Getting a Better List of Styles in Word

Styles are one of Microsoft Word's better features but Microsoft has never made them particularly easy to use and especially never easy to manage. In my last job, I eventually created a small set of templates with a common set of style names but with differing formats. Some documents could have more than thirty styles. Tracking changes to the styles across differnt documents was painful. 

Office Watch points outs that you can use AI tools like Copilot or Gemini to help you analyse and manage your styles. 

Copilot or any AI (Claude, ChatGPT etc.) can read a Word styles document and reorganize the contents into something more useful, such as:

• Hierarchy table
• Grouped Styles
• Style Guide
• Design System Diagram
• Visual Table
• Style Compliance Table

The article includes a sample prompt and some examples of reports and diagrams that you can create. 

As I recall, Adobe FrameMaker doesn't have many features for reporting on style properties, but there are third-party tools that you could probably use in conjunction with AI tools to create similar reports.

How Journalists Are Using AI

The Nieman Journalism Lab has published an article showing how several Pulitizer Prize-winning journalists used AI tools in their work. 

 A translation of a mass shooter’s cryptic journal in the days after an attack. A public records review that revealed failures to install flood warning systems in Central Texas. An exposé of American technology companies’ complicity in building the Chinese surveillance state. An audit of the SEC’s crypto lawsuits that showed weakening enforcement under the second Trump administration.

On May 4, the Pulitzer Prizes recognized these stories among the winners and finalists across 15 journalism categories. The reporters behind each of these stories also disclosed using AI to the judging committee. Ultimately, five award winners and three finalists this year disclosed AI adoption in their submissions — the most since the disclosure requirement was added in 2024.

The journalists use of AI fell into several key categories:

• Searching for information in a large number of public records
• Translating under deadline pressure
• Making a trove of documents searchable
• Checking other writers' work

Looking at the details of how these tools were used really makes me wish I had had them available when I was working as a technical writer at the TSX. Just the ability to search through the job control system or QA test databases would have been very useful. 

How To Get Rid of Goog;le's AI Weights File

If you use Google's Chrome browser under Windows and don't want to use it's AI features, then you should read this. 

Google has been downloading a 4 GB file called weights.bin that's used by Gemini Nano, which runs locally on your PC. If you don't want this file, or the AI functionality, you can set up a registry key to block it, then delete the file. Instructions are in the article linked above.

The file is installed on my PC and I'm leaving it alone as I occasinally use Gemini in Chrome. Still, it would be nice if they told you about it and gave you the choice before using up such a big chunk of your disk. 

Featured Links - May 13, 2026

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

Overlooking the marsh

• When the Emperor Has No Clothes and the Cabinet Has No Conscience. "A President in Decline, and Only Six Days Until Beijing." The scary quote: 'Dr. John Gartner, among the most vocal of the professionals tracking this deterioration, offers a formulation that is worth sitting with. The Donald Trump you see today, he says, is the best you will ever see him. It will only get worse from here."'
• On Superpower Suicide. "And the recovery of justice." The call for a new era: "The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future."
• DNA identifies four more crew members of doomed Franklin expedition. "Three served on the HMS Erebus; the fourth was Petty Officer Harry Peglar of the HMS Terror." Modern science and historical sleuthing working together. 
• e.C-200 Ultrasonic 8" Chef's Knife.  High tech meets kitchen knifes. I want this!
• I knew my writing students were using AI. Their confessions led to a powerful teaching moment. "The problem wasn’t just the perfectly polished, yet mediocre prose. It’s what’s lost when we surrender the struggle to translate thought into words."
• How Jeff “Skunk” Baxter took his session guitar experience and inspired a radical digital guitar. "Skunk was involved in designing Roland and Fender's innovative G-5 – an all-in-one guitar offering a plethora of built-in tones and models." No more lugging 15 guitars around on tour. 
• The 'Quick Settings' overhaul is the most underrated part of Android 16. "The changes may not seem like a big deal at first, but after months of using Android 16 on my Google Pixel 8 Pro, I've realized they make a noticeable difference in everyday use." I have found this myself and it's much easier to use than the Apple iPad OS equivalent. 
• Composite Artemis II Animation Shows Just How Much Stuff Is in Low Earth Orbit. "It's like playing dodgeball! Except the ball is traveling at 17,000 mph!"
  
