Sugoi & Yokunai

FDA-Approved Drug Shows Promise for Reversing Osteoarthritis Damage. The drug is lacosamide, which is actually a seizure medication used to treat neuropathic pain. It targets a protein called Nav1.7, which is found mainly in the nerve cells and is responsible for sending pain signals to the brain. But Nav1.7 is also highly active in chondrocytes, the cells responsible for maintaining cartilage, and in osteoarthritis it becomes overactive. So it made sense to try lacosamide on osteoarthritic cartilage, and it worked. A hydrogel formulation will keep the drug in the knee joint longer, but it must be injected. Paper here.

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AI Is Helping Patients Solve Medical Mysteries. I used to marvel at how pediatricians could look at a child and make a diagnosis of some obscure syndrome. I wondered how they could store all that knowledge in their heads. Well, apparently some of them can't. And so someone created Face2Gene, which identifies a genetic condition based on facial and non-facial dysmorphologies. Something like this was probably needed for a long time, but without AI computer vision, it was impossible.

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Some trees can worsen air quality. Weeping willows and poplars can emit volatile organic compounds which can decrease air quality. I'll bet other fragrant trees, like eucalyptus trees are even worse. Something else to worry about.

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WorldSolve is a repository of problems worth solving. If you're considering a startup looking for ideas, this might be a good place to start.

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Lutefish is a low-latency conferencing system that lets you jam with someone on the Internet. You gotta purchase a device, though, to handle the connections with your instrument. Let's hope it doesn't get bought out by Google or Microsoft, which will make you first log in to their system first. Or try to add AI features you don't need, just because.

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I saw this article from 2019: Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think. And then I saw this article: My Grandfather's Career Took Off at 58. Yeah, it's nice when you're genetically endowed not to be senile, and still in reasonably good health.

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There's a lot of datacenter articles today. The NYT has an article about how a bunch of teens have taken it upon themselves to virtue signal about datacenters. I bet they're heavy users of technology that depends on datacenters. An Axios article tries to explain away some of the concerns, such as water consumption. But knowing how teen virtue signalers are, I doubt that facts will matter to them. But The Economist thinks that the war of datacenters is fake. Politicians are opposing datacenters just to make themselves look tough to the public. Tina Kotek has taken the stance of opposing datacenters, but her union constituents aren't happy and they are moving to Idaho, where there is less opposition. Oregon's loss, Idaho's gain.

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Comcast's Xfinity Shield Turns Millions Of Routers Into Motion Sensors. It's strange that in a world where people take down Flock cameras, that Xfinity would think that people would purchase a device that tracks them in their own home. We already have the ability to install cameras that can detect intruders. I doubt that Xfinity's system will identify the criddler that breaks into my home. What we really need is a deterrent to stop them once they do break in. Like robot arms that come out of the walls and hold the intruder in place.

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Medicare's ongoing plan to lower physician reimbursement is going to worsen the doctor shortage situation. Medicare and Medicaid are socialist solutions to healthcare. There is already so much spending in healthcare. So much of the U.S. budget is dedicated to spending on these two items. The Trump administration is making Medicaid spending leaner, but efforts to decrease Medicare reimbursement will backfire. It just amazes me that some otherwise smart people advocate for universal healthcare run by the government.

Here's another reason why fewer smart people will want to become doctors. Does the naïve desire to want to heal people outweigh how much the psychological damage and trauma of litigation can exact on a physician's life? Pediatricians are not as likely to be sued, but the trauma of death is very real. In medicine, doctors might get sued if they work for deep pocket employers, like OHSU or Providence, even if they were not directly responsible. And the news media may not paint the picture in a way that balances the issue from the doctor's perspective. And the the doctor is not at liberty to defend his/her position in the public square. Even acknowledging that a patient was under his/her care violates HIPAA rules, and can result in monetary penalties. That's why many just say "no comment". 

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Mathematics may be the first academic profession to see its work taken over by AI. It seems to me that a lot of math problems were unsolved because human mathematicians just didn't have the working memory space that LLMs do. But what likely irks some mathematicians is that tough problems are being solved by people who aren't mathematicians, but are just smart people with some math background. That's gotta sting.

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The Caps Lock key is one key that I wish could be repurposed. I already use Karabiner-Elements so this should be straightforward to implement.

