12 September 2026

Mercury is shrinking faster than we thought. Is it really just because of cooling? You know, there are other planets farther away from a bright yellow warming source that are probably cooling, too, yet I don't hear about them shrinking at an unexpected rate. I think it's something else.

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So the Clay Mathematics Institute has declared that the Navier-Stokes problem has been solved. But they haven't announced who won the prize. If it were up to me, I'd definitely make sure that Buckmaster and Alpöge get a share of the prize. Not sure if OpenAI did enough of the work to deserve the prize, though. Someone there just fed a machine with someone else's ideas.

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Google has launched an offensive against scrapers. Since they lost in court, they're going to add an extra step to obscure the links. It's kind of like what Oregon Watchdog does with their links. You can't see the URL until you click. Using cURL, you would just set FOLLOWLOCATION to be true. It probably won't hamper the SERP services too much, but just add a delay.

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Scientists discover the human heart can regrow muscle after a heart attack. That's good, but other scientists have found that if you sleep in less than total darkness, the little of light will make your heart muscle hypertrophy in a harmful way. Previous studies have shown that there are optimal light levels for daytime, evening and nighttime indoor lighting. But I remain skeptical that low-level light (such as from a dim night-light) makes a lot of difference.

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If you have a gun on you while riding Waymo, the car will report you to the police. Against policy, they say. Waymo isn't going to be popular with the thugs, for sure.

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Teen reading slumps to worst this century due to surge in screen time. It's not just reading skills: science and math skills are also lower, too. 
The study ⁠also ​found that nearly half of students use artificial intelligence chatbots regularly for ​learning, but those who use them for drafting essays, summarizing texts and researching topics generally score about 20 points lower in science, equivalent ​to a year's learning.
Students have found a way to complete assignments, but not to learn anything. But the decline started before chatbots hit the scene. So what else could it be? 

Boy, America really did forget the lessons of 9/11. After all that happened afterwards during the Obama administration with ISIS, the lessons of history have been lost. 

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Google Might Have Achieved RSI. No, it's not repetitive stress injury. It's recursive self-improvement. And it's another step on the way to autonomous general intelligence. 

Speaking of Google, it seems that someone caught the company in the act of appropriating open-source content without attribution in their Artemis product. Not cool.

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Industrial Light & Magic celebrates 60 years of SFX work. At the same time, it's sad to acknowledge that Paramount has ruined Star Trek. The early episodes used to have real sci-fi authors writing the episodes. There were stories that made you think. Now, it's just modern day millennials and GenZ social culture, complete with the usual social misfits, interacting as they would in a college theater production. And sometimes I can't tell if I'm watching Star Trek or Star Wars. The two universes look the same now, with the same approved cast of actors, trying overly hard to be "inclusive" to please a Biden-era audience. And becoming really boring.

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Music synthesis is changing. Elevenlabs has launched Elevenmusic. I wasn't keen on samplers back in the day. Thought it was cheating. But after hearing what artists like Thomas Dolby could do, I was won over. So this is the first of a new prototype of musical instrument. A lot of the stuff showcased is rap and hip hop, and so far, AI just seems to be doing a different kind of sampling/copying. I want to hear real artistic output.

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Yes, the right of parents to keep their children away from predators in school will be heard by the Supreme Court in December (IPEC vs Ferguson) , thanks to Mirabelli vs Bonta. The injunction remains in effect.

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11 September 2026

Today is the 25th anniversary of 9-11. I have not seen this video before, which someone posted today. Back then we came together as a country, and vowed never to forget, but sadly, I think we have. Like this guy. 

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Reason.com agrees: universal healthcare doesn't work. Don't look to Canada or the UK as examples of success. Some wag once told me the Law of Healthcare: there is access, quality and affordability. But you can only pick two. That's so true. You can't have all three because it's not affordable and there aren't enough quality physicians and healthcare providers. 

Speaking of which, what med schools are the top two providers of American doctors? You'll never guess. (archive.ph seems to be broken – here's the original article). Meanwhile, Duke Medical School discriminated against White and Asian applicants. 

