10 April 2025

Chewing a special gum might be able to suppress infection from herpesvirus and some influenza A strains:

A chewing gum made from lablab beans, Lablab purpureus—that naturally contain an antiviral trap protein (FRIL)—to neutralize two herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and two influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2). The chewing gum formulation allowed for effective and consistent release of FRIL at sites of viral infection.

Spiffy.

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Newly-discovered Comet Swan is visible with binoculars now. It's in Pegasus and it doesn't look like it's going to be a great comet. Oh well.

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Multnomah County is facing a budget problem. So what do they do? Cut the Homeless Services Department, which pays for tents, tarps and other supplies that nonprofits then distribute to homeless people? Cut services to illegal migrants? No, they tell the district attorney to cut his staff.  Yup, cut services that help the people who pay taxes that support the city. Doom Loop.

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Oregon pays people not to work during the summer. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me, either.

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They admit it! Why isn't Oregon fighting back against the Trump administration cuts to Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program money? Because they realized that the programs that were funded weren't doing anything helpful anyway, and would be difficult to defend. Points for being honest, anyway.

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ChatGPT now has the ability to reference ALL your past conversations.Could be handy. Could be creepy.

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Elite athletes have another way they could make money – selling their feces.  Apparently, it's got some good stuff in it.

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Google might be back on the AI winning track. Yeah, I've played around with Google's Gemini-2.5-Pro and it's really good.  I like it, actually.

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Apparently the Nissan Leaf can be hacked. Hackers can take over your car, listen to conversations, see where you've been, etc.

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Cannabis smoking can effect long-term epigenetic changes in genes related to aging and cancer. But you didn't really care about those things anyway, right?

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Yikes. The UK is creating a precrime murder-prediction tool, to determine who is most likely to kill. What a dystopian country the UK has become.

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9 April 2025

Oregon Tier1 retirees are still enjoying ridiculous benefits. Isn't it so Oregon that the Oregon Supreme Court judges wouldn't allow it to be shut down, and they themselves enjoy its benefits? How is that not a conflict of interest?

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The Ritz-Carlton hotel building is "underwater". Investing in Portland was never a good idea at the time. It's even worse now.

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Two nutrition items:
Tumors like fructose that has been metabolized by the liver. The liver has ketohexokinase-C (KHK-C), and tumors like fructose metabolites produced by this enzyme.

Omega-6 fatty acids promote growth of triple-negative breast cancers. Linoleic acid promotes their growth.

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Wow, Microsoft was briefly the world's most valuable company again. Sic transit gloria mundi.  They used to be, but not anymore – Steve Ballmer took care of that.

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Dr. Mehmet Oz likes AI Healthcare.  AI technology is not ready for this.

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8 April 2025

Big development in legal circles yesterday: the death of district judges putting a nationwide hold on presidential EOs. No more "Hawaii judges". This never made sense, and I'm glad it's now clarified and on the books.

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A Cleveland Clinic study suggests that getting this year's flu vaccine might increase your risk of getting it. I wish that they checked whether people who got the vax developed antibodies, and whether they were IgG1 or IgG4.

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Why Trump's tariff policy makes sense. In historical context, it makes sense. The status quo is not acceptable to the U.S.

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Wow, five million "voters" were cleared from voter rolls. The mainstream news wouldn't report this, of course.

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Because of federal funding cuts, Oregon is eliminating math and literacy programs. Rather than eliminate services for non-citizens. It shows where the priorities are. They've got money for this, but choose to spend it foolishly.

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North Korean tech workers are struggling to get jobs at American tech companies, but there's an easy way to identify them. 😁

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Hmmm. Why people struggle with computers. It's not just the lack of training.

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Science's big problem is not a loss of trust, it's a loss of influence.Well, they blew it with Fauci and COVID, and they're still blowing it big time with gender crap.

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7 April 2025

Lasso peptides may be a new class of antibiotics.  Lariocidin B is a member of this class, and binds to ribosomes, much like other antibiotics we already have, like macrolides, but they interact at the 16S subunit, not the 30S or 50S subunits.

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MathStudio is a different kind of calculator, that's for sure. As a student, I would have had a lot of applications for this. As an old ronin, it's a diversion. I could use something like this for data analytics, though. Anyone know of anything like it?

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Meta dropped Llama 4 over the weekend, and I, too, got excited. But it's not on Ollama.ai yet, and I haven't gotten around to getting it from Huggingface. Seems like it's more like Llama 3.4 than a 4.0. The reaction has been "meh". The models are large, though, but apparently they haven't been trained that thoroughly.

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China has a lot of datacenters that were built in anticipation of a high AI demand, but that feel through. Don't blame DeepSeek, though. There's still room for a lot of research and growth. You think NVIDIA is saying that all the works has been done?  Heck no. China could rent out all that metal for geek hobbyists in the world, but who trusts Chinese datacenters to run or host your stuff? No one, that's for sure. Only the Chinese would trust the Chinese.