• Meta’s Embrace of A.I. Is Making Its Employees Miserable (gift link). "As it adapts to the artificial intelligence era, the company is pushing many of its 78,000 workers to use the technology, and preparing to lay some of them off."
• The “big one” might not come alone: Double West Coast earthquake threat. "Two major fault systems along North America's West Coast, the Cascadia subduction zone and the San Andreas fault, may be more closely connected than previously believed. A new study suggests that activity on one fault could trigger earthquakes on the other, raising the possibility of closely timed seismic events."
• Free Universal Construction Kit. "The Free Universal Construction Kit is a 3D-printable set of adapters that allow you to connect 10 popular construction toy systems, including Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K'Nex, Krinkles (AKA Bristle Blocks/Stickle Bricks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob."
• Reviving the IBM Selectric Composer Fonts. " Before you can start drawing a revival of a typeface originating from any mechanical system, you need to do the math." A great article for typewriter and typography nerds. I occasionally typed on a Selectric in my first job out of university. It was almost a religious experience. The ladies in the office typing pool could hit more than 100 words per minute. I was lucky to do 30. 

We're Toast 66

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. 

Springtime in Paris after the AMOC collapses

• A catastrophic climate event is upon us. Here is why you’ve heard so little about it. "This system – known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) – delivers heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. Recent research suggests that if it shuts down, it could cause both a massive drop in average winter temperatures in northern Europe and drastic changes in the Amazon’s water cycles. This could help tip the rainforest into cascading collapse and trigger further disaster."
• Key Atlantic Current System Collapse Could Trigger Huge Carbon Dioxide Release, Increasing Global Warming By 0.2 °C. "he Atlantic Ocean has a complex system of currents and eddies known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), and includes the famous Gulf Stream, which helps with milder temperatures in Northern Europe. Over the last century, however, the AMOC has been slowing down, and new research highlights just how bad things might get for the planet’s climate if it collapses completely."
• Climate change is supercharging hurricane rainfall, contributing to deadly floods. "Freshwater flooding has caused over half of all direct hurricane deaths since 2013. The threat will increase as climate change makes hurricanes wetter and potentially slower-moving."
  
• The Clock Is Ticking on a Global Tragedy. "It’s not just oil that travels through the Gulf; the region is home to a massive industry that produces the agricultural fertilizer required to keep food production going. The ongoing disruption of this trade has raised the spectre of global famine."
  
• SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites. "Here's how that could impact the atmosphere and the night sky. 'These launches affect everyone,' says one astronomer."
• Palantir Meets the Anti-Christ. "More and more, the Silicon Valley tech bros are revealing themselves as very dark figures indeed. Gone are cookies and surfing, now they are peddling “AI Kill Chains” for tracking and targeting state enemies. Those being tracked don’t have to have guns. They can be troublesome journalists or civilians hiding from mass deportation."
• Satellites Could Start Smashing into Each Other in Less Than Three Days, Study Finds. "But new research led by Sarah Thiele at Princeton University has found that one of the biggest threats is a solar storm that could cause a cut in communications between satellites and their operators. If the resulting geomagnetic storm did cut comms, the research shows that it could take just 2.8 days before a collision."
• How climate change threatens the economic backbone of the Pacific. "Warming water temperatures caused by climate change pose a substantial risk to local tuna populations, threatening Kiribati's economic backbone."
• The Man Who Made America Safer for Measles. "A brief history of how crackpot ego became public-health policy."
• Major hurricanes in the Northeast are rare. Could climate change make them common? "A Category 4 hurricane making direct landfall on New York City could cause as much as $500 billion in insured damage."
• How strong can a hurricane get in a warming world? "In the Gulf of Mexico and western Caribbean, hurricanes with 224 mph (100 m/s) winds are possible. Warming the oceans will increase this maximum potential intensity, with potentially devastating effects."
• Panama’s ocean lifeline vanishes for the first time in 40 years. "For decades, the Gulf of Panama has relied on strong seasonal winds to trigger upwelling, bringing cool, nutrient-packed water to the surface. But in 2025, this dependable event didn’t happen. Researchers point to unusually weak winds as the likely culprit, reducing ocean productivity and warming coastal waters. The surprise disruption highlights how vulnerable these critical systems may be to climate change."