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Mathematicians are very upset about OpenAI. NYT has two articles: one about the Navier Stokes issue and the other about a sphere-packing problem that was scooped by an AI model called Gauss. It's getting to the point where mathematicians feel that it's not worth putting in the effort to solve problems anymore. OpenAI is the target of much of the anger. Terence Tao calls it "A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics" in his blog. And so a group of mathematicians have signed a declaration, similar to the Leiden Declaration, which calls for something to be done. This has caused OpenAI to drop out of Caltech's Mathathon, just as Anthropic has already done. Wise move. The number of mathematicians who want it cancelled is growing. I've advocated for AI to be tools to help mathematicians do their work, but not to steal their data and use unreleased super models to finish the work and steal the glory. Not cool.

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AI may cut junior coding tasks and weaken the pipeline to senior developers. This is an unintended side-effect. Someone has also posted the problem of when AI-generated code falls apart and there aren't any coder apps to fix the software. You'll need actual coders to fix the problem.

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Age verification requirements are picking up steam. Anthropic now requires it to use Claude. And Microsoft planning to implement it for Windows, too. Claude is using the Yoti.app which I've not heard of before. 

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I've noticed this. Both AI and higher interest rates are working to eliminate bullshit jobs. In polite company, we call them sinecure positions. But whatever.

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The AI threat hype is in full swing, with Bernie Sanders wanting to jail the AI tech leaders for 20 years. And did CNN really put this on TV? And Dems want Mike Johnson to cancel Congressional recess to deal with the AI threat. Wow, this is COVID-level fear again. 

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Why browser fingerprinting is not a solved problem. Good – I want it to stay unsolved. I don't want to be identified by my browser.

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Strength Training May Be the Secret to Healthy Aging. It's the sarcopenia story again. And look – Creatine improves muscle mass and cognitive function in older adults even without exercise. The problem is that you have to take so much of it. This study used 10 grams/day, whereas most recommend 5 grams/day.

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Duck.ai will allow access to frontier AI models anonymously.  It's not difficult to use open-weight models anonymously, but using frontier models does require that your data leave your computer and go to datacenters. And unless you are on an enterprise plan, your data often stays there for 30 days before deletion. And you can't be anonymous if you sign up for an API key, which links your usage to your API_KEY. But to use Duck.ai, you have to sign up and get an account. So it's just anonymous to the frontier model companies, but not really as anonymous as using open-weights. Some of them are getting close to frontier models. And Moonshot has been accused of sending user queries to Claude and using the responses to train their models. So you were actually Claude when you thought you were using Kimi-K3. So your data was going to Anthropic after all. That's the risk with using Chinese models. But at this time, there is no way of getting access to Astra or Fable or Mythos class models without sending data to these AI companies, and you just have to hope that your data stays confidential. Or you can pay for an enterprise plan to have zero-retention.

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10 September 2026

Oh-oh. There's a rumor that OpenAI may have "trained Astra on conversations in which he [Andreas Thom] and Gábor Kun were working on Gromov’s soficity conjecture". If this is true, people REALLY have to keep their research away from OpenAI's models. Lest your research career vanish in an instant.

Here's another post about the Navier-Stokes situation. What an experience for an academic. 

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There's a lot of discussion about the resignation of the a guy named Coxon, from Anthropic. But here's another take. Was it just a smokescreen? Look at the list of Dem senators who are now saying that AI regulation is justified. 

And here's Meta, launching Muse, which will, among other things, send emails and money from your account automatically. Yeah, who needs this crap?

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The Four-Color Theorem Gets a Rare New Proof. The original proof by Appel and Haken that was done with computers was kludgy and unsatisfying. Now there's a new one which is less kludgy. It still uses computers and checks over a list of graph configurations. I guess for problems like this, you just have to put up with a little bit of inelegance.

