24 March 2025

Teslas and Tesla showrooms are tech-equipped. It's not a good idea to vandalize them – as some vandals discovered. One didn't think his fingerprints on the Molotov cocktail bottle would be discovered. Not too smart.

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You want to glue to things together? Perhaps check this site first.

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The vanishing male writer. I noticed this several years ago when I was looking for a good new horror novel to read. The only male writers were the usual: Stephen King, Clive Barker and maybe Laird Barron. I don't enjoy reading horror by female writers. They're always more focused on people have relationship issues, and when the horror occurs, I always say to myself "Is that it?" Or "what just happened?"  The scary stuff is always understated. Male horror writers will give me stories where true horror is uncovered,  often when someone does something or goes somewhere they're not supposed to. I don't want to read stories where some heroine has to eradicate a ghost or demon by reconciling some bad relationship that happened years ago that she tried to forget. If I'm wrong, let me know.

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Vancomycin-resistant enterococci secrete bacteriocins that kills off its competitors. How they do so may be a strategy to attack them, something that is sorely needed.

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Oregon has the second-highest rate of WFH workers. A whopping 17.7%. It used to be more like 6.3%. Only Colorado has a higher percentage. These are the folks whose jobs AI will likely take away.  When I read this article, it sounds like Portland has a lot of people that are struggling to find something to do. It's not a vibrant city, full of opportunity and action. There's a lot of wishful thinking in the article. The Trump era is not going to treat Oregon or Portland well. They have been so used to federal money to keep things going, and now there won't be any of that. And there aren't that many billionaires to tax either.

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Washington state Democrats are crazy. 
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23 March 2025

The Oregonian reflects on why Portland hasn't been able to recover.  Why it lags behind other cities.
The whole article has the attitude of "Gee, we did everything right. What could it be that keeps Portland from recovering?"

This is what they focus on:

A big win would help a lot, he said. Blosser suggested projects like a Major League Baseball stadium, or the Albina Vision Trust’s plan to add housing, cap Interstate 5 near the Rose Quarter and restore a historically Black neighborhood, could demonstrate Portland has shifted out of reverse and into gear.
They focus on concerts, baseball games – all one-time draws into the city.  And spending money to revitalize the Albina area is something you after you fix the problem of businesses exiting downtown Portland.

That's why businesses stay away. Bash the police!  Protest!  Smash things!  Disrupt other people's lives.

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“We’ve spent decades building trust with people, especially with the LGBTQ+ community and immigrants. They’re not comfortable going to someone they don’t trust.”
Things sure have changed since I grew up, that's for sure.

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This is why vaxxed people get COVID-19 over and over again. The vax causes them to respond to infection with IgG4 subclass antibodies which are not protective, and has limited ability to fight the virus. And if you keep getting COVID over and over again, it increases your cancer risk.
Now the NIH seems to no longer be interested in research grants dealing with mRNA vaccine technology. And why isn't Marty Makary approved yet? This taking way too long.

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Tina Kotek decries Trump's Medicaid cuts as threatening one-third of Oregonian's who rely on it, as well as impacting housing initiatives.  Medicaid money wasn't intended to provide housing. I think Tina has enough money – she just doesn't want to stop spending it on non-citizens.

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22 March 2025

Oral minoxidil 5 mg once daily is just as effective as twice daily topical minoxidil for androgenetic hair loss. Don't wait for the FDA approval, because it will never happen. No profit margin to make it worth the effort.

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So, OHSU and UnitedHealthcare finally came to an agreement. Well, well.

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Cargo Therapeutics is leaving California. The first crumbles down the cliff before the landslide?

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Wow!. Apple Mac Studio M3 Ultra workstation can run Deepseek R1 671B AI model entirely in memory using less than 200W. Truly an AI workstation for those choosing the Mac platform.

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This should be a warning to Portland. Young people are leaving the UK in droves because they're sick of paying high taxes for crap.
Joe feels this pessimism, too, and says that the chances that he will return to the UK are slim unless there’s a rebalance between pay, public services and opportunities for growth.

