23 April 2025

Google won't eliminate third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. Doesn't affect me since I don't use Chrome. But OpenAI has expressed interest in purchasing Chrome from Google, should they have to sell it. So this issue may not be settled. OAI is not the buyer I would have imagined or preferred. It won't be an inexpensive purchase either.

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A battery that lasts 5,700 years without recharging has been created in the UK.  But it depends on C-14, so it's not clear to me how powerful it will be.

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Yachts for Science. Now that's a cool organization. It's like Angel Flight, but for researchers instead of cancer patients.

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CAR-T cell and mRNA technology. This uses CAR-T cells to deliver the payload, which may make it more precise, and avoid some of the problems that we've seen with liposomally-delivered mRNA products. And maybe the plasmid contamination problem won't be an issue. And let's start by thoroughly testing this technology before giving it to the public, this time.

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22 April 2025

Everybody's saying that Google on the brink of a collapse. What are they going to do? Divest it of Chrome? Divest it of Android (that would be nice)?  It would be nice if they could open source their search algorithm, although that alone wouldn't do much, since any competitor would need the massive number of datacenters to support search. Although I suppose you could implement a smaller version if your intent was not to serve the world. I think this is unlikely, though.

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Researchers identify simple rules for folding the genome. Condensins, cohesins, histones. Things often seem simple until you learn more about the details.

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3 Doors Down is coming back to Hawthorne. Apparently the original restaurateur is back to take over the reins again. Dang, I wish it wasn't on Hawthorne, though. The street's changed since five years ago.

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Climate change advocates are scared that people are no longer believing in that religion anymore.  Yeah, when AOC is flying around in a private jet instead of taking her bicycle, or even driving her Tesla, it's pretty clear that Green New Deal is a sham. 

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Annals of Internal Medicine reports an alarming increase in psilocybin use. And guess who is using it the most. Adolescents.
And guess which states legalized psilocybin use?
Oregon was first in legalization of marijuana, then came Measure 110, and now this. It's no wonder businesses can't find anyone competent to hire.

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21 April 2025

China is developing a non-nuclear hydrogen bomb. And some car companies want to develop cars based on hydrogen fuel cells. Which would require hydrogen recharging stations in many places. Yeah right. Our society isn't the best fit for this technology. Imagine the havoc that vandals could wreak. Nuh-uh. Not in America.

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Seattle breaks records on homeless tents removed, encampments cleared. Whack-a-mole.  Bruce Harrell is in over his head.

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Will the Justice Department break up Google? We need a neutral search engine that just delivers high quality searches. Google's problem is that it controls what we see. It controls what information we receive when we request it. Things were OK during the early days, but when there was profit to be made, and a monopoly to keep, things changed. Then it began to matter what president people should elect. What bad news needed to be hidden. What ideology should be promoted, and which ones suppressed. I'm not sure breaking up Google is going to change this. We need a search engine that is politically and commercially neutral, but is also private. Good search engines aren't free – you have to sign up for an account, and that's the main problem. I want to search without having to have my queries and what I click on linked to my account.

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Blue state blues. More Oregonians are holding multiple jobs.

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Gotta love this Dr. Roach column where he says:
I generally avoid prescribing brand-new drugs until they have a bit of a track record, as long as there are tried-and-true alternatives.
Boy, did he sure push the COVID vax hard. He didn't care about no track record or tried-and-true alternatives, did he?

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There might be a second medical school in Klamath Falls. It'll be an osteopath school, though.

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Lahaina residents want to rebuild just like before. But there are people who don't want things like they were before. They insist on shoreline restrictions, new regulations, new protections. And if your nice oceanfront property is over the "erosion hazard line", well, that's just unfortunate, isn't it?
“It infuriates me when I hear folks asking for Lahaina back the same way,” she said. “That just shows me a different level of entitlement …
The nerve of those people, right?

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Bond villain wannabes can now get their own military-grade satellite and AI datacenter, as well as other cool things an evil overload might need. 

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What's happening to men? They're not pursuing traditional career pathways. Especially healthcare – it's a woman's job now. Just as well, when AI takes over.

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Those paper receipts at the grocery store are toxic!  Just ten seconds of skin contact and you'll get more bisphenol S than California thinks is safe. If you care enough to select your plastic water bottle carefully, you'll want to read this.

