30 January 2026

Chinese EV by Xiaomi apparently put American EVs to shame. Vehicles made by the world's smartest people. I still don't trust modern Chinese workmanship, though.
And Elon is transitioning out of the EV business. I guess even Elon has a hard time juggling multiple companies. Who does he think he is? Marco Rubio? 

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Facial recognition tech is amazing. And with all the other tech available, if you stalk an ICE agent and he gets out of the car. By the time he's at your window, he knows who you are and can greet you by name. You are in the database. Who knows what the implications are? Protesting in 2026 is not like protesting in the sixties. People don't realize this, and could unknowingly put themselves in a world of hurt. Interfering with police activity because social media told you to do it – you gotta ask yourself if it's really worth ruining your life.

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Doctors recently kept a man alive for 48 hours without lungs.  Before I clicked, I thought it was going to be an article about rectal oxygenation technology, but no.

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Microsoft Is More Dependent On OpenAI Than The Converse. Interesting viewpoint. Microsoft has made some big investments. If they don't pan out, well....

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Richard Feynman's son Carl thinks he knows how best to interact with doctors. I had no idea he was on social media. I disagree with Carl's approach. You can easily be taken down the primrose path to a diagnosis and cast off things that don't seem relevant to you. I would prefer the Sherlock Holmes approach – to hear the case and it unfolded, and ask pertinent questions along the way.

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Chinese Restaurant Syndrome. Every time I read articles like this, I believe that people haven't done enough detective work. OK sure, you debunked MSG as being the culprit. But why did so many people report strange symptoms associated with eating Chinese food. I've experienced it myself. So has my son. It's not imaginary or psychological. It's real. There's something else that's producing the symptoms. What is it? Why does the investigation stop there?

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Clawdbot has changed its name again from Moltbot (dumb name) to OpenClaw.  Now what about all those people who named their apps and websites with the Molt name? Like Moltbook. Or Moltworker.

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Exercise is still good for the brain. All that BDNF helps, I guess. The improvement is not a lot, though. The Predicted Age Difference (PAD), as assessed by MRI scan, does decrease in the exercisers by 12 months, but there is still some overlap. 

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The new scam. Chinese are marketing untested, unregulated peptides to unscrupulous resellers. All for an easy buck.

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Why France just dumped Microsoft Teams and Zoom. France wants to make their own enterprise software. Remember when France was determine to create their own Internet, called Minitel?  What is it about France? Is it paranoia?

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Some updates on research to make people and things invisible.  Not much has changed since the last time I looked. 

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The first human test of a rejuvenation method will begin “shortly”. David Sinclair again? I thought he was discredited. He's back in action, and although there are skeptics, he's determined to reach his goal. The magic drug is ER-100 from Sinclair's lab.

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Portland State University restructuring moves forward as budget shortfall widens. "Portland State University’s financial picture is getting bleaker." What to do, when you are an academic center in a Blue socialist city, where money is fleeing, enrollment is declining, the faculty want pay raises and you can't lay them off, taxes keep going up, and student protestors destroy your property and few, if any, become wealthy donors later.  PSU was founded in 1946 to educate post-WWII veterans. What is the purpose of PSU today?

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29 January 2026

Drug trio found to block tumour resistance in pancreatic cancer

A new study reports that a triple-targeted drug combination can drive complete and lasting regression of pancreatic tumours in preclinical models, potentially overcoming treatment resistance in one of the deadliest cancers.

Researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre have announced a potential breakthrough combination therapy that induces complete regression of pancreatic tumours and prevents tumour resistance in preclinical models.

Paper here. The drugs they used were: 

  • RMC-6236 (daraxonrasib): targeting KRAS
  • Afatinib: an EGFR family inhibitor
  • SD36: a selective STAT3 degrader
There are some clinical trials with RMC-6236, although not with the combo above. My sense is that the KRAS inhibitor is the major contributor of the combo.

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Freakpages. Where you get to learn about stuff that you see mentioned in blog posts about that you're supposed to know.

