Some Tips on How to Spot Falsehoods

It's getting harder to spot falsehoods and disinformation online. That's not just true for election news but in culture war areas like climate change or vaccine safety.

I've been following a few people who write often on this topic; one of them is Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist, who publishes a newsletter called Your Local Epidemiologist. I highly recommend it; she covers a wide range of medical topics, often interviewing other experts in the field.

Today's newsletter is titled "9 ways to spot falsehoods" and is well worth the time to read. Here are the first three tips.

1. Basic sniff test. If vaccines are causing hundreds of thousands of deaths, wouldn’t we have overwhelmed morgues? If election workers were unloading trash cans full of ballots they forged at an election center, would they dump them out in front of a security camera? More often than not, these allegations don’t pass a basic sniff test. Pause and think before you share.
2. Follow the money. Most people don’t just spread lies for fun. They are doing it for one of two reasons: 1) political motivation, or 2) making a profit. If someone has created a movie that “proves” election fraud happened, but you have to pay $19 to view it, red flags should be going up everywhere. If a podcast talks about the benefits of supplements but then sells those same supplements thereafter, you should consider whether those two things are linked.
3. Ask follow-up questions. If someone makes a bold claim online, ask them to explain it. They’ll often respond with statements like “Democrats are stealing the 2024 election. We all know it.” Or “hydroxychloroquine obviously stops Covid-19 infections.” Ask them how they know it. Once you do, you’ll have evidence to analyze.

Featured Links - October 28, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A burning bush in full flame

•  ‘Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump. "Enthusiasm can be a productive force for good, but our culture has rapidly become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in."
  
• Political Polarization and Health. "In addition to social determinants of health, such as economic resources, education, access to care and various environmental factors, there is growing evidence that political polarization poses a substantial risk to individual and collective well-being."
• Inside the Bungled Bird Flu Response, Where Profits Collide With Public Health. "When dairy cows in Texas began falling ill with H5N1, alarmed veterinarians expected a fierce response to contain an outbreak with pandemic-sparking potential. Then politics—and, critics say, a key agency’s mandate to protect dairy-industry revenues—intervened."
• Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act. "The limitations on Trump deploying the military in terrifying ways are almost non-existent."
• A Priceless Business Leadership Lesson From The Grateful Dead. "Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead’s singularly iconic and beloved bassist, died last week at age 84. He was a beautiful musician, a wonderful man, a sweet soul. He also – through his identifiably unique approach to his instrument and how it becomes so integral to the band’s creative development – exemplified more than just music. And the lessons we learned from him – and the boys – are more applicable to business than ever before. "
• How a conspiracy-fueled group got a foothold in this hurricane-battered town. "Over the course of 11 days, a supermarket parking lot became a snapshot of the chaos that can unfold in some corners of post-disaster America." I hope this isn't a preview of coming chaos, but I am afraid it might be.
• How Google is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers – And Why. "A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of caffeinated inspiration/despair, I sat down and wrote a long Facebook post as to why we were ditching Google and switching to DuckDuckGo. Today I want to dive even deeper into this topic, and give you a first-hand account of how Google is killing hundreds of thousands of blogs and small publishers. And maybe give you some insight as to why they are doing so."
• Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan. "Born poor in colonial India and dead at 32, Ramanujan had fantastical, out-of-nowhere visions that continue to shape the field today."

Photo of the Week - October 27, 2024

It's autumn and the summer flowers and plants are dying off. This picture is from our backyard flower garden. It's a bit sad, but still quite beautiful. I took this with my Pixel 8 Pro and boosted the colours a bit in Google Photos. 

Autumn Colours

Saturday Sounds - Phil Lesh and Friends - April 1999 - The Warfield, San Francisco, CA

Sad news yesterday. Phil Lesh, founding member and bassist for the Grateful Dead, has died at the age of 84. I saw the Dead eight times but never managed to catch Lesh in any of his post-Dead bands, generally known as Phil and Friends. 

So this week's musical treat consists of three Phil and Friends shows from April 1999 at the Warfield in San Francisco. This version consists of Lesh on bass, Steve Kimock and Trey Anastasio on guitars, Page McConnell on keyboards, and John Molo on drums. Donna Jean Godchaux also sings on some of the songs..