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Chinese car battery manufacturers have a powerful battery that can fully recharge in 5 minutes. Way ahead of Tesla. And it's not lithium-based. It's sodium ion-based. Tesla Superchargers pull around 300 amps.  Imagine one of those Chinese 1000 amp charging stations in America being set on fire because someone just wants to stick it to Elon.  Yeah, that's why we can't have nice things in the U.S.

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20 April 2025

UC Santa Cruz is no longer the most stoned college in the U.S.  Lewis and Clark College is #4. I'm really surprised Reed College didn't make the list.

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Occasionally, Democrats do something right. Senate bill 1121 will make doxxing a crime

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Healthcare workers need a good night's sleep. Don't know about the meditation part, but sleep is essential. Until the Libby Zion case, medical residents had to take call on a brutal schedule, and they didn't care if you were sleep-deprived or not. You still had to make life and death decisions. This was based on Dr. William Halsted's surgical schdule, where he worked non-stop in order to develop his skills, and so all the residents had to be so dedicated.  Turns out he was a cocaine addict, and that's how he did it.

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Now, this is someone who is a fascist. Gretchen Whitmer wanted doctors to take implicit bias training to retain their medical license. After affirmative action and DEI, of course people have developed opinions about who is really qualified and who is not. That's just natural. Doctors are human, too. It's not "implicit bias". It's just being aware of what's going on.

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Blue states are not going to like thisCMS is closing the loophole that allows Blue states, especially Oregon, where 70% of Oregon Health Plan money comes from the fed, to institute a "provider tax" that would pay for Medicaid funding. Some feel that the states should be paying for more of this, and stop using the provider tax trick.  Of course, Oregon is paying for healthcare for illegal immigrants, which many would not agree to. Oregon has money – they just need to prioritize citizens.
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Top Pot doughnuts and coffee will close their Queen Anne location.  The owners are not saying why, but you can guess. They make some of the best doughnuts. Check it out at QFC stores.

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19 April 2025

Some excitement about the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier. Curing cancer and regrowing hair? Wake me up when it happens.

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ChatGPT's o3, o4-mini are really good at geolocating from photographs. I'll have to keep this in mind. However, these new models hallucinate more. Some good and some bad. Life is like that.

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How the might have fallen. Providence is warning about hard times ahead. Gone are the Obamacare days when they were flush with cash, building the Franz Cancer Center, buying out doctors practices and making them Providence employees, buying naming right to PGE Park, and starting their own venture capital company.  Times have sure changed. Now they are facing considerable headwinds, no doubt due to the nursing strike, and the difficulty in finding quality people who want to move to Portland to work for them. And living in a Blue state, it seems like almost everyone is on Medicaid.  And the taxes....

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18 April 2025

The Oregon Trial Lawyers Association is also opposed to an OHSU-Legacy merger. But that's because it's going to be harder to sue Legacy docs if they become OHSU docs. And they see that as a loss for society.  Well, on the other hand, many people view OHSU as having deep pockets, so OHSU docs often get named as the defendant, even if it's not his/her fault but are only partly involved in the case. I've seen this happen. Not to mention that the media tends to make any legal case involving an OHSU doctor front page news, while similar cases involving other doctors goes unmentioned.

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Some actors sold their image to AI companies and now regret it.  Well, at least they got paid. Other people's images are being manipulated for free. Pretty soon, generative AI will be able to create new faces, which can be used for any purpose, and there will be no need for actors.

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New flexible brainstem implant might replace cochlear implants for those with neurogenic deafness.

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Nice systematic review that shows that the latest GenAI LLMs don't have the accuracy sufficient to replace human doctors. An analysis of 83 studies showed an overall accuracy of only 52.1%. Some were better than non-experts, but none were better than experts. Just as I thought.

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17 April 2025

We need to stop pretending that AI is intelligent. The article is talking about LLMs, of course. Yeah, they aren't intelligent yet. You can think of it as a glorified search engine with a different kind of user interface. It doesn't answer your queries based on an indexed list of documents, but rather by its language embeddings, can determine what you are asking for, and can provide the necessary answers.