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Google is getting into the world-building business, too, with Genie 3. 

Mozilla is going to do something in the AI realm.  "...a bunch of people are banding together to create something good in the world and take on this thing that threatens us.”  “It’s super corny, but people totally get it.”  What it is that they plan to do is not clear. But they plan to take on OpenAI and other big players. Somehow, I don't think those guys are worried. 

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Picify is trying to be a scaled-down Photoshop for people who don't need the full package. I'll bookmark it and maybe try it out someday. (I'm frequently disappointed by these efforts, so we'll see.)

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A treatment for male-pattern baldness? Polygonum multiflorum, also known as Polygoni multiflori radix (PMT) or He Shou Wu, is a root used in traditional Chinese medicine for more than a thousand years. It may be effective against male-pattern baldness. If it were that effective, why do I still see a lot of bald Chinese men?

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Smart Quotes for Smart People. Everything you wanted to know about them. Yeah, they look nice, but they are always gumming up my RSS readers, who don't know how to interpret them, and so they flag an error, and my feed is declared invalid. So for my RSS feeds, I convert them all to dumb quotes, so I can at least read something.

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This is a great essay: A Nation of Laws...or Leftists?  There's a lot of people who want to make the USA a nation of Leftists, ruled by feelings instead of laws. Where the Constitution and courts are only something that conservatives must follow. Because the Left answers to a "higher cause".  One of the items from Freakpages that I cite above, is Luxury Beliefs, like Defund the Police, or Cultural Appropriation. All these things came from elite New England private colleges where the students are from wealthy families who can afford to dabble with silly ideas. Who cares if some people think they're bullshit, right dahling?

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How to avoid using Google tech in 2026.

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Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital to close gender clinic. Finally. What a sick, medieval, barbaric practice that was. This will do down in the halls of medical horror and shame, that doctors practiced this.

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We've all been there.  Rumination is the dark companion of anxiety and depression. Preventing you from doing things in your life to be productive or just helping you get out of your funk. Here's how to take steps to get yourself out of its grip.

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Interesting Tesla is going to phase out their highest priced Model X and Model S. Tesla will only make the cheapest Model 3 and Model Y.  Instead, the company is transitioning to making humanoid robots.

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28 January 2026

Something else we need to be constantly anxious about? We are only 2.8 days away from space disaster. 

A "close approach," defined as two satellites coming within less than 1km of each other, happens about once every 22 seconds. Within the Starlink network alone, this occurs roughly every 11 minutes. To avoid collisions, each Starlink satellite must carry out an average of 41 course corrections every year.

Solar storms can interfere with or disable satellite navigation and communication systems altogether. When that happens, satellites may be unable to respond to threats in their path. Combined with higher atmospheric drag and increased uncertainty, this loss of control could quickly lead to a serious accident.

The most widely known outcome of widespread satellite collisions is Kessler syndrome. In this scenario, debris from collisions accumulates around Earth, making it nearly impossible to launch spacecraft without them being destroyed. 

Maybe Earth will have a ring in my lifetime after all.

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IYKYK.  This made me laugh out loud.

Philip Glass. Nobody cares. Philip Glass. 🤣
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Depressing. Browser fingerprinting is just a fact of life. All you can really do is have a different browser that you use for different things. One for banking and financial stuff. One for general browsing, etc. And use a VPN. It's like putting on a different set of gloves. That way surveillance orgs can't link all the fingerprints to the same person.

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Just a little exercise can go a long way. The trick is to be consistent.

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What the hell is going on with modern men??? So pathetic. You see articles like this:
Celibacy taught me I’m too clever to find love.  Too clever? No wonder his girlfriend ditched him.
App for Quitting Porn Leaked Users' Masturbation Habits. Who uses an app for this? And the worse thing is that the user data is still exposed for all the world to see. On top of everything else, how humiliating is that?

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Be wary when you give a parking ticket to software engineer.  You may open yourself up to a can of worms. And something like this will be created.

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How to get power naps right. Don't oversleep. 15 minutes. Set an alarm.