“It’s a big problem for me. The social contract in Canada is strong,” he said. “In the UK, it’s broken.”
Well, I'm not sure Canada is the best solution, and people are fleeing there because it's the easiest immediate solution.

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21 March 2025

Companies are exploring new form factors for phones. Huawei's new phone looks interesting. Apple is planning a foldable phone with a liquid metal hinge. As my wife would say: more things to break.

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Chinese companies are reacting to Trump's tariffs by cutting prices – and moving out of China. Xi is not pleased about that. This is what the pro-tariff people were hoping would happen, while nay-sayers were thinking that all it would do is raise prices for Americans. That might happen if we were a tiny country, but the U.S. market is not one to deny, as even Canada is finding out.

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Harvard is turning into a community college, offering remedial math courses. It's not the place where the smart go to innovate. It's a DEI institution, where they have to accommodate those who got in for reasons other than merit. And since they're going to make it free for lower income folks, what's cachet of the Harvard name anymore?

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India is planning to issue a government-developed browser that they want everyone to use.  This Redditor warns against this, as they will likely insert a government-created root certificate that will allow them to spy on people. If they wanted to, of course.

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If you live in these areas, don't drink the rainwater.

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Brain scans reveal when babies first form memories. Their hippocampuses start becoming functional around 12 months of age.

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If you're up for a Blade Runner ambient track to study with or just have in the background, this four-hour Eurorack-generated soundscape is for you.

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Revenues from Portland metro homeless services tax in 'fiscal valley of death'.  Portland leadership is unhappy that they can't continue to get money to feed their municipal money sink.  Up for discussion is the Metro Supportive Housing Services tax. They don't understand that when you feed the squirrels, you get more of them.

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Yikes. Multnomah County is spending money on AI licenses for its employees. Looks like some AI companies are going to get a lot of Portland-flavored training data. I'll bet some higher-up thought this would be a great thing to "modernize" the county.

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Crazy. This is how health insurance operates in California.
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Oregon Democrats – how can they justify this?

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20 March 2025

Happy Vernal Equinox.

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UCLA scientists discover a drug, DDL-920, that led to the complete recovery of movement control in mice after they experienced a stroke.
The drug, tested on mice, restored these gamma oscillations, and in turn reconnected neurons to essentially heal the brain damage without arduous physical rehabilitation.
Amazing, if confirmed. Paper here.
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Interesting survey of executives regarding their experience with AI.
  • 59% of the executives say they're "actively looking for a new job with a company that's more innovative with generative AI."
  • Less than half (45%) of employees — versus 75% of the C-suite — think their company's AI rollout in the last 12 months has been successful.
  • According to a May 2024 study from IBM, nearly two-thirds (64%) of leaders said their organization needs to embrace AI despite the fact that it will change jobs faster than employees can adapt.
  • According to a 2024 LinkedIn report, 53% of employees said they hid their AI use from employers for fear that it would make them look replaceable.
  • Execs are often so far removed from the actual implementation of AI on a worker level that they don't see or understand this fear and resistance
So true.

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WTF, man. Some guy asked ChatGPT to look up information on himself. ChatGPT told him that he was a child murderer. 

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The parts of the brain involved in word recall have been identified. No surprises here. They're in the expected places – the areas where if dysfunctional, cause Wernicke's and Broca's aphasia. 

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So there was a world happiness survey, and the United States came in #24. The winners were the northern European countries, of course. But man, even Mexico beat us.  Of course, the survey data were obtained between 2020 and 2022, when Biden was in charge, so this is no surprise. Those were bleak years. Apparently this was the first time the U.S. dropped below the top 20.

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Oregon lawmakers (the usual crowd) wants to make Lunar New Year a paid state holiday. Oregon is a big joke.