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The title of this article says Cherokee Nation In The US Bans Data Center Development. But then you read:

On the same day, the Cherokee Nation also released a report on data centers, which found that 64 percent of the 1,593 Cherokee Nation citizens surveyed did support hyperscale data center construction within the Reservation, a 7,000 sqm (75,347 sq ft) area in northeastern Oklahoma where the nation has legislative, executive, and judicial powers. Only 14 percent supported their development, and 22 percent remained unsure.

The report states that two data center projects – Project Clydesdale, a $1 billion campus in Tulsa County, and Project Mustang, potentially located in the Claremore Industrial Park – are currently under development within the Cherokee Nation Reservation.

Datacenters would be a great way to make good use of all that reservation land. Better than casinos.

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Here’s the Salary It Takes to Live Comfortably in Each U.S. State in 2026. Washington is the 6th most expensive state to live in. Oregon is the 7th most expensive state. And California is #3. Of course.

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PSU Forecasts Multnomah County Could Lose More Than 17,000 School-Aged Children in the Next Decade. 

Young families with kids are fleeing Portland. Is it any mystery as to why?

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OpenAI is introducing ChatGPT for teens. But will they use it? Or will they view this is as not sitting at the grown-ups table?

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The hidden toll of being a doctor. This is one of the hidden side-effects of Obamacare. It made free-standing physician practices financially untenable, and forced many to become hospital employees. Sure, it freed them from having to worry about taxes and business matters. But the cost became evident later, as the honeymoon period wore off. Now, I'm reading many stories of burnout and exhaustion such as this. Who would want to go into medicine today?

Related: Every student is cheating with AI now. They're not building intellectual muscle, for sure. 

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How to use uBlock Origin like a master. I like being able to disable scripts selectively, but knowing which one to block is still a matter of trial and error.

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13rt is an email service that creates spoof emails. I'm thinking of subscribing since many time, I need to use a spoof email, and my existing provider of this service requires me to create hard-to-remember addresses. I use Line2 to spoof my phone number, and it works really well.

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Almost nobody pays attention to web standards anymore. I'm seeing a lot of websites designed using an AI builder. But I'm seeing a lot of web sites that have trouble loading, or are blank. Or load partially and require reloading. My browser shouldn't have to struggle. And here's a graph of the size of the World Wide Web. Why does it fluctuate so much? I expected a steady increase. 

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Apple is incorporating cameras into the next AirPods, so they'll be like Meta's Creep Glasses.

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So this is what the OHSU CEO was fired for? One thing I disagree with:

Are you kidding me? In Portland, those things are a plus! OHSU probably couldn't believe their good luck when he applied. Naw, Tarek, it's something else, trust me.

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What a slap in the face. James Beard Awards reject Portland’s bid to host dining’s biggest night. If that's not a clear message. I don't know what is.

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This guy has a new theory of aging – that's it a program, not just systemic breakdown. There does seem to be evidence that accelerated aging occurs in timed points in our lives. So I suspect that there is indeed a program to it, much like puberty. It would be great if this guy could decode the program and figure out how to modulate it. 

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Mathematicians are getting serious about AI now. They created a  The Leiden Declaration on Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics. It's kind of an odd thing to do. Like when feminists say "This circle is my safe space." It's just a gesture, and has no real impact. You don't see physicians making a declaration like that, when you know AI potentially threatens traditional medicine, too. Doctors probably know that such declarations are meaningless. It just makes you feel that you've achieved something.

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Some people are taking Cialis because they think it will help them live longer. Well, it'll make something longer. Anyway, if you choose to go that route, don't get your supplements from Amazon.  You might get their "nearest unit in stock". I ordered Korean sunscreen from Amazon once, and got the American version instead, which contained avobenzone. Had to return it.

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Bruce Schneier has a handy way of helping you decide it should use AI for a task or not. The idea actually came from AI researcher, Daniel Meissler. I like it. 

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It seems people are using AI assistants (probably ChatGPT, which is like Google to chatbots) to get recommendations for what doctors to see. Sounds like doctors better get on Reddit and start recommending themselves. That's what I would do. But using a chatbot for this purpose is really stupid. 

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Sad trombone. CEO who fired 900 employees over Zoom gets fired, demands job back.  Karmic retribution!

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Imagine this:

A mother is suing Portland Public Schools and two school officials, saying she was banned from her children’s elementary school after criticizing its display of an “Intersex-Inclusive” pride flag and alleged gender identity lessons. 

Why is an elementary school getting involved in putting on a display of gender identity and some teacher's sexual preferences? This is what Portland public school students rank so poorly. This is what takes up time in the school curriculum instead of essentials.