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Everyone's okay with their AI, just not yours. Glad to hear someone saying this. People criticize others for using AI. While they themselves use AI.

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ImageFK. This looks really handy. Will probably come in handy for quick photo editing. My guess is that this is a wrapper for a frontier model. Doesn't say what they use, though. Maybe Grok or Gemini. 

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In fact, Google was sued because it was alleged that the company listened to and recorded people's conversations on the phone without their permission.  Google did not admit guilt or plead innocence. It just settled. 

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Some professor lost two years of his work when he made a setting change in ChatGPT and all his stored work was erased. Who just leaves work on ChatGPT and expects that it will be curated? With no backup. 

And speaking of people who get burned using tech that they don't fully understand, here's a three-parter on those who jumped onto the Clawdbot craze.
DOA. Oregon Dems are going to try to sneak in a retail sales tax.

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U of Oregon students demand abortion drugs be provided to them for free. For free!  Bunch of little children, aren't they?

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Portland Public Schools calls on lawmakers to use reserve funds to fill budget gap.  After giving them hefty raises, of course there's going to be a budget gap. What? There's no money for this? Oh, no....

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Oregon's population hasn't increased since 2020. No surprise there.

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Great news for Palisades fire victims.  Trump signs executive order for feds to take over LA’s ‘nightmare’ wildfire rebuild in huge boost for victims. No longer will they be held hostage to Karen Bass and her rebuilding permit policy.

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27 January 2026

Yann LeCun  thinks the LLM approach is a dead-end in terms of developing artificial general intellience (AGI). And now he has a new model out called Kona.  Energy-based models are not as common as the usual loss-function based approach. Not sure why this approach is inherently advantageous, but we'll see.

There's a bunch of AI and machine learning posts out recently:
USA Today says that "AI isn't inevitable. We should stop it while we can." Stop it?  That's not gonna happen. David's a young guy, and someday we'll see his follow-up article "I though AI should stop – I'm glad I was wrong".  That picture of Bernie Sanders on the page doesn't help lend substance to his pleas either. 
Marketwatch says that people are in a "foul mood" despite a strong economy. The only reason I'm on a foul mood is that the PNW is a Blue region, and we have to put up with Blue state crap. I bet they only got the opinions of those in big cities. No wonder the mood is foul.

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Good Citizen Syndrome.  This is so true. Don't assume that people aren't working hard behind the scenes to make things look OK.
When reliability engineering is done well, nothing bad happens. When nothing bad happens, it looks like nothing is being done at all. But it takes a lot of work to make nothing happen!
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Should professors be force to retire? Is this a joke?  So that established thought leaders can make room for younger people that need an academic job. Not a good enough reason. The answer is no. Full stop.

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Wow! Someone restored ScottAdamsSaid with all of Scott Adams' posts. A great archive of a unique thinker.

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Moderna Won’t Run Phase III Vaccine Trials as Skepticism Grows in US. Well, Stefan Bancel, you reap what you sow.

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Native Instruments might go bankrupt. Boy, this will ruin a lot of people's investments in their software, including mine. As far as I know, Kontakt 8 still won't run on macOS 26, which forces my computer to stay on Sequoia. 

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Toothbrush-activated powder whitens, repairs and protects teeth. The chemistry to produce the desired compound, BSCR, is activated by piezoelectricity. How cool is that?  And it restores the oral microbiome, killing periodontitis-causing Porphyromonas gingivalis and Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and reducing inflammation.

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Meta is being sued because a user has found that WhatsApp does not really have end-to-end user encryption. C'mon, this is Meta! If you wanted secrecy, you need to use Signal or Telegram. It's like eating at a fast-food joint and expecting healthy cuisine. 

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Nike is laying of 775. And struggling pot shop sales means less money for drug treatment programs. I never understood how that connection was made.  It's like asking candy manufacturers to fund diabetes treatment programs. Or asking tobacco companies to fund hospital ventilators. But that's Oregon.

