PEREGRINE PULP

Other than the city of Victoria and a few other places being named after her, I realized I knew little more about Queen Victoria. Even...

Spain warming faster than rest of northern hemisphere: study - Apr 2010 https://phys.org/news/2010-04-spain-faster-rest-northern-hemisp...

My current favourite conservative meme is a video showing Joe Rogan proposing to his guest, "You have people like Bill Gates saying that ‘planting trees to deal with carbon is ridiculous, that’s a ridiculous way to do it…’ How is that ridiculous? They literally turn CO₂ into oxygen. It is their food." There’s so much to love about this, but we can just stick with the planting of trees and carbon offsetting and don’t need to get into the politics around Bill Gates or how ‘20s

Like many folks, I’ve been playing with artificial intelligence off and on. Initially, back in 2023, I was turned off by how half-baked all the models seemed, especially on the visual front, while being somewhat pleased with what I was seeing and hearing in the realm of text-to-speech. Sometime in the late '80s, my mother brought a Commodore from work to train on. The text-to-speech that system produced was not meaningfully improved upon, by my own assessment, until just rece

As the independent senator from Vermont goes on a tour of America, we've nearly reached full reversal. The same media who engaged in...

Can we talk about CBC’s Vote Compass ? I'd love to know if it's actually possible to assess someone’s political leanings or which party...

Though I've been following along, I haven’t written at length about Ukraine since the opening weeks of this most recent Russian invasion. At that time, in late Winter and early Spring of 2022, knowing almost nothing about the conflict or what precipitated it, I was studying the previous decade of local and regional history with a focus on politics and ethnic violence. Doing so, most annoyingly, I was finding plenty that contradicted what I was hearing in the popular press and

I was recently looking for some statistics on iatrogenesis . That's just a fancy term for the medical system screwing up and causing harm rather than preventing or relieving it. Think: hospital acquired infections, adverse drug reactions , medical errors, psychological damage ,  and the like. However, as so often happens, I couldn't find what I was looking for but accidentally stumbled upon this extremely interesting study  on the prevalence of ineffective medical treatments

PRIVACY At the airport. In a lounge between the gates and food court, a young British family alights on a circular couch. Mom is dealing...

I’ve been writing about this province's epidemic of overdose deaths and related themes for a while now. Just in recent times I’ve...

Nicholas Kristof — The New York Times Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. Elon Musk says that no one has died because he slashed humanitarian aid. I went to South Sudan to check if that's true. It's not. Within an hour of starting interviews, I had the names of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who had died because of decisions by wealthy men in Washington. The visit that moved me the most was to a remote area that used to have no health car

What’s the deal  with the measles? ( Offered in the tone and tempo of Jerry Seinfeld, of course. ) Measles outbreaks are taking up a lot of time and space, even here in Canada, in the traditional and new press. Along with that, I keep reading that RFK Jr, the new head of America’s Health and Human Services, is promoting things backward and upside down as preventatives or cures and generally making everything worse, as he's always so determined to do. So what do you suspect I

SPIN Four men, two probably in their 40s and two probably in their 50s or 60s, and a child of about seven or eight are sitting at a table...

OKAY I’m a fan of etymology and semantics and, really, everything to do with language; still, somehow I never gave much thought to the...

DOGBALL A camper was parked with a guy working on it. The man's dog spotted me coming from almost a block away and, like we were old...

The West Vancouver Streamkeeper Society  was established in 2001. Their objective is to restore and sustain local aquatic wildlife...

Somehow I missed obelisks . Well, I suppose everyone missed it — or them . Discovered in human gut and oral bacteria, researchers...

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

Ziggy : I don't know. Is it just me? Tolga : What? Ziggy : Seems all the same people we all watched dedicating the last decade of...

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...