Sugoi & Yokunai

Marie Curie was so radioactive that even today the radiation from her fingerprints can be detected. She was a hot babe.

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Looks like Captain Cook's ship The Endeavor has been finally located after sinking 250 years ago.

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Ah, Oregon, once again a national embarrassement.

Even Tina Kotek thinks that Portland better stop piling on the taxes, as the wealthy are fleeing the city. That's how you know it's really bad.

Multnomah County is closing their passport service. Due to budgetary concerns, of course. Portlanders pay higher tax – get even less service.

And Pearl District residents are afraid of the new homeless shelter in their neighborhood.

Oregon's jobless rate hits another post-pandemic high.

Portland toy store, Merci Milo, calls it quits. It's too expensive to operate and nobody wants to go shopping around there anymore.

Meanwhile, Tina Kotek says she will make sure that the mean old Feds don't take away her ability to support illegal aliens.

It's clear that just because the federal government ousted the Democrats, when you live in a Blue state and Blue city, you still suffer a lot.

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NY Times writes an article using ChatGPT to tell you what jobs you might apply for when AI takes away your current job.  Trust authenticator? Trust auditor? Escalation officer? AI personality director? C'mon.

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Things have changed considerably in the past year between Microsoft and OpenAI. Interesting that Microsoft owns GitHub Copilot but still wants access to Windsurf. Is that an admission that their own product is deficient? It's hard to maintain relationships in the dynamic, constantly changing world of tech.

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Amazing statistics. The U.S. added 1000 millionaires daily last year. Net worth rose 11% in the U.S. last year. Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan led last year for individuals with a net worth of $100,000 to $1 million, accounting for 28.2%, followed by Western Europe with 25.4% and North America with 20.9%.  Over 80% of adults in the UBS sample had a net worth of under $100,000. Overall, about 1.6% registered a net worth of $1 million or more. How did you fare?

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Who knew that Honda was in the rocket business?

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What will it take to break up Google?

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What does Criag Federighi think about the iPad? He seems to really like it. And here's some example of what iPadOS 26 will be able to do.

And what does Apple think about Siri? It seems Apple is admitting defeat on this. They know they can't catch up.

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Pope Leo takes on AI. I agree with the commenters. Although Pope Leo is a math major and more tech savvy than Francis, he is way over his head. I am not convinced he could contribute much to the discussion.

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Did you know that the brain also produces insulin? Makes sense, I guess, as insulin drives glucose into the cell.

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A deep dive into Google's Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Google seems to be doing everything it can to keep you from actually visiting the web pages it scrapes data from.

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Sam Altman thinks we've already entered the early stages of the Singularity. Hard to say. It's like entering the event horizon of a black hole. You won't know when you've crossed it.

Sam Altman also reports that Meta is trying to steal his employees by offering really high signing bonuses. Like $100 million. Wow, nice job if you can get it.

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Obamacare already ruined physician practices. It promised great things. They should have called it the Unaffordable Care Act. Now it's clear that it can't survive without ongoing federal subsidies, like much of Democrat promises. You can't legislate quality medical care. Eventually the money runs out. The government shouldn't be running our healthcare industry anyway.

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What the hell? After all China did to the world with COVID-19, many (most?) countries view China more favorably than the U.S.

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This is how it starts.  MIT has developed an AI model that is always learning and never sleeps. Baby steps to the AI takeover, I think.

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Oregon ski resorts can't get liability coverage now. Can nothing in Oregon work anymore?

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Ever wondered how LLMs know that they've finished what they had to say and stop talking? Doesn't that require comprehension? Well, not really. We think.

Then there's this: LLMs know when they are being evaluated. Really creepy. 

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Do you have social anxiety? It might just be your gut bacteria. Man, the microbiota-gut-brain axis doesn't cease to amaze.

Speaking of which, the microbiota in your poop can predict whether you are going to die within 30 days. 

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So who do I believe? This guy who tells me top optimize for LLMs? Or this guy, who says that people are rushing into Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)? People are using both – traditional search, as well as LLM query engines. It depends on the question. And I still don't trust AI to get my answers for me. They can miss things. But they are good for idea suggestions and to make sure you haven't forgotten anything.

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Could there be a fifth force of nature? If so, it would be mediated by a new Yukawa particle.

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Oregon is third worst in the nation for hepatitis C deaths. Probably because so many people in Oregon are IV drug abusers, that hepatitis is rampant. I would bet that we're terrible for hepatitis B, too.

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Dumb. Looks like PERS is going to be restricted to just investing in carbon-neutral companies. Which means it may miss out on some good investments, and that someone is going to have to be paid to look over every single potential investment and decide if it's good enough to invest in. The time and dollars spent that have to go to satisfy this insane requirement. So does that mean PERS is going to invest only in solar panel companies and windmill farms? Do they still like Tesla, or is that just out of the question?

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Things are looking bleak for Providence. Bet they miss those Obamacare days, when money was just rolling in. And we still had leadership that wasn't as left-wing as it is today, and so business actually wanted to stay in Oregon.

