26 November 2025

Amazon Leo UItra is the new rival to Starlink.  It'll be faster, too, capable of 1 GBps instead of the max 380 MBps with Starlink. It'sll probably cost more, though. Doesn't start until sometime in 2026. What will Elon do in response?

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Netgear is also rolling out a new Nighthawk MiFi modem that reached 3.6 Gbps. I'm not sure if my wireless carrier will support this. Looks like you gotta sign up with Airalo. That's too bad.

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First, a former physician used his personal email address in a meeting group, contrary to hospital policy. Second, the meeting organizer did not remove the physician from the meeting invite following his departure in June 2023, according to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario.
As a result, when the physician installed Otter.ai on a personal device in September 2024, the transcription tool was able to access the rounds meeting invite via the physician's personal digital calendar.
...it wasn't clear whether the physician even realized the Otter.ai bot had attended the meeting on his behalf and recorded it – or whether it had done so for other meetings as well.
“That’s a whole level of autonomy and independence that we haven’t been prepared for but need to start thinking about,”
This is a new vulnerability. It's not going to be just healthcare, but every virtual meeting where confidential matters are discussed.

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I just thought this was a sneaky way for a Chinese app to get all sorts of personal information from you. Well, at least the developer tells you:
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Beware of AI slop Thanksgiving recipes.

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GPT-5 is the best predictor of the future.

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Elon Musk Drove ~1/3 of Women Off Twitter. Well, I think X is much better now. It's more balanced now that conservative voices have a say and are not automatically censored, like back in the Trump 1.0 days.
Check out the New Must-Have College Admissions Skill: Tolerating Other Viewpoints.  

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Data center provider razes 55 homes to make room for Illinois campus. Sign of the times. And then, there is Oregon. "‘The precedent is Flint’: How Oregon’s data center boom is supercharging a water crisis."
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Daily coffee drinking may slow biological aging of people with major mental illness. But why just those with mental illness? Drinking up to 5 cups lengthens telomeres, and gives you "the equivalent of 5 extra biological years". I'll take it.

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Brain changes observed during pregnancy. Yup, I've noticed it.

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The gruesome new data on tech jobs. I remember during the dotcom era, techies were SO desirable. They were millionaries. Now, they are struggling to find a job and a sense of self-worth, with feelings of doubt and perhaps betrayal.

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Southern Oregon is the canary in the coal mine. Actually many of the coastal towns in Oregon are. Sucks to be in a Blue state, when the rest of the country is doing fairly well, or at least is not hurting. Oregon had seemed like it was doing OK, but it was all due to federal subsidies. Paying for this and that. Plus illegal immigrant labor. Now that's all gone, and Oregon is suffering. It's painful, but a cleansing is overdue.

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25 November 2025

Americans are holding onto devices longer than ever and it’s costing the economy. Costing the economy? You gotta be kidding. One reason not to buy a new phone is the hassle of transferring everything over. Sure Apple has made it easier, but you often have to re-login and enter credentials for apps again. And newer phone aren't that revolutionary in what they offer. I've haven't noticed my photos being that much different.  Offer Tony Stark's phone and I might consider it.

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Quick – what's the largest city in the world?  Tokyo, you say? Nope. It's Djakarta.  What's #2? Dhaka, Bangladesh. In third place is Tokyo. Then New Delhi, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Cairo, Manila, Kolkata, and Seoul. What does this tell you about the future of the world?

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Tina Kotek is now worried about the price of gas because of what the Olympic Pipeline leak might do, in terms of a shortage. Maybe you could halt the gas tax, Tina? Afraid that people will revolt at paying $5 per gallon for regular?

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Cheetos and Doritos will be sold without artificial dyes and without the powder that we've all come to expect. Doritos will look like regular tortilla chips. Still won't be considered "healthy" for you. 

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Is kimchi good for your immune system? This paper suggests that it might be. I think if you can eat it and survive, your body must be especially tough.

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Another paper says that there are changes in your body at certain ages. This paper is focused on the brain, and says that ages 9, 32, 66 and 83 demarcate distinct cognitive eras. You know, I have noticed changes since being an older ronin. I'm less tolerant of B.S. now and less anxious about things. I don't worry as much about the future. I think hormonal changes in puberty certainly have an effect and would mark a change at age 14 for boys and age 12 for girls. Certainly at menopause, women think differently. At age 83, your brain is showing the effects of all sorts of things: alcohol, chronic stress, head injury, your education, how much you cultivated learning things and maintaining interest, and overall physical activity.