Phil and Friends had many versions, but this is one of the earlier ones and my favourite of all of them. The setlists include Grateful Dead standards, songs by Phish, and a few judiciously chosen convers. The shows were professionally recorded on multitrack tape with the intention of releasing a live album, but that never happened. The recordings soon made their way into the wild and have been widely circulated. The sound is perfect, the video less so (at least by modern standards), but still watchable.

So sit back, light a fat one in Phil's memory, and enjoy.

Phil and Friends - The Warfield - April 15, 1999

Phil and Friends - The Warfield - April 16, 1999

Phil and Friends - The Warfield - April 17, 1999

Happy Birthday, Core Dump

Happy birthday, Core Dump. I started this blog 21 years ago today. It was originally on Google's Blogger platform, but I moved it to a self-hosted WordPress blog around 2010, then back to Blogger in 2018. 

I'm still at it, though I sometimes wonder why. I'm not posting as much as I used to and readership (assuming I can trust Google's stats) is way down, but it satisfies my creative itch. And it is a useful resource; I often find myself looking up old posts for reference.

At some point, I will probably have to shutter the WordPress site. If I can figure out how, I would like to have a local copy available for reference on my PC. For now though, I'm keeping it going; at least until Google kills of Blogger. 

Internet Life

Science fiction author Peter Watts has written an interesting blog post about the possibility life emerging spontaneously inside the internet. That's not a new idea; SF authors have been exploring the idea for years (Skynet in The Terminator series, Robert J. Sawyers WWW trilogy are just two examples), but now AI researchers are looking at how it might actually happen. 

Now Blaise Agüera y Arcas and his buddies at Google have rubbed our faces in our own lack of vision. Starting with a programming language called (I kid you not) Brainfuck, they built a digital “primordial soup” of random bytes, ran it under various platforms, and, well…read the money shot for yourself, straight from the (non-peer-reviewed) ArXiv preprint “Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction”[1]:

“when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. … increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators.”

Apparently, self-replicators don’t even need random mutation to evolve. The code’s own self-modification is enough to do the trick. Furthermore, while

“…there is no explicit fitness function that drives complexification or self-replicators to arise. Nevertheless, complex dynamics happen due to the implicit competition for scarce resources (space, execution time, and sometimes energy).”

Watts summarizes the research in (relatively) non-technical detail. It's fascinating and more than a little bit scary. After reading the post, do check out his novel, Maelstrom, cited in the post, in which he explored some of the implications 15 years ago. 

2024 World Fantasy Award Winners

The winners of the 2024 World Fantasy Awards were announced at the World Fantasy Convention in Niagara Falls, NY last weekend. These are the winners for fiction.

• NOVEL: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due (Saga Press/Titan UK)
• NOVELLA: “Half the House Is Haunted” by Josh Malerman (Spin a Black Yarn)
• SHORT FICTION: “Silk and Cotton and Linen and Blood” by Nghi Vo (New Suns 2)
• ANTHOLOGY: The Book of Witches edited by Jonathan Strahan (Harper Voyager US/Harper Voyager UK)
• COLLECTION: No One Will Come Back for Us and Other Stories by Premee Mohamed (Undertow Publications)

Featured Links - October 21, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A setting harvest moon

• In an era when the natural world collides with the human, we must get to a truer vision of what life means on this planet (gift link). An opinion piece by Jeff VanderMeer, the Florida-based author of more than a dozen novels, the most recent of which is Absolution.
• Complete Planetary Destruction Is Not as Easy as It Seems. "Humans are very bad at taking care of the planet, but the Earth has survived bigger threats than us..." Earth will abide, but will humans?
• Technical Chernobyl animation shows how an RBMK reactor explodes. "Higgsino physics published a straightforward (if not exactly simple) animation showing what went wrong at Chernobyl. It's like a physics equivalent to those 'every day from your favorite war' animations showing the front lines advance and retreat across continents. Except this war happened in a big metal bucket in Pripyat. Turn on closed captions, but not until you have absorbed the legend at the bottom."
• Respiratory viruses: Wastewater monitoring dashboard. "This dashboard provides data about respiratory virus levels, including SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), influenza (flu) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in wastewater (sewage) in Canada." 
• Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. "Typst is similar in spirit and aims to LaTeX: it’s a typesetting tool that can be used to write and generate documents, usually PDF files. It intends to be used in academic/scientific environments, much like LaTeX is nowadays."
• Walport ahoy! "White smoke over the Health Canada rooftops. But Dr. Naylor has questions." Per Greg Wilson on my Mastodon feed: "The Walport Report on Canada's (mis)handling of the COVID pandemic has finally been released - on the Friday before Thanksgiving weekend, with no official announcement." 
• World Concert Hall ... Every Online Concert in This World. A site that streams online classical music concerts. 

