Sugoi & Yokunai

Eight Vital Signs for the OHSU-Legacy Merger.  A lot has indeed changed since 2022 when the merger was initially proposed. Legacy has gotten healthier, and OHSU has gotten a lot weaker. There are more reasons to argue against the merger than for it. I agree, as do the commenters in this article. This is one of Danny Jacobs' many mistakes. Let it drop.

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Cool. Wirelessly-controlled bionic hands are a thing now.

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Yeah, this is not a good precedent to set. I'm talking about allowing people to direct their taxes to pay for one particular thing. So politicians get to select their favorite cause, and let people direct all their tax money to it, in order to get it funded, while leaving other vital services unpaid for?

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OHSU is planning for life with a 75% cut in research money. Still want to rescue Legacy? Maybe rescue yourself.

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Make it make sense. Portlanders complain about crime, but they want to cut the police budget.

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Bad news for China – we can get those rare earths elsewhere. Trump calls it not having any cards to play.

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Dem solutions to Dem problems. To keep Denny Blaine Park neighbors happy, Seattle is going to build masturbation booths for the weirdos. I pity the city worker tasked with having to clean up afterwards.

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In a patient with glioblastoma, neoadjuvant triplet therapy with ipilimumab, nivolumab and relatlimab followed by surgery, then adjuvant radiation therapy with temozolomide, kept that patient in complete remission for 17 months. Sure it's just one patient, but it's an amazing result.

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Google won't eliminate third-party cookies in the Chrome browser. Doesn't affect me since I don't use Chrome. But OpenAI has expressed interest in purchasing Chrome from Google, should they have to sell it. So this issue may not be settled. OAI is not the buyer I would have imagined or preferred. It won't be an inexpensive purchase either.

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A battery that lasts 5,700 years without recharging has been created in the UK.  But it depends on C-14, so it's not clear to me how powerful it will be.

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Yachts for Science. Now that's a cool organization. It's like Angel Flight, but for researchers instead of cancer patients.

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CAR-T cell and mRNA technology. This uses CAR-T cells to deliver the payload, which may make it more precise, and avoid some of the problems that we've seen with liposomally-delivered mRNA products. And maybe the plasmid contamination problem won't be an issue. And let's start by thoroughly testing this technology before giving it to the public, this time.

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Intel plans to lay off 20,000 people. Some of those could come from Oregon, which means a smaller tax base, more on the unemployment roll, and less support for neighboring businesses. The Doom Loop continues.

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Portland faces a $1 billion infrastructure gap. The shortfall numbers Portland is facing seem to get bigger and bigger. And they want to build a ballpark? Seems like Portland wants to spend like a rich city. Take care of real issues before you spend money on frivolous things we don't really need.

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If you are 30 years old today, you are older than more than half of the world.

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Newspapers push $122M Google tax to fund themselves. This is more Khanh Pham craziness. Oregon state thinks it has the right to charge Google for selling ads which Oregon business buy, making money doing so.  Journalists still haven't figured out a way to be profitable. Few want to pay money for Oregon newspapers anymore. 

Google should respond by just refusing to index anything from Oregon. No Oregon news sites on Google. Go back to the old days before Internet search. See what happens. Maybe other search engines will follow suit. All the newspapers would cry out from the great reduction in readership.  People would get angry as they can't search for things anymore. Let's see who needs who.

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Seattle's Shanghai Garden calls it quits after decades in Chinatown. Same reasons as usual. A real shame.

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Someone needs to Make Canada Great again. I can't believe they are prepping their citizens for a hard life ahead.

Social mobility lies at the heart of the Canadian project. Many people in Canada assume that ‘following the rules’ and ‘doing the right things’ will lead to a better life. Anyone can get an education, work hard, buy property, and climb the social and economic ladder. This is an informal but powerful promise.