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Going deeper into the hole. A youngish Oregon legislator thinks this is a good idea: Oregon bill would let state withhold payments to feds amid sanctuary funding threats. It's Rep. Willy Chotzen, folks. He thinks this is a great idea.  

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Federal judge blocks Trump DOJ access to Oregon voter rolls. Guess who that federal judge is. Why it's Mustafa Khasubei, of course. John Kennedy was right, he should never have been granted federal judgeship. But it was the Biden era, so it happened.

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Portland is the kinda city where people have to ask this question: Does Reviving Someone With Narcan Open the Reviver to Legal Liability?

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That package, if passed by the council, would dedicate $8.5 million to rent assistance, $1.2 million to tenant eviction defense, and $1.4 million to “affordable housing portfolio stabilization tactics.” Another chunk of the money would provide gap funding for ongoing affordable housing development efforts. 
And what does the City Council have to say?

“I’m frustrated by Mayor Wilson’s whining,” Councilor Loretta Smith said. “When he doesn’t get everything he wants, he goes out into the public and whines about it.”

Sigh. Portland is run by a bunch of schoolkids.

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26 January 2026

So the vaccine was on the right track after all. A breast cancer vaccine was tested 20 years ago, and although it was not pursued, the women were followed, as is the right thing to do. Turns out the vaccinated cohort was living way longer than typical for metastatic breast cancer. 

“We were stunned to see such durable immune responses so many years later,”

Turns out the vaccine induced the presence of T-cells positive for CD27, seen on natural killer cells. That's probably the mechanism. So now, they're going to see if they can pick up where they left off and improve it. I'm used to reading more about CD28 and checkpoint inhibitors, so this is new.

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Versatile stuff.  2000+ approved used for WD-40.

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Google AI Overviews cite YouTube more than any medical site for health queries. Ah yes, the YouTube Institute of Medicine. Nice of them to get referrals from Google, eh? 

But for geolocaton, Google's AI mode is the most accurate. GPT-5 is the worst, and I can confirm that.  GPT-4.1 did a good job. But since Google AI mode uses Gemini 3, I'll use the Gemini API, instead of using Google, which I try to avoid as much as possible.

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Apple is going to beef up their AirTags. The problem is that they're really thick. That's why I don't use them. They're not meant to be hidden, but to show off, hence the leather holder. I'd rather not thieves know that something is protected by a tracker, otherwise what's the point?

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This is why so many politicians and activists like to portray themselves as victims. It's partly due to wanting the sympathy, but it's also a kind of narcissism, seeking recognition and validation. Makes sense.

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Why Pancreatic Cancer Is So Deadly. Turns out that pancreatic stellate tumor cells secrete periostin, enabling cancer cells to invade nerves and spread at an early stage, leading to metastasis. Periostin alters the tumor environment, and generates a desmoplastic reaction: intense fibrosis around the tumor formed by cells and proteins that harden and inflame the tissue. This hinders the arrival of chemotherapy and immunotherapy drugs because they have more difficulty penetrating the hardened tissue. I remember when researchers were trying to digest this layer of stroma with drugs like marimastat, and that effort failed.

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Dario Amodei is always warning about the dangers of AI to the world. But I notice he hasn't stopped making more AI models. I wish he would stop worrying about this and fix the Anthropic site, which is so hard to use. Ever since they switched from console.anthropic.com to platform.anthropic.com, I get errors.

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Microsoft is getting into the AI chip business, too - the Maia 200 AI accelerator. Why not? 

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I didn't realize that this topic was so sensitive. Simon Willison wanted people to stop calling chatbots LLMs and call it Artificial intelligence. Apparently that offended enough people that he had to apologize for it. This is so below my "Chamath Line".

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nVIDIA hopes to make pinpoint weather forecasting so easy that you won't need a supercomputer for it.  They've got an AI model that is probably so distilled and quantized that it can perform well enough on a scaled-down GPU. That's progress.

