6 October 2024

How well are solar panels recycled? The sad answer is: not very well at all.  Very few get recycled.  The rest go into a landfill. And they don't last 30 years, like they're supposed to. Because that's just the theoretical lifespan.

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Hurricane Helene damage is going to be very long-lasting. And the government under Biden-Harris is strangely doing very little to help. In fact, they are hampering private efforts, instead of working side by side. Something sinister is afoot.

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23 and Me seems to be in a bind. They want to ensure customer privacy, but the value of the company is in that data. Without it, no one is interested, and the company will have to shut down.

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I've never heard of the Warburg Institute.  Sounds like a fascinating place, where you would expect to find a copy of the Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis, Cultes des Goules, the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten.

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5 October 2024

Drug overedose deaths are increasing in Oregon, despite decreasing in most other states.  Thanks to M110. What was that term people were using? Oh yeah – "harm reduction".

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Lung cancer patients live about 50% longer after treatment with amivantinib and lazertinib.  This is only in EGFR-mutated lung cancer, which has relapsed after prior treatment with osimertinib. Only a minority of patients fall in this category, but for those that do, this is a good option to have.

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Another wrinkle in the OHSU-Legacy deal. I knew that the vast majority of OHSU workers were unionized, but didn't realize that only about 22% of Legacy workers were. OHSU made a secret deal with unions, and now Legacy workers are finding out about it after the fact. How's that for transparency?

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The moon might have a viscous liquid core. I love that they call it "unexpected movement". I was thinking it might be something else.

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It's now harder to track executive jets. Nike added its jets to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed list. I'd bet Elon Musk's planes are on that list.

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A new molecule called LaKe mimics the effects of exercise and fasting by boosting lactate and ketones. It's only been tested on rats so far, though.

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As marijuana use increases so do problems associated with its use. As I've been saying, the marijuana that legislators envisioned they were legalizing is not what's out there now.

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A Nordic-based engine developed in conjunction with Volvo is using biogas, and supposedly spews less CO2.  Details are scant, but it seems to be a step in the right direction.

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Seattle's Grand Illusion movie theater is closing. Ah, fond memories. All good things must come to an end eventually, I suppose.

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4 October 2024

Glassholes again. Now Meta has their own version of Google Glass, and concerns about security/privacy dangers arise once more.

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Glucose in the brain is necessary to have, but it can suppress activity of older neurons.  The key gene is Slc2a4, which codes for the glucose transporter protein GLUT4. But promoting growth of older neurons is more complicated than just decreasing glucose intake, as the article suggests. But at least this discovery is hypothesis-generating.

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The huge toll on PhDs. It's the pressure to publish. Finding jobs. Especially when all around you, folks are starting families and having comfortable lifestyles. It can be tough being an academic.

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So, will we finally find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is?  I'm skeptical. Satoshi has proven that he's not dumb. (And I hate the trend of modern journalists to use they/them as a singular pronoun. It's not. Stop it.

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3 October 2024

It's been over a year – we finally have an answer.  Downed active power lines were felt to be responsible for the Lahaina fire.  Auwe.

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There may be a way to prevent runaway thermal lithium battery fires. Still, it's not going to help one at home when one of these fires starts. Are you prepared to deal with a lithium ion or lithium polymer battery fire? Ordinary extinguishers may not work – lithium ion fires need a Class B extinguisher. Some say just let these fires burn out since they tend to be short-lived, but the fumes can be toxic.

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Oregon doesn't have enough doctors and nurses. But in Oregon, these professionals can't cross state lines to work.
The source of his frustration: lawmakers’ refusal to join what are known as “interstate licensing compacts.”  ...at least 40 states are members of these physicians and nurses compacts. But not Oregon.
Why not? An Oregon Medical Board spokesperson did not directly answer the question. But leadership has been largely critical. “We have been actively engaged in discussions about the compact, and remain concerned for patient safety,” said the board’s executive director, Nicole Krishnaswami. “When a person is licensed through the compact, we are not able to review their criminal history.”
So we get all kinds of unvetted illegals in our state. But doctors and nurses are under greater scrutiny because they might be criminals. Forty-plus states have solved the problem, and I don't see any issues. But not Oregon.

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Here comes more inflation.  A federal judge removes roadblock to let student loans be discharged to the rest of us to pay off.  Unfair!

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Dismantling Google is a terrible idea. If you are a shareholder, I guess. Google has becoming a company to be feared. They have so much data on everyone.