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Gallup ranked states in terms of how excellent they are in healthcare, and what surprised me is how uniformly lousy they all are. There's not much difference in quality of healthcare among all the states – they're all about the same. This actually makes me doubt the quality of the ranking methodology. Healthcare in certain states (like Texas, Massachusetts, New York and California) definitely have access to quality care. They suffer from other things, but quality in a few states are definitely better than others. Oregon is near the bottom (as usual) and even with OHSU, the state got a C grade.

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So funny. Katie Wilson is now thinking she would meet with Trump if he asked her. No, Katie. Trump met with Mamdani because he asked for the meeting and Trump has interests in NYC.  He has no interest in Seattle. You're on your own.

And Seattle is ending their program supplying crack pipes and tin foil to the homeless drug users. I bet Katie Wilson will restore it, though. 

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Phil Knight gave $3 million to help elect Republicans to Oregon government.  As long as we have mail-in balloting and ballot counting over several days after election day until the preferred candidate wins, that will never happen. Don't throw good money after bad, Phil. Oh well, it's not my money.

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"After an extensive national search" OHSU Health hired a CEO. It's always an outsider – no one internal either wants the job or has enough support from colleagues. This guy came from a Kaiser hospital in the Bay Area. Kaiser isn't known for excellence in medical research, but perhaps he'll know how to save money for the hospital.

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24 November 2025

Hayli Gubbi volcano in Ethiopia erupts for the first time in recorded history. Mount Semeru erupted recently. The volcanos are waking up. It's far away, but somehow this disturbs me.

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Let's talk about the Asian experience in the US throughout history. Heh, not the guy I thought would be discussing something like this, but we can't judge by appearances, can we? It's true. Asians have been discriminated against for a long time. I don't think that Trump is discriminating against Asians. I think he's just concerned that China is a dangeous economic threat to the U.S., which is something that previous administrations (think Obama) neglected to consider in their drive to globalization. Witness Trump's embrace of the Japanese PM. However, I am disappointed that his online swag shop had hats with "Blacks for Trump", "Women for Trump" and a variety of other groups, but never had "Asians for Trump". Forgotten again.

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Wisconsin and Michigan may pass laws banning VPNs, just so they can force their age-verification policy. I've always said that the Internet is just not a place for children, even though people want to get children online. Forcing age-verification is violating online privacy. And there will be other ways to get around this. Politicians were never the brightest bulbs.

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Study shows that California loses a taxpayer every 1 minute and 44 seconds.  For New York, it's 2 minutes and 33 seconds, and this is data from before Mamdani won the election. I predict it will be the same situation for Seattle. It's already something like this with Portland.

And for those who stay in Seattle, juggling two or more jobs isn’t just for low-wage workers. Hope you love your socialism, Seattle-ites. Good and hard. 

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Seattle and Portland are amongst the heaviest users of cannabidiol. Are people in so much pain in the Pacific Northwest, or have epilepsy? One wonders.
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Verizon is cutting 165 jobs in Washington state. Layoffs start in late January. Holiday season bummer. More tax base reduction and business contraction. 

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23 Novemnber 2025

Turn a cluster of Macs into an AI supercomputer in macOS Tahoe 26.2. The catch is that you will have to have a computer using the M4 or M5 chip that is capable of using a Thunderbolt 5 cable. I figured there'd be a catch.

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Mayor Keith Wilson is dead set on opening a lot of overnight homeless shelters. The problem is, many of the shelters are on average, less than half full. So what's the point? This seems to be a grand waste of city money to fund the operation of these shelters, when the homeless aren't using them.

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22 November 2025

China Just Invented the Battery That Will Kill Gas Cars. It's "next-generation" lithium batteries. I keep reading about these batteries, but don't see anything in production yet. A case of over-excited reporters?

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Open Access is no more. This is unfortunately, although to be honest, whenever I tried to use the button in my browser, I didn't get access. The button didn't work. The Unpaywall button does work, though, and it's still working.

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Arginine supplementation curbs Alzheimer's disease pathology in animal models. Interesting theory, but I doubt it's that simple. Paper here. It's a Japanese paper, but I still think that this experiment isn't going to be reproducible. We'll see if arginine supplementation is the cure we've been looking for.

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How embarrassing. Oops. Cryptographers cancel election results after losing decryption key. This is exactly why elections should be low-tech. Keep it simple. Paper and pen. Forget fancy cryptography.