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A 2024 study of ~112,000 people taking cognitive tests found that even short, mild COVID infections were associated with small, but measurable, cognitive deficits after recovery (a loss of about 3 IQ points). Severe cases requiring intensive care were associated with much steeper deficits (corresponding to a loss of -9 IQ points).
Well, then I wouldn't worry so much. There's a greater difference in IQ points amongst various racial groups, and even within, and I'm not seeing that it translates to any significant detriment. They still become entertainers or government workers, and some even make it to Washington DC.

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Leave it to CNN. They feature an article on new nuclear reactor technology, and all they focus on is how some people are afraid. Don't be like the Germans. We are going to have to develop nuclear energy, and small modular reactors will be the future. This is the solution, not limiting datacenters or building more windmill farms or lining our contryside with solar panels.

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So this morning, Beaverton, OR was trending on X, and this is why. Looks like the City of Beaverton wants to jump on the anti-ICE bandwagon, too. Oh boy, this is trouble we don't need.

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9 states cut income taxes in 2025. And Oregon wasn't one of them.

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Hospital Pricing Has Become Highway Robbery for American Patients. It's true. Hospitals, like universities, have grown accustomed to major cash flow coming in. They're like the government now, with so much administrative waste and fat. I don't like the fact that healthcare is so monolithic now, where care is delivered at just a few large institutions. Community clinics are almost always satellite clinics of some central monolith. The few independent clinics remaining are often spartan, austere and utilitarian, located in parts of town where the rent is affordable. But now hospitals are feeling the pinch, and this doesn't bode well for healthcare.

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25 January 2026

Open AI joins Google and Meta - another company that wants to know everything about you.

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“I think it’s OK for nurses to make close to $200,000, just to make a livable living in the tristate area, honestly,” said Ms. Roy, who lives in Bergen County, N.J., and pays about $30 in tolls and parking each time she comes to work.

In the New York metropolitan area, a family of four with two working parents needs pretax income of about $145,000 to cover their cost of living, compared with about $112,000 in Miami and about $105,000 in Houston, data compiled by the Living Wage Institute show.

Nurse practitioners in New York earn more than their counterparts in every city in the country with the exception of Bellevue, Wash., according to data compiled by Indeed, the online job site. Indeed shows nursing jobs in New York pay about $142,000 a year, about 9 percent higher than the national average of about $130,000.

Nationally, the median annual pay for registered nurses was $93,600 in 2024, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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All is not well between Mark Zuxkerberg and Alexander Wang. Well Meta is committed to Wang now. Yann Lecun left, so who else is there? What if Wang leaves? Not a healthy situation.

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Hawaii's physician workflow continues to decline. Back in 2018 Hawaii was one of the best states to work in. But that was 8 years ago, before COVID-19. By 2023, it was not financially feasible for physicians to practice there.

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There's an inventor in Bend who is working on producing a flying car.  He's still testing prototypes. The production facility itself won't be started until 2027, so who knows when an actual plane will be available.

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Legacy Health is pushing back against the nurses' union (ONA) about wanting ICE agents away from hospitals. I knew that Portland's sanctuary city policy would come back to bite them. If only they cooperated, none of these problems would happen. But no.....

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Portland Faces $13.6 Million Budget Gap in Current Year. And it could be larger, once they actually get into the details. The City Council seems like a group of college activists way in over their heads. 

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24 January 2026

"Ptolemaic code" I'll have to remember this one. In the era of vibe coding, it's when code actually works but is based on something incorrect, which later becomes apparent when the code is expanded or used in a different situation. All the "epicycles" break down. Great analogy.

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Recently, the NYT posted this article: Americans are turning against gay people. Is it really gay people they're opposing? Or just woke DEI policies? Like this example, from the Bee. Yeah, it's not the Biden/Harris era anymore, even though some people pretend that it still is. And Hollywood is especially afflcted by this poison. 

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Not All Sitting Is Equal. One Type Was Just Linked to Better Brain Health – the kind where you don't let your brain turn to mush. Well that's good, I suppose, seeing that so much work I do is at the computer these days. Still, this ronin should exercise more.

