PEREGRINE PULP

I was just writing about a new study looking at the universality and problems with 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. The researcher was considering the persistent problem of large language models fabricating its own facts and pairing that with the reality that "the most common and critical applications of LLMs in the enterprise is answering que

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. 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

I take in a lot of food-related content. This week I was just watching a BBC documentary from 1957 about French peasants working as travelling salesmen across the Channel in the UK. Their wares? Onions. Men would leave their families in Roscoff , a commune in the Finistère département of Brittany, on the north end of the most westerly corner of Franc, and travel across to Portsmouth in ships carrying hundreds of tonnes of copper and rose Oignon de Roscoff . There they would

There’s been a lot of discussion about Greenland the last few weeks. Other than the Norse arriving there and going on to Canada a thousand years ago and Greenland’s melting ice sheets dumping tremendous volumes of fresh water into the North Atlantic and disrupting thermohaline convection , I know almost nothing about the world’s [second] largest island. (I don’t know why we pretend Australia is not an island…) My favourite story from my recent readings is about a hydrogen b

The Federal Court of Appeal confirms that the federal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act was unreasonable and ultra vires [beyond their legal authority], and that it infringed paragraph 2(b) and section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

I keep hearing folks in Europe and the United States dunking on wind power, claiming it has been a total failure, and offering this as strong evidence of the lie that always was alternative/renewable/green energy. Of course, in the current atmosphere, the alternative commonly presented is nuclear. Great. That gives us something relatively simple to compare to see if there's any truth to that. The most recent nuclear reactors built in the US were Units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle El

Probably the biggest and most lasting news story of 2025, even here in Canada, was the pending total economic collapse of the US and, as a result, likely that of the world. US consumer spending and GDP was supposed to crater. The imposition of tariffs and general Trumpist chaos was going to further worsen global trade and result, at the very least, in a global trade war — but perhaps translate into a world war — by the end of 2025. These were the predictions of the moderate p

John W. Trinkaus (not to be confused with John P. Trinkaus, the embryologist) is a hero of mine. Born in 1925, Trinkaus served in the US Air Force during WWII, studied electrical engineering after the war, and then worked as an engineer for a few decades. With graduate degrees related to engineering and management, he eventually took up a professorship at a CUNY's Baruch College business school and would come to be a Professor Emeritus and the school's dean. Trinkaus also c

Because of light pollution, many birds around the globe sing almost an hour longer today than historically or those birds who reside in more remote areas. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adv9472 Hunted to near extinction, since the 1980s green sea turtles were listed as 'endangered.' Decades of sustained conservation has just resulted in their status being lifted to 'least concern'. https://www.popsci.com/environment/green-sea-turtles-not-endangered The volume of

Last summer I was writing about my continuing confusion around pandemic-related matters and my feeling that there remains a serious lack of dialogue around any of it. No one liked that. So, let’s try this again. A TIMELINE - 2020 - January 22 - The WHO convened an emergency meeting about an outbreak of a novel coronavirus called 2019-nCoV. The committee could not reach consensus on declaring a global emergency. January 25 - Ontario confirmed Canada’s first case. British Co