However, things are changing. Wealth inequality is rising. Children are already less upwardly mobile than their parents. Policy Horizons has explored some of these changes in Future Lives (2022) and Basic needs at risk (2023). More recently, the Disruptions on the Horizons: 2024 report, suggests that downward social mobility might become the norm in the future. The scenario below paints a picture of Canada in 2040 in which most Canadians find themselves stuck in the socioeconomic conditions of their birth and many face the very real possibility of downward social mobility.

While this is neither the desired nor the preferred future, Policy Horizons’ strategic foresight suggests it is plausible.

3.4 People might find alternative ways to meet their basic needs

Housing, food, childcare, and healthcare co-operatives may become more common. This could ease burdens on social services but also challenge market-based businesses.
Forms of person-to-person exchange of goods and services could become even more popular, reducing tax revenues and consumer safety.
People may start to hunt, fish, and forage on public lands and waterways without reference to regulations. Small-scale agriculture could increase.
Governments may come to seem irrelevant if they cannot enforce basic regulations or if people increasingly rely on grass-roots solutions to meeting basic needs.

Like the saying goes: "Good times breed soft men. Soft men breed hard times."

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Everybody's saying that Google on the brink of a collapse. What are they going to do? Divest it of Chrome? Divest it of Android (that would be nice)?  It would be nice if they could open source their search algorithm, although that alone wouldn't do much, since any competitor would need the massive number of datacenters to support search. Although I suppose you could implement a smaller version if your intent was not to serve the world. I think this is unlikely, though.

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Researchers identify simple rules for folding the genome. Condensins, cohesins, histones. Things often seem simple until you learn more about the details.

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3 Doors Down is coming back to Hawthorne. Apparently the original restaurateur is back to take over the reins again. Dang, I wish it wasn't on Hawthorne, though. The street's changed since five years ago.

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Something thinks he or she has proved that P ≠ NP. 

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Climate change advocates are scared that people are no longer believing in that religion anymore.  Yeah, when AOC is flying around in a private jet instead of taking her bicycle, or even driving her Tesla, it's pretty clear that Green New Deal is a sham. 

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Annals of Internal Medicine reports an alarming increase in psilocybin use. And guess who is using it the most. Adolescents.

And guess which states legalized psilocybin use?

Oregon was first in legalization of marijuana, then came Measure 110, and now this. It's no wonder businesses can't find anyone competent to hire.

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China is developing a non-nuclear hydrogen bomb. And some car companies want to develop cars based on hydrogen fuel cells. Which would require hydrogen recharging stations in many places. Yeah right. Our society isn't the best fit for this technology. Imagine the havoc that vandals could wreak. Nuh-uh. Not in America.

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Seattle breaks records on homeless tents removed, encampments cleared. Whack-a-mole.  Bruce Harrell is in over his head.

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Will the Justice Department break up Google? We need a neutral search engine that just delivers high quality searches. Google's problem is that it controls what we see. It controls what information we receive when we request it. Things were OK during the early days, but when there was profit to be made, and a monopoly to keep, things changed. Then it began to matter what president people should elect. What bad news needed to be hidden. What ideology should be promoted, and which ones suppressed. I'm not sure breaking up Google is going to change this. We need a search engine that is politically and commercially neutral, but is also private. Good search engines aren't free – you have to sign up for an account, and that's the main problem. I want to search without having to have my queries and what I click on linked to my account.

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Blue state blues. More Oregonians are holding multiple jobs.

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Gotta love this Dr. Roach column where he says:

I generally avoid prescribing brand-new drugs until they have a bit of a track record, as long as there are tried-and-true alternatives.

Boy, did he sure push the COVID vax hard. He didn't care about no track record or tried-and-true alternatives, did he?

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There might be a second medical school in Klamath Falls. It'll be an osteopath school, though.

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Lahaina residents want to rebuild just like before. But there are people who don't want things like they were before. They insist on shoreline restrictions, new regulations, new protections. And if your nice oceanfront property is over the "erosion hazard line", well, that's just unfortunate, isn't it?