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Seattle's affordable housing industry is in crisis mode now. Yup, one more sector that was just dependent on federal subsidies which are no longer rolling in.

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Another major company is leaving Oregon – that is Tektronix. And it's now national news that Oregon is committing economic suicide. Here's WWeek, recognizing that it's a big problem for the state.

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Oregon institutes protections for geolocation tracking in teens younger than age 16.  Once in a while, Oregon legislators do something beneficial.

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Uruguay scientists have developed a drug (called SANA) that supposedly promotes weight loss without suppressing appetite. It's based on salicylates and creatine. The weight loss was about 3% at two weeks. Not a lot, and I doubt it will outsell the standard GLP-1 receptor agonists.

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Salmon Valley school superintendent in Washington says that federal subsidy cuts will be problematic for the school district. It amazes me how everything seems to be dependent on federal money. This needs to stop. The federal government shouldn't be subsidizing everything in the U.S. Can't the state take care of this?

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Well, the numbers are here at last. And it's devastating. Intel will lay off 15% to 20% of its employees, many of which will be in Oregon. Things are that bad. Gee whiz, can Oregon get some good news for a change?

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Here's an opinion about the AI hype is all about. It's a race to get the $50 trillion prize.  Meanwhile young graduates are finding it very difficult to get jobs. This is likely AI related.

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Despicable. Another company claims to fight refractory cancer, prey on hope, and take people's money. And people aren't getting any better. I don't how these people sleep or look at themselves in the mirror. This is why we have clinical trials first.

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A Harvard study showed that women who drank at least one cup of coffee daily aged gracefully and had less dementia. The effect was not seen with decaf coffee – only the real stuff. Remember though, this study was not set out to research the effects of coffee. It was an entirely different study, and so is just a retrospective subgroup analysis, which is only good for generating a hypothesis, and not for making recommendations. Still, drinking coffee is easy to do.

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Nature articles will now make public the initial acceptance letter with request to modify and publish the authors' response. Could be interesting to read. We might get some additional insights.

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Another paper that shows that our brains get soft if we don't exercise them, and use generative AI for cognitive offloading.

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Some examples of truly unusually gifted humans.

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Terence Tao discusses the hardest problems in mathematics and physics in a Lex Fridman interview.

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AI education has the potential of disseminating outdated science, since large models can't be updated frequently enough. You think that's bad, try medicine, where things change so quickly.

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Those sneaky Chinese. This is how the smartest people in the world get around those pesky nVIDIA chip export restrictions. You pack the data in suitcases and send them to the United States. Then someone runs the code on the GPUs and sends the data back to China. Because there's no restriction on data, right?

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A lot of people objected to Apple's paper on the limitations of reasoning models. Large models don't necessarily live up to the hype.  Gary Marcus sums up seven main objections to the paper and knocks them down. 

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Incredible how the geographic coordinates of the Great Pyramid of Giza are the speed of light in microns/sec N, and 10,000,000 m from the North Pole. Surely it's just a coincidence. Got those Graham Hancock/Erich von Däniken vibes.

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Is Google going to destroy the Web? Seems a bit overblown. Not destroy. Just change. If Google just kept doing what they were doing before, and just providing us with good search results, it might stick around longer. They wouldn't have made as much advertising money, but people wouldn't be criticizing as much as they do now. Google is trying to preserve its golden goose, but the bird is getting old.

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AI is making students dumb. Kinda like the Internet has made students dumb. This is one of the major threats of AI – taking away so much cognitive skills from us humans. We'll have a generation of dummies who won't know what to do without an internet-connected phone nearby.

And here's an article about a man afflicted with ChatGPT-driven psychosis. LLMs are a force multiplier for mental illness. 

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Five greatest physics lectures of all time. No excuses now. This is what the Internet was made for.

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OHSU has decided to go with Shereef Elnahal. It's interesting to think that they had a guy who was ready to take on the role (Nate Selden), but oh no, Tina Kotek had to have a nationwide search first. In the end, the just found one guy willing to take the job, and he's got no obvious advantage over Selden. Being from Harvard and the East Coast is a disadvantage, I think. Was it just that they wanted an outsider?  Just wanted to have someone else besides Selden, who was already Dean of the School of Medicine? What is the point? At least Selden was a local and already knew people. So much money wasted. Selden had been with OHSU for 25 years. What a way to treat him.

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Photon transport through the entire adult human head. What a weird study to be doing. They measured light of 800 nm wavelength (in the infrared range) going through the skull, and actually detected photons on the other side. I would have thought all such light would be absorbed, but some penetrated through. What use this information has is beyond me.

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Apple has a problem. This could be huge for Apple. I don't think there will be robust sales for the new iPhone. Who really needs a new phone that doesn't really do much more than the iPhone 16, and is just thinner and more likely to bend and so, likely has an inferior battery life, I don't know for sure. And the Liquid Glass look? Seems to make text harder to see. Somehow, I don't think Steve Jobs would approve of what's going to come out.

