Winter Solstice today.
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Crazy. It must have been wild a couple of days ago when the power went out in downtown San Francisco, and all the Waymo cars stopped dead in the streets blocking traffic. We're not ready to have autonomous cars driving around.
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Another article on how tech billionaires want to build their own cities. This is been done over and over throughout the years. It'll never work, and a lot of money will be spent for nothing. I don't expect California Forever will go anywhere. Don't build in California, for starters. You have to do it outside of Democrat control.
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Medical Mystery Prize. Upon reading the patient clinical history, it appears that the patient has avoided standard medical evaluation, and has self-diagnosed and self-treated with supplements. The panel of "biomarkers" also suggests that the person has seen a naturopath rather than a regular medical practitioner. I'm not seeing the standard evaluative protocol I'd expect. Who knows what this person has?
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Our brains have four stages of cognition. The age borders are probably not precise, but the idea is sound. I have noticed that I don't think like I did earlier in my life. I seem to synthesize things better. Memory is probably not as sharp as fact recollection as before, but one wonders if that isn't because one has had to memorize a lot more facts than earlier in life. Can the brain recall it all? The memory is there, most of the time. You know if the recollection is correct or not. It's just the ability to recall. My ability to understand the speech mannerisms of the GenZ folks is low. Can't stand the speech fillers. And yes, my tolerance for BS is really low. And I do care less about other people's opinions. I am really becoming a crotchety old man – just like in the stories.
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There was a power outage at NIST recently, and now the world's atomic timekeeper can't issue the standard time. They had a standby generator, but all it did was just issue the incorrect time, so they'll have to disable it. They hope to get things fixed soon. Update (2025-12-21): No worries. "There are redundancies in place." Only the Boulder location was affected.
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Mayo Clinic just closed 6 rural Minnesota health clinics. More closings may follow. I've read on social media that somehow the Trump administration is to blame. This report is careful not to say that. In reality, it's likely that this happened because of a shortage of doctors and decreasing patient volumes in the rural clinics. Rochester is not that big of a city, and physician salaries are generally higher in major cities than in places like Rochester. Plus, patient population is decreasing in the rural areas, making it not worthwhile to staff those clinics, even as doctors didn't really want to work there anyway. This is going to be one of many instances of the healthcare industry contracting, as our local hospitals realize.
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Is tramadol more harmful than beneficial? This paper would suggest that it is.
Tramadol may have a slight effect on reducing chronic pain levels (low certainty of evidence) while likely increasing the risk of both serious (moderate certainty of evidence) and non-serious adverse events (very low certainty of evidence). The potential harms associated with tramadol use for pain management likely outweigh its limited benefits.
The potential harms included "higher proportion of cardiac events and neoplasms" although this was just a meta-analysis.
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Ah, Microsoft.
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