media-induced mass panic. And then government officials began assuring the...

A paper was just quietly published showing several independent large language models, all the latest versions of the big ones from all...

The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) just published "Women and girls bear the brunt of conflicts..." In the thread that followed they described how, for example, "The escalating humanitarian crisis in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, continues to force thousands of people to flee, the vast majority of whom are women." With that they shared three other examples of terrible violence, really the worst kinds of things your imagination can conjure, experienced by p

I don’t even know how you would explain to future generations what has taken place over the last decade. So much context is needed just...

So what is this fluoride panic about? It’s certainly not about the existing evidence.

The Quinsam River, just outside Campbell River  on Vancouver Island, has just seen the highest pink salmon return in a decade . And this...

I’ve been writing for some time about the sudden and curious rejection of our age-old understanding that humans cause much, and in many...

According to the IUCN Red List , more than 45,000 species on Earth are currently threatened with extinction. Particularly threatened are...