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People don't care about climate change crap. Even CNN is forced to admit this:

Blue state governments make you think this is something of urgent concern. Pay climate tax. Or carbon tax. And get rid of your gas-powered car. Build windmills and convert farmland to solar panel installations. Germany followed this to their detriment, and now they are frantically trying to recover. 

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Why Chinese Citizens Are Far More Optimistic About AI Than Americans. 

At the University of Arizona’s commencement in May, former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt was booed for extolling the “huge benefits” of AI. Meanwhile, Chinese state media was celebrating how enthusiastically the country’s students were embracing artificial intelligence in the classroom.

That said a lot about the decline of American college students, who no doubt, will continue to whine about how they can't get jobs, while they protest about whatever the Democrat Socialists decide. They can't do the required math even at top schools, and they want colleges not to grade them, because they are too stressed out. What the hell? They can boo Eric Schmidt, like he cares.

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All is not well in Google Land. A decade of internal AI battles is finally catching up to Google. Well, they have a lot of money, and I'm sure they'll work it out.

Google’s new watch tracks insulin resistance to flag diabetes risk. It sounds nifty, but I'd hate to invest in it, knowing Google's track record. It's more like proof of concept until a more reputable company starts making it. 

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Another Fauci lie exposed, and this time, it's a liberal reporter complaining. It's becoming clear to more people that the SARS-CoV2 response was an orchestrated scam. Everything – six feet distancing, masks, and the mRNA vax product. The heavy-handed policing. All scams.

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The Mumonkan in 3D. You don't crack these until you study other Zen texts and even some Stoicism, before you understand what the monks were getting at. What these texts describe are monks who were too steeped in Buddhist scripture. They knew the words, but were sorely deficient in the understanding and the practice. This is why Bodhidharma crossed into China.

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Business Insider talks about how mediocre weather apps are causing disruption in businesses. People cancel commitments because of reports of rain, which often turn out to be inaccurate, but businesses lose out from the cancellations. I know first-hand how inaccurate these apps can be. You need multiple opinions. For the Pacific Northwest, Pirate Weather has been the most accurate for me.

Update (17 Aug 2026): MIT wrote about the weather forecast data being sabotaged by the prediction market. When money is riding on a certain event, people are willing to make forecast models say what they want. 

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Mathematicians are grappling with the possibility that AI might eclipse them
AI Isn’t Outthinking Mathematicians. It’s Out-Remembering Them

Imagine having your own Johnny vonNeuman at your side, helping you to pursue ideas. Wouldn't that be a powerful tool?

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How NOT to do government wildfire warnings. Courtesy of the bumbling UK.

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Six 30-second bursts of intense exercise can be enough to trigger some beneficial cardiovascular changes in your body. It's a start anyway.

Gotta get rid of abdominal fat. And visceral fat, which you can't see. Those are the real killers.

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Japanese publishers are fighting imposter news sites with a cryptographic signature. Their news organizations are fighting back against impostors. I'm not sure how much of a problem that is in America.

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Laser-zapping mosquito killing machine is finally available for sale. A bit pricy, but if I were bothered by mosquitoes, I'd consider it.

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Th mysterious art of conducting. I used to think conducting was pointless, until I realized that the orchestra was one giant instrument for a single person to play. And that what you were hearing was one person's interpretation of classical music. Everyone has a different personal approach. At that point, I wanted to conduct an orchestra, too. And one can sort of do that with DAWs and orchestral VPS plug-ins. Not quite the same, but if you have an idea, it's possible. The Spitfire Orchestra sounds great. Check it out.

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Who needs an EE course in circuit design? Now you can learn about it online at Spicy Circuits. This is what the Internet was made for.

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Project S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y. is about creating your own Jarvis personal assistant. Well, it probably won't be that, but it's another voice-to-text app.

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Where the Shadow Fell. Very often, after a total solar sclipse, someone is inspired to create something impressive. This is one of them. Very nice, and I'm sure Fred Espenak would have been pleased with this effort.

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Age Verification Is A Bad Way To Solve The Problem of Children on Social Networks. What’s The Alternative? The solutions offered aren't really solutions, and won't solve the problem. There could be a trusted third-party keeper of identification, with the ability to certify using zero-proof methods to verify to q website that someone was an adult without giving away the identity. There would be two trusted authorities: a verify authority and a request authority. 