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Elevated plasma markers related to neuronal damage and accumulation of phosphorylated tau suggest the presence of ongoing neuropathology in the chronic phase following a single moderate–severe TBI. Plasma biomarkers were associated with measures of microstructural brain disruption on MRI and disordered cognition, further highlighting their utility as potential objective tools to monitor evolving neuropathology post-TBI.
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The moon's orbit is weird. This video will change how you look at the moon.

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2 October 2024

So much to unpack in this article. They gave a group of doctors clinical vignettes as a diagnostic challenge and half the group was allowed to access GPT-4 for help.  How did they fare? Here are the score:

Doctors w/o GPT-4:  73.7%
Doctors with GPT-4: 76.3%
but GPT-4 alone: 92.1% grimacing

Not looking good for human doctors.  It was a timed test, so maybe some anxiety caused wrong answers, but the control group was allowed all their usual online resources except an LLM.  The study says that the doctors were selected from various institutions, but didn't disclose where.  First, machine learning models are great when you present them with nicely packaged clinical vignettes. The trick is to tease out the salient elements. But secondly, that doesn't exonerate the human doctors: they deliberately chose to ignore the right diagnosis in favor of something else. This dispels the notion that AI can help clinicians be better doctors.
Thirdly, it foreshadows the future of medicine – that diagnosticians will be replaced by human nurses who are paid to create clinical vignettes for a model to parse. Real geniuses will go into research and industry, and eschew clinical medicine, also largely because it will pay far less than their earning potential.

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Yikes!  Taking the mRNA vax product wipes out the long-lived plasma cells from the bone marrow.  This explains why the vaccinated tend to get COVID-19 over and over again. What a mistake it was to get it.

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The artist that won an art contest with an AI-generated creation based on other people's work is now upset because his own work is being copied by AI.  He scorned detractors when he won the contest, but he's not so relaxed about morals now that tables have turned.

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HaLow WiFi has a range of 9.9 miles away. That's an improvement. My next question: how safe is it? Will I be able to have children?

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A casualty of Hurricane Helene.  
Spruce Pine is one of the only places in the world to mine high-purity quartz.The mineral is an essential ingredient of chips in countless products, including medical devices, solar panels, cellphones and the chips powering the latest tech craze: artificial intelligence. A few weeks of shutdown is not the end of the world, Conway tells Axios. However, longer than that could put the industry into "another crisis." The semiconductor industry would need to find alternatives.
Yikes.

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Do Canadians lack ambition? The president of Shopify thinks so.

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1 October 2024

This is not good.  More than ever, Americans are reliant on government aid. We are on the path to communism.
And Oregon continues to lead in the West in the proportion of people dependent on SNAP for food.

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Loneliness has been blamed for several diseases. Now, more recent research suggests it might not be true. That's good I guess.

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New vaccines could prevent tumors before they form. This is for those with Lynch Syndrome, which is not a rare condition. It's known that checkpoint inhibitors work on tumors that arise in these people. So it makes sense to stimulate immunity to key antigens. I still wish they used a different platform than mRNA vaccines, though. Or at least have them developed by companies that have better transparency and quality control standards.

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This is a great idea. So much of critical software depends on open source code.  Why not pay developers of these important components we all depend on?

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30 September 2024

Handheld ultrasound scanner creates detailed photoacoustic images. The resolution is incredible.

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Oh boy... California creates new ways to sue people. Now there is a law against "hate littering".  That'll make us all civil, right? Are there any more ways we can sue people from doing stuff we hate? 

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That's good I suppose. California makes it illegal to admit students who benefit from legacy or donor considerations.  Did the state already cure cancer?  I can't believe how many trivial things the legislature focused their attention on.

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29 September 2024

Oh, so you've noticed. Clinical cancer research in the US is increasingly dominated by pharmaceutical industry sponsors, study finds. Why is this so? I've seen many brilliant scientists get tired of low salaries and having to put up with teaching and administrative crap, and flee for "industry", as they call it, where the pay is higher and there are no teaching responsibilities. Plus, government grants are not a guarantee and at a university, come with indirect costs and fees. You have to hire and pay for your own postdocs and supplies.  At a pharmaceutical company, everything is provided for you and all you need to do is your research.

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And crap happens with academic research, too. I'm glad the Data Colada incident got resolved favorably. But what a smear for Harvard. What's going on with Ivy League schools these days?

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Remember those articles about how caloric restriction would activate genes that would make you live longer? Scientists like Ray Walford were so big on this.  Sirtuin activation, and all that. Well it turns out that it only makes a difference is selected organisms whose lifespans are abnormally shortened.  In organisms with a normal lifespan, caloric restriction makes no difference.  

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Augmented reality goggles may help doctors perform spinal taps better. Kinda interesting, but getting that gear on before the procedure would be cumbersome.  If there's a problem, patients get sent to interventional radiology instead. They do a good job.