The nerve of those people, right?

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Bond villain wannabes can now get their own military-grade satellite and AI datacenter, as well as other cool things an evil overload might need. 

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What's happening to men? They're not pursuing traditional career pathways. Especially healthcare – it's a woman's job now. Just as well, when AI takes over.

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Those paper receipts at the grocery store are toxic!  Just ten seconds of skin contact and you'll get more bisphenol S than California thinks is safe. If you care enough to select your plastic water bottle carefully, you'll want to read this.

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Chinese car battery manufacturers have a powerful battery that can fully recharge in 5 minutes. Way ahead of Tesla. And it's not lithium-based. It's sodium ion-based. Tesla Superchargers pull around 300 amps.  Imagine one of those Chinese 1000 amp charging stations in America being set on fire because someone just wants to stick it to Elon.  Yeah, that's why we can't have nice things in the U.S.

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UC Santa Cruz is no longer the most stoned college in the U.S.  Lewis and Clark College is #4. I'm really surprised Reed College didn't make the list.

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Occasionally, Democrats do something right. Senate bill 1121 will make doxxing a crime. 

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Healthcare workers need a good night's sleep. Don't know about the meditation part, but sleep is essential. Until the Libby Zion case, medical residents had to take call on a brutal schedule, and they didn't care if you were sleep-deprived or not. You still had to make life and death decisions. This was based on Dr. William Halsted's surgical schdule, where he worked non-stop in order to develop his skills, and so all the residents had to be so dedicated.  Turns out he was a cocaine addict, and that's how he did it.

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A breakthrough in Hilbert's Sixth Problem, and some progress towards proving the Navier-Stokes equation. Paper here, if you want to slog through it.

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Now, this is someone who is a fascist. Gretchen Whitmer wanted doctors to take implicit bias training to retain their medical license. After affirmative action and DEI, of course people have developed opinions about who is really qualified and who is not. That's just natural. Doctors are human, too. It's not "implicit bias". It's just being aware of what's going on.

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Blue states are not going to like this.  CMS is closing the loophole that allows Blue states, especially Oregon, where 70% of Oregon Health Plan money comes from the fed, to institute a "provider tax" that would pay for Medicaid funding. Some feel that the states should be paying for more of this, and stop using the provider tax trick.  Of course, Oregon is paying for healthcare for illegal immigrants, which many would not agree to. Oregon has money – they just need to prioritize citizens.

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Top Pot doughnuts and coffee will close their Queen Anne location.  The owners are not saying why, but you can guess. They make some of the best doughnuts. Check it out at QFC stores.

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Some excitement about the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier. Curing cancer and regrowing hair? Wake me up when it happens.

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ChatGPT's o3, o4-mini are really good at geolocating from photographs. I'll have to keep this in mind. However, these new models hallucinate more. Some good and some bad. Life is like that.

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How the might have fallen. Providence is warning about hard times ahead. Gone are the Obamacare days when they were flush with cash, building the Franz Cancer Center, buying out doctors practices and making them Providence employees, buying naming right to PGE Park, and starting their own venture capital company.  Times have sure changed. Now they are facing considerable headwinds, no doubt due to the nursing strike, and the difficulty in finding quality people who want to move to Portland to work for them. And living in a Blue state, it seems like almost everyone is on Medicaid.  And the taxes....

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The Oregon Trial Lawyers Association is also opposed to an OHSU-Legacy merger. But that's because it's going to be harder to sue Legacy docs if they become OHSU docs. And they see that as a loss for society.  Well, on the other hand, many people view OHSU as having deep pockets, so OHSU docs often get named as the defendant, even if it's not his/her fault but are only partly involved in the case. I've seen this happen. Not to mention that the media tends to make any legal case involving an OHSU doctor front page news, while similar cases involving other doctors goes unmentioned.

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The current owner of the Goonies house plans to restore it to its original 1980s glory.