Featured Links - May 6, 2026

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

Springtime swans

• Rip.so, the graveyard of dead internet things. 'rip.so is a "graveyard of dead internet things," with a handsome old-web aesthetic (there's even a <marquee>!) with which to enjoy the sites that time forgot.'
• Russia cloaks launch schedule after spaceport falls in Ukraine’s sights. "We had serious inbound attempts to the cosmodrome that day.”
• Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks. "Senate Bill 73 holds websites liable for users who mask their location." Yet another ridiculous law trying to regulate the internet. 
• Rush Lost Its Beloved Drummer. The Band Is Ready to Get Back on the Road (gift link). "After losing Neil Peart to cancer six years ago, the trio is returning to touring with Anika Nilles, a powerhouse drummer who’s forged her own relationship with the group."
• What if Dark Matter Doesn’t Actually Exist? "Modern cosmology assumes dark matter exists. But what makes us so certain that dark matter is the answer—and what if we're wrong?"
• The Paradox of Medical AI Implementation. "From Missed Opportunities to Missing Evidence."
• Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone? (gift link) "What the rise of A.I. and the gutting of books coverage across U.S. media will mean for literature."
• Windows has a tool that shows every app that touched a file on your PC. "Microsoft's Process Monitor was the tool that surfaced all these activities that I never knew existed. Unlike the Task Manager, which shows resource usage percentages, it reveals the exact files my apps are touching in real time. Seeing the volume of activity gives me a deeper understanding of my computer."
• New Lithium-Plasma Engine Passes Key Mars Propulsion Test. "NASA engineers recently tested a next generation electric propulsion system that achieved new records while requiring lithium metal vapor for fuel and holds the potential to be a gamechanger in propulsion systems for the future of space exploration."
• Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers. "AWS stops billing Middle East cloud customers as repairs to war damage drag on."
  
• Break free from the fossil-fuel trap. "We're going to pay an extra +$500 billion for oil and gas this year."
• Don't Save This World. Design the Next One by science fiction author and futurist Karl Schoeder. "In this article I’ll lay it out one of the inventive processes I use. This is an approach common to many of my posts. I’ll present it in four easy stages that you can learn to follow yourself. Then, I’ll give you a couple of fun examples of how I’ve used it." 

.

We're Toast 65

It's well past time for another one of these posts. 

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. 

Our toasting Earth

• Global warming is making the strongest hurricanes stronger. "Recent studies link human-caused warming to more powerful, more destructive storms worldwide."
• Anthropic’s new AI tool has implications for us all – whether we can use it or not. "Mythos, the company claims, has found vulnerabilities in every major browser and operating system. In other words, this new AI model might be able to help hackers disrupt much of the world’s most important software."
• The emerging danger of post-hurricane heat waves. "With global warming making people increasingly dependent on air conditioning, power failures from hurricanes followed by heat waves are creating increasingly hazardous risks to health."
• Key ocean current is slowing at locations around the Atlantic (archive link). "Measurements by buoys at four latitudes in the western Atlantic provide the strongest evidence yet that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation is weakening,"
• MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science. "When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength."
• Sustaining the Unsustainable. "Trump’s spectacle of force cannot hide the truth: America is meeting the appetites of the present by stripping future generations of stability, dignity, and hope."
• Earth's Population Has Surpassed The Planet's Capacity, Study Suggests. "Based on more than two centuries of population data, a team led by Corey Bradshaw of Flinders University in Australia found humanity is living well beyond the bounds of what our planet can support long-term."
  
• Scientists issue warning on concerning phenomenon observed in food chain: 'Urgent need for us to take action'. "Scientists studied the presence of microplastics along Goa's coast, finding that every animal in the food chain was affected."