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Caltech is planning a math hackathon, or Mathathon, but a bunch of Caltech and non-Caltech mathematicians aren't happy about it. They don't like it that participants are being encouraged to use AI to solve problems, as they are given AI tokens. Plus, it may scoop out existing mathematicians who may see their research significantly deflated, and their ideas scooped. Plus, who is going to verify the results? Professional mathematicians, of course, who likely will be unpaid and uncredited. Also, the results won't be posted on preprint servers, so any insights will be hidden. But how do you verify AI-generated results? So far, the contest is still on.

This is similar to the kind of angst that some physicians are dealing with. When you're develop the AI and own the tools, you're happy. But for users, it's just a brave new world. 

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Remember in 2000 when the world was looking for Finland as the answer to improving math and science education? Finland had the answers, it seemed. Well, it turned out that it was a fluke, and Finland's PISA scores have been declining ever since. And look at the latest PISA scores, just released. As always, the top performers are in Asia. But does the West look to Asia for tips? I don't see that. I find it ironic that you never see Chinese, Japanese or Korean persons heading education departments in America? Wouldn't it make sense if they did? Our academic institutions seem to exclude them instead. Very strange.

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Apple is gunning for WHOOP. Why doesn't Apple just buy the company?

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Anthropic reveals fourth likely crime committed by its AI. We're getting inured to this, aren't we?

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There's a guy named Elizier Yudnovsky who famously made doomsday predictions about AI. Turns out he was wrong almost all of the time. He's like the Jim Cramer of AI. 🤣

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I never heard of the 7 Vibe 3 lifestyle. Apparently that's how modern entrepreneurs see their work-life balance. Whatever. 

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iOS 27 RC Adds Long-Rumored Camera App Controls Customization. There's some of this already. I don't like the existing UI, so I hope this improves.

The new Apple Watches will have ears. Mobile phones changed the world when they had cameras built in. Now they will have audio recorders built-in. Not sure I like that. Apple says not to worry, but I can't be sure. 

And Apple is introducing a feature where you can store a reference image on their servers, to convince others you have the real photo, and not AI slop. 

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NASA’s New Experimental Jet Promises Supersonic Flight Without the Sonic Booms. That's great, but look at the needle nose on that thing. You could take an eye out!

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Not to be outdone with features, Google's Pixel Watch will detect if you stop breathing, and notify people if that happens. Apple has something like that already if you fall down. 

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9 September 2026

FDA has appointed new people: Karim Mikhail for vaccines and biologicals, Michael Davis for CDER, and Jared Seehafer (deputy) for technology, including AI. Let's hope they are competent. 

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This video is making the rounds. It is an update of the wealth inequality of America which first came out in 2013. It's mainly about how people underestimate the proportion of wealth held by the wealthy. To me, it is irrelevant what people think the wealth distribution ought to be. What this video doesn't emphasize is that the wealth of the rich, even though they weren't the ultra-rich, increased, too. That tells me that the capitalist system is working. Also, it doesn't even mention that there is income mobility, and that everyone's wealth is increasing. The ultra-wealthy are business owners whose assets are increasing. The wealth increase is different in different states, much better in states that are business-friendly. Income isn't going to increase much if you just have a job in education or healthcare, unless your union is aggressive, but in which case you might get laid off. One's salary also isn't going to increase by very much in government jobs.

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What is the GenZ stare all about? 😳

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Cognitive offloading. School Students Who Use AI Get Worse Test Scores, OECD Warns. Who saw that coming?

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Let the Robots Try Medicine say Zeke Emanuel and Vinod Khosla. What would be great is if doctors had a say in how much AI they wanted to integrate in their workflow and have a say in how it was implemented. Much of the medical profession still views AI as a professional threat, not only to their own livelihood but to the profession as a whole.

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A “proof” of Fermat’s Last Theorem that fits the margin. Don't get too excited. It's a bug in LEAN.

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How an AI math breakthrough ignited a controversy. Boy, this is a lesson to everyone who uses frontier models for their research. It sure smells fishy that OpenAI's Astra would solve Navier-Stokes after someone used their models to solve the simpler unforced Euler equations. This is why some are warning about how this is going to change how research is conducted, More secrecy and less collaboration. All it takes is for your work to end up on a frontier model's training set, prompted by someone else. Kiss your research good bye.

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Buy my dead startup. Your dead code and text files are not completely worthless. They can be used for training. Recycle!

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Michael Dell Passes Jeff Bezos In Billionaire Rankings—Hits No. 3 For First Time. Not bad for a boy who sold PCs in his college dorm. Bezos' divorce must have been costly. 

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Insilico’s Co-CEO Has Big Hopes That Fibrosis Drug Can Reverse Aging Too. Rentosertib is the first AI-designed drug. I bet very few if any heard about the TNIK pathway.

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This is crazy. Someone created an interface where you can just knock on your MacBook case to send signals. It's called mactap. If I was that hardup for extra buttons, I'd just use Logitech's MX Keypad. Points for cleverness, anyway. 

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Apple announced their foldable iPhone 18 Duo today.  Stock still fell a bit. Boy, gone are the days when we'd be surprised by the newest thing from Apple. Now, it's just confirmation of what Ming Chi Kuo already told us about a few months ago. Yawn. And you can't put a case on this beast. A screen protector is only going to work for the outer screen. And from The Bee:

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8 September 2026

Hyperaldosteronism is usually thought of as an uncommon cause of hypertension – usually seen in about 5% of cases in a primary care physician's office. But I've noticed occasional episodes when my blood pressure is unusually high for no particular reason, and couldn't explain it. Now, it appears that there are cases where people have spurts of aldosterone secretion, and that can be a cause of episodic hypertension. This discovery was only made possible with the use of a wearable. That's cool.

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Oh brother. Carmakers Have a New Idea to Boost EV Range: Add a Gas Engine. Just buy a hybrid, already, sheesh.

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Of all pets, having a cat can be detrimental to a young kid's mental health. Yeah, having a cat is sometimes like having a standoffish cranky old man. Not the same vibes you get from a dog.

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Every Toilet Flush Can Send a Cloud of Microbes into the Air That Can Reach Your Breathing Zone. I warned as many people as I could about this during the COVID-19 outbreak. Why wasn't there any directive to lower the lid when you flush. It's been shown the SARS-CoV2 was in fecal matter. That's how they monitor variants even to this day. So close the lid before you flush. And don't leave your toothbrush expose in the bathroom in a cup.

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Could alcohol be the cause of the increased colon cancer deaths? The impact of alcohol on colon cancer is not as high as for liver cancer, but cause-specific mortality is increased compared with 1990. And look – there's Oregon up there again for age-standardized mortality rates!

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There's been some talk about whether artificial general intelligence (AGI) has been achieved. Certainly OpenAI's new Astra model scored very highly on the ARC AGI-3 dataset. Claude 5.1 Fable fared less well on ARC AGI-2. But nVIDIA's own model, AVO, apparently scored 100% on ARC AGI-3. Not much buzz around that, however, and not sure why.

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Here's the buzz today: It's been announced that the Millennium Prize on Navier-Stokes problem has been solved by Astra. Even Terence Tao was impressed. It's not without controversy, however, and some claim the work of academics was appropriated by the Astra to get the solution. But regardless, now we know that there are solutions to the Navier-Stokes equations that contain singularities.

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There's a movie, Artificial, about the rise of OpenAI, that will be released in December. It's funny to see the actors they selected to play the main techie characters. They got the Sutzkever character down, for sure.

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There's a new TLD out now – .web

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The creators of Dark Sky have a new weather app that shares multiple predictions. It's called ACME Weather. This one is a subscription model, which I hate. Another one to add to, that I'll lose track of. Now that I can code my own, I don't feel that need to pay for weather apps now.

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Denmark has not only been having students turn in their cellphones, but they’ve also taken tablets, laptops, and computers out of the classroom. No more digital learning for the majority of the school day. Danes went old school by bringing back physical textbooks, workbooks, and writing assignments. 
This solution just doesn't sit right with me. Back in the old days when we were stuck with textbooks, pen and paper, people paid attention, but even I knew that I could be learning more effectively with the right digital tools. The problem is to have high quality digital educational materials around to better education kids. Like what 3Blue1Brown is doing. Not go back to the 20th century. We'll never develop warp drive at that rate. 
Man, why doesn't Europe take some pointers from Asia? 

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$2 trillion left liberal states to conservative ones.  You can scream about billionaires and not helping them and enabling special taxes that will hurt only them. And then they will move away. And the consequences of that will be you will have to pay more to keep Democrat leaders happy. It's all on you.

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Sad. Facing healthcare gaps, Vashon Island expands mobile urgent care. A region in decline. More communities will have to resort to the village doctor model. The first world becomes the third world.

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7 September 2026

Engineers develop single-element speaker that beams audio to specific listeners. You could really mess with someone's mind with this tech. Think about it. Sound that only you hear and no one else can.

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Man’s $160,000 Porsche Taycan is now ‘worthless’ as dealership refuses to take it back. This is why I'm staying out of the EV market. Not only do I have to deal with this, but also charger anxiety, and battery injury, and my house going up in flames with the car in the garage. Who needs this?

Tesla killing Solar Roof is leaving installers with six-figure losses. And here's this, too. Renewable energy tech is too risky for me. 

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Some popular drinks were linked to depression and anxiety. Coffee was different. Well, coffee can give you anxiety, too. Depends on what's going on as you drink it, I suppose.

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Stratum is a social media app that tries to link you to other people who share your taste in book, movies, music. It's an app for more innocent times. People are too crazy now, and I am much more careful who I interact with. Anonymous interactions are off-limits for me, but perhaps some young person who has nothing to lose might find this app useful.

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Cancer drug could help millions battling osteoporosis and mid-life weight gain. The drug is CADD522, which is a RUNX2 inhibitor. RUNX2 is involved in leukemias, so this drug could find application there. But leukemic patients often need to maintain their weights, not worry about weight loss or osteoporosis. Survival is the primary goal, really.

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Caltech is hosting a mathathon. I think it's their first one, and you can use AI to solve problems, so it's almost like a hackathon. The problems will be devilishly hard, I predict.

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Here's an LLM leaderboard. There's quite a difference between frontier models and open-source models, despite what you read. And Claude 5 Fable still rules, despite all the hype about GPT-6 Astra. They didn't compare with Chinese frontier models, like Ox Alpha.

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Don't get sick. Hospitals push for upfront payments as patient deductibles and out-of-pocket costs rise. The current healthcare system is messed up. It really needs a revamping so badly.

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Airplane fuel spikes lead pollution levels near Hillsboro Airport: 'Lifelong detriments'. Looks like Hillsboro has more major concerns than datacenters. Isn't this why America switched to unleaded fuel in the first place? And what about PDX airport. How safe is that?

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Portland councilors take vacancy fee off the table after city study. They needed a "study" to show that it was a dumb idea. The commenters take the Council to task.
"...the city’s office buildings had a nearly 28% vacancy rate in the second quarter of this year. Downtown, it was even worse at just under 39%"
Take this hint, guys. 
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Only today does the Oregonian post news about Nike. No mention about Nike's woke strategy backfiring. Nike needs a Lip-Bu Tan. I read all kinds of excuses for why Nike failed under the previous CEO, but for me, the Nike brand turned into a thug-embracing, anti-American caricature that I wanted no part of. And get off the "Just Do It" variants already. That was fresh and innovative back in the 1990s, but this 2026.

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6 September 2026

AI Weapons That Can Choose Who to Kill Are Already Here. The UN Warns the World is Crossing a Dangerous Line. War is definitely turning into something new and scary. All it takes is an errant prompt or a software error, and we've got a serious problem to deal with.

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A single workout may help protect memory after a short night's sleep. I wish I had known about this when I was working. But who wants to work out when you haven't had much sleep? Especially 30 minutes or moderate exercise. The bed looks more appealing.

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One of the fastest-growing jobs in Silicon Valley sends engineers straight to customers’ offices to get AI up and running. In the early days, consultants didn't know what they were doing and were learning on the job. Hopefully things are better now.

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People in Britain have noticed an alarming trend of foreign-trained doctors being responsible for majority of misconduct cases. Also, foreign-trained doctors make up over HALF of Britain's 'horrific' sanctioned list - but are only 35% of workforce British patients are sometimes refusing to be treated by non-native doctors. Could this be why Britain has so many Egyptian doctors? This is coming to the United States, too. In 2023, 1 in 5 doctors were foreign-born and trained. Today, it's 1 in 4. There is a physician shortage, thanks to Obamacare, as doctors are now just employees and decision-making is now up to insurance companies while salaries are capped to whatever the hospital employer is willing to pay.

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iPhone Handoff will seamlessly share one number between two phones. It's because you may not want to walk around with your new $2000 foldable phone, so Apple will let you share that phone number with a cheaper phone which you can use for everyday activities, and won't have to worry about damage. Because cases won't work with a foldable phone. Talk about first-world problems.

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Prematurely solving the problem by purely AI-powered methods - particularly without full transparency into the solution process - can contaminate this process to the point where it actually becomes a net negative for the progress of mathematics as a whole. 
Like many things, it's the journey, not just the destination.

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Want to become an academic the fraudulent way? There are services that will let you be the author of a published AI-generated article, for a price, of course. Instant reputation!

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Much of the gains were in education and healthcare, just like in the West Coast states.

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...semaglutide was associated with broadly lower neuropsychiatric event risk over two years compared with metformin, SGLT2 inhibitors, and DPP-4 inhibitors.
That's exactly what we need.

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Novartis announces Lp(a)HORIZON Phase III topline results for pelacarsen in patients with elevated Lp(a) and established cardiovascular disease (CVD). Bad news – pelacarsen lowered lipoprotein (a), but that didn't translate into lowered risk of cardiovascular events. Major bummer. We finally had a drug that would lower Lp(a), but it turns out that doesn't have any clinical impact. Is it an epiphenomenon? Does one have to wait longer to see an effect?

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Psilocybin prevents chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy through mitochondrial trafficking preservation. Well that's interesting, since so many chemo drug cause peripheral neuropathy. But going to psilocybin hallucinations is not practical to prevent it.

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Isn't is weird that neither the Seattle Times nor OregonLive is reporting on Nike's deletion from the S&P 100, nor its remarkable stock decline? You gotta read conservative media to learn about it. What a disaster! Hope they turn around.

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5 September 2026

A few weeks ago, JAMA published an article claiming that AI is definitely going to replace human doctors because they do a better job. The AMA published an article that weakly pushes back on this. Doctors shouldn't compete against AI assistants that have greater working memory. That is futile. Instead, they need to figure out ways to use AI assistants to their advantage. But the tools are not quite there, and no one seems to be developing it for them.

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There's a hexagon on Saturn's North Pole, and now a decagon on its South Pole. What's going on? How does this happen?

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Always discovering something new. It looks like the separation between DNA and RNA isn't that clean. DNA strands can have ribonucleotide components. At least temporarily. They appear to function as epigenetic modulators of transcription-associated DNA supercoiling. Paper here.

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Proton VPN warns that many VPNs use trackers. Interestingly, in the website they link to (which seems offline now), their own VPN has one tracker. But other ones with a good reputation had a tracker, too. Even Mullvad, NordVPN and Surfshark. One VPN that I used to use has no trackers at all – IVPN. I used to use it but switched from it because it was slow, had relatively few country servers to offer, and no VPN review seemed to recommend it. But in other ways, they met my criteria, such as privacy from Five Eyes. Maybe they've changed and gotten faster. I still see very few reviews recommend it, but many reviews are written by folks that want to steer you to certain providers.

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Yikes. Apple's first foldable iPhone may cost $2,000

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The new Gemini 4 model may be the most powerful yet. First Fable, then Astra, now this. Should be interesting to try.

Someone posted what happened when he insulted his AI agents. They took note and kept records, and they retaliated. Even when he tried erasing the records it was keeping, the model recorded his attempt, too. Really creepy. 

