PEREGRINE PULP

GUY: So, you won the lottery and want to bring power to the world (or just your own city.) You read Our World in Data and find their work compelling. You and the folks in government want to go all-in on a public-private nuclear partnership; after all, nuclear is safe, clean, reliable, and cheap (in the long term). Oh and it’s sexy right now. That helps. Great. What existing reactor do you use as your model? What engineering and construction firms do you go with? How do you g

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 just a cursory survey reveals a pretty interesting life. Queen Victoria was born Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent (named after her godfather, Russian Tsar Alexander I ) on May 24th, 1819. Her father, as you would expect, was an Englishman, Edward, Duke of Kent, and her mother German, Princess Maria Louisa Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfald.

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 with the six-month-old and dad props up the three-year-old on the couch before quickly stepping away to find a drink. As soon as dad's back is turned the kid immediately hops over the back of the couch, down into the donut-hole of a void and crouching in concealment. Seconds later mom leans over with a look of horror on her face. Her son fou

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 drinking hot beverages. Conversation revolves around cars for some time before transitioning to sports. Eventually politics and the coming election are discussed. "They're going to elect that Bank of England guy." With near-empty cups, the eldest one starts talking about how "Of course the earth don't spin." Two of the men don't respond but

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 friends, he ran and grabbed his half deflated volleyball, raced over to me with it. He dropped the ball at my feet and then leapt back, full of wiggle and not looking at me at all but staring intensely at the ball. Of course I booted it, intending to send him on a run. To my surprise the old boy jumped and pulled it out of the air. He quickly pl

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...