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Apparently vibe coding with o3 is really great. I have to check it out. I'm ready for something better than Claude 3.7 Sonnet.
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Very interesting background story about Yamanaka factors. What a genius.

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Oregon's unemployment rate is at a record high since 2021 – 4.6%. No one is surprised.

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Democrat solutions to Democrat problemsEdmonds, WA is selling city assets to make ends meet. That's going to just buy the city a few days of operational time. What then? 

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There's a nucleus in the thalamus that is important in conscious perception. Connections to the cerebral cortex is made through the thalamofrontal loop. Makes sense, since the thalamus is important in processing sensory input from the body, especially pain.
Another group of researchers have also discovered a molecular connection between adipose tissue and anxiety. Immune cells in fatty tissue produce a hormone called GDF15, which produces anxiety.  Maybe this is why we are seeing so many mentally ill obese people these days, as obesity has been increasing over the years.

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Australian scientists have discovered a quantum-based, jam-proof GPS system. It uses quantum sensors to detect small changes in the earth's magnetic field, and doesn't require sending signals to satellites. It's also portable, so perhaps someday it can be placed in a phone.

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Wow, the homeless population in Portland doubled since January 2023. Is it a surprise that the Homeless Industrial Complex failed to solve the problem? Heck no, it's the homeless support system, where people come from all over the nation to enjoy the city's generosity. The city says that this data is helpful, and "that means we can better provide them the services they need to end their homelessness".  And of course, Democrats will need even more money to accomplish this. 🙄

And because of taxes, the Portland Blues Festival is cutting back on days. And there will be no Oregon Symphony Waterfront concert.  And no Oregon Brewers Festival.  Pay more. Get less. 

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There's a bill that aims to limit the number of bills a legislator can introduce to no more than 25 per session. For some, it should be zero.

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The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is ending their DEI practices. I thought they already did this back in February. They said that “Fred Hutch promotes the belief that everyone deserves a life free from cancer.”  Yeah, we all think that – that wasn't the issue with DEI, though. If they can do it, so can Harvard. Was it that hard?
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16 April 2025

"CT scans could cause 5% of cancers, study finds". Whoa. When I read that I had to check out the article. The operational word is "could" and if you look at the actual article, they didn't do a longitudinal case-control study, but rather, used the RadRAT model that estimates what the cancer incidence would be. It's a model, and so it could be wrong. Not to panic, as the article commenter said. If you are recommended to get the CT scan, you should get the CT scan. Doctors should continue to be cautious about how many scans they order.

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A caffeine metabolite, 1-methylxanthine (1-MX) has been shown to improve memory and lead to "increases in key brain chemicals linked to learning, neuroprotection, and antioxidant defenses".  Sign me up! I already drink coffee, and I do feel like it has some beneficial brain effect. The original study was done in male albino rats, so it's not clear how much of my perceived benefit is just wishful thinking.

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Conservative Americans are more likely to distrust science. Gee, I wonder why?
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Japan's population keeps decreasing. The drop is a record. Few are interested in having kids in Japan. Marriage rates are low. A lot of young Japanese would rather spend money on crap like gacha. Sounds like an unhealthy society, which is a shame. C'mon, Japanese men and women – get off your oshidi and start making babies!

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A great way to trash Wikipedia's reputation even more. Harvard activists stage a giant Wikipedia edit session, to make them look less bad, and replace antisemitic attributions with innocent-sounding pro-Palestinian goodness. This is why Wikipedia alternatives exist. You would think Wikipedia would care about their online reputation, but I guess not. This is another example of the scability law. Wikipedia was great when it was still small and every editor aspired to quality. When you open it up to the world, it becomes crappy.

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This video is going around. The United States has gotten out of shape in terms of manufacturing, and can't do basic stuff anymore. How far we've fallen. If there's a need for military escalation, I fear for the country. We won't be able to make things as we did during WW II. 

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Don't fall for this Google Gmail scam. It's amazing that Google won't fix it, or admit that it's a problem.

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Oregon legislators are set on getting that kicker money, especially since they won't be getting as much federal dollars. But Oregon has the money – they just want to keep wasting it on illegals and the homeless.
Washington is looking to raise taxes, too. Gotta feed that always-hungry Democrat machine.

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Well, well. Legacy Hospitals are actually financially healthy and don't need OHSU's rescuing after all. Wasn't that the reason for the merger? 