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The NIH guidance justified its new 15 percent indirect cost cap by comparing what foundations typically pay for indirect costs: zero. The Gates Foundation has a maximum indirect cost rate of 10 percent. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation pays up to 12 percent. If universities accept zero to 12 percent indirect cost rates from foundations, they should accept a similar rate from the government, argues the NIH.

Colleges reject the relevance of the comparison. They can forgo indirect cost funding from foundations only because the government already provides it, they say. In other words, taxpayers are easy marks when their money is being stewarded by federal bureaucrats. Private funders drive a harder bargain with their resources.

If the NIH doesn't have to pay as much in indirect costs, it may have more money to allocated to more researchers. It won't help the current grantees, though. Sad to see that Dr. Aaron Grossberg is seeking opportunities elsewhere.Privatized research may be the thing, and industry may indeed be the place where ground-breaking research gets done. Universities have been living off government subsidies for too long.

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19 March 2025

Google settles lawsuit that says people who were not White or Asian got paid more. One shouldh't discriminate on the basis of race, but should race alone necessarily guarantee equal pay?  No, it shouldn't.  I think Google just wanted to get this out of the way and move on.

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Some frank discussion about what Artificial General Intelligence will mean for the world. We aren't talking about it much, partly because it's hard to imagine, and we don't want to waste time and energy discussing a scenario that may not happen. Nothing has even been truly smarter than humans before, so this has never been a problem. But what if it were?

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Wow, this is incredible.Greenpeace tried to block Trump's efforts to revive the Dakota Access Pipeline. Not only did they lose today, but as a result, they will go bankrupt and face financial ruin.  FAFO, man.

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What best predicted mortality in old age?  Not episodic memory, verbal fluency, verbal knowledge, or one's general composite intelligence score. The best predictor was verbal fluency. Being able to communicate well and fluidly was the best sign that the rest of you is healthy, too.

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Boy, the EU is really being a tyrant when it comes to technology. They are screwing over their population's ability to obtain the latest technology. They want "interoperability" with all other tech.  They have a list of demands that Apple must follow to access their market. I guess Europe isn't going to see the latest tech then. Too bad.

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Well this isn't good.  Employment for computer programmers in the U.S. has plummeted to its lowest level since 1980. This is really bad news for those just graduating with CS degrees. It depends on what will happen with the H-1B visa situation. I would have thought that a CS program would teach AI, but that's not the case, apparently.

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Mastodon is doomed.  This surprised me, especially as it has been trendy lately to leave X/Twitter. But Mastodon is kinda clumsy to use. I've tried it, and there is very little quality content on the platform. Lots of stuff only of interest to teenagers and neurodivergents. 

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Harvard study says seed oils are healthier than butter. Who funded the study??? I can't find this information. It matters! Studies like this are usually sponsored.

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18 March 2025

Another one bites the dust:  Fat Tire Farm is closing after 40 years in business. Everyone is hurting.

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Creatine might help mitigate the cognitive decline of sleep deprivation, but man, that's a LOT of creatine. They used 0.35 grams/kg body weight, which came out to about 20 to 30 gm of creatine. This was a one-time dose, however, but still.... It's not clear how they determine that particular dose, but I wish they tested a lower dose, as in other studies.

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This is why people don't trust medical authorities anymore. Cornell students will get an exemption from the required flu vaccine if they are Black or other BIPOC. What does skin color have to do with flu susceptibility?

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$8.4 Billion: Enormous Cache of Rare Earth Elements Discovered in America.  They don't mention which rare earth elements, though. They're not all the same.

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Another study shows that meditation strengthens the posterior cingulate gyrus.

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Chinese men can't find brides, so they are taking matters into their own hands. Boy, is China's racial makeup going to change.  A lot more Southeast Asian genes mixed in.  But that's how life works. What's going to happen to the prospects of Southeast Asian boys?

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17 March 2025

Apple might remove the USB-C port from future iPhones.  Why, Apple, why?  Is it just for to continue the thinness effort?  Does anyone really want a paper-thin phone? I guess Tim Cook couldn't cram any more pixel into the screen, so he's just going for thinness. And emojis – Tim loves emojis for some reason. There's always a few more with each release.

