Featured Links - November 25, 2025

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

Lifeguard station at Scarborough Bluffs

Reinventing the Subsistence Economy. "How Energy and Food Decoupling Rewrite the Map of Post-Growth Futures." An optimistic look at a possible future from Karl Schroeder.

The Terminator Future Has Arrived. "Gaza represents a future of warfare that will be repeated elsewhere as the algorithms are proving efficient, merciless and remorseless."

The Worst Part About Publishing a Book in 2025 Is The New Kind of Spam. Authors are getting buried in targetted AI-authored spam. 

Google’s New Gmail Upgrades—Why You Must Choose Carefully. Unless you live in the EU, Google may be opting you in to giving them access to your private data.

Russian Unreality and American Weakness. "Notes from a bizarre moment of diplomatic history." An absolutely devastating take down of the proposed "peace plan" to end the Ukranian war from historian Timothy Synder. 

Open the pod bay doors, HAL (Arguing with A.I.). A detailed post showing how AI can provide misleading results, with examples.

Bitcoin isn't anonymous — investigators can trace every transaction on the blockchain. Just in case you thought all those drug buys were safe. 

Photo of the Week - November 24, 2025

This week's photo is of a lifeguard station at the Scarborough Bluffs park. Of course, there were no life guards on duty this time of year. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

Lifeguard station at the Scarborough Bluffs

 

Saturday Sounds - Philip Glass and Tenzin Choegyal - Be the Sky

This week's musical treat is a new album from Philip Glass and Tenzin Chiegyal, Be the Sky. I've just listened to this and love it.

From Google: "Be The Sky" is a recent album collaboration between composer Philip Glass and Tibetan musician Tenzin Choegyal, released on November 14, 2025. The album is described as a collaboration born from their two-decade friendship, blending Glass's minimalist style with Tibetan musical traditions. It's a musical tribute to the Dalai Lama and serves as an offering of hope and spirituality.'

It's one of Glass' best works since Glassworks. Beautiful, ethereal, contemplative music for the soul. Enjoy. 

An Update on Our LG TV

Two years in on our LG C3 TV and I am finally starting to get comfortable with the native LG interface. We've been using either the Rogers apps or casting from the Chromecast. But the Rogers remote is a bit awkward to use and the Chromecast can be glitchy with some services (Disney+ in particular).

LG recently upgraded their WebOS and it's quite usable, although with my vision I occasionally have to get up to get closer to the TV. My main problem with it is that the remote is not backlit, a major omission for a TV that's likely to be used in a dim room. (It does have voice control, which I have yet to set up, but I will get to it).

There is also an app for Android that can be used in place of the remote and does finally seem to work the way it should. I had tried it when we first got the TV and found it had issues with the earlier version of WebOS.

Now I am in the process of getting the various apps for services that we use to work. More on that another time.

A Significant Anniversary

I saw my first Grateful Dead concert on this day in 1970. Five minutes into their set, I was a Deadhead for life. Apparently, only one audience tape has survived the perils of time; if the sound crew recorded the show, it's been lost. That's sad because the jam with Jorma Kaukonen of the Jefferson Airplane, who were playing at a different venue the same night, is worth a listen. (Jack Casady may also have played; my memory is fuzzy, though some reports suggest he did play).

From Rolling Stone: "Serendipitously, the Jefferson Airplane were playing the War Memorial in Rochester, New York, the same 1970 evening that the Dead were doing a college late-nighter. So after his band’s gig ended, Airplane guitar pilot Jorma Kaukonen headed over to campus to join the Dead for a hot take on the Bobby Womack-via-Rolling Stones nugget “It’s All Over Now,” some smoking blues jams (both country and Chicago-style) and a rocking rendition of the old folk standard “Darling Corey.” Sketchy sound on the surviving bootlegs, but fiery playing."