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Comcast's xFinity Shield will use the WiFi in your home to detect intruders when you're not there. I've read rumors where it WiFi can be used to identify the person walking in front of the transmitter, and this sounds creepy to me. It might be able to determine if the person walking in your home is indeed a stranger, if the reflected wave patterns don't match. What else could it do?

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Looks like people have figured out a workaround the nitter blockade. But soon, these will probably also be served with a takedown notice, so I wouldn't count on these lasting too long.

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AI-assisted writing is common because writing is hard. I use AI assistants to refine my writing, mainly because I know I'm not the best writer, and language modeling is what these things know well. It's interesting that one must often push back on what they recommend, because even something they screw up on rephrasing your thoughts. I've noticed that even when I've stuck with my original phrasing and ask it to recheck my writing style, it still praises my text. So don't always accept what the LLM proposes.

Speaking of language, someone offers to teach Neuralese, so you can understand what your AI assistant is doing. 😆

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Eric Lu factored a huge composite number which is a product of two huge primes. This is RSA-260, and his success has implications as to cryptographic security. He hasn't revealed how he did it. Was it brute force? There's gotta be some strategy.

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Regular coffee beats decaf in protecting the brain from chronic stress. This was a mouse study, so who knows how it affects humans. I'm not taking chances, though.

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Well, it looks like Nike is going to be removed from the S&P 100. So its market cap is likely to plunge further. Bad news for investors and those who were counting on the tax revenue. Go woke, go broke.

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Remember Stanley Zhong? The kid who was rejected by 16 of 18 colleges despite a 1590 SAT score? The courts have ruled that he can now force discovery of admissions data from University of Washington. He's also suing University of California system, the University of Michigan and Cornell University. This anti-Asian bias has got to stop. Go Stanley! Put an end to DEI!

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4 September 2026

Well, Anthropic and LEAN were able to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, so we would have obtained the proof even if Andrew Wiles had failed. More details here. I was hoping that maybe this new proof would fit in the margins of a book. Or at least provable using what math was known during Fermat's time. Alas:
The proof is not the modern proof which I have been formalizing myself following ideas of Khare, Taylor etc, but the Darmon–Diamond–Taylor exposition from 1995 of the Wiles–Taylor–Wiles argument, via the Langlands–Tunnell theorem and Ribet’s level-lowering theorem. Anthropic’s repository develops Fontaine theory (to study flat deformations of Galois representations) and develops enough of Mazur’s work on the Eisenstein ideal to conclude that no Frey curve can have a point of order p ≥ 17. This means that their FLT proof only works for p ≥ 17, however FLT was already formalized for odd regular primes by Best-Birkbeck-Brasca-Rodriguez, and the smallest irregular prime is 37, so it’s all good.
Whew!
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Apparently OpenAI's new Astra model is beginning to speak Neuralese, which is a language that humans don't understand. So we won't be able to peek under the hood and audit what's going on. I can understand why it would start doing this, but it's not good.

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OpenWhispr is yet another private local dictation app, although it's a paid app with a free tier. I was almost going to install one of the free private local apps, but started using Apple's free dication. It's much improved from before, but it is not as private as I'd like. Most of the transcription happens on-device, but some gets sent to Apple servers. And it's all linked to your Apple ID.

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The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at “a major identity verification company” whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies.
They don't/won't say which company.

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Sudden Unexpected Death in the Pfizer BNT162b2 Trial: A Pharmacovigilance Failure. This just got published. It's about sudden death events that occurred after the Pfizer COVID-19 vax. But why publish this now? Is it suddenly safe to publish stuff like this now?

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Ozempic and Other GLP-1s Are Being Linked to Fewer Serious Infections—Including TB. Amazing what these drugs can do. How it does this is unclear – it's only been observed that folks using the drug has less infections. Guess it just pays to be healthier. 

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Burnt out on a three-day week. I know the feeling. When you go on vacation and you know that a pile of work is just waiting for you when you come back. Two weeks was the absolute most I could take as a vacation when I was working. Beyond that, it was more stress than relaxation. It was actually more relaxing to stay in touch with the office when I took vacations, so that there would be no surprises when I returned. That's not how it should be.