Suppose the user wants access to a site. He requests a unique many-digit verifyID code be sent to him. The user sends a message to  the verify authority that will get a age-verification request from the server authority, and it should send a verdict of the isOldEnough() function. Meanwhile the website sends the verifyID to the request authority, who sends it to the verify authority, who recognizes the number, and sends back the yes verdict to the request authority. The request authority then sends the YES/NO verdict to the website, and if it is a YES, the user can proceed. All this can occur in a few seconds.

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There are lot of tiny, colorful glitches over South America because of a weak spot in Earth’s magnetic field. Weid. I didn't know this.

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Why Our Memory Slips After Age 50. Blame it on the microgllial population in our briains. They become increasingly derived from blood monocytes, and they are more inflammatory and don't do what the original microglial population did. I think it's only part of the picture, though. There's got to be attrition of cells in the hippocampus. And what about this? Or this?

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Brands Suddenly Care About Reddit. Redditors Don’t Return the Feeling. Now companies have discovered Reddit, and they want to poison Reddit by filling it with positive reviews of their product. Not good.

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Anthropic explains how Claude's watermark works. It's a statistical scan of text, looking to see if the next-prediction token that is characteristic of a Claude LLM matches what is seen in the text. Changing some words, especially unusual words, might defeat it.

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Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin. A key reason to stay with Firefox. This extension is essential.

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Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms. Yeah, getting innocent people in trouble due to a mistake. It seems the product was really not ready for production. It really needs to be taken off the market and troubleshot.

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The Chinese Brand That Didn’t Exist In Britain A Year Ago Just Outsold Honda And Mazda Combined. This is in the UK but still. The auto industry can't relax.

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Realistic AI IMage Generator Getting to be really difficult to tell from real photos. But you may not need to use this companiy. It's getting to be easier to duplicate there elsewhere using the better models. Maybe even you can create this?

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I understand this guy completely. If you want to change something you see, you can write the fix yourself. AI can be a force multiplier. A superpower.

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Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated. Was thie AI scribe company the same one tha created Flock cameras? Just kidding.

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Nice try. Guy tries to influence how a legal AI model might behave but injecting prompts into it that tell it si dismiss. 

Try to be original, at least.

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Northwest power plan calls for billions of dollars in electric buildout to meet soaring demand. So where will the power come from?

    Parts of the plan are likely to be controversial, particularly the addition of new natural gas plants. They can no longer be permitted in Oregon, and Washington is looking to reduce its reliance on natural gas. The proposed plan sees most of the new natural gas capacity being built in Idaho and Montana, although some would be built in Washington.

    Light said in a media briefing Thursday that the region has captured much of the low-hanging fruit in terms of energy efficiency. She said the plan still sees opportunities for energy savings from replacing inefficient residential heating, appliances and insulation. But the bulk would come from changes in the commercial and industrial sector.

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Engineers Create Superglue That Bonds in 10 Seconds, Holds For Years And Gets Stronger Underwater. Don’t get it in your eyes!

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Farmer Trusted AI After It Gave Good Advice, Then It Helped Wipe Out 25 Acres of His Crops. What? You can't trust AI on mission-critical problems? Who knew? And I notice that the article doesn't mention which chatbot it was. I bet it was a Chinese model.

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Perverse incentives. Senators urge end to online bets on wildfires. If you had a lot of money riding on whether there would or would not be a wildfire, what would you do? Gotta protect your investment, right? Yeah, it's not climate change.

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Anthropic is planning on a $2 trillion IPO this October. I already know how the trajectory of the stock is going to go.

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Some Claude users are mad that Anthropic’s new watermarks will catch them using it at their jobs, classes. Some people already claim to have defeated it. I think it will be illustrative to see how many have the mark. 😂

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Toddler’s tragic death from brain-destroying amoeba offers lessons for doctors. The kid was from Washington state. Making the diagnosis is incredibly difficult, but it highlights the need for doctors to refer as soon as they reach the end of their expertise. Still, the 30 days it took to get the diagnosis is not excessive. It's not like you can get in to see the next expert right away. Hopefully AI can help with this, but it has a long way to go.

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Zoom has a zero-click vulnerability. It's now been 6 years since COVID and we still don't have a reliable video conferencing platform. Shame.

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SquashImage compresses your image files without (noticeably) degrading the image. Could come in handy.

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Protect your email address. It's a major part of your identity, in a sense. It's great to have some ability to create disposable email addresses.

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Over 70% of Americans oppose AI data centers. But they love AI, search engines, and tech functionality that is based on AI.