Featured Links - November 18, 2025

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

The Scarborough Bluffs

• Loeb’s 3I/ATLAS “Anomalies” Explained. It's weird, but not 'that' weird. (I would love to be proved wrong on this, but I'm not holding my breath).
• Review: Playing the Short Game. How to Market & Sell Short Fiction. Review by Geoff Hart, technical writer/editor and author. 
• We could have healthier, more affordable lives through renewables and electrification. "Vested interests are spending $billions to prevent this."
• A Chinese AI model taught itself basic physics — what discoveries could it make? "A tool called AI-Newton can derive scientific laws from raw data, but is some way from developing human-like reasoning."
• The Big Shift in Cardiology to Atheroma and Inflammation. 'One A.I. company's tag line: "Creating A World Without Heart Attacks"'. This ties in to the idea that COVID-19 is a hematological disease that just happens to have a respiratory component.
• Workplace Surveillance Is Here, Counting Your Mouse Clicks and Bathroom Breaks. "Remote employees are being tracked and punished by invisible systems. Some workers are refusing to play along."
• Inside Canada’s shadowy crypto banking system that makes it easy to facilitate ‘an unlimited amount of crime’ (gift link). "Reporters went undercover to expose a growing crypto-to-cash industry that is openly flouting anti-money laundering measures."

Photo of the Week - November 16, 2025

I took this week's photo at Bluffer's Park in Toronto earlier in the week, right around noon. For some reason, my normally reliable Pixel 8 completely botched the exposure, and the resulting picture was underexposed and had no contrast. So I started playing around with it in Google Photos and came up with the picture below. It looks nothing like the original, or the actual scene, but I rather like it. (I do wish I had been shooting RAW, though). 

The beach at Bluffer's Park in Scarborough

Saturday Sounds - Pearl Jam - 2025/05/18 - Pittsburg, PA

This week's musical treat is from Pearl Jam, a band I've enjoyed listening to for many years but have never managed to catch live. (I did see Eddie Vedder driving down Kingston Road in a classic car one night when they were in Toronto for a concert).

The concert is from Pittsburg, PA on May 25, 2025. Unfortunately, it's blocked from embedding, so you will have to watch it on YouTube. It's a fan-shot multicam video but the audio is a soundboard dub. Enjoy.

We're Toast 64

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. 

Winter is coming

The planet has entered a ‘new reality’ as it hits its first climate tipping point, landmark report finds. "As humans burn fossil fuels and ratchet up temperatures, it’s already driving more severe heat waves, floods, droughts, and wildfires."

The Caribbean has a super-hurricane problem. "Caribbean nations face an increasing threat from super hurricanes, which can cost a significant fraction of their GDP. Climate change is expected to make the strongest hurricanes stronger."

World’s oceans losing their greenness through global heating, study finds. "Researchers say decline in phytoplankton suggests weakened planetary capacity to absorb carbon dioxide."

They were drilling off Oregon. What they found could shake all of California. "Scientists have uncovered evidence that megaquakes in the Pacific Northwest might trigger California’s San Andreas Fault. A research ship’s navigational error revealed paired sediment layers showing both fault systems moved together in the past. This finding hints that the next “Big One” could set off a devastating one-two seismic punch along the coast."

This Week in Space 185: Gutting Goddard. "Dismantling a NASA Center." The war on science continues. 

Vaccine Skepticism Comes for Pet Owners, Too. "Anti-vaccine sentiment is spilling over into veterinary medicine, making some owners hesitant to vaccinate their pets, even for fatal diseases like rabies." Rabies is fatal to humans too. To quote Jerry Pournelle: "Think of it as evolution in action."

The pandemic next time. "How President Donald Trump’s administration has undermined efforts to develop vaccines and drugs for the next viral scourge." People, perhaps millions of people, will die because of their stupidty. 

VLC Is Getting Dark Mode

I generally use VLC for media playback but it's been a struggle because it doesn't have dark mode, which with my vision problems is essential. Well, it does now if you download the latest nightly build, version 3.0.22. 

The current stable version seems to be 3.0.20, which the  Check for Updates option says is up to date. Version 4.0 is in development but I'm not going to try that one for now..

Instructions on downloading it are in this blog post by Gordon Glas. Note that Windows Defender will probably give you a warning about installing it, but considering it's coming from the developer's website, you can ignore that. 

Given that the build is still under development, it may not be stable, but so far I haven't noticed any major issues. The dark palette could use some tweaking for better contrast in places like the Help > About dialog and the playback buttons , but it's still far easier on the eyes than the previous version. 

Featured Links - November 11, 2025

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

Model of the Edmund Fitzgerald at the Shipwreck Museum in Michigan

A Ghost Fleet of Tankers Is Keeping Russia’s War Machine Afloat. The West Can’t Stop It. "How Putin outsmarted the oil sanctions."

