Big Muddy

From ProPublica’s new article on RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine agenda, a throwback to the era before vaccines became controversial in the United States (first on the left and now on the right): Vaccines, for decades, weren’t politically divisive.

I came across a remarkable contrast in vote efficiency in one of political analyist Patrick Déry’s recent newsletters: specifically, the case of the Parti Québécois in 1973 versus today.

The founder of Abacus Data, a Canadian polling firm, dropped kind of an interesting URL yesterday: abacus-weighting.com.

Nate Silver linked to this throwback article from 2016 in The New York Times in his recent article on fake AI polls, which I also wrote about a few days ago.

A somewhat disturbing bit of reporting from Nature tells the story of bixonimania, a fake eye disease invented by Swedish medical researcher Almira Osmanovic Thunström and her team.

Here’s an interesting figure and accompanying passage from this 2023 preprint entitled “Machine Culture”: The innovations generated by AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero soon entered human culture, as shown by research comparing human gameplay before and after the…

Here’s a fun project from Tyler Vigen, creator of the famous Spurious Correlations page (which has been cited as a cautionary tale in many a science class).

A few days ago, two professors (Leif Weatherby and Benjamin Recht) published an opinion piece in the New York Times calling attention to Axios publishing a story on maternal health using invented polling results: A recent Axios story on maternal health po…

I quite enjoyed Nate Silver’s recent Substack post “Social media has become a freak show” (curiously, the title element of the page is “Social media is turning into a freak show”—I think the transformation has already occurred).

A few weeks ago, I experienced a situation familiar to many Canadians, described in this article from Jonathan Jarry of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society: On Sunday, March 22nd of this year, a large swath of the population in Quebec was w…

An interesting exchange between Guido van Rossum and Andrej Karpathy a few days ago on Twitter: Guido van Rossum: I think I finally understand what an agent is.

My PhD co-supervisor at the University of Toronto, Dr.

Andrew Gelman, professor of statistics at Columbia University, runs one of my favourite blogs on the Internet.

Yesterday, I wrote about how the ZeroClaw GitHub repository had been down for two days with little explanation.

Earlier this month, I wrote about setting up one of the many lightweight OpenClaw alternatives, namely ZeroClaw.

For-profit plasma donation is in the news today in Canada.

I am sharing a thoughtful article today from Alex Panetta’s A.I.

In light of several recent Python package compromises (litellm, telnyx), here is a useful tip from Hacker News commenter mil22: For those using uv, you can at least partially protect yourself against such attacks by adding this to your pyproject.toml: [to…

The Colorado House voted today to ban the use of personal data to algorithmically set the price of a product or determine a wage.

Bioinformatics has long been an unusually collaborative and transparent field, with genomes, protein structures, and other complex biological data habitually deposited into open databases during the course of research.

Wealthsimple is a fintech company at the forefront of a lot of innovation in Canada’s personal finance sector since the company’s founding in 2014.

Zak Vescera, writing for the Investigative Journalism Foundation, observes that fraud cases reported to Canadian police has more than doubled between 2013 and 2024: At the same time, the number of cases cleared by Canadian police has fallen.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open, community-driven map database powering countless apps and services and used by organizations including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Mapbox, and Wikimedia.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to have a place to put down posts and articles that have lodged themselves in my brain.

I am sharing today TimeMap.org: an atlas of regions, rulers, people, and battles throughout history.

Alternate title: Blue Jay brutally feeder mogs Tufted Titmouse From the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a pretty neat article about dominance hierarchies at the bird feeder using over 7,600 observations collected by citizen scientists contributing to Project…

This fascinating article by Nithin Vejendla in Works in Progress makes the case that bus networks would benefit from bus stop balancing: having fewer stops spaced further apart.

The Canadian province of Manitoba has introduced a bill to ban algorithmic price discrimination (also known as surveillance pricing), i.e., the use of personal data to set prices for individual consumers: New Democrats announced in December they would beg…

The Times of Israel journalist Emanuel Fabian is claiming that Polymarket gamblers (sorry, “traders”) have threatened his life over a report he released about an Iranian missile attack on Israel on March 10.

Prof.

Economist Scott Cunningham shared an important example of why we should always report the statistical package and version used in our analyses, as he used Claude Code to produce six versions of the exact same analysis using six different packages in R, Py…

Many people in the Americas would probably be surprised to learn that, in much of the rest of the world, being born in a country does not by itself make you a citizen.

Today I discovered geoBoundaries, a CC BY 4.0-licensed database of political administrative boundaries covering the entire world.

Canada’s banking sector is legendarily stable.

David Oks had a great post yesterday on the classic parable of how the adoption of ATMs did not lead to the predicted job losses among bank tellers.

I am sharing today a short blog post by the Institute for Replication: “What will the paper of the future look like?”

Back in September 2025, US President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F.

This provocatively titled piece in the The Hub (“Why the world needs even more Canadian coal”) made me realize I know very little about one of Canada’s most important exports: coal.

In Canada, any person or corporation in the country can make a request for general records to any agency of the federal government through the Access to Information Act (the equivalent in the United States is the Freedom of Information Act).

Time zones are hard.

Given my recent posts on AI in academic publishing, I just wanted to share this joke from Prof.

This thread from demographer Lyman Stone on the definition of the US homeownership rate has stuck in my head for a couple of years now.

Today, I wanted to share this piece from economist Scott Cunningham (Baylor University), who wrote about how AI is widening the gap between research and publishing.

As mentioned last week, I’ve been meaning to test out a personal agent from the Claw-like ecosystem.

The best mantra to come out of the AI era is: “You can just build things”.

I learned a new word today: contronym.

It’s been one month since my first post on Big Muddy.

Twitter’s “Today’s News” section is a mix of real news, very minor stories (usually discussion of a random AI-related post), nonsense trends, and barely disguised marketing.

I recently came across the following policy on the submission page of an academic journal: Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools: One of the goals of Spectrum is to stimulate critical thinking and skill development among authors and reviewers alike.

Simon Willison is building a library of posts covering best practices for using agentic coding tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex.