Too much iron is not good for you. Well yes there are iron-storage disorders, but blood-letting? Too much of that can lead to iron deficiency. There is a happy medium.
Many student loan borrowers are in for a big, bad surprise in 2025. This may help reduce the national debt somewhat, but I suspect so many people will default. But they do need to pay it back. If their degree is not worth it to them to pay back, why should it be worth it to the rest of us?
a href="https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/energy/just-a-fraction-of-the-hydrogen-hidden-beneath-earths-surface-could-power-earth-for-200-years-scientists-find" target="_blank">Hydrogen in the ground could be a source of power for 200 years. The problem is to locate the reservoirs of hydrogen and extract it, without expending too much energy in doing so. I can't believe that such a light has would avoid dissipation for this long.
Meanwhile, in some places in the U.S., private-equity firms now own more than half of all medical practices within certain specialties. “We are being picked clean by private equity,” a New Jersey-based radiologist said at a recent meeting of the American Medical Association.
Private-equity firms have learned that they “don’t have to make things better or make them more efficient. You can just change one small thing and make a ton more money.” They are hardly the only corporations to learn this lesson. Increasingly, health insurers, private hospitals, and even nonprofits are behaving as though they aim first to extract revenue, and only second to care for people. Patients often are viewed less as humans in need of care than consumers who generate profit.
Berwick said that his own physician’s practice had recently been acquired by UnitedHealth. One day, he asked his doctor, “Anything different now?” “Two things,” the doctor replied. “I have to see more patients each day. And my patients have new diagnoses that I didn’t put there.”
Obamacare made it harder for independent practices to survive. So physicians have had to sell their clinics to hospitals or private equity.
The ronin has discussed this before. Wealthier nations spend more on healthcare, because they can. it's not necessarily an indictment of the healthcare system itself, but inefficiencies and profiteering do exist.
There are people who need far less sleep than average. Several mutations have been identified in certain genes that could explain this. But what these genes do is unclear. I am not so blessed and need my sleep time, but I can get away with less for a while, before the need for sleep returns and I must nap. Short naps seem to be restorative, but there is more to it, depending on my emotional state, etc.
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A third kind of magnetism has been discovered - altermagnetism. There's actually three other types, though: diamagnetism paramagnetism and ferromagnetism. Anti-ferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism are just variants of ferromagnetism. But altermagnetism is different, and could have practical applications.
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Wow! I love perpetual calendars as a kid and thought they were works of genius, until I found out how regular the calendar is. But this one really takes it to the extreme, and is designed with so much thought and planning. Seeing such genius and then looking at the world today, knowing that there are a lot of people who would destroy it in an instant, in the name of some stupid cause, is really depressing. We live in the world where we can't have nice things. Even the Chapel of Bankers and Merchants is a work of art. We have truly regressed.
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How to hack an electronic road sign. I've seen this before. This is why people are able to hijack these things, and I'm surprised that they haven't improved security.
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About 1 in 7 science papers are fake. And it's going to get worse. I read the paper mainly out of curiosity to see how the estimate was determined, and it's just a metasurvey. No one really knows, and this is really disturbing.
Speaking of not being able to have nice things, this is an example of the Ronin's Second Law again. People wanted BlueSky to be like the old Twitter days, when left-wing viewpoints predominated. But open it up to the public, and you know there will be stuff you don't like. But they want to ban free speech, instead of just ignoring it, like adults. Welcome to the real world. Nothing stays nice once everyone gets access. Get used to it.
Black plastic kitchen utensils aren't bad for you after all. It was just a math error by the science reporter. The reporter who made the mistake (a Chinese person, too, ironically – thought they were supposed to be good in math) defends the report:
“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” Liu told National Post. (It doesn't?) “The levels of flame retardants that
we found in black plastic household items are still of high concern, and our recommendations remain the same.”
MediSearch just launched, as a chat-interface medical Q&A engine. Seems better than the run-of-the-mill ChatGPT, but I didn't try the Pro (paid) version.
I've heard this before. AI is running out of data to train on. The question is, does it have enough already? Data is always being generated but apparently it's not going directly to train new models. Could that be a good thing for humanity? Should we start being careful how much data we send?
Something else to worry about: mirror bacteria. These are bacteria with chiral structure that renders them impervious to existing antibiotics. But these are the very scientists working on it. They need to stop themselves!
Scientists are fleeing Argentina because they can't get grants anymore. This is a problem with a lot of science. So much is supported by government grants. And there is so much junk science. But even good science needs support. We really need someone to figure out which science really deserves funding, but so much is political. Especially climate science, which is really more like a religion now. I kinda agree with Millei, having read some of the studies on climate change, which seem poorly done. For a country like Argentina, perhaps scientists should leave climate studies to other countries which can afford to spend money on such research that really goes nowhere (Sorry, Nature).
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Five medical breakthroughs in 2024. Actually, osimertinib has been around for a few years, and the discovery was not new to 2024. But the others were nice.