Featured Links - April 15, 2026

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

Docks waiting for summer

• The Cascadia Subduction zone isn’t shutting down – but it’s more complicated than we thought. "But while the discovery is real, the interpretation that the subduction zone is winding down gets ahead of the science. What the new research actually shows is far more complex — and more interesting. But before we can understand what this tear means, we need to go back to plate tectonic theory."
• Helium Is Hard to Replace. "One such supply chain that’s suddenly getting a lot of attention is helium. Helium is produced as a byproduct of natural gas extraction: it collects in the same underground pockets that natural gas collects in. Qatar is responsible for roughly 1/3rd of the world’s supply of helium, which was formerly transported through the Strait of Hormuz in specialized containers. Thanks to the closure of the strait, helium prices have spiked, suppliers are declaring force majeure, and businesses are scrambling to deal with looming shortages."
• 5 takeaways from NASA’s biggest test in decades. While successful, there are a lot of things that will have to be addressed before the next Artemis mission. 
• Bad as Trump Is, What Follows Him May Be Worse. "The fight to define MAGA’s future is turning ugly—and more extreme."
• Trump, Pope Leo and the Lessons of 1933. "There is no way that in this new age of fascist threat, the Church is going to forget the lesson of the Reich Concordat."
  
• Solar panels are creating an unexpected effect by forming rainfall clouds and thriving oases in the middle of the desert. 
• Yellowstone's magma source may be closer than thought, reshaping hazard models. "Now, a research team from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGGCAS) has developed a comprehensive three-dimensional geodynamic model of western North America that simulates the present-day dynamics of both the lithosphere and the underlying convecting mantle, revealing a mechanism for magma generation beneath supervolcanoes."
• This founder helped build SpaceX’s most powerful rocket engine. Now he’s building a ‘fighter jet for orbit.’ "The company is developing a technology called solar thermal propulsion. Today’s standard satellite engines either burn chemical fuel or convert the sun’s energy to electricity, using that to power efficient but low-powered thrusters. Portal’s engines would instead concentrate the heat of the sun, using that to heat propellant and move the spacecraft along at high speed."
• How AI Is Turbocharging the War in Iran (archive link). "Intelligence, targeting and damage assessments are accelerating thanks to military versions of software now remaking business and daily life."
  
• Chinese Electrotech is the Big Winner in the Iran War. "An energy-hungry world is being pushed away by America and into China’s arms."
• This Experimental Drug Could Be a Game Changer for Pancreatic Cancer. "In a Phase III trial, Revolution Medicines' daraxonrasib almost doubled the survival length of people with advanced pancreatic cancer." 
  
• Members of neo-Nazi ‘active clubs’ join combat events at secretive Virginia compound. 'A network of militant neo-Nazi active clubs from around the US has been participating in riot-style combat events with other white nationalist groups in Virginia as part of what their founder called a “tip-off point for a fascist cultural revolution."
• SpaceX wants to launch a million satellites. Here's how that could impact the atmosphere and the night sky. "'These launches affect everyone,' says one astronomer."