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Democrat Ron Wyden wants to pack the Supreme Court and introduce new demands that the Court must follow, like disclosure of income tax. The whole purpose of the tricameral government was to make each branch of government be independent, and not beholden to the other two. If there's a problem with SCOTUS, it should be addressed by the Chief Justice. At this time, John Roberts doesn't seem to have a problem with Charles Thomas, so if you think there's a problem, take it up with him. Congress should have no control over the goings on in the highest Court.  Control your own members first.

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Some people want to really uglify Deschutes County.  Good thing they were prevented from uglifying the southern Oregon coast. Enough already. There is no reason why we shouldn't continue with our current energy sources. This could happen here:

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Here's a pet peeve of mine: people who introduce equations into their paper to make their idea sound "scientific". Like there is some science behind their thinking. The author calls it "mathiness".  Others have other names.

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Hear, hear! Two thirds of Americans are willing to self-censor, afraid to speak their minds, becase they fear someone will get  offended.  When did we start to become so afraid? The crazies among us seem to have no concerns. But I think no one wants to get involved in litigation, having to defend accusations of racism, sexism, transgenderism, what have you. It probably started when idiot judges awarded decisions to snowflakes. So when people saw that the legal system was messed up, they saw it was better to avoid problems. Now of course, only the woke get to be vocal. Common sense voices just get yelled at, with no one coming to their rescue.
But maybe there is good news. Some think that America is getting less woke. The great experiment has failed, and we are dialing back. We shall see.

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It used to be possible to hijack a Kia and get sensitive info about the owner, with a phone app just by scanning a license plate. This is why people tend to avoid the bells and whistles that techies offer. It's not that they're Luddites. They would rather have the status quo over the risk of enjoying unnecessary convenience at the cost of privacy and security.

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Prepare for a massively disruptive dockworker strike.  This reminds of the joke about which part of the body is the most important. Everything is important and needs to function properly, in order to avoid shutting down the whole body.  Even the lowly asshole.

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In reality, no one really knows. I think the reason that the media wants the presidential election to appear close is that so when Harris is reported to have won, people won't automatically assume election fraud.  Because it was close, right?

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28 September 2024

We dodged a bullet. Fed cancels offshore wind farm auction. Lack of interest, apparently.

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How temptation works.  This is why work always fills the time allotted to it.

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Something doesn't make sense. Check out these two news items from today:
This is the very definition of "spek-u-la-tive".

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The Creounity Time Machine. Developed for coin collectors, but of interest to anyone who wants to learn about ancient calendrical systems.

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Liberals like to wonder why we are hesitant to spend money or give away things for free when we are "the richest country in the world". It's easy to be rich when you don't have to pay back debts, but only the interest on the debt. The National Debt has now increased to $35.3 trillion.

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27 September 2024

I remember GRC SpinRite when I was a WIndows user. It's been updated after 20 years. We Mac users have OnyX from Titanium Software.

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This is crazy. Sam Altman wants 5 gigawatt datacenter for his projects. This is presumably to create AGI? The human brain doesn't require that much power, and it makes one appreciate nature. How about we build an underground computer facility, make it nuclear-proof. Call it Colussus. 

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Speaking of brains, some additional insights into the brain structure of those with autism spectrum disorder. My question is that with all these anatomic differences, how did these arise so often, such that we have so many autistic kids?

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Hospitals are evaluated on various metrics, especially their mortality rate. This metric shows how many people die after treatment at a facility. It is aimed at measuring the quality of care. But it created bad incentives.

Consider a scenario where a critically ill patient is admitted to a hospital. If the staff thinks the patient will likely die, they may take drastic measures to protect their mortality rate. This could mean refusing further treatment. Or, it could mean forcing the patient's family to transfer them to another facility. This decision often comes after the hospital has made the most money from its services.

By pushing out patients on the brink of death, these hospitals gain two benefits. They maximize their profit and lower their mortality rate. From a management perspective, this appears to be a win-win situation. The hospital maintains a prestigious status with an apparently low mortality rate. This also boosts its financial performance.
Hospitals (and medical clinics) need to be evaluated differently. How well do they do prospectively, on index cases that you can compare from hospital to hospital, clinic to clinic, not on bulk statistics.

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Steve Jobs 10 minute rule.  I'll try it next time, although I think for me, it's a 15 minute rule. I give it a bit longer before I get an walk away.

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Well now. Key Dems don't like Measure 118.  But will Oregon voters override their concerns? That's the thing. You never know with Oregon voters.

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Is Oregon one of the hardest-working states in the America?  Doesn't look like it.

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