PEREGRINE PULP

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

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