Featured Links - April 8, 2026

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

A choppy bay

• The Next Coup Attempt. "And How to Stop It." An unsettling post from historian Timothy Snyder. 
• The Artemis Earth photo is incredible – but the one thing that nobody is telling you about it will blow your mind. 'The famous "Hello, World" photo by astronaut Reid Wiseman isn’t quite what you think.' I didn't figure it out until I read the article.
• How to Find Thunderbird Profile Location in Windows 11, 10, 8, 8.1, 7. I needed to figure this out because Thunderbird moved the profile folder on my wife's laptop and my backup program couldn't find it. This is a useful article for anyone using Thunderbird on Windows.
• The Lancet: Long COVID and Risk of Incident Cardiovascular Disease. "A recent study (see PLoS Med.: Association Between COVID-19 Vaccination and Sudden Death in Apparently Healthy Younger Individuals) found no evidence that COVID-19 vaccines increase the risk of sudden cardiac death in young healthy adults, but they did find a strong link between recent COVID infection and an increased risk of sudden cardiac death." 
• Data Centres Are on Track to Wreck the Planet. Can We Stop Them? "They will guzzle more water and power than the world can afford—for an AI video of your cat as an astronaut."
• Any USB drive or cable you plug in might be a silent killer. "As if we didn’t already have enough malware to worry about, malicious hackers and state-sponsored cybercrime teams are turning ordinary-looking USB drives and cables into weapons that can infect or fry — within a single second — any computer or electronic component you plug them into."
• Experiments refute dark matter claim. "The results of her analysis, which have excluded the dark matter explanation with greater confidence, were published in Physics Review Letters ...". 
• Canadian couple shows how a $40 weekly food budget is possible. "Michelle Nijdam, 31, has been gaining a following online after she started sharing how she sticks to a strict $160 monthly budget (or $40 weekly budget) while living in Vancouver — one of the most expensive cities in Canada. On her YouTube channel, @MichellesHomemaking, she talks about the ups and downs of having a tight budget while sharing some handy tips."
• Gambling on War and Death. "Polymarket allows anonymous accounts to bet on everything — but with increasing attention to war. Will a tanker be seized? When will the next drone strike occur? Gamblers can even look at maps of Ukrainian villages and play the odds on which neighbourhood of innocent civilians will be hit. It is literally about making a killing on killing. And it is also about manipulating the market in frightening ways."
• The 51st State Fantasy Is Over: How King Charles and Mark Carney Put An End To Trump's Desire To Invade Canada. "How Trump’s annexation campaign collapsed against 200 years of history, one king, and a prime minister who played the long game."
• Art UK. "Connecting you to art. Art UK is a unique digital experience that connects everyone with the UK's public art collections. We digitally unite one million artworks from 3,500 institutions – museums, libraries, town halls, hospitals – as well as public art in our streets such as sculptures and murals."
• Why U.S. Gatling Guns Are Not Stopping Iran’s Shahed Drones. "In any discussion of drone defense, Gatling-type guns are often presented as a trump card. These rapid-fire weapons, originally developed to defend U.S. warships against sea-skimming missiles, can easily down bigger and faster threats than a 120 mph Shahed drone. On paper they look devastatingly effective, and news reports speak enthusiastically of their “shredding Iranian drones.” But they are not a magic wand to make all drones disappear, and some Shaheds are getting through."
• America forgot how to make a classified nuclear warhead ingredient. "The U.S. government forgot how to make a classified component of its own nuclear warheads, then spent $92 million figuring it out again. The material is called Fogbank, and almost everything about it is classified — its composition, its purpose, and how it's manufactured." Just think of all the money they could have saved if they'd had a documentation library,

Featured Links - April 1, 2026

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

Note:  There are no April fool jokes in the post.

The rite of spring

• The broligarchy's war on journalism. "The capture of US media by Trump allies is accelerating and the UK is the next in line. Plus: the mystery money behind my old newspaper." The financial shenanigans described here are quite remarkable. If you read The Guardian or The Observer, you should read this. 
• When is an alien invasion not an alien invasion? "Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's alien invasion novel is a time capsule from the Cold War, and a reminder that the threat of nuclear annihilation isn't ancient history." A good review of one of my favourite books from the 1980s that places the book in a wider historical perspective. 
• Endgame for the Open Web. "Now, the centibillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time."
• ‘Truly spectacular’ drug for sleeping sickness simplifies treatment, raising hopes for eradication. "European regulators greenlight new one-dose compound that could help African countries get rid of an ancient burden." 
• ‘Canadians don’t want to come here any more’: anger over Trump squeezes US border businesses. "Shops and restaurants once bustling with tourists now struggle for survival as Canadians think twice about crossing the border." It's not just anger over the tariffs; people do not want to deal with the increasingly obtrusive border searches and the risk of ending up in an ICE detention centre. 
• Computer finds flaw in major physics paper for first time (archive link). "A computer language designed to robustly verify mathematical theorems and expose logical flaws has been turned towards a physics paper – and spotted an error. The discovery raises questions about how many other papers may harbour similar issues."
• How to Home. From Recomendo: "a YouTube channel with excellent videos that demonstrate how to complete common household repairs, such as wiring switches, fixing faucet leaks, and threading wire through walls and ceilings. Unlike many DIY videos, these feature high-quality audio, are well-lit, and aren’t blurry."
• How Alberta’s Separatist Movement Could Shake North America. "The resentments, politics, and risks behind their push to leave Canada." The separatists in Alberta are a small minority, but they are very committed and have ties to the US right. 
• The Hunt for Mr. Deepfakes. "A Toronto-area pharmacist is accused of being the internet’s most prolific peddler of deepfake porn. He’s just the beginning."
• This Week’s Small, Furry and Wet Reminder, That Repair is Still Possible. "Some hope for humanity, brought to you by beavers, with no consultants, no ribbon cuttings, just the ancient art of fixing what we keep breaking." Today, the UK. Tomorrow the world!
• Silicon Valley Giants Finally Face the Music. "Is this the Big Tobacco moment for the tech bros?"
• America and Public Disorder. "You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder. We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size."
•  The life and times of Grateful Dead icon Bob Weir. "We salute the Grateful Dead original, who – in the last 30 years of his life – stepped out from Jerry Garcia’s considerable shadow to emerge as a guitar hero in his own right."