Still Haunted by the Edmund Fitzgerald. "50th Anniversary Tribute". Seems appropriate that we are getting our first winter storm on Sunday. 

 Google Docs Gets Smarter. "Audio narration, AI help, and 40 new templates." Many of the new features require an AI-enabled plan, but there are some, like document tabs, that could be quite useful for longer documents.

The Florentine Diamond Resurfaces After 100 Years in Hiding. "A legendary jewel of the Hapsburg dynasty — not seen since 1919 and thought lost, stolen or recut — has actually been safe in a Canadian bank for decades." This is quite a story. 

‘Frankenstein’: How Close Is Guillermo del Toro’s Film to the Original Novel? A Mary Shelley Expert Answers Our Burning Questions. "So, just how well does del Toro’s version stack up against Mary Shelley’s original novel? We asked Julie Carlson, an English professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and an expert on the British Romantic period and the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley family, for her thoughts." I enjoyed the movie, though I did find it hard to watch in places (many very dark scenes). 

Find cancer clinical trials in Canada. "Helping people living with cancer and healthcare professionals navigate cancer trial options." It's good that Canadians have an alternative to looking in the US for information. 

New laser treatment could stop blindness before it starts. "A new laser treatment may halt dry macular degeneration by using controlled warmth to trigger the eye’s self-repair mechanisms." Of course, it will be years before this becomes widespread, assuming it works. 

I’m never going back to Microsoft Word after mastering this open-source self-hosted tool. "Enter HedgeDoc, the open-source web-based collaborative markdown editor that has changed my writing setup. By running it on my server, I achieved true data independence that Word could never offer." Ten or fifteen years ago, I would have jumped on this, but at this point in my life, I just can't be bothered.

Photo of the Week - November 9, 2025

Here's another fall photo, this of a neigbour's burning bush. I love the red colour. Taken with my Pixel 10 Pro. 

Red autumn leaves

 

Saturday Sounds - Julian Taylor - Live at TD Music Hall

This week's musical treat is a live album from the Julian Taylor Band. I posted here last November about Taylor's last solo album after we saw him perform in Greenbank. This live album, recorded at Toronto's TD Music Hall last year, features him performing with his band. The songs include material from his solo career and from his albums with his band. Enjoy. 

More on Disinformation 8

It's time for another post about disinformation and misinformation. I could probably do a post a day like this if I had the time and the stomach for it.  

Imagery faked with AI’s help only added to the awfulness of Hurricane Melissa. "A Category 5 landfall during Halloween week was scary enough on its own."

The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly. "We uncover footprints of activities connected to scientific fraud that extend beyond the production of fake papers to brokerage roles in a widespread network of editors and authors who cooperate to achieve the publication of scientific papers that escape traditional peer-review standards. Our analysis reveals insights into how such organizations are structured and how they operate."

Scientists slam Trump administration climate report as a ‘farce’ full of misinformation. "Experts say the report being used to justify the mass rollback of climate regulations has many claims based on long-debunked research."

Symbolic Strength More Important Than Facts When It Comes To Misinformation. "Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It’s one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that’s obviously wrong. Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider it a “win” to lean in to known falsehoods."

You did no fact checking, and I must scream. "Recently, the beloved actor Patricia Routledge died. Several newspapers reposted a piece of viral slop which I had debunked a month previously. Let's go through the piece and see just how easy it is to prove false."

MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying), Freedom, and the Lie That Canada “Kills Its Own”. "When a government program becomes a punching bag for MAGA/MAPLE MAGA Religious Cult led internet outrage, facts go missing. Let’s put them back."

Anti-vaccine myths surged on social media ahead of the CDC shooting. Before the shooting, social media companies relaxed their protocols around misinformation.

The Autism Epidemic That Never Was. "RFK Jr.'s scientific illiteracy has led the ignorant down a dangerous path."

How the Rapid Spread of Misinformation Pushed Oregon Lawmakers to Kill the State’s Wildfire Risk Map. "This is how misinformation gets accepted as fact."

A Sodom and Gomorrah Story Shows Scientific Facts Aren’t Settled by Public Opinion. "Claims that an asteroid or comet airburst destroyed the biblical Sodom captured the public’s imagination. Its retraction shows that scientific conclusions aren’t decided by majority rule in the public square."