Photo of the Week - October 20, 2024

There was a comet in the sky this week and Nancy and I tried to view it on a couple of evenings without much success. It showed up very faintly in one picture that Nancy took but I couldn't find it either with the naked eye or in any of my photos. This picture is of the view over Frenchman's Bay. There may be a comet in there somewhere but I can't see it. Nonetheless, it's a pretty shot. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

Frenchman's Bay after sunset

 

Saturday Sounds - The Tragically Hip - Fully Completely

In this week's musical treat I want to revisit The Tragically Hip. A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the wonderful documentary, No Dress Rehearsal, which chronicles their career. This week, it's the deluxe release of Fully Completely, which has some of their best songs. 

The original album came out in 1992 and was rereleased in 2014, just a couple of years before their final tour. It features several songs, "Courage (For Hugh MacLennan)", "At the Hundredth Meridian", "Fully Completely", "Fifty Mission Cap", and "Wheat Kings", that became anthems in their concerts and burned themselves into the brains of a generation of Canadians. The rerelease also includes live versions of most of the songs. Enjoy.

More About Disinformation

It's time to publish links to several articles about misinformation and disinformation. I don't know if it's just that there's more of it or people are paying more attention to it. As you might expect, most of the articles are about politics and not just the US election as Canada gets in there too. 

Halloween decorations

• The Russians had money. The Canadian had far-right influencers. The U.S. Department of Justice says it has a criminal case. "A U.S. indictment alleges that two Russians helped funnel millions of dollars into a media company in order to spread misinformation that would benefit Moscow."
• From the Storm to the Stormtroopers. "Today, our American fascists blame the hurricanes on the meteorologists and disrupt the government response.  Tomorrow they will blame climate change on the climate scientists and deport their enemies of choice.  And the day after tomorrow there will be no democracy and no country, just a politics of impotence and a fascist catastrophe."
• The Climate Clowns. "An outrageous new lie is being spread about hurricanes, and I can’t even." I don't know which is scarier: that a politician would have the nerve to spout garbage like that, or that people are stupid enough to believe them.
• A Disinformation Trial Run. "The conspiracies and false claims surrounding hurricane relief efforts carry an important silver lining." About the only positive side to the flood of disinformation is that the media seem to be catching on to the nonsense.
• The Media Is Finally Calling Trump Out. But Is It Too Late? "The double standard Kamala Harris is being held to by the media is mind numbing."
• A fringe party packed with conspiracy theorists could soon be leading one of Canada’s largest provinces. Here’s why I’m not surprised. "British Columbia’s provincial election is getting extremely weird, and it might be a sign something’s deeply broken in Canadian democracy. The Conservative Party of B.C. — led by a man who had to issue a mea culpa after discussing the idea of prosecuting doctors in “Nuremberg”-style COVID-19 trials — has been surging in the polls. The party now looks set to make significant gains or perhaps even replace the incumbent B.C. NDP."
• Weaponized Polling Is More Dangerous Than Ever. "Right-leaning outfits are skewing the polls for Trump for quite sinister reasons."
• What Keeps Latino Voting-Rights Activists Up at Night? Disinformation (gift link). Activists say the nefarious material is more widespread, sophisticated and complex than ever.