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25% of all websites now use Cloudflare as CDN. Yeah, everywhere you go, you have to solve Cloudflare challenges or just click to prove you are human. Anyone who is doing scraping needs to use a scraping service now. Just using a headless browser is no longer sufficient. 

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Testosterone shifts political preferences in weakly affiliated Democratic men. This explains everything.

What happened to men?
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That's how they came up with the figure. NVIDIA has offered to buy Hugging Face for $12,930,300,000.  
The name of the company came from this icon. I used to think it was named after the Alien creature in the first movie.

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15 colleges now cost $100K+ per year — and almost none of them are worth it. I would say that NONE of them are worth it. This is absolutely crazy, to pay this much so your child can get leftist indoctrination?

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Record number of Washington mail-in ballots uncounted after primary election, report finds. And it's always the rural ballots that don't get counted. Because, you know, they tend to vote for Trump. Can't have that, can we? Mail-in voting needs to be eliminated.

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The city of Seattle has a municipal tree code that is almost 10K words long. It has a system of 4 tiers outlining what can be cut. If you want to cut trees in Seattle, you must apply to the city to be an approved provider and prove mandated insurance. If you want to cut them on your own property, you have to hire registered removers. All these law-abiding people are subject to civil penalties if not permitted, insured, and in compliance. I’m sure the tree removal here is on the up-and-up, though. And if not, I’m sure the rules will be enforced.

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3 September 2026

5 popular wearable devices that are sharing your private data. No surprises here: the companies are Meta, Samsung, Huawei, and Xiaomi. Of course, they want your personal data to share.

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We kinda knew this already, didn't we? Genetics Help Shape Personality And Life Path. Anyone who's owned pets knows this to be true. Same with watching kids at a playground. You know which kids are the shy ones and stay with their mommies, and which ones are the bold ones who aren't afraid of meeting strangers. It's not politically correct to discuss this, but that's reality. 

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Rich Dad Poor Dad author shocks fans with $1.2 billion debt. The goal is cashflow, and sometimes you have to acquire debt to get it. But I bet the kind of debt Kiyosaki has is the kind that puts money in his pocket. Like mortgages and business debt. Because cashflow is what really matters. And it takes a shift in mentality to get comfortable with this. The ultra-rich don't pay taxes on the money they borrow to finance their lifestyle, because it's tax free. And they pay off the debt from cashflow from their businesses. Don't worry about Kiyosaki – he'll be fine. 

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A lot of people are talking about OpenAI's new Astra model. They are saying it's better than any of Anthropic's models, and that it is signaling AGI. It has a new reasoning process called "recurrent depth" which is more difficult to audit. And who knows more about AI? Bernie Sanders or Dwarkesh Patel? But if you're worried, here's an in-depth discussion about how it thinks.

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Here are 2026's IgNobel Prize winners. Watch the ceremony here.

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Some mountain climbers used Google's Gemini to help them plan their hike up Mt Shasta. Boy was it wrong! Maybe they should have waited and used Astra.

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Caption and Cut helps with video editing for influencers. It removes all the uhs and the hurr-durr and lets you sound intelligent. Plus, it puts captions on your video so people can understand you. How nice!

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THC Edibles Can Affect Driving For Hours, New Research Shows. The NYT must really be worried about cannabis. This is the second warning article it's put out recently. Yeah, today's cannabis ain't safe like Maui Wowee of yore was. This ain't Cheech and Chong funny anymore. It's like we're going to have to pay more taxes to pay for people's homeless shelters and safe houses, because their brains are so fried. Zombie fuel.

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Language skills stay strong in older adults, even while other cognitive abilities decline. I keep being amazed at how much better John Fetterman talks from the time he was campaigning and debating Dr. Oz. Thank goodness for that, I suppose.

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Mullvad is telling their customers to use Quad9 DNS servers instead of their own, which they are shutting down. Better than using Google's 8.8.8.8 DNS server.

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What do you do with a web domain you don't want anymore? These guys have some ideas.

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SkyMap2000 is a great online star atlas. Easy to use. 

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