Featured Links - March 25, 2026

Things I was interested in but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Bluffer's Park on a cloudy day

• Inside the fiery, deadly crashes involving the Tesla Cybertruck. "Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they’ve disintegrated drivers’ bones. Victims’ families blame what they say is the faulty design of a truck Elon Musk calls ‘apocalypse-proof’" Just in case you need another reason to not buy a Cybertruck. 
• No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing (gift link). "Lab-made drugs soaked into the pages of letters, books and even legal documents are being smuggled behind bars, killing inmates and frustrating investigators."
• Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers (archive link). "The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world."
  
• Resisting the superbugs (archive link). "Canadian researcher Gerry Wright is searching for the next generation of life-saving antibiotics." Unfortunately, discovering a new antibiotic is easier than getting it to market. 
  
• Record-torching March heat ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change. "Friday’s spring equinox may seem like a quaint notion to those already enduring furnace-like 90-110°F summer heat." In this part of the country, we've had a cold winter with more snow than usual in recent years.
• The Trap Always Closes. "Donald Trump, Lyndon Johnson, and wars we can’t win." History shows that Trump can't win this war. His only way out is to stop, and he won't.
• Ryugu asteroid samples contain all DNA and RNA building blocks, bolstering origin-of-life theories. "We are stardust, we are golden ...".
• The World Factbook. "The community-maintained successor to the CIA World Factbook. Comprehensive data on 254 countries and territories." The CIA killed the CIA World Factbook in February and that this site is maintaining the information. 
• Canada wants to build up its long-neglected Arctic. The hard question is how. "Ottawa wants to modernize a region in the north that’s about six times the size of Texas, ‘just like in the 1800s’"
• As SpaceX Launches its 10,000th Satellite, A Photographer Captures the Impact on the Night Sky, "This week SpaceX passed an eye-watering milestone: it launched its 10,000th satellite into low-Earth orbit. The sheer scale of the devices whizzing around above humanity is unimaginable, but photographer Joshua Rozells is helping people see. Rozells’ image, Swamped Skies, is a composite of 343 photos that all contain at least one satellite streak. The Australian photographer didn’t set out to make the image; he originally wanted to capture star trails."
• Project Hail Mary is packed with hard science. An astrophysicist breaks it down. '"Project Hail Mary" is more than just an epic adventure film with beautiful visuals. It's a story that reminds us how important our world is—and how vital science is to our continued existence on it.'
• When Hyperglobalization Meets Chaos. "Choke points are everywhere you look." The crisis over the strait of Hormuz is only the beginning. 
• Historians Say They’ve Discovered a Long-Lost Page From the Archimedes Palimpsest, a Treasure Trove of Rare Ancient Mathematical Treatises. "Three leaves had been missing for more than a century. Researchers found one of them when they decided on a whim to check the archives of a French museum."