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I came across this article stating that Markdown is not always suitable for technical writing. I think that there is truth to this. Markdown should be a format that computers (LLMs especially) should write in. But for humans? I find it too cumbersome. Humans just need a WYSIWYG editor that saves in RTF format. But I also came across this nice list of Markdown editors that someone bothered to compile. Not too long ago, I did a web search to find the best Markdown editor to see if there was an editor that would make it easy to use this format. All I got were websites of various editors, but not one that reviewed and showcased them all, like this site. This shows how the best search engines still don't get everything.

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Thanks for reminding me why I stopped using Firefox.  By the way, LibreWolf finally updated to 145.0 and you don't need the --no-quarantine parameter. I think the developer finally bought himself an Apple developer account and signed the software, so now
brew install --cask librewolf
just works. Apple has announced that the --no-quarantine parameter wasn't going to work after August 2026, so it's about time.

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Scientists create new bullet-proof fiber that is stronger and thinner than Kevlar. This is thinner than a human hair, and it stops bullets? Really? But it's Chinese. When are we going to develop something like that here? Still, I bet this will be a hit in the UK.

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The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting. There's not much you can do about it. I like the Brave approach, where it makes up random fingerprints so that you're never the same. I wish other browsers would adopt this approach. Mullvad sort of works, but not quite.

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Why it takes months to tell if new AI models are good. He's talking about LLMs, of course, not referring to all AI. So take the initial reviews with a grain of salt. Try it yourself and see.

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21 November 2025

125 interesting biology links.

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Norway was feeding Bovaer to their cows to reduce cow farts. And the cows were suffering. Now they are stopping this, learning a lesson from the Danes.  But it's not even cow farts that produce most of the methane. It's their belching. And a significant contributor is the settling ponds and lagoons that process their manure. 
But why are we worried about cows when humans produce 60% of all methane emissions? Not from farts, but from everything humans do. Human wastewater represents 14–20% of total methane emissions. Vegans fart more than those following a typical Western diet.  So it's crazy to make cows miserable for the sake of reduced methane emissions. This is the kind of insanity that makes people not take liberals' concerns seriously.

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The game Zork is now open-source. This ronin spent a lot of time playing Adventure, which is like Zork. But now, as an older guy, this is bittersweet news.

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Oregon's school chronic absenteeism is the among the highest at 33%In 2022-2023 Oregon was the second highest. Even in Lake Oswego, the percentage of those chronically absent from school is 18%. That's embarrassing.

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Dave Ramsey pointed out the flaws of Obamacare in 2016.  It's even worse today.

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20 November 2025

Light magnetically influences matter? Yes it does. What can be done to exploit this?

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Rare brain cell may hold key to preventing schizophrenia symptoms. Does this brain cell appear when who have a pet cat?

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Ringit could be useful. It makes your phone emit a loud ring, even though it's on silence. Could be abused, though.

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CreepyAI tech is making mind-reading no longer science fiction.

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One of the fastest growing AI universities in the world is the Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. 
Tsinghua has produced more of the world’s 100 most-cited AI research papers than any other school, and the university generates more AI-related patents each year than MIT, Stanford, Princeton and Harvard combined. Between 2005 and the end of 2024, Tsinghua researchers filed 4,986 AI and machine-learning patents—including more than 900 last year
And they don't have to worry about DEI initiatives of pro-Palestinian protestors cancelling lectures. 

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A stretchable bandage like finger cover may allow haptic feedback. It's called VoxeLite.

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OpenAI launches Codex-Max, an AI that can code on Its own for 24+ hours straight. Talk about energy consumption. Who pays for this? How many people need something like this?

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The experimental TMSR-LF1 thorium-powered molten salt reactor in Wuwei, Gansu Province, has achieved the first successful conversion of thorium-uranium nuclear fuel, the Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced.

"This design not only improves fuel utilisation but also significantly reduces the generation of radioactive nuclear waste, which is one of the advantages of thorium-based molten salt reactors."
This is what we need here.

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Gary Marcus thinks that Yann LeCun needs to be taken down a peg. I didn't know that convolutional neural nets were actually invented by Kunihiko Fukushima in 1979-1980, and that adding backpropagation was actually invented by Wei Zhang and colleagues in 1988.  All the stuff you read credits LeCun. I felt bad that he didn't get the Nobel Prize, but now I guess I don't.

