2 April 2025

This video, How to stop a robot dog, is one of the best ads for remote computer software.  Well done.

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Google hasn't figured out what to do to deal with the use of ChatGPT.  Clearly Google has made changes to its algorithm, and it is really sensitive to detecting non-human access.

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Google is now reluctant to share AI research, for fear of helping rivals. This makes sense. The Chinese will capitalize on it faster than anyone else.

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There are rumors that Mozilla is going to launch a new email platform called Thundermail. It will have its own email service. I don't know, with their new policy of claiming ownership of whatever data you put in their hands, will we want to trust them with email?

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Antidepressant use is linked to sudden cardiac death. I wonder if it's QTc prolongation, which can be a problem with drugs like this, especially interacting with other drugs people take.

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ZeroHedge has an article about the decline of Seattle. Of course they blame Trump. Dem stupidity has led to poverty and decreased wealth, and so they look to those who still work and who have some wealth, and they say, "gimme some". Portland is already seeing this, and Oregon has far fewer billionaires than Washington. The Doom Loop continues.

Tina Kotek is still fixated on mental health issues, as well as the homelessness problem and education. As one can easily see, her efforts are indistinguishable from there being no effort made at all. In these areas, Oregon is crap by any measure. And the sinking economy continues to sink.

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And then there's Hawaii. They miss that sweet COVID money, even though COVID isn't a threat anymore. It was used for all sorts of stuff unrelated to COVID. Oh well.
And just like the monorail system, Hawaii just can't fix anything without spending gobs more money than planned. This time it's the benefits system.

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At this rate, will humans bother to write code? Even AI agents are writing and executing their own code. This is the world we live in now.

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What a time to be alive. Mitochondria transplants are now a thing. This is amazing.

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Names can shape one's facial appearance. I suspected it was true. Kids that are given good names will grow up to reflect that.

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The true villain in this artistic appropriation isn’t necessarily OpenAI (though they’re hardly innocent bystanders). It’s Japan’s bewilderingly creator-hostile copyright framework. In May 2023, the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs issued an interpretation of copyright law that effectively threw creative professionals under the technological bus, declaring that copyrighted works could be used without permission for AI training purposes. (The article specifies that the AI can train on copyright material if its purpose is ‘non-enjoyment’, which roughly translates to – artistic styles can be copied/replicated as long as the AI doesn’t replicate ideas/sentiments/scenes/characters from the training data)

The legal loophole hinges on a distinction that would make even the most pedantic lawyer blush: as long as the AI isn’t “enjoying” the works it’s ingesting (whatever that means for a neural network), it’s perfectly fine to feed it the entire corpus of an artist’s life work without consent or compensation. Article 30-4 of Japan’s Copyright Law provides this exception for “non-enjoyment purposes,” essentially declaring open season on creative content so you could ‘Ghiblify’ your selfie without infringing on Miyazaki’s nuanced material. As long as the AI doesn’t make photos of you standing beside Totoro, or recreating scenes from Spirited Away, it’s all kosher.
Bad law, and very sad for Hayao Miyazaki.

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And South Korea is doomed unless they start having kids again. What is it about those Asians that getting married and starting a family is so difficult? Or so off-putting?

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1 April 2025

If you are a serious piano player, you must watch this video where Garrick Ohlsson covers Chopin's 16 piano technique innovations. It must be a delight to be a student of his.

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AI was able to read a woman's brain waves and translate that into voice so she could speak. As someone commented, you wouldn't want to do that to a man. 😁

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Yes, it really is true, and now we have scientific evidence: conservative women are more attractive than liberal women. 

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Adobe is closing their downtown Portland office.  Drip, drip, Portland.

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Industry advocates at odds over reason for major dip in Portland apartment construction. Yes, this is a real headline. The truth is there are several reasons why no one wants to build in Portland. Doom loop.

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31 March 2025

New bill proposes to eliminate vote-by-mail. This needs to go. And voting results the same day, not a week later.

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Yes!  Housing first doesn't work. We tried it, and it's time for something else.  We shouldn't leave the decision as to treatment up to the criddlers. They've already shown they have poor judgment.

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"As Oregon ages, tax revenue may shrink." I guess that means the young people in Oregon aren't the source of tax revenue that we've come to expect?  There are other reasons for the shrinking tax revenue, and it isn't necessary aging. Oregon leaders can't seem to understand why revenue is declining.