Featured Links - March 18, 2026

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

Birds wintering on the Bay

• Please drive carefully: scientists plan to transport volatile antimatter for first time. "Cern researchers are testing traps capable of moving antimatter, which explodes into energy as soon as it comes into contact with regular matter."
• War on Iran may provoke a terrorist attack in US – and that may be the point. "‘Of course there’s going to be retaliation,’ says one expert. ‘It may be that this is what Trump’s interested in’"
• When you’ve been told to find new ways to use AI in technical documentation. "Some Documentation Managers and Technical Authors are now being asked to demonstrate how they are using AI and to quantify the benefits. Here are some suggestions on how to approach that challenge." In this article, I saw several uses for AI that would have potentially improved my productivity in my last job. 
• The man who proved rockets could reach space was mocked in his time. "One hundred years ago, Robert Goddard’s invention of the liquid-fueled rocket changed space exploration." This week was the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard's first launch of a liquid fueled rocket. We've come a long way in a 100 years. 
• Forget Google Docs, Canadian-made cDox could be your new place to write. "cDox stores your data in Montreal, and promises not to train AI on it." A Canadian alternative to Google Docs.
• Dish drive (gift link). "Hundreds of antennas take root in B.C.’s Okanagan Valley for an ambitious project to monitor signals from space."
• Wireless eye implant helps blind patients read again. "Now researchers have shown that a tiny wireless eye implant may help restore some of that lost central vision. In a clinical study, many blind older adults who received the implant regained enough clarity to recognize letters and short words. While the device does not restore natural sight, it helped several participants read again after years of irreversible vision decline."
• The “dumb” TV pivot: why your next screen shouldn’t be smart. "Reclaim your living room: screens without smart TV bloatware." We have a smart TV but hardly ever use any of the built-in features, preferring to stream through our Chromecast. 

Featured Links - March 11, 2026

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

Lactose-free cat

• The Corporate Miscreants Driving the Affordability Crisis. "These 20 firms all have something in common: Their CEOs get paid millions, their workers are being pushed onto public assistance, and voters are fed up with them."
• We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI. The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious."
• NASA’s DART Mission Did More Than Just Nudge an Asteroid, Study Says. "With these new findings, researchers are closer than ever to validating a key planetary defense technique."
• Managing phone media. "Dealing with photos, screenshots, and videos created by your phone isn’t simply a matter of deleting them. In this article, I’ll describe how to move media off your phone and onto your computer, remove media from the cloud, and disable automatic synchronization of media (which is usually the default)."
• Whiteouts, Ice Roads, and Wolverines: What Working at a Diamond Mine in the Far North Is Like. "In minus forty, even a twisted ankle can turn deadly if no one knows where to find you."
• The bombshell results that demand a new theory of the universe (archive link). "Last year, our most detailed map of the universe yet suggested our understanding of dark energy has been wrong for decades. The shock result is reigniting the search for a better cosmic story." This is one of the best articles on the subject of dark matter and dark energy that I have read. 
• The Myth That Wind Farms Are a Guillotine for Birds Is Being Debunked by Hard Data. "The harm caused by wind turbines isn't nearly as bad as you think."
  
• Meat Without The Animals. "Meat cultivated from cells — with no need to raise and slaughter an animal — is now a reality. But can it be made cheaply enough to displace animal agriculture?" 
• Mozilla Partners with Anthropic to Better Secure Firefox. "As Mozilla explains, this isn’t a one-off: Unlike the previous AI-assisted bug reports it’s received, which included false positives that required unnecessary work on its part, the Anthropic bug reports were different. They focused on the Firefox JavaScript engine. And each included minimal test cases to help Mozilla quickly verify and reproduce each issue."
• ‘We’re no longer attracting top talent’: the brain drain killing American science. "As Trump slashes science funding, young researchers flee abroad. Without solid innovation, the US could cease to have the largest biomedical ecosystem in the world."

Featured Links - March 4, 2026

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

• Fat Signing Bonuses, and Concierge Service, for Family Doctors (gift link). "In a country where a quarter of the population lacks a family doctor, Canadian communities compete in a zero-sum battle to recruit family doctors." The competition for doctors willing to work in small towns is becoming more intense in Canada, and I suspect, in the US as well. 
• This Looks Like an Insider Bet on Aliens (archive link). "Someone just put a lot of money on ET." I wonder if they have inside information. 
• Nature Comms: The Risk of Kidney Disease Increases Following SARS-CoV-2 Infection Compared to influenza. Yet another reason to do everything you can to avoid catching COVID-19.
• Measles outbreaks are costing the U.S. millions of dollars. The true losses can't be counted. "As vaccination rates decline, the economic consequences will increase, research suggests."
  