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Some actors sold their image to AI companies and now regret it.  Well, at least they got paid. Other people's images are being manipulated for free. Pretty soon, generative AI will be able to create new faces, which can be used for any purpose, and there will be no need for actors.

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New flexible brainstem implant might replace cochlear implants for those with neurogenic deafness.

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Nice systematic review that shows that the latest GenAI LLMs don't have the accuracy sufficient to replace human doctors. An analysis of 83 studies showed an overall accuracy of only 52.1%. Some were better than non-experts, but none were better than experts. Just as I thought.

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We need to stop pretending that AI is intelligent. The article is talking about LLMs, of course. Yeah, they aren't intelligent yet. You can think of it as a glorified search engine with a different kind of user interface. It doesn't answer your queries based on an indexed list of documents, but rather by its language embeddings, can determine what you are asking for, and can provide the necessary answers.

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Apparently vibe coding with o3 is really great. I have to check it out. I'm ready for something better than Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

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Very interesting background story about Yamanaka factors. What a genius.

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Oregon's unemployment rate is at a record high since 2021 – 4.6%. No one is surprised.

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Democrat solutions to Democrat problems.  Edmonds, WA is selling city assets to make ends meet. That's going to just buy the city a few days of operational time. What then? 

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There's a nucleus in the thalamus that is important in conscious perception. Connections to the cerebral cortex is made through the thalamofrontal loop. Makes sense, since the thalamus is important in processing sensory input from the body, especially pain.

Another group of researchers have also discovered a molecular connection between adipose tissue and anxiety. Immune cells in fatty tissue produce a hormone called GDF15, which produces anxiety.  Maybe this is why we are seeing so many mentally ill obese people these days, as obesity has been increasing over the years.

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Australian scientists have discovered a quantum-based, jam-proof GPS system. It uses quantum sensors to detect small changes in the earth's magnetic field, and doesn't require sending signals to satellites. It's also portable, so perhaps someday it can be placed in a phone.

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Wow, the homeless population in Portland doubled since January 2023. Is it a surprise that the Homeless Industrial Complex failed to solve the problem? Heck no, it's the homeless support system, where people come from all over the nation to enjoy the city's generosity. The city says that this data is helpful, and "that means we can better provide them the services they need to end their homelessness".  And of course, Democrats will need even more money to accomplish this. 🙄

And because of taxes, the Portland Blues Festival is cutting back on days. And there will be no Oregon Symphony Waterfront concert.  And no Oregon Brewers Festival.  Pay more. Get less. 

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There's a bill that aims to limit the number of bills a legislator can introduce to no more than 25 per session. For some, it should be zero.

––– 良くない–––The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is ending their DEI practices. I thought they already did this back in February. They said that “Fred Hutch promotes the belief that everyone deserves a life free from cancer.”  Yeah, we all think that – that wasn't the issue with DEI, though. If they can do it, so can Harvard. Was it that hard?

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"CT scans could cause 5% of cancers, study finds". Whoa. When I read that I had to check out the article. The operational word is "could" and if you look at the actual article, they didn't do a longitudinal case-control study, but rather, used the RadRAT model that estimates what the cancer incidence would be. It's a model, and so it could be wrong. Not to panic, as the article commenter said. If you are recommended to get the CT scan, you should get the CT scan. Doctors should continue to be cautious about how many scans they order.

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A caffeine metabolite, 1-methylxanthine (1-MX) has been shown to improve memory and lead to "increases in key brain chemicals linked to learning, neuroprotection, and antioxidant defenses".  Sign me up! I already drink coffee, and I do feel like it has some beneficial brain effect. The original study was done in male albino rats, so it's not clear how much of my perceived benefit is just wishful thinking.

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Conservative Americans are more likely to distrust science. Gee, I wonder why?

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Japan's population keeps decreasing. The drop is a record. Few are interested in having kids in Japan. Marriage rates are low. A lot of young Japanese would rather spend money on crap like gacha. Sounds like an unhealthy society, which is a shame. C'mon, Japanese men and women – get off your oshidi and start making babies!