Featured Links - October 15, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The moon over Frenchman's Bay

• Jim’s Toolbox — So many nifty tools in one collection. A simple utility that provides a front-end to many Windows' settings and features in one place Easier and faster to use than digging through the Windows 11 interface. 
• Mossad’s pager operation: Inside Israel’s penetration of Hezbollah (gift link). "New details emerge of Israel’s elaborate plan to sabotage Hezbollah  communications devices to kill or maim thousands of its operatives."
• Conceptual models of space colonization. From SFF author Charlie Stross: "And what I'm nibbling on is, to paraphrase Oliver Cromwell, the big question of what if all our models or paradigms for how to structure a colony effort are wrong?"
• The Wilderness Hidden in the Heart of Toronto (gift link). "A sprawling network of ravines threaded through Canada’s largest city offers urban explorers an oasis of birdsong, burbling creeks and whispering trees." The ravine system really is a natural wonder and extends out of Toronto; see the Rouge River system to the east which is a national urban park.
• One of the busiest emergency departments in Ontario also has some of the shortest wait times. "On a tour this week, Peter Voros, Humber River’s vice-president of clinical programs, showed off how the command centre and its staff keep patients flowing. One of the big-screen TVs displayed how long patients had been sitting in the ER’s “O-zone,” where patients wait if they are expected to be examined and sent home. Experienced nurses known as clinical expediters monitor the screens and intervene if a patient waits longer than the targeted time for their health complaint."
• Missing immune cells may explain why COVID-19 vaccine protection quickly wanes. "New insights on what stimulates long-lived antibody production could spur better vaccines."
• Amazon is filled with garbage ebooks. Here’s how they get made. "It’s partly AI, partly a get-rich-quick scheme, and entirely bad for confused consumers."
• COVID-19 raises the stakes for heart attacks, strokes, and even death long after infection, new study finds. "The study, involving nearly a quarter-million adults, found that those with any type of COVID-19 infection in 2020 had twice the risk of suffering a major cardiac event—a heart attack, stroke, or even death—in the three years after a diagnosis than those who weren’t infected. People whose infections were severe enough to warrant hospitalization faced nearly a four times greater risk of a major cardiac event or death than the uninfected group."
• 'It went horribly wrong': DNA analysis sheds light on lost Arctic expedition's grisly end. "By comparing DNA from the bones with a sample from a living relative, the new research revealed the skeletal remains belonged to James Fitzjames, captain of the HMS Erebus. The Royal Navy vessel and its sister ship, the HMS Terror, had been under the command of Sir John Franklin, who led the voyage to explore unnavigated areas of the Northwest Passage. The treacherous shortcut across the top of North America meanders through the islands of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago."
• The politically incorrect guide to saving NASA’s floundering Artemis Program. "To get somewhere, Artemis must avoid going nowhere."

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving

It's Thanksgiving weekend up here in the Great White North. We're not quite white yet, but nights are getting down to the freezing point so it won't be long. I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. Regular posts will resume on Tuesday. In the meantime, enjoy these fall flowers.

Fall flowers

 

A Journey Across a Divided America

There's always been division and polarization in US politics, but I'm not sure if there's been a time since the Civil War when the country has been so evenly divided. Most of the coverage of current politics seems to focus on the politicians and the "chattering classes", but not what's going on in the lives of average Americans.

Recently, author and journalist Ian Brown spent two weeks riding a Greyhound bus across the US from Los Angeles to New York followed by Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Barbara Davidson. He writes about the trip and the people he encountered in this long article in the Globe and Mail. 

“On a plane, you have first-class and economy,” a rider would say to me on the first day of the trip. “On a bus, you have no idea who’s on there with you.”

The bus is also the last truly democratic way to get from here to there, at a time when a critical slice of Americans can’t decide which road to take. There were 168 million registered American voters in the last presidential election. Polls suggest they are deadlocked between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The election will be decided by an estimated three million undecided voters in swing states – among them Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all places I plan to debus for a glance around before I reach New York City. (Georgia and North Carolina are also swing states, but I have only two weeks, so they’re off the itinerary.)

All of which is to explain why, on a Saturday in late summer, I was standing in the doorway of a four-person tent pitched on a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles’s Skid Row, a short walk from my hotel and the nearby Greyhound station.

It's a brilliant, sharp piece of writing coupled with memorable photos and I strongly encourage you to take the time to read it. (It's a gift link from my subscription, so no paywall. Articles like this are why I subscribe to the Globe and a few other newspapers). 