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Trump’s rise was fueled in part by the perception that liberal elites advanced unpopular policy agendas without seriously considering dissenting arguments. Because liberals protest more than any other political group, every additional protest that isn’t accompanied by rational conversation just endorses the image: We are the rowdy, unthinking kids uninterested in genuine engagement, more than happy to take refuge in numbers. 
It took an MIT student to say it. All college kids need to read this.

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Microsoft gave the FBI keys to unlock BitLocker.  Well, why should you worry if you have nothing to hide, right?

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The Nobel Institute is so dead against the notion of Trump keeping this year's Peace Prize, they are going out of their way to say that Trump can't have it. Making sure that this is announced everywhere by the media. Yeah we know. Trump is never going to get the Nobel Prize like Melania will never be on the cover of Vogue. That's not the point. The point is that even if the Nobel committee can't see it in front of their faces, others are in their rights to do what they can to correct the obvious mistake.

BTW, The 1961 Literature Prize went instead to Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić. I'm sure you've heard of him.

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Cancer might protect against Alzheimer’s — this protein helps explain why. And what is that protein, you might ask? It's cystatin-C. Cystatin-C is typically used to assess renal function because it is filtered through the glomeruli like inulin (which you have to infuse), and not secreted like creatinine. It can detect cisplatin nephrotoxicity earlier than if the creatinine clearance is used. All this stemmed from the observation that "senior pathologist made an offhand comment: “If you see someone with Alzheimer’s disease, they’ve never had cancer.” But that's false. It's not cancer that affects cystatin-C levels. It's the kidney dysfunction caused by the chemotherapy they receive. Maybe cancer patients don't get Alzheimer's disease because they don't survive as long. Or that there are other reasons to attribute cognitive decline. I predict this study will go nowhere.

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The House of Representatives voted to keep the ability for cars to be turned off remotely. I guess this might be needed in some dangerous situations. This is never going to affect me. But it's interesting that this is being debated.

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Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft. Ha ha!  Microsoft's own engineers would prefer to use Claude Code than their own product, Cursor. That tells you something.

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Colorectal Cancer Is Now the Top Cause of Cancer Death in Younger People. So far, the leading hypothesis is that this is caused by the colibactin toxin secreted by some bacteria, usually E coli.

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The Trump administration lowered federal income taxes, and Oregon's state income tax is linked to it. So Oregonians could see lower taxes. Except that Democrats in Oregon legislature want to decouple it, so that they can still maintain high taxes. A few legislators want to allow Oregonians to enjoy lower taxes, and they are being targeted by unions, who want to keep the taxes high. Yup, we learned from Trump's first term, that it doesn't matter who the President is.  Iif you live in a Blue state, you won't see any benefit from conservative policies.

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23 January 2026

A new AirPods Pro 3 is coming out this year? Already? I just bought the AirPods 3 not long ago. This one will have an infrared camera and is aimed to go with the Apple Vision Pro headset, which I don't have. If that's the main enhancement I won't get it, but there are apparently additional tweaks. We'll see.

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Sweeping Amazon layoffs slated for next week. King County businesses are struggling to survive. Is this what you wanted, Seattle?

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How Pharmacy Benefit Managers Hide Their True Earnings. Yeah, PBMs need to go. They're a blight on healthcare.

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The Hope Chinese Charter School is doing well. It's great for them to stand independent and avoid being part of the public school system. While Beaverton School District sees their enrollment drop, Hope has a waitlist of people wanting to get in. Excellence matters. "Ninety percent of its students demonstrated mastery of grade-level math skills on state tests in spring 2025, among the highest in the state." Wow!

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Anthropic CEO's chilling prediction: Dario Amodei says ‘we're 6-12 months away' from AI doing what software engineers do. Scary that some don't write code at all anymore. You know this isn't a healthy thing, but what to do? Software of the future might really suck.