• AI Made Writing Code Easier. It Made Being an Engineer Harder. "Yes, writing code is easier than ever. AI assistants autocomplete your functions. Agents scaffold entire features. You can describe what you want in plain English and watch working code appear in seconds. The barrier to producing code has never been lower. And yet, the day-to-day life of software engineers has gotten more complex, more demanding, and more exhausting than it was two years ago."
• John Shirley's guide to wrecking your career in science fiction. "A short memoir with  material that may be upsetting. Published for the first time at Boing Boing. Some of it's about Harlan Ellison, a hero of my youth--an enemy for a while, then a friend once more. Joe Straczynski, I review The Last Dangerous Visions, which you co-edited, at the end of this."
• A new space race could turn our atmosphere into a 'crematorium for satellites'. "When we look up at the night sky and see a satellite glide past, we might not consider climate change or the ozone layer. Space may feel separate from the environmental systems that sustain life on Earth. But increasingly, the way we build, launch and dispose of satellites is starting to change that."
• The Stupidest Glitch Imaginable Killed a $72 Million Lunar Mission in a Single Day. "NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer satellite was supposed to map water across the surface of the Moon, but glaring design and testing errors killed it."
• Trump Is Spoiling for a Fight over Canadian Potash. "The fertilizer that feeds America is key to the president’s next confrontation with Ottawa." 'Next confrontation` There's more? Oh, joy. 

A Futurist Looks Ahead to 2026

Amy Webb is an American author, futurist, and founder to the Future Today Strategy Group. I read her book, The Genesis Machine, a few years ago and was seriously impressed. 

Every year she publishes a newsletter article looking at what happened during the year and what it portends for the coming year. If you want to get a handle on these topsy turvy times, it's essential reading. 

She starts out by looking at what she expects to be the big themes for 2026. These are the first three. (All are described in detail in the newsletter)

1. Convergences will drive the next wave of disruption and growth. 
2. The post-search internet. 
3. The rise of unlimited labor. 

After that, she looks at some of the signals to watch for in 2026.

At FTSG, we define signals as indicators of emerging change. Longtime readers of this annual letter know that 18 years ago, I created an end-of-year inventory of signals to methodically reflect on the prevailing forces that are likely to influence the world ahead. It proved to be an invaluable catalogue months later for our clients and partners, so I've continued to publish this end-of-year letter with impactful signals for the entire FTSG community.

Cataloging signals is a practice I've refined and honed for two decades. My annual inventory is a way to think about the evolution of technology, science, business, and society as part of a long continuum.

Below is a short list (not hyperbole!) of signals I collected from the past year that are likely to shape the year ahead.

This is a long newsletter article but well worth the time it takes to read through it. A good idea would be to bookmark and look at it again in mid-year.  

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. 

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."

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."

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."

Featured Links - October 29, 2025

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

Autumn colours in the park

• Catalog of Dark Patterns. "Discover a variety of dark pattern examples, sorted by category, to better understand deceptive design practices."
• Electronic Eye Implant Restored Vision in Patients With Age-Related Macular Degeneration. '"The device could be a boon for millions with vision loss from advancing age." They still have a long way to go before this technology becomes widely available and effective. 
• I tried using NotebookLM as a personal journal (and it worked better than I expected). If you keep a personal journal, this might be worth looking at. 
• This free video editor replaced everything I used to pay for in Adobe Premiere. "Here’s why Lightworks is a solid Adobe contender…" I don't do enough video editing to need anything more than Clipchamp but I do need to find an alternative to Photoshop. 
• GlassWorm: First Self-Propagating Worm Using Invisible Code Hits OpenVSX Marketplace. " It's using stealth techniques we've never seen before in the wild - invisible Unicode characters that make malicious code literally disappear from code editors. Combine that with blockchain-based C2 infrastructure that can't be taken down, Google Calendar as a backup command server, and a full remote access trojan that turns every infected developer into a criminal proxy node." This is a security nightmare.
• OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws. "In a landmark study, OpenAI researchers reveal that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs, even with perfect data, due to fundamental statistical and computational limits." 
• The Pivot. "I'm calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons." A thought-provoking article from SF author, Charlie Stross. 
• 5 undeniable, truthful facts about dark matter. "Dark matter has never been directly detected, but the astronomical evidence for its existence is overwhelming. Here’s what to know." This is the most convincing article I've seen yet for the existence of dark matter as opposed to other theories.