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...people who overestimate their political knowledge are more likely to react negatively during online conversations with those who hold opposing views—and as a result, become more emotionally polarized over time. The researchers found that this “overconfidence effect” helps explain why cross-cutting discussions, or exchanges between people with different political views, often fail to reduce hostility between political groups and may even backfire.

...the Dunning-Kruger effect was clearly present in the political domain. Participants who scored the lowest on objective political knowledge tended to believe they were more knowledgeable than average. In contrast, those who performed well were more likely to underestimate their knowledge. This misalignment between actual and perceived knowledge helped identify who was politically overconfident.

Rather than reflecting an honest effort to engage, such exchanges may become battlegrounds for self-affirmation, particularly among those who falsely believe they have superior political knowledge. When people feel certain they are right, they may become less willing to listen and more inclined to attack, reinforcing existing divisions.
I knew it!
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Those elderly who use devices such as cell phones are less likely to be demented. It's probably not cause and effect. I think that if you're not demented, you're more likely to figure out how to use your smart phone.

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I like Microsoft's Kermit font. It's a better Comic Sans.

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There’s no money to repay anyone”. What a mess. The Ritz Carlton hotel project is so symbolic of Portland. A monument to the city's failure. So what will it become – a giant homeless shelter? 

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15 April 2025

Happy Tax Payment Day!  It's a good day to be reminded of how much Oregon has wasted your tax money.

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Really? According the US News & World Report, the John A Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu is a Tier 1 school in primary care, beating a lof of the bigger names. Am I reading this right? Better than UCLA or Dartmouth? How did that happen?

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I'm confused. First Trump announced that he's giving smartphones and chips a break from his tariffs. Then he says that there are no exemptions after all.  You would think that Apple would try to shift production to the U.S., but no, it's shifting production to Thailand, while it squeezes what it can from India and Vietnam. What's the deal, Tim Cook? Even NVIDIA is opening up production in Arizona.

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Speaking of chips, Intel has found a buyer for the Altera division. Man, FPGA chips were supposed to be one of the promising directions for AI processing, and in better days, Intel would be developing this tech themselves. Now, they're having to sell parts for the money.

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U of O's Institute for Policy Research and Engagement School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management says that Oregon is going to see more businesses fleeing the state due to the unfavorable business climate. Oregon needs to figure out how to retain businesses, but I guess that's not one of Tina Kotek's priorities, is it? Meanwhile, there's the infamous Khanh Pham, who now has the idea that big tech companies like Google and Meta should pay for local journalism.  At least $122 million apiece each year, she says. What a joke.  And all because AI doesn't refer back to the news sites as much as before. Get a clue, Khanh. Google is well-aware that AI is changing the business model, and they're afraid that it's not bringing in as much revenue to them as well. I guess every blue state has their own AOC.

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Democrat solutions to Democrat problems. I wasn't aware that if you're overdosing on fentanyl and someone calls for medical assistance, "the person calling for emergency medical assistance — as well as the person overdosing — will not be arrested or prosecuted for drug possession". It's called the Good Samaritan Law
Man, this wasn't the Good Samaritan parable I remember reading, where the Samaritan supplies illegal drugs to someone, and then when that person gets close to death, calls for help. I guess Oregon legislators read a different biblical translation. Laws like these are why Oregon has so many druggies.

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Bidaya AI is noticing some weird behavior with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Seems it doesn't use LLM tools. But from the screenshots, I can't tell if the problem is with Gemini or Google's AI Studio.

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14 April 2025

Why AI Is Better than Doctors at the Most Human Part of Medicine. Is AI really more empathetic than human doctors? Not really. They can mimic an emphathetic human, but this is only during the chat session. Once the chat closes, the model has no memory. Who are you, again? Don't be fooled.

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A nucleus in the brainstem has been found to have functionality it wasn't known to have before. It's the red nucleus, and it coordinates motor function planning, and responding to rewards. Something called salience. We're still discovering things about the human body.

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Heh. Trump is going to issue an EO that will force states to buy new voting machines or else manually count the ballots. Yes! It's time we got rid of the flawed, leaky, compromised Dominion voting machines, and use machines that are verifiable and can't be easily hacked. Great move, and will ensure that elections are trustworthy. Of course, this will cost money and the Blue states are screaming. This will force them to abandon spending money on illegals. This is important.

