PJH Studios

Author: Patrick

  • Flooded with AI slop

    The ability of AI to near instantaneously churn out paragraphs of text is being weaponized to overwhelm well meaning officials.

    One morning in October of 2024, Fredericton city councillor Margo Sheppard received an email with the subject line: “The Real Policy Crisis: Prioritizing ‘Nature’ Over People.” It was polished — almost algorithmically smooth — and it calmly urged her to reconsider Fredericton’s net-zero policies. 

    Over the next month, a flood of similar emails followed, all aimed at getting Fredericton to abandon global climate targets. Sheppard is used to emails from organizations on all kinds of issues, but not this many, not on this issue — and not so well crafted. She grew suspicious.

    “If we’re getting them in Fredericton,” Sheppard thought, “councillors all across the country must be getting them too.” 

  • Ukraine hunting drones with a shotgun and an airplane

    It’s such a simple idea: fly a two seater single engine plane, give the passenger a shotgun, and go drone hunting. Click through for a crazy picture of one setup.

  • Publishing newspapers at 15

    A group of teenagers are publishing their own weekly newspaper in Montauk, NY.

    Billy Stern, the paper’s 15-year-old top editor, kept tabs on their progress in a planning document on his laptop. According to his color-coding system, reporters had already filed articles about nearby summer camps and the construction of a new hospital on the grounds of a former baseball field.

    He turned to Teddy Rattray, 15, the paper’s most prolific columnist and Billy’s friend since Little League, to float ideas for a restaurant review.

    “We still haven’t done hot dogs,” Teddy said. Billy agreed: Hot dogs should be an editorial priority.

    The operation has grown slicker since the boys got into the news business last year, as eighth graders at East Hampton Middle School. Billy had been looking for a summer job that was more stimulating than his usual gig squeezing lemons at a food truck. He enlisted Teddy and Teddy’s cousin Ellis Rattray to put together an eight-page paper exploring Montauk from a teenager’s perspective.

  • Play Doom anywhere

    First person shooter Doom has earned a meme-like reputation for practically being able to be played anywhere. This stems from decisions made during its creation, enabling portability.

  • Exporting the Irish Pub

    There’s an entire business devoted to exporting the Irish pub vibe.

    But founder Mel McNally is not in the business of just shipping pub-in-a-box packages around the world. Each one is custom-designed to fit a specific space in collaboration with the local owner, who has creative control over the many, many, many details involved. The company’s stock-in-trade is not the Irish pub as a commodity; it’s the Irish pub as a vibe. You can’t sell the history and lore and memories intrinsic in a community’s longstanding institution. But you can sell the craftsmanship inextricably linked to a nation’s cultural legacy.

    The Irish Pub Company evolved out of a project McNally did about pub design for a competition when he was an architecture school student in Dublin in the 1970s. What the professors believed to be a cheeky excuse to spend time drinking pints turned into a two-year expedition through Ireland in which McNally and some architect friends visited more than 200 pubs in cities and remote country villages.

  • I Don’t Have Spotify

    I Don’t Have Spotify is a clever, one trick web app that takes Spotify links and finds music on other services. It works well for songs and albums.

  • How the Trump Administration is breaking the government

    A collective of writers have put together a website documenting how the Trump Administration is breaking the government. It’s detailed, concise, and well sourced.

  • Infrared enabled contact lenses

    Every day we get a little closer to the future, and recently, Chinese scientists have created contact lenses that can see infrared light.


    The team screened various biocompatible polymeric materials (used to make commercial contact lenses) to find just the right refractive index and optical and mechanical properties, and integrated them with the aforementioned nanoparticles to make upconversion contact lenses (UCLs). Then they tested their lenses on mice, giving them a choice between a dark box and a box illuminated with infrared light. Mice wearing the contacts chose the dark box; those without augmented vision showed no preference. And the pupils of the contact-wearing mice constricted in response to infrared light, while brain imaging showed the visual processing centers reacting to it as well.

  • Growing Sequoias in Detroit

    An effort started in 2020, seeks to grow an urban forest of sequoias in Detroit.

    Giant sequoias are not native to Michigan. And, yet, they’re somehow thriving in the state, which has a much cooler and wetter climate than their native California.

    The biggest giant sequoia east of the Rockies is a 77-year-old specimen, called the Michigan Champion, that was planted in 1948 on the eastern shores of Lake Michigan. The tree measures roughly 116 feet tall and 5 feet in diameter.

    “They’re safer here … we don’t have wildfires like [California],” Kemp tells the Associated Press. “The soil stays pretty moist, even in the summer. They like to have that winter irrigation, so when the snow melts they can get a good drink.”

  • Whac-a-mole movie

    No, it’s not The Onion. A Whac-a-mole movie is in development.