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Holy crapPortland isn't building very many luxury apartments anymore. Construction is WAY down.
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67% of Oregon voters think the state's economy is on the wrong track. I'd like to know why the rest think it is on the right track. Who in their right mind would think so?

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Homeless in the Portland area has increased by more than 60% since 2023, despite all the efforts to reduce it.
Doesn't anyone care to think that maybe a change in strategy is warranted? We've tried it this way and it isn't working. Let's listen to the conservatives and see if their approach might be more successful. How about that?
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"We've had the highest number of management positions within TriMet's personnel than we've ever had with the lowest number of employees that we've ever had."
Who rides TriMet anymore? Would anyone want to sit in those chairs? You never know what you might sit on. One of the commenters is prescient. Notice the use of the word "positions" that are being cut? It's probably a reduction of open positions rather than any union member being laid off.

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Portland wants to ban the use of AI software that landlords use to calculate setting rent. And the landlords are not happy. As usual, Portland city council see the word "AI" and goes nuts. This is not dissimilar to using a spreadsheet. Robots aren't setting the rent. It's just a deep learning protocol. 

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19 November 2025

Tilapia skin apparently works well enough to cover the exposed dermis in burn cases.  I wonder what's the status with spray-on skin that was working so amazingly well.

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Another advancement in longevity research. Aging is accompanied by a buildup of senescent cells. One component of the regulation of this is the differentiation of CD4 T cells into Eomesodermin (Eomes)+CCL5+ T lymphocytes (CD4-Eomes). This system was not known when I was in school. Who heard of this before 2019. Now it looks like it plays an important role in preventing some of the bad outcomes of aging, like tissue fibrosis and inflammation. 

And Swiss scientists created an artificial bone marrow model. This is really fantastic, and could be a new research platform. Paper here.

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Hoo boy. Look at the top 25 insanities that DOGE discovered. We were paying for this?

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Yes!  The job market is heating up — for jobs that people usually don’t want. This needs to happen. It'll be painful in the beginning, but it's better this way.

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SCOTUS must stop mail-in voting.  And also, the counting of votes for days after the election has been completed. Where we count and count until the "preferred" candidate wins.

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So much government money goes into wasteful and fraudulent non-profits. NGOs may have noble names, but are money-wasters.

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Providence Oregon is announcing layoffs of 150 jobs.  "recent policy changes and regulatory pressures"
Providence Swedish is announcing layoffs of 296 jobs. "state and federal Medicaid cuts to state and city business occupation taxes, commercial insurer denials, and a drop in procedural volumes"
Clearly Obamacare has lost its lustre. These hospitals operate in Blue states that view any entity with assets and cashflow as their piggy bank. And they depend on unionized workers that also want to put the squeeze on. Not good.

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18 November 2025

Sharper MRI scans may be on horizon thanks to new physics-based model. This is good, as it might decrease magnetic fields strength requirements.

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Two related articles: Why top firms paradoxically fire good workers and Why one of the nation’s most prosperous industries is shedding jobs. It's not just AI. It's apparently some power dynamic to get the ones who remain to accept lower-paying jobs.

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Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is the most common leukemia diagnosed. One of the things that oncologists will do is check to see if there is evidence of mutations in the immunoglobulin heavy chain variable region. You want them mutated, because unmutated IgHV has a worse prognosis, as they are not as likely to have come from the more mature germinal B centers, but rather from naïve B cells.

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CRISPR breakthrough reverses chemotherapy resistance in lung cancer. CRISPR was used to disable the NRF2 gene. Paper here.

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DangTirzepatide quashes appetite only temporarily. After several months, you'll want to start eating stuff again.

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Engineers made the first fully synthetic brain tissue model. Well this is how it starts, doesn't it?

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Gemini 3 came out today. Google wants to turn it into your 'thought partner'.  Uh, no thanks.

Are you using Google's Nest for home security. Might want to read this

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I wondered what was happening with Suisun City and California Forever. Despite the billionaires being involved, there was still not enough money to realize the dream. It's still a wasteland. Don't build something like this in California. It's not the state you thought it was. 

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai sums up my AI anxiety perfectly.

Speaking exclusively to the BBC at Google’s California headquarters, Pichai acknowledged that while AI investment growth is at an “extraordinary moment,” the industry can “overshoot” in investment cycles, as we’re seeing now. He drew comparisons to the late 1990s Internet boom, which saw early Internet company valuations surge before collapsing in 2000, leading to bankruptcies and job losses.