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Review of the latest: The July 2026 Model Wave: GPT-5.6, Gemini 3.6 Flash, Grok 4.5, Kimi K3, and GLM-5.2 Compared.

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Astronomers discover a new kind of cosmic object – a black hole ‘star’ The size of a solar system, glowing a brilliant red. I can't envision this.

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The Quest For Caffeine You Can Have At Night. I think this is being approached the wrong way. I think the orexin approach will be more satisfactory.

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In Oregon, a school district can legally seize your property if it wants it. As a Lake Oswego chuch is learning to its dismay.

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Oregon education funding committee recommends increasing school spending by $2.5B to $5B. The Oregon education system is just a monster that keeps growing. Doing less, but insisting on being fed.

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Scientists are making headway on orexin research, perhaps hoping to get insights into why we get sleepy and perhaps allow us to feel more awake and alert on demand. I'm all for that.

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A lot of people are posting about how Claude's watermarking works, and maybe how to remove it. Some are skeptical.

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Here's some cool new CSS features to know about.

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Subscribers to the automatic pet feeder service, Petlibro, found out that their pets are missing meals now that the service is offline. This the nightmare that prevents me from trusting tech from new startups.

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Apple Skipping iPhone 18 Launch This Year. Wow, for the first time that I can remember. No wonder their stock went down today. Supply chain issues.

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Physicists say they’ve found mysterious ‘glueball’. 

Well, we'll see if this is replicated before I get too excited.

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So uBlock Origin has thrown in the towel. Facebook is the scourge of the Internet. I use multiple blockers, not relying on just one. And many Facebook domains are blocked in my /etc/hosts file. 

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curl: Nobody wants to work with Windows. Such a difference from the world of 1999, when Windows and Microsoft ruled the world. Now we have alternatives.

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University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to ‘Curb Mental Health Crisis’. What in the world is the matter with today's young adults? So many are infantilized now. And yet, they seem to want to tell the rest of us how to run our lives.

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Evidence of what we already knew. Dogs can interpret human facial expressions. Dog owners already know this. 

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Remember James Damore? I'd put quotes around the term "thought criminal". He was prescient and just told the honest truth. Now we see that he was right. But poor guy sounds like he's recovering from PTSD. It must have been hard, thinking that for a short period in time you were the most gated guy in Silicon Valley. This article is from The Free Press, but it reads like it's The Daily Beast. I'm glad Damore eventually landed on his feet, but man, it must have been hard. Now do Brendan Eich.

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Tina Kotek took $400,000 from the IBEW, but the IBEW wants to build datacenters. So what's Tina going to do? It's interesting that they know who can be bought and who can't. They wouldn't give money to Drazan.

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Oregon ranks among worst states for public education, Washington earns top marks. In some ways, Washington and Oregon are similar. But when it comes to education, the two states are completely different. Washington students excel. Oregon students skip school, because no one cares anymore.

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The closing of Lloyd Center is another manifestation that Portland can't have nice things anymore. One less reason to go into the city. Little by little, the city decays further.

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AI Anxiety Won’t Be Eased by Universal Basic Income. Of course it won't. Every time we have a technological paradigm shift, the answer is not universal basic income. It's finding out where you fit in the new world, and adjust accordingly. There will always be work – the issue will be whether you are willing to do it and how hard you are willing to work.

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New tech adds phone tracking to license plate readers, associating devices with identifiable cars. The tech is called SignalTrace. I don't mind using tech to catch criminals, but I'm not pleased about being dragged into an investigation I have nothing to do with, and have my own affairs probed. There's a Black Mirror episode that this reminds me of. What will it take to defeat this geofencing risk? Satellite phones? Faraday bags when you go into the city?

The UK’s War on Anonymity Has Come to America. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. 

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Frequent cannabis users wake up with their “stress hormone” already elevated. Messing with your brain for an easy stress fix or momentary escape is always fraught with hidden risk.

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Never bet against Elon. Nice summary of the times people told Elon that something couldn't be done, and Elon did it anyway and succeeded. Just because YOU can't do it, doesn't mean someone else can't.

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Is this BS? Now you can find out once and for all!

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Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse. And that is bad AI retrieval and resynthesis. Do people really want Google to show you its version of what you wanted to see?

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Oh yes it can!  Portland can’t let Centennial Mills’ charred husk be a metaphor. It will. See Gordon's Fireplace Shop, if you don't believe me.

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Portland State Univ. requests $44M from city ahead of approval of new Broadway venue plan. Yeah, no money for policing. But money for Broadway play theater? Sure, why not.

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