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30 March 2025

Even Democrats surprise themselves.  In Hawaii, the cost for a flood management project for the Ala Wai canal was $354 million a few years before 2023. Then in 2023 it soared to $1 billion. The Federal government was supposed to pay 2/3 of the cost. It never got completed. Now recent estimates for the cost are put at $11 billion!  Can Democrat governments ever get anything done? The project was started in 1999, if you can believe it. Nothing ever seems to get done in Hawaii.

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Oregon schools are still implementing DEI policies.

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Apple is planning to create an AI-doctor. Sounds more like an AI-nurse practitioner. It'll just make recommendations based on parameters it collects on your Apple watch. Hired doctors will make videos. Yawn. I don't trust Silicon Valley with health matters any more than I trust 23andMe, which fortunately I didn't buy into.

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29 March 2025

Boy I think this is misleading. Here's the title: Cancer’s “Master Switch” Blocked for Good in Landmark Study.  They go on to say:

Using this approach, they have successfully blocked a key cancer-driving transcription factor known as cJun, marking a significant step forward in targeting previously untreatable cancer mechanisms.

I studied c-Jun as a researcher, and this gene is linked to hematopoietic cytokines. Blocking it is one thing, but in doing so, a lot of very important cell functions in non-cancerous cells would be affected. They only killed cells, but did not test this in living organisms. I'd wait a bit before getting too excited. I'll give it a "sugoi" though.

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UPS will eliminate 244 jobs in Portland. This is even more bad news for the city. Seems like every week, we read reports of more jobs lost, along with budget shortfalls and plans to raise taxes. Doom loop.

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Tina Kotek should stay out of this and not be swayed by activists who want to shut down the OHSU Primate Center. Sometimes there is no substitute for primate research. Plus:
Barr-Gillepsie added that the research center’s closure would likely cost OHSU more than $100 million and eliminate more than 500 jobs.
OHSU can't afford this, on top of everything else.

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Canary in the coal mine. Valley Medical Center in Renton is letting go 101 staffers as a result of Medicaid cuts. Hospitals should not be so dependent on Medicaid. Medicaid should ideally be used infrequently, for a minority of people who are disabled or cannot otherwise get medical insurance. Now we have situations where 25% to 30% of people are on Medicaid. This is sign of a broken society, where increasingly more people are dependent on the socialist solution of using government to be their insurance company. The government was never intended to serve this function, and it shouldn't. I suspect other hospitals are feeling the pinch, too, and more will have to implement similar measures.

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BuyOnceSoftware.  Useful software you pay for once and own forever. Instead of paying for a subscription. I like this.

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WSJ publishes the story of what happened last year when Sam Altman was fired. This happens in a lot of businesses, and you just don't hear about it.

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Now Elon Musk and Taylor Swift can hide their private plane flight paths. In the world we live in today, this makes sense.

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28 March 2025

Tucker Carlson interviewed Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong recently. Dr. S-S was not afraid to state that he thinks the vax caused the increase in cancer incidence.  Some of what he says needs corroboration, but he is not someone to dismiss lightly.
But then take a look at these two articles:
First this: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39981972/
then this: https://www.embopress.org/doi/full/10.1038/s44320-025-00093-6

So it seems that two jabs causes epigenetic modification of H3K27ac which impacts tumorigenesis and causes a pro-inflammatory state with long-term changes in the immune system. And changes to the H3K27ac histone may play a role in the development of certain cancers (breast, lung, colon, prostate).

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Porttland City Council members want the city to buy housing and rent it cheaply to people who can't (or don't want to) pay market rent rates. They say that data obtained from the Democrat Socialist Party said it was a good thing. Fortunately, the city is too broke to waste on a money-loser like this. That's probably the only thing keeping Portland from doing something stupid like this.

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The OHSU and UnitedHealthcare deal is still being worked on. They threw a lot of crap at each other. I'm amazed they're still talking to each other.
Update: A deal has been signed. No details, though, on what was agreed on.

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Poor baby. When you're a billionaire, SAm Altman thinks everyone hates you for everything. That's only if you're a businessman with a public profile, who has to make business decisions to maintain your wealth. 

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27 March 2025

Bill Gates thinks that AI will replace many doctors and teachers. I agree on the teachers, but AI will replace more nurses than doctors.
And Oregon thinks we're so short on doctors that we need to ease up on standards to let foreign doctors practice. How about a no on that? We need to start spending money on training more doctors (and nurses) instead of wasting money unproductively.

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COVID funds are being pulled and Oregon is complaining. Can't believe some people think we still need COVID money.  It was just a slush fund for other things. Time to stop this nonsense.

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Seattle is losing their brightest students. DEI policies are hard to get rid of.