“We can look back at the Internet right now. There was clearly a lot of excess investment, but none of us would question whether the Internet was profound,” Pichai said. “I expect AI to be the same. So I think it’s both rational and there are elements of irrationality through a moment like this.”

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Be Careful What You Tell Your AI Chatbot. A chatbot is not your best friend that you can confide all your secrets. And you might indirectly give away more than you might think. Remember, these things are smart.

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RSL: Really Simple Licensing. This is meant to be a new licensing standard designed for the AI era. Where you might get licensing fees for AI training on your content. Let's see it in practice.

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An injectable antenna could safely power deep-tissue medical implants. Kind of like using a Qi charger. This could solve a big problem.

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The earth tilted 31.5° in less than 20 years.  I sure didn't notice. I can't believe that it's just because of pumping groundwater. I think it's probably something else.

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Oregon has a shortage of dentists willing to help low-income kids. The article attributes this to low reimbursement, but the question really is why reimbursement was reduced? It's because money needs to go to support non-citizens and the growing and endless number of homeless.

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Now the NGOs who want to get in on the Homeless Industrial Complex business model now find themselves at a conflict between federal and state laws.  Instead of getting real jobs, some folks get grant money to set up an NGO that pays them a salary. They were probably hoping to get both federal and state money. But that's no longer possible. 

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Wells Fargo is laying off 444 more people. Just in time for the holidays. Not that there's ever a good time to get this news.

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Hawaii small businesses struggle as costs and minimum wage rise. Hawaii learns the painful lesson that you can't just legislate wealth. Think about it. Minimum wage has gone up in all the West Coast states. Does anyone feel rich? Comfortable? Stable? All people do is complain about how prices keep going up. Think there might be a connection?

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Oregonians could be looking at slower court systems, crowded prisons, fewer resources for state law enforcement investigations and decreased local grant funding for anti-theft programs under the proposed cuts public safety agencies put forward.

Charging people with crimes and bringing them into prisons or the court system could also become more difficult with less public access at the Oregon Judicial Department. Staff for the department say that a $35 million dollar cut or 5% reduction in funding could reduce the courts’ ability to respond to rising caseloads and implement court security projects. 

The state’s human services department is no stranger to cuts from federal uncertainty, and it’s already staring down roughly $500 million in losses every two years under new regulations from the GOP tax and spending law meant to reduce payment errors for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. 

A 5% cut at the agency would amount to $372 million mainly through workforce reductions and paying providers and contractors less. It could result in the most vulnerable residents of the state, including children and foster families, receiving even fewer benefits. 

One program on the chopping block is the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families UN program, which provides family coaching, engagement and cash assistance to families with little to no income. The proposed reductions would see the loss of benefits for about 3,200 2-parent families
Of course, Oregon could have made changes that would make it more business-friendly and raise the wealth of the entire state. It's way too late for that now.

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17 November 2025

CoolRNA-based gene therapy might reverse nerve damage seen in ALS.

The study found that muscle cells produce small RNA molecules called microRNA-126 and send them in vesicles, through the synapsis, to the tip of the nerve cell. The role of these molecules is to prevent the expression of the TDP-43 protein at the neuromuscular junction when it is not needed. Dr. Ionescu explains: “We discovered that in ALS, the muscle produces a smaller amount of microRNA-126, which leads to an excess of TDP-43. The excess protein forms toxic aggregates that attack molecules essential for functioning of the mitochondria — the nerve cell’s powerhouse. Damage to the mitochondria causes an energy deficit, gradually destroying motor neurons and leaving patients’ muscles paralyzed.”

Conversely, increasing the level of microRNA-126 in tissues taken from ALS patients and in ALS model mice led to a decrease in the levels of TDP-43, and the neurons stopped degenerating and even regenerated. The researchers concluded that adding microRNA-126 rescues neurons damaged by ALS, prevents degeneration of the neuromuscular junction, and could serve as a basis for developing effective drugs for this currently incurable disease.

Paper here.

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The company is focusing on A.I. that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace and automobiles. It is unclear where Project Prometheus will be based.
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There is a AI-based mushroom identifier, called MushroomCheck. The images on this page are full of AI mistakes. Hope the app isn't.

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There are weird rock circles in the  Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, near San Diego.  They look man-made, but so many?

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Sea urchins are just brain and gonads. Do they have consciousness?

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