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Must see. I think Kevin O'Leary has the right perspective on tariffs. The reporter typifies people who like to rev up the panic for the views. You have to have someone who knows how to play a longer game, because that's how you change the world. The tariff's have certainly gotten people's attention, and that's the first step.

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There's Portland, ready to raise taxes on businesses again to fill those recurring "budget gaps".  And Portland's non-profits don't have enough money to provide free legal assistance to illegal aliens, now that federal money isn't coming in.

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6 April 2025

Me want! NVIDIA's DGX Spark looks awesome. A machine learning powerhouse about the size of a MacMini. I bet this will be a winner. At $3999, it's not cheap, but it will save on time, and encourage people to create more complex models.

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Not everyone is a fan of Google's new AI-powered Overview feature when you search on Google directly. I think if people wanted a good overview, they'd head on over to Perplexity or Faro. Does is worsen search results? YMMV.

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What's in the bright red fire retardant?  You don't want to know. But you should, especially if it's sprayed all over your house.

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As predicted, companies are fleeing Seattle. I guess they don't like being viewed as the city's piggy bank. And in Oregon, the high estate tax is making the wealthy elderly flee the state, too.

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Apple wants to create an AI doctor with Project Mulberry. I think it's going to take jobs away from nurses and nurse practitioners more than doctors. Those are the roles that will go first.
Even Rochelle Walensky (remember her?) sees a problem.

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5 April 2025

Oregon House passes bill allowing landlords to evict squatters. Can't believe we didn't have this law before. But it doesn't cover those who overstay their lease.
Update (2025-04-11):
The law is ineffective.  Read why.
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More on the PP405 agent that supposedly reverses androgenic hair loss. It's supposed to be "promising" but I haven't seen pictures of before and after. At least it's not debunked.

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Saccharin may kill multidrug-resistant bacteria. If I can't get monkfruit sugar or allulose, this would be the next best thing.

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Why are so many young adults getting cancer?  And not just cancer, but aggressive, turbo cancer. I don't think it's just obesity or even plastics. It really suggests some toxin or some genetic alteration. I think I might know what it is.

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4 April 2025

I've noticed this, too. Sites like Techdirt are so politically left now, that I'm turned off to going there. I want tech, not lefty politics. I thought it was strange that the astronauts said that they were OK with staying stranded in space, and that it was no big deal. Really? Now we know how things were , and why they said that. They didn't know who would win the 2024 election, and being on the wrong side of history could be fatal.

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Most think artificial intelligence won't improve their lives. They're probably just thinking of LLMs, but that's not all of AI. In other areas, AI has made things easier and more convenient. But suprahuman intelligence will be a threat, and there is no good way of stopping it.  The main advantage to slowing things down is for the USA to keep its rivals poor and make it so they have to divert their resources to infrastructure and basic needs. So that they don't have money to spend on developing AI. We have a limited time to do so. Or else, we will have to play the Moloch effect game.

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Even Spokane is falling into the Doom Loop.

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Look at all those new Oregon taxes. And the City of Portland is adding some of their own, too. You get to use less of your city and state, but you have to pay more for the privilege. How fair is that?

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The Napavine billboard has been sold. Hope they add new messages. It's been pretty stale lately.

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I've never heard of a sun candle before.  Interesting.

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Oregon is going to sue to resist making Voter ID a requirement to vote. Are they admitting that they need illegals to vote? Seems like it.

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3 April 2025

CAR-T cells were made even more effective by using focused ultrasound to activate heat-shock protein promoter engineered cells integrated with a positive feedback loop from CAR signaling to create these EchoBack CAR-T cells.  These cells were able to suppress glioblastoma cells in a mouse model. 

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They say "Never meet your heroes." I hate these exposé writing against famous mathematicians and scientists, always written by women, that seek to take a man down by telling about his "scandalous" treatment of women. Now Roger Penrose is the target. Give the man a break. He's a true genius – don't expect him to think like a normal man. If you want to write about him, just discuss his work. The rest is gossip.

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What we're finding out is that so much of Oregon government's ability to function is dependent on federal money. Take it away, and so many things fall apart. Now Oregon Department of Education ends math, literacy programs after federal funding cuts. Well, there go one of Tina Kotek's plans, right? We have the money – it just get misspent.

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Here's another money-waster: The City of Portland will now be in the business of renting housing to people who can't afford homes. The city has no shortage of these people, and who gets to have an apartment?  Why do the rest of us have to pay for their rent? This should come out of charity or the lottery, not taxes.

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Oregon can't stop wasting taxpayer money. Now school employees get unemployment pay for summer and winter breaks. The rest of us don't get this benefit – we just find seasonal work.

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2 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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1 April 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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