Featured Links - October 7, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

The Scarborough bluffs

• Prime's enshittified advertising. "Prime's gonna add more ads. They brought in ads in January, and people didn't cancel their Prime subscriptions, so Amazon figures that they can make Prime even worse and make more money." From Cory Doctorow. 
• ‘Everything is dead’: Ukraine rushes to stem ecocide after river poisoning. "Russia is suspected of deliberately leaking chemical waste into a river, with deadly consequences for wildlife."
• Escalating contest over South China Sea disrupts international cable system (gift link). "China’s effort to dominate the disputed waterway is taking a toll on the network of underwater cables that provide essential internet connectivity in Asia."
• College students used Meta’s smart glasses to dox people in real time. "The demo highlights the dark side of AR glasses."
• Mark Shapiro doesn’t even talk a good game. "The Blue Jays are a disaster. And the boss has to go (gift link)." As usual, Rosie DiMano doesn't pull any punches.
• License Plate Readers Are Creating a US-Wide Database of More Than Just Cars. "From Trump campaign signs to Planned Parenthood bumper stickers, license plate readers around the US are creating searchable databases that reveal Americans’ political leanings and more."
• The 1912 War On Fake Photos. "Concern about deceptively edited photos feels like a very modern anxiety, yet a century ago similar worries were being litigated."
• Enough, already: why humanity must get on board with the concept of ‘sufficiency’. "It’s a policy approach gaining momentum around the world. It aims to avoid demand for energy, materials, land and water, and ensure wellbeing for all humans, while staying within planetary boundaries."

Photo of the Week - October 6, 2024

It's fall, which means time to harvest. We have a garden in the backyard and this year planted tomatoes, zucchini, squash, beets, cucumbers, peppers, and garlic. Most of the flowering/climbing plants were a disaster. The tomato plants didn't produce and the cucumbers and beets got eaten (despite having chicken wire fencing around the garden). We did get a couple of small peppers and squash and a few zucchini.. 

The garlic, which we planted last fall, and the potatoes turned out well. (The potatoes were in planters). 

The last crop wasn't strictly a garden crop. We've had Jerusalem artichokes growing along the fences for several years and have harvested them before. You can mash them just like potatoes. This year we got a bumper crop.

I roasted some for supper, following this recipe, and they were delicious.

This week's photo is in honour of our final harvest. It wasn't such a bad year after all.

Jerusalem artichokes

Saturday Sounds - Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band - 2024/09/22 - Fallsview Casino, Niagara Falls, ON

This week's musical treat is a concert that I wish I could have been at: Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band at the Fallsview Casino in Niagara Falls Ontario on Septermber 22nd.  Ringo has played in the area several times over the years, often kicking off his tours at Fallsview or Casino Rama, but I've never managed to get to one. 

Per Wikipedia, the current lineup of the band is:

• Ringo Starr – vocals, drums, piano (1989–present)[5]
• Colin Hay – guitar, harmonica, vocals (2003, 2008, 2018–present)[6]
• Hamish Stuart – bass, guitar, vocals (2006–2008, 2019–present)
• Buck Johnson (musician) – Keyboards, guitar, vocals (2024–present)
• Gregg Bissonette – drums, percussion, trumpet, backing vocals (2008–present)
• Steve Lukather – guitars, bass, vocals (2012–present)
• Warren Ham – saxophone, percussion, keyboards, harmonica, vocals (2014–present) 

As is typical for his shows, the songs include some classic rock numbers, songs from Ringo's post-Beatles career, and a few Beatles hits. The concert video is a fan production with stable video and decent sound. I hope I'm in as good shape at 84 as Ringo is now. Enjoy.

The Last Dangerous Visions Is Finally Published

The Last Dangerous Visions is probably the most famous book that (almost) never was. The third in a series of legendary anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison was supposed to be published in 1974, but the publication date kept slipping, Ellison died in 2018 and the anthology has finally been published thanks to the efforts of Ellison's friend and literary executor, J. Michael Straczynski (the creator of Babylon 5, among many other things). 