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A great way to trash Wikipedia's reputation even more. Harvard activists stage a giant Wikipedia edit session, to make them look less bad, and replace antisemitic attributions with innocent-sounding pro-Palestinian goodness. This is why Wikipedia alternatives exist. You would think Wikipedia would care about their online reputation, but I guess not. This is another example of the scability law. Wikipedia was great when it was still small and every editor aspired to quality. When you open it up to the world, it becomes crappy.

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This video is going around. The United States has gotten out of shape in terms of manufacturing, and can't do basic stuff anymore. How far we've fallen. If there's a need for military escalation, I fear for the country. We won't be able to make things as we did during WW II. 

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Don't fall for this Google Gmail scam. It's amazing that Google won't fix it, or admit that it's a problem.

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Oregon legislators are set on getting that kicker money, especially since they won't be getting as much federal dollars. But Oregon has the money – they just want to keep wasting it on illegals and the homeless.

Washington is looking to raise taxes, too. Gotta feed that always-hungry Democrat machine.

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Well, well. Legacy Hospitals are actually financially healthy and don't need OHSU's rescuing after all. Wasn't that the reason for the merger? 

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Political overconfidence worsens polarization in online debates.

Those elderly who use devices such as cell phones are less likely to be demented. It's probably not cause and effect. I think that if you're not demented, you're more likely to figure out how to use your smart phone.

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I like Microsoft's Kermit font. It's a better Comic Sans.

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“There’s no money to repay anyone”. What a mess. The Ritz Carlton hotel project is so symbolic of Portland. A monument to the city's failure. So what will it become – a giant homeless shelter? 

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Happy Tax Payment Day!  It's a good day to be reminded of how much Oregon has wasted your tax money.

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Really? According the US News & World Report, the John A Burns School of Medicine in Honolulu is a Tier 1 school in primary care, beating a lof of the bigger names. Am I reading this right? Better than UCLA or Dartmouth? How did that happen?

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I'm confused. First Trump announced that he's giving smartphones and chips a break from his tariffs. Then he says that there are no exemptions after all.  You would think that Apple would try to shift production to the U.S., but no, it's shifting production to Thailand, while it squeezes what it can from India and Vietnam. What's the deal, Tim Cook? Even NVIDIA is opening up production in Arizona.

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Speaking of chips, Intel has found a buyer for the Altera division. Man, FPGA chips were supposed to be one of the promising directions for AI processing, and in better days, Intel would be developing this tech themselves. Now, they're having to sell parts for the money.

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U of O's Institute for Policy Research and Engagement School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management says that Oregon is going to see more businesses fleeing the state due to the unfavorable business climate. Oregon needs to figure out how to retain businesses, but I guess that's not one of Tina Kotek's priorities, is it? Meanwhile, there's the infamous Khanh Pham, who now has the idea that big tech companies like Google and Meta should pay for local journalism.  At least $122 million apiece each year, she says. What a joke.  And all because AI doesn't refer back to the news sites as much as before. Get a clue, Khanh. Google is well-aware that AI is changing the business model, and they're afraid that it's not bringing in as much revenue to them as well. I guess every blue state has their own AOC.

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Democrat solutions to Democrat problems. I wasn't aware that if you're overdosing on fentanyl and someone calls for medical assistance, "the person calling for emergency medical assistance — as well as the person overdosing — will not be arrested or prosecuted for drug possession". It's called the Good Samaritan Law. 

Man, this wasn't the Good Samaritan parable I remember reading, where the Samaritan supplies illegal drugs to someone, and then when that person gets close to death, calls for help. I guess Oregon legislators read a different biblical translation. Laws like these are why Oregon has so many druggies.

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Bidaya AI is noticing some weird behavior with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Seems it doesn't use LLM tools. But from the screenshots, I can't tell if the problem is with Gemini or Google's AI Studio.

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