Delusion by Design: How Conspiracy Groups And Bad Actors Are Engineering AI Platforms And Chatbots to Confirm Their Beliefs and Lies. "Chatbots and AI Models Trained on Junk Science are now Being Used to Radicalize, Recruit, and Mislead the Masses - and It's working."

Three quarters of Canadians say misinformation affected the federal election: poll. "The Leger poll, which sampled more than 1,500 Canadian adults from April 29 to May 1, suggests that 19 per cent of people think false information or misinformation had a major impact on the election."

Hot Air: the danger of climate misinformation. "Tortoise has identified more than 300 influencers who are spreading content about climate change that ranges from scepticism to misinformation. Claims made over the past three years on X, YouTube, TikTok and media sites have been compiled in a searchable database that shows how online untruths about climate are growing, changing shape and spreading."

2025 World Fantasy Awards

The 2025 World Fantasy Awards were presented last weekend at the World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, UK. The full list is available on File 770. These are the fiction winners.

•  Novel: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey/Hodderscape)
•  Novella: Yoke of Stars by R. B. Lemberg (Tachyon Publications)
•  Short Fiction:  “Raptor” by Maura McHugh (Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology)
• Anthology: Heartwood: A Mythago Wood Anthology, ed. Dan Coxon (Drugstore Indian Press)
• Collection: A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell (Hogarth/Granta Books)

Review - The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantary, Volumes 12 and 13

Over the last couple of years, I've been neglecting short fiction, which is odd considering that I was a frequent reader of science fiction magazines as a teen. (I used to dream about Analog and for a while I had an almost complete set of The Magzine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and a 30-year run of Astounding.Analog). So after finishing Ray Nayler's excellent The Mountain in the Sea, I decided to dive back into anthologies for a while. I;m going to start publishing short reviews as I finish them. 

For many years, the best annual anthologies were those edited by Gardner Dozois. Sadly. he passed away in 2018. so his last anthology was the 35th edition of The Year's Best Science Fiction, covering 2017. Since then, Jonathan Strahan and Neal Clarke, among others have edited series of year's best anthologies. 

In this post, I'm going to briefly discuss Jonathan Strahan's anthologies, The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, Volumes 12 and 13 covering the years 2017 and 2018.  These are hefty books: Volume 12 has 539 pages and 29 stories, Volume 13 has 30 stories and 494 pages. Both volumes include an introduction by Strahan and short biographies of each author.

For each book, I'm just going to list the stories that I bookmarked as being especially good with occasional annotations. I should note that I much prefer science fiction to fantasy, so I didn't read many of the fantasy stories (though I did start reading all of them). I bookmark the stories that I like and create a numerical score: stories I liked/number of stories in the book, expressed as a percentage.

Volume 12 (Likes: 29%)

• "Eminence", Karl Schroeder
• "The Chameleon's Gloves", Yoo Ha Lee
• "Crispin's Model", Max Gladstone: This one turned out to be horror, not my usual taste but quite good. 
• "The Discrete Charm of the Turing Machine, Greg Egan": A dark look at an AI-dominated near future. 
• "An Evening with Sereryn", Rich Larson
• "Babylon", Dave Hutchinson
• "Bring Your Own Spoon," Saad Z. Hossain: A science fiction story with djinn.  
• "Belladona Nights", Alastair Reynolds: This was easily the best story in the book. A vision of humanity's far future that was elegaic, powerful, and terribly sad. 

Volume 13 (Likes: 23%)

• "Yard Dog", Tade Thompson. Jazz and fantasy, a nice mix. 
• "The Blue Fairy Manifesto", Annalee Newitz
• "Okay, Glory", Elizabeth Bear
• "Meat and Salt and Sparks", Rich Larson. I must track down his story collections; I like everything I've read by him.
• "Nine Last Days on Planet Earth", Daryl Gregory. I think this was my favourite story in the book.
• "Golgatha", Dave Hutchinson
• "Quality Time", Ken Liu. If you know any software developers or tech engineers, get them to read this. 

Featured Links - November 4, 2025

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

Autumn Leaves

My Non-Fossil Car Experience. "Very few EV drivers ever go back." Our next car will probably be a hybrid. I don't think we're ready for a full EV yet. 