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Google's going to implement an age assurance tool that is zero-knowledge. Do you trust Google to do this? I really don't. They can triangulate the data from so many different ways.

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Pseudomonas aeruginosa can break down hospital plastic. And this bug is not rare, especially in hospitals. So now. hospital plastic needs to be coated with antimicrobials to prevent this.

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This is how it starts. Strange neutrino pulses have been detected that emit from deep within Antarctic ice. It's aliens!

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The CEO of Scale AI is joining Meta. Scale AI hires third world workers to do all the grunge labeling work for AI datasets. They have to watch all the videos and images and classify them. Sometimes the images are NSFW and something NSFL. Well, Alexandr Wang will make his billions.

Update (16 June 2025): So Google is cutting ties with Scale AI. Can't blame them, really.

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Providence is going to lay off 134 employees. All for the usual reasons. The nurses union (ONA) claims that the Providence administration hasn't lowered their own salaries in response to their financial downturn, and Providence is not denying this. Makes me wonder how serious they think it is. Why not lower the salaries of executives, instead of firing people and making patient care that much more difficult? It's a legit point. Put some skin in the game. And Providence should get on the phone and talk to Kotek and get her to do something about Oregon's lousy economy and high crime rate. Stop businesses from leaving and stop raising taxes on everything. This way so many people won't have to be on CareOregon/Medicaid.

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Mathematical connections elucidated in describing physics at the quantum level, statistical level, and Navier-Stokes level.

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Girls fall behind boys in math during the first year of school. Why does this happen?

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Laptop speakers can leak audio through walls, through inadvertent radio transmission leakage. Probably not something I'll have to worry about. 

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U.S. Senators may ban pharma ads on TV networks. Boy, is their budget gonna suffer. They should ban it from radio, too.

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Sleeping in total darkness turns about to be important. Even a little bit of light can apparently interfere with deep sleep.

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In a parody article, someone wrote that Cape Breton was going to have its own time zone. Google and Meta picked it up as actual news, and started disseminating it. 

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Not good.  Intel is going to start laying off an unknown number of people in Oregon in July. This is going to hurt Oregon even more.

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This is news to me. RFK Jr. is telling people that:

What? Suddenly medicine is a commodity? So cheap? We're getting even deeper into socialized medicine? Do we have all these doctors now, who will be willing to work for peanuts? Or does he expect AI to step up? Or nurse practitioners? Or FMGs?

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Some folks are looking into a theory that gravity is just a manifestation of entropy.  Yeah, it's a long shot.

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Fastest way to detect a vowel in a string. Nice review of Python coding techniques.

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Sad story of a guy who convinced HP to buy Palm and WebOS, and then see it die.  Oh, what could have been. The stars really misaligned, didn't they.

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Using ChatGPT changes your brain – for the worse. All that cognitive off-loading. Quick, somebody let Ohio State University know. Use of ChatGPT will be required come this fall.

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It hasn't happened yet. Someone speculates on what will be AI's first big disaster. So many possibilities.

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Well shoot. Houseplants don't actually purify the air. The original story that said it did was flawed.

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Looks like Khanh Pham's crazy bill to tax Google and Meta has advanced in the legislature. I bet she thinks she's doing Oregon a service.

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Dutch Bros is officially moving their HQ to Arizona. All those jobs. All that tax base. Tsk, tsk.

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Yes, those political TikTok videos really do shape people's minds. And Trump's team makes better ones. Of course, we knew that.

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Here's a map of where inflation is the highest. What do you notice?

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nVIDIA is going to build the world's first industrial AI cloud datacenter. But it's going to be built in Europe, to help European countries. What, not enough business in the United States?

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Apple introduces a haptic movie experience. OK, Apple, you can do cute small stuff like this, but how about something significant, too. You know, like what Steve Jobs would have done?

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Last year's winning optical illusions. Most of them are stuff we've already seen before. The latest entries are from 2023. The 2024 contest is underway. So late.

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A pancreatic cancer vaccine that "eradicates" disease? Why hasn't this gotten more publicity? Because, it's still early in the development phase. From the description, it seems more like cellular therapy, rather than a vaccine.

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Semaglutide is linked to neovascular macular degeneration.  It's already linked to muscle and bone mass loss. But on the plus side, it may increase penis length by a several millimeters. So, worth it?

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Great article on what it's like going through a lawsuit. It's not fun, and AI can be a very helpful companion.

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Clark County schools are feeling the money pinch. Schools always seem to need money. Why is that? Wish the students' grades would reflect the investment.

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Here's Biden on sanctuary cities in 2007 when he had a few more brain cells. Obama had a message, too. It's clear. The Democrat party is not the same as it was before. Just because you were a Democrat then, doesn't mean that it makes sense to still be one today. So Trump is not some fascist dictator, just trying to enforce immigration law, unless those two were also. 

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Remember when Portland didn't call in the National Guard, so as not to "escalate" the violence?  Yeah about that.

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