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Text2Note is a neat concept for those who want to make sure they don't miss actionable items from a long document, where the writer did not highlight important things. I don't know about paying for a subscription, though.

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Nitisinone is an FDA-approved drug to treat hereditary tyrosinemia type 1 that could be repurposed to prevent mosquito-borne illnesses.  When taken, blood levels are enough to kill the insects that suck one's blood. Paper here.

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26 March 2025

"There could be billions more people on Earth than previously thought." Not to panic. It's just that they may have counted wrong before. It's not like a whole continent was recently discovered. I won't notice any difference, and neither will you.

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"I traded my U.S. medical career for life in Canada. Here’s how the two health systems stack up." Interesting read on how the two systems compare. This is just an ED doc's perspective. It's sad that Americans have more of an adversarial relationship with physicians. And medicine seems to be increasingly more about the billing codes. This really got worse when Obamacare came on the scene. As physicians became hospital employees and got paid far less than before, all attention was paid to these codes, and ways to game the system to get higher billiing codes.

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“If you’re asking about products over Alexa, you’re going to see that behavior also reflected on the web,” Choffnes says. “If you go to Amazon.com, for example, you’ll see recommendations based on what you asked.”

Even when Google was able to draw on a user’s behavior, it still frequently profiled people incorrectly. According to the study, Google was able to correctly profile a married person with 70% accuracy but could only do so with 10% accuracy for people who are “in a relationship.”
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Nearly 100% of bacteria can be identified in 3 hours. This uses FISH probes using artificial peptide nucleic acids to target sequences in the bacteria. This tech is from South Korea, and reminds me of ddPCR used to identify mutations in circulating tumor DNA. This will be revolutionary if it can be widely adopted, as it may obviate the need for much of empiric antibiotic therapy, and allow for a more tailored approach.

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Wow, this Super Grandma lives in Oregon. Looks like Bend more than Portland. Staying active and avoiding sarcopenia is key.

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Three articles from Fortune paint a gloomy picture for GenZ and millennials:
Not looking good, and Trump will not forgive their student loans.
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Gee, who didn't see that coming?  Seattle’s payroll tax collects less than expected.  Better figure it out soon – those homeless will need their food and supplies.

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We had a taxpayer-funded FHA mortgage program for illegal aliens???  WTF, man.

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25 March 2025

Espresso and office coffee-maker coffee can elevate your cholesterol. It's not a lot, and the benefits outweigh the risks.

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Wow, I would have thought it would be in the prefrontal cortex. There is a link between intelligence and the posterior parietal cortex. It's probably not the only place.

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Chewing gum releases microplastics in your mouth. But the microplastics they identified were "polyolefins, polyethylene terephthalates, polyacrylamides and polystyrenes" and not DEHP phthalates or perfluoroalkyl microplastics (PFAS) that appear to be the bad players.

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18% of Oregon residents receive SNAP benefits, the third highest in the nation.  Oregon is so dependent on federal subsidies. It's not even funny.

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24 March 2025

Teslas and Tesla showrooms are tech-equipped. It's not a good idea to vandalize them – as some vandals discovered. One didn't think his fingerprints on the Molotov cocktail bottle would be discovered. Not too smart.

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You want to glue to things together? Perhaps check this site first.

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The vanishing male writer. I noticed this several years ago when I was looking for a good new horror novel to read. The only male writers were the usual: Stephen King, Clive Barker and maybe Laird Barron. I don't enjoy reading horror by female writers. They're always more focused on people have relationship issues, and when the horror occurs, I always say to myself "Is that it?" Or "what just happened?"  The scary stuff is always understated. Male horror writers will give me stories where true horror is uncovered,  often when someone does something or goes somewhere they're not supposed to. I don't want to read stories where some heroine has to eradicate a ghost or demon by reconciling some bad relationship that happened years ago that she tried to forget. If I'm wrong, let me know.

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Vancomycin-resistant enterococci secrete bacteriocins that kills off its competitors. How they do so may be a strategy to attack them, something that is sorely needed.

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Oregon has the second-highest rate of WFH workers. A whopping 17.7%. It used to be more like 6.3%. Only Colorado has a higher percentage. These are the folks whose jobs AI will likely take away.  When I read this article, it sounds like Portland has a lot of people that are struggling to find something to do. It's not a vibrant city, full of opportunity and action. There's a lot of wishful thinking in the article. The Trump era is not going to treat Oregon or Portland well. They have been so used to federal money to keep things going, and now there won't be any of that. And there aren't that many billionaires to tax either.

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Washington state Democrats are crazy. 
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