Photoshop's biggest rival is now free, with one big exception. I'm going to have to download Affinity and have a good, hard look at it. I don't need the (mostly AI) subscription features for the limited editing I do. 

A Review of Grokipedia, Using Myself as Test Subject. John Scalzi explains why you shouldn't trust Grokipedia and LLMs in general. 

Why time feels like it’s speeding up, and how to slow the pace. "You’re not wrong to think time is running away from you. Experts explain the strange phenomenon and what to do about it." 

We’re Number Two! "How Trump ceded the future to China." In less than one year, the Trump regime has set the US into a decline that may take a generation to recover from, if recovery is possible at all. 

Please stop using NotebookLM as a note-taking app. "At its core, NotebookLM is a research assistant. Not a note-taking tool." Here's a contrast POV to the article I linked to last week. 

Can You Use a High-End TV as a Computer Monitor? "A high-end TV can be an affordable way to get more display real estate for your computer setup—but there are some essential considerations before you replace your monitor with a massive OLED or QD OLED TV."

Movie and TV Reviews - October 2025

Movies and TV shows that Nancy and I watched in October when not watching the Blue Jays march into baseball nirvana. I do these posts mainly so I can keep track of what we've been watching, so the reviews are cursory. 

Movies

• Black Bag: A British spy thriller directed by Stephen Soderbergh. Not a lot of action but very tense. Well acted, well made, and well written. (Amazon Prime)

TV Shows

• Death Valley: A British police procedural set in a small town in Wales. A somewhat ditzy detective connects with a retired actor who played a detective on TV.  This one is pretty light but well writen and acted, and funny. (BritBox)
• The Studio: We only got through two episodes of this before giving up. It was billed as a comedy but it works only if you enjoy stupid people running around yelling at each other. Lots of cameos, but that wasn't enough to keep watching. (Apple TV+)
• Karen Pirie (seasons 1-2): A British police procedural featuring a female detecitve tasked with investigating a 25-year-old cold case. Twisty and well made. (BritBox)
• The Reluctant Traveler (season 3): Eugene Levy heads off on more travels. One of the highlight's is a rour of Windsor Castle conducted by Prince Willam. (Apple TV+)
• Invasion (season 3): I'm not sure why I kept watching this, It was more interesting than the previous seasons but, like too many series these days, far too padded. The one good idea in this season was the religious fanatics worshipping the aliens as the vector for the Rapture. (Apple TV+) 
• Nova: Superfloods. Documentary about the North Carolina, Texas, and Valencia floods. Scary stuff. 
• Nova: Pompeii's Secret Underworld. A look at what daily life was like in Pompeii before the eruption. Some nifty recreations of what the city was like along with some remarkable historical analysis. Could have done wihtout the junky fighting recreations though. 

Photo of the Week - November 2, 2025

We seem to have moved into a very autumn-like weather pattern here, with cool blustery weather being the norm the last week or so. This picture is of Lake Ontario on a windy day taken with my Fujifilm X-S10 and the 16-80 mm. zoom.

Incoming waves. Fujifilm X-S10 with Fujinon 16-80 mm. at F5.6, 1/480 second, ISO 400, Velvia film simulation

Satureday Sounds - Blows Against the Empire - Jefferson Starship

This week's musical treat harkens back to 1970. I was then (and still am) a big fan of the Jefferson Airplane, but it was clear the group was splintering. That became blindingly obvious with the release of Blows Against the Empire billed as by Paul Kantner and the Jefferson Starship. It instantly became one of my favourite albums and has remained that way ever since. 

I've heard it called a solo album but that doesn't really fit considering that the musicians include members of the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and other San Francisco musicians. It was the first (and maybe the only) album to be nominated for science fiction's Hugo Award, though sadly, it didn't win. 

File 770 just published a long article about the album, including quotes from an interview with Paul Kantner. That prompted me to give the album another listen, and I still think it's one of the peak moments of the San Francisco psychedelic era. If you're only familiar with the Jefferson Starship through their hits like "Miracles" or "Jane'' (or God forbid, "We Built This City"), this will be an eye opener. 

The version embedded below is the remastered release, which includes a few bonus tracks, none of which are essential.