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Tao of Mac weighs in on the Apple Intelligence fiasco. It doesn't look like Siri will ever be the Jarvis we were hoping we'd have.

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Resentment. Nice commentary on all the "kill the billionaires" protests we've been seeing lately. But the solution that is offered to fix this isn't going to work. Because there will always be someone who has a grape. (Read the essay to understand what I mean.)

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Maybe you don't need a fancy foundational model to help you make a diagnosis. An open source model performs just as well, and it's the Llama 3.1 405B parameter model, which means that Llama 3.3 70B parameter model might be just as good.  But here's the catch:
Both open-source and closed-source AI algorithms are trained on immense datasets that include medical textbooks, peer-reviewed research, clinical-decision support tools, and anonymized patient data, such as case studies, test results, scans, and confirmed diagnoses. 
These models were fine-tuned. What busy physician has time for this?
The open-source model exhibited genuine depth: Llama made a correct diagnosis in 70 percent of cases, compared with 64 percent for GPT-4. It also ranked the correct choice as its first suggestion 41 percent of the time, compared with 37 percent for GPT-4. For the subset of 22 newer cases, the open-source model scored even higher, making the right call 73 percent of the time and identifying the final diagnosis as its top suggestion 45 percent of the time.
And even so, they weren't perfect. So you wouldn't want to trust them completely. The point of this article is that it's the data and the training, not necessarily the size of the architecture.

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Uh-oh. Chronic exposure to too much heat can age you.  I know that long-term sun exposure can make you look wrinkled and old. But it appears that heat accelerates the aging process genetically, too. But if you look at the data table, you see that the differences are really slim, and barely make statistical significance.

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Gotta clean that water bottle often.

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Another one bites the dust. Forever XXII is shutting down all stores.  This is going to leave a gaping hole at Washington Square.

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Oregon's SB 611 hopes to give free food to illegal aliens.

As for Oregon, SB 611 is being put forward as the state is confronting potential federal funding cuts, everybody and their brother seems to want higher spending on schools, affordable housing, transportation and healthcare, Trump tariffs could lead to a trade war that hurts export-heavy Oregon and fears of a national recession are growing.

But what stands out even more in the current debate over the bill? All of its enthusiastic supporters haven’t the faintest idea what it would cost the state.

Oregon lawmakers, ladies and gentlemen.

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Doom loop.  Plummeting property values in downtown Portland are costing the city millions of dollars in tax revenue that would otherwise go to vital city services, as the city looks at a $92.8-million budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year. This is not a good time to be a Blue city or Blue state.

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16 March 2025

This thread echoes this article, which talks about the decline of human "brain power". This is based on test scores, especially PISA scores, but relying just on this assessment is tricky.

The share of adults in high-income countries who are unable to use mathematical reasoning when evaluating simple statements, or who struggle to integrate multiple bits of information from a piece of text, has climbed to 25 per cent.

I see it especially in the caliber of politicians today, compared to what they were like when I was growing up. When I was growing up, we have TV shows where they would invite Milton Friedman to talk. We had Ted Koppel and McNeil-Lehrer news hour. Now we have The View and Joy Reid (well, not anymore).

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Tinnitus may result from the brain sending signals to the cochlea to increase gain. Until recently, it wasn't known that there was an afferent feedback loop between the brain and the cochlea.

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Another article on why Oregon is short on public defenders, and they still skirt around why there is a shortage of good attorneys. It's crap like this:

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Timeless.  Portland protestors want city leaders to tax the rich, and spend the proceeds on them. There already aren't enough rich to tax to satisfy them, so shut up already. And they call it "investing" locally. Throwing good money after bad is not investing.

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This is funny.  So in Fresno, there was a Kid's Day fundraiser, where they raised money for the local hospital. Yeah, how did that go?  Suckers.