I can still remember the impact that reading Dangerous Visions had on me as a teenager and I'm certainly not alone in that. It's unlikely that The Last Dangerous Visions will have the same impact, but it's still an important book and deserves ntoice. In Rolling Stone, Jason Sheehan writes about the book's history and why it still matters. (archive.ph link)

That original Dangerous Visions was legendary. It featured new writers alongside famous ones (a collaborative model more or less unheard of at the time), took on topics like race and god and war and freaky space sex. It celebrated the New Wave movement in science fiction that would go on to invent the future we’re living in today, and stuck sparklers and road flares in it so no one could possibly claim they didn’t see it coming. The book was kinked to the frequency of chaos and revolution at a time when mainstream writers were afraid to speak truth to power lest it upset their ability to eat, and publishers were afraid to take chances on new voices. And since we find ourselves again in a similar moment, it’s only fitting that this final installment of Harlan’s anthology comes to the table with the same kind of blood on its teeth.

So here, now, in this cursed year, at history’s dumbest inflection point, we have the capstone to Harlan’s 50-year project. The Last Dangerous Visions gives us Stephen Robinett doing a school kid’s “What I Did Over The Summer” essay on the nightmare warehousing of the elderly and Max Brooks’s epistolary document on the asymetric warfare of hunger and panic. There’s stochastic, structural weirdness from John Morressy; a short, sharp wake-up call from all the things we refuse to see by David Brin; Cory Doctorow on forgiveness and robots; and Cecil Castellucci’s tale of a galactic food critic arriving at a terrible conclusion about how one might come to truly appreciate a culture through their food. With TLDV, Joe followed the model originally established by Harlan — new voices right next to the established ones, young outlaws and old masters together. From the universe of stories that Harlan selected for inclusion in TLDV (in all of its various iterations), Joe kept 24, plus a four-page introduction to Ed Bryant’s trippy “War Stories” written by Harlan himself and never before published. He then added seven more stories, newly commissioned for this publication — including “Binary System” by Kayo Hartenbaum which is about isolation, the loss of definition in the absence of societal constructs, and the conditional immortality of being useful to capitalism. It’s the first story that Kayo ever sold, and that, too, is in keeping with Harlan’s model because, 50 years ago, Harlan bought a story about torture and resistance called “Leveled Best” from a then-19-year-old unpublished writer named Steve Herbst that was supposed to be included in the original, non-existent 1974 edition. Joe included that one in TLDV, too.

Movie and TV Reviews - September 2024

Movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in September. I do these posts mainly so I can keep track of what we've been watching, so the reviews are cursory. 

Movies

• Pink Floyd: Reflections and Echoes. A documentary covering the career of Pink Floyd. The parts about the beginnings of the band and Syd Barret were interesting but the rest of it was rather superficial. It really needed to be at least twice as long. (YouTube)
• The Space Shuttle that Feel to Earth: This is an excellent 3-part documentary about the demise of the Space Shuttle Columbia and her crew of seven in 2003. I've read a couple of books about it and seen other documentaries, but this covered more ground and had more interviews with people involved than anything else about the Columbia that I've seen. (BBC)
• The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal.  A four-part documentary and wonderful tribute about Canada's favourite band. See my post from last Saturday for more about it.
• Wolfs: I expected a little bit more from this. There were good moments but it never quite came together. It gets a solid B with A+ for cinematography that might be difficult to watch if you don't have a good TV as it is entirely shot at night and indoors. (Apple TV+)

TV Shows

• Monsieur Spade: This imagines that Sam Spade ended up living in post-war France, but of course he couldn't really retire. I thought this was going to be a light romp, but it has a dark side. (Acorn TV)
• The Capture (season 2): A British police procedural/political thriller in which deepfake technology plays a key role. You won't want to stop watching. I liked the first season and this was even better.  (Amazon Prime)
• Rings of Power (season 2): Given how much money Amazon is rumoured to have spent on this, I can't believe how bad it is. Watch for the eye candy only. Tolkien must be spinning in his grave. 
• The Moonflower Murders: This is really a sequel to The Magpie Murders. It's light entertainment with a somewhat more complicated plot than usual for this kind of show. (PBS)
• The Steeltown Murders: Another British police procedural, this one about a small team of officers working to solve a 30-year-old cold case in Wales. Very well written and acted. It started out a bit slow, but had us hooked by after the first couple of episodes. (Acorn TV)
• Outer Range (season 2): This show is like a cross between Yellowstone and Lost. At least some of the time travel elements are becoming clearer in the second season. (Amazon Prime)