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Why Mozilla is failing. They really should not be paying their CEO that much money, and use it to build a better browser, like people think the money is being used for. I'm still using LibreWolf.

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Too many adults are clueless on how to be adults, and need to take classes. How in the world did this happen? Are adults so infantilized today?  From their protesting and online commentary, you would think that they sure got it all figured out. Are we talking about the same people?

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Another article touting the benefits of universal basic income. First of all, these were Germans. Not applicable to the United States, where much of that money would probably be misspent. Second, these article always don't follow-up long enough. Sure, everyone is happy in the beginning. But follow them long enough, and see if you've just bred a new dependency class. UBI is another non-scalable concept – good in the small, limited, and controlled setting, but not applicable to general society. All they can conclude is that it worked for them. That's it.

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Anthropic and OpenAI are now free to embrace freedom of speech, now that Biden is no longer in power. No more pledges to "avoid bias and discrimination", which generally was code for silencing anyone who criticized CRT and transgender ideology. Let the people judge.

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Half the men in Seattle are never-married singles, census data shows.  How sad. The commenters are eager to pass on advice like, get off the computer, or go to dance class, etc. The real reason is that young men have been trained to think they are just creepy perverts who need to stop bothering modern women. And modern women of dating age in Seattle are more likely than ever to be very far-left. This is the sign of a culture in decline.

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Do you dare ditch your iPhone case?  I'd still use a case, especially as the new iPhones will be aluminum instead of titanium. The metal will be softer.

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How to choose a modular synth. When I was young, I dreamed of owning a large modular synth. But now, I am a plug-in guy, and use DAWs. Recreating a patch would be so onerous, for one thing. And so the music that comes out of modular synths tends to be just ambient stuff, repeating things over and over. If you like that sort of thing. But the rest of us would like to create a different kind of music, with more complexity and variability, and less mechanical and automated sounding.

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Blue Origin's brief space venture has return safely.  Nice publicity for Bezos, since SpaceX has been getting nearly all of the media exposure recently. But the real celebrity, to me, is Amanda Nguyen.  Wow, why is she not more famous?

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A Dutch neurologist, Bas Bloem, thinks that Parkinson's disease stems from pesticides, specifically paraquat. It may be one cause, but probably not the only one.

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This article says that dementia is more common in married men than unmarried men. The author is "living single" – think she might be biased against marriage?  Anyway, it always pays to read the research article directly. What you'll find is that the study population is from people who signed up for a dementia study with the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center.
First, the study used data from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC), one of the largest cohorts with annual clinical evaluation of dementia over one of the longest follow-ups (up to 18 years). The NACC is an ongoing longitudinal study that has enrolled > 50,000 participants, with some up to 19 annual visits. Referral-based or volunteer participants were recruited from > 42 ADRC across the United States. Since 2005, the Uniform Data Set (UDS) has been collected annually (within a ± 6-month window) using a standardized protocol for all participants by trained clinicians or clinic staff. 
Doesn't sound like a random person in the U.S. How were these people identified for participation? Did they have relatives with Alzheimer's dementia? If so, there may be other factors going on. Interestingly, the Psychology Today writer doesn't mention this. Instead, she attributes the dementia risk to single people being better able to maintain social ties. C'mon.....

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Adipose tissue has an epigenetic memory for obesity. Once you become obese, there are epigenetic changes that produce transcriptional differences that don't resolve after weight loss. This promotes rebound obesity. The authors identified 4 histone modifications seen in adipose tissue of obese patients, which they suspect drives the change. I wonder how long it takes to be obese for these changes to occur.

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Time to use Uber?  Lyft now records the conversations you have in the car while you're riding. What a world we live in today.

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Here's a disturbing article. OpenAI's rise has felt very dot-commish to me, and apparently others feel so, too. How will OpenAI become profitable? Is this why Nadella has been a bit distant with OpenAI recently? If the company goes down, the impact will be felt by Microsoft, Softbank, NVIDIA, and Oracle. Coreweave is a minor player, and much like the empty Chinese datacenters rusting away that no one uses, it will probably just be written off.
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