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Lake Oswego lakefront residents are learning some valuable lessons about living in Oregon. Build something nice that wasn't there before, and maintain it with your own money and some judge will say everyone should have access, too.

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Another "cure" for baldness? UCLA scientists have found that a protein PP405 keeps hair follicle cells dormant. Inhibiting that protein may induce hair growth.

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All the major search engines make up references a lot. For mission-critical searchers, Perplexity is the go to site, but it still misses a lot. This is where improvements need to be made.

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There is likely a genetic basis for the reserved, risk-averse, pragmatic, no physical affection personality of Asians. And it seems to be a dominant trait. You can even see it in Asian babies vs White babies, the latter of whom are outgoing and friendly, while Asian babies hide behind their mothers. The author calls it Arcticism.

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Cool.  Barnard's Star has four planets revolving around it.

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Some Israeli startup wants to foist AI nurses on us. I don't think people want uncanny valley nurses. This is not how I envisioned AI to be involved in medicine. The technology is not ready yet. It just superficially looks that way.

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15 March 2025

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28. I still can't understand why someone would want this surveillance device in their homes. But that's just me.

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The Siri development team must not be feeling good these days. I recall when Steve Jobs dismissed the MobileMe team in a very humiliating way. Bet it got the rest of the company motivated, though. It's informative that Apple can't make AI work they way people expect it to work. They've got Silicon Valley's best brains at their disposal, and yet they struggle. It's not easy to implement agentic frameworks well.

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This essay on Stoicism resonates with me. I wondered why Marcus Aurelius wrote his Meditations, when he could have just be a Roman emperor like all the rest. And he made statements that seem to counter common sense, such as not to be disturbed by bad events because it's all in your head. Easy to say when you're an emperor, but not so for the rest of us. I guess he meant to just say not to overreact to external events, but sometimes it's just human to do so.
Too strong a stoicism, like any individualist philosophy, scales poorly. A philosophy emphasizing only this inner work, though it may personally work well, gives no guidance as soon as you have enough responsibility to participate in society. 

...stoicism is not a sufficient philosophy for a good life, only a survivable one. We must remember what that responsibility, strength, and character are ultimately for.
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Scientists discover how to reactivate cancer's molecular 'kill switch'.  Cancer cells don't just have one "kill switch". This research finding will be just one of many. Congrats to the researchers, but there will be more work to do.

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I'd spend $20 to taste the Erewhon strawberry. Sounds like it is indeed more than your usual strawberry. I haven't seen it at the local stores yet, though.

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Alcohol consumption increases risk of sunburn.  Then you read the article and find out that intoxicate people are less likely to apply sunscreen adequately, and they also stay out in the sun longer, possibly because they're too inebriated to realize that they're burning.  What a useless study.

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You could be leaving DNA traces in the air around you. Probably not enough to be implicated in a crime scene, but just so you know, a bit of you blows off into the air wherever you go.

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KGW reports that the reason OHSU emergency department is jammed is because people are coming in with the flu. Only now are we seeing this?  I suspect that the COVID vax has ruined people's immune systems, and now everyone is constantly sick.

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Seattle firefighter has a message for those idiots who think they are sticking it to Elon by setting Teslas on fire. Think twice – you're letting toxic gases into the atmosphere and risking a prolonged hot fire. Not climate-friendly, to say the least, although those gronks aren't really that concerned about climate. It's just something they are told to believe, because Dems told them to.

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Happiest cities in the Northwest. Seattle? I don't think so. I think the happiest cities are the smaller ones that don't have criddlers and incompetent lefty city leaders who misspend the municipal money. Portland is way down there, which is believable. But c'mon.

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Sakana.AI has put out its first fully-generated scientific article. Well, if Sokal could get published, I'm sure AI can, too.

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The story behind Social Security Numbers. There's never been a convincing explanation for why Barack Obama's SSN begins with 042 instead of 575 or 576 like all other Hawaii-born citizens. And I think people think it's healthier not to investigate this matter.

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