The quasiparticle, called a semi-Dirac fermion, was first theorized 16 years ago, but was only recently spotted inside a crystal of semi-metal material called ZrSiS. The observation of the quasiparticle opens the door to future advances in a range of emerging technologies from batteries to sensors, according to the researchers.
The universe is weirder than we realized.
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Apple's Siri is now blended with ChatGPT. So now Siri can help with homework? And boy, Tim Cook sure loves his emojis. That's a feature with just about every Apple update release.
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This is what happens when you don't pay down your loan. Average student loan debt increased in first half of 2024 in Oregon. How does that happen? People stopped paying during COVID-19 and just figured it would suddenly go away by itself. Well, it hasn't. What are the rest of us supposed to do about it?
Google has built a computing chip that takes just five minutes to
complete tasks that would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years
for some of the world’s fastest conventional computers to complete.
It's more like that many years for a standard computer to confirm the computation. What Google really announced was a breakthrough in an error correction benchmark, using their new chip. But people in the field think it's a big deal, so I guess it is.
The cumulative incidence of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, sleep disorders, and sexual disorders at three months following COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the vaccination group than no vaccination group. However, schizophrenia and bipolar disorders showed lower cumulative incidence in the vaccination group than in the non-vaccinated group.
Claude AI is good but is running into production issues. As a coding assistant, it's great for small stuff and is very polite and gracious. But for more complicated stuff, it repeats mistakes that you've told it about. Sounds like a limit in its conversational buffer.
o1 now has a Pro version that costs $200 /month to get access. It's quite impressive from the reports.
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Patrick Soon-Shiong wants the LA Times to incorporate an AI-based bias meter. Naturally, some people think it's laughable. He'll probably take it down because so much of their reporting will turn out to be biased. They just don't want you to know. Bias meters should be in the browser, not offered by the news media. How can we trust them? I'll select my own meter, thank you.
The healthy dietary pattern was characterized by a higher intake of fruits, whole grains, legumes, vegetables, milk, and other dairy products, whereas the unhealthy dietary pattern was characterized by a higher intake of red and processed meat, alcohol, and both refined and
sugar-sweetened beverages.
His resignation and message should set off alarms with OHSU leaders. Instead, in the public announcement of his resignation, OHSU appeared to treat the change as a ho-hum shift that reflects the obliviousness that Druker is calling out.
...the institution has been slow to recognize the symbolic significance to the greater community of Druker’s resignation.
We're number one! Oregon in the news again, top spot for another bad reason. We have the most homelessness families per capita. And the reason is that we encourage it. We throw money at it. So naturally, they come. Criddlers get to live life how they want, have free use of the city, and Portland pays for their needs. Tents, tarps, boofing kits. Abandoned buildings to explore and take over. More NGOs and agencies being spawned to take advantage of the money flow.
Based on this review, I switched to Firefox Mobile on my iPhone. It is indeed better than the Firefox Mobile I tried many years ago. It's much better, and more like iCab Mobile, which is still a good browser. I was hoping I could install ad blocker extensions, but it's still not possible.
Explaining Asian Americans’ academic advantage over whites. This study was conducted by two Asians, who conclude that it's just culture and attitudinal differences that account for Asians having better grades, and not innate intellectual differences. My theory is that Asians (especially guys) are less likely to have those distracting girlfriends (or boyfriends) that take them away from their studies. So they can hit the books. If they were suddenly endowed with studly attractiveness, well, it might be a different game. Well, that's this ronin's story anyway.
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The Politics of Medicine. When I read articles like this, I am reminded of how the doctor profession is so wildly out of control over what happens to them. They don't understand politics or economics, and so others that do get to determine how medicine will be practiced, and the doctor has to adjust and get used to it. And the similarly uninformed public weighs in and makes the argument that we need socialized medicine. The libertarians get closer to the answer. What must be done is to leverage competition so that excellence and positive outcomes are rewarded. It's no wonder doctors end up practicing in what appears to be a hodge-podge of ad hoc practice environments (requiring chain or group memberships) designed to satisfy a particular segment only. The medical profession really needs to get better educated in things outside medicine that are being imposed on them.
Update (10 December 2024): This article highlights how wasteful private medical insurance bureaucracy is. But again, the answer is not government-provided insurance. It's to scrap the existing system in favor of raw competition for the benefit of the consumer.
Oregon has seen very limited job growth. It's mainly in health care and social assistance. And by healthcare, we're not talking doctors or nurses, which would be helpful, but instead it's support jobs like family services for the elderly or disabled, daycare, nursing home staff or jobs in doctors’ and dentists’ offices. And government jobs.
What does ARM's CEO think of Intel's predicament? (You can read the article if you turn off Javascript temporarily on your browser.) Intel doesn't have a lot of good options, and I read that the older, experienced employees are heading for the exit doors. If I were the CEO, one of the options I'd consider is selling to AMD, although shareholders would balk at this. Better some loss than a total loss.