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Remove Sora Watermark in 3 Seconds: The Fastest Free Tool for Creators. We saw the video of the Somali migrant defending his Lamborghini from being repossessed. It sure looked real, but you could see the Sora watermark. This prevented a lot of outrage. But what if the creator had removed the watermark? It probably would have caused a lot of anger and maybe more violence than the current situation is generating. This is what we feared would happen with GenAI. Stuff like this shouldn't be readily available, if you ask me. Let fraudsters code their own watermark removal. Must we make it too easy for mischief-makers to create chaos?

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Mold is a destroying the world's art legacy. We still don't have the technology to prevent growth of xerophilic fungi, at least not without destroying the artwork, too.

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US officially exits World Health Organization, accusing agency of straying 'from its core mission'. Yeah, I fully agree with this. The leader is still Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was essentially worthless during the COVID-19 pandemic (I thought his term was over). That showed me that the organization has lost its way. Then they got involved with so-called "gender-affirming" care, and decided that it no longer a mental disorder when it clearly is. Time to start redirecting funds to more effective organizations.

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This article had to come from the DailyMail. "Useless Seattle social workers said there was 'no danger' for boy, nine, living in homeless encampment surrounded by fentanyl and rat droppings". This is the crap that Seattle puts up with. Everyone blames someone else, and no one gets fired or disciplined. At least KIRO reported it.

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"Every time you go out, you’re rolling the dice on whether it’s going to be a traumatic event or not."  I agree, but it's going to take more than merging the two governments to fix that problem.

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22 January 2026

Ill-advised. Ireland wants to give its cops spyware, ability to crack encrypted messages. Oh yeah, how long will it take their software to end up on the dark web?

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Wake me up when I'm supposed to concerned.  Your Brain Might Not Be Full of Microplastics After All.  This is why people don't trust media anymore.
Just like this: TikTok is still a danger. America no longer cares. 

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Consumer spending pushes US economy up 4.4% in third quarter, fastest in two years. Economy's booming. This is what I voted for.

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The old is new again.  How Bipolar Androgen Therapy Works. We used to call it "intermittent androgen therapy".

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Schrödinger’s cat just got bigger: quantum physicists create largest ever ‘superposition’. OK, it's just 7000 atoms of sodium metal, but still. So is it dead? Or alive?

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This needs to be said. Starting a Startup at 25, 35, or 45 Is Not the Same Decision. When you're at different stages in life, your risk tolerance is different. Also important is whether you have a wife and kids, or want to have one someday.

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Network map of human language.

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I wonder if this is the source of many fairy tales. Lanmaoa asiatica causes the same hallucinations in people who eat them – visions of tiny people all around. Looks like Boletus bicolor or Boletus sensibilis.Unusual for it to produce a particular kind of hallicination, though.

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Clawdbot Showed Me What the Future of Personal AI Assistants Looks Like. I used to be a sucker for personal assistant software. Usually they were just scheduling software for PDAs, where you had to enter all the information yourself. Then I would have Siri enter the information, but Siri would make mistakes. Now in the era of AI, you don't have to do even that. And now they can intelligently do a lot more. I'm inclined to give this a whirl.

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Portland’s new council president wants to focus on city’s ‘real crises’. They wouldn't know what to do. The progressives are like college kids pretending they know how to run a city. Even yesterday, Council meetings were disrupted by anti-ICE protestors. You reap what you sow.

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Here's Kotek's Oregon Prosperity Map. In short, it's going to create new committees to study things, and of course, invest in "infrastructure" to support union jobs. Create a Global Trade Desk to sell Oregon as a place to invest, without actually doing anything to make it attractive. Meanwhile, there are taxes to be raised. Homeless to spend money on. Funds to support illegal aliens. Mental health agencies that need funding. More lawsuits against the Trump administration. More SNAP fraud to pay for. And Medicaid money to bogus companies that support Tren de Aragua killers. 

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Oregon Democrats now want to move the transportation tax hike vote to May, and people can't figure out why. Except they do know why. They don't want it to appear on November's ballot, alongside Tina Kotek's re-election vote effort. Because you won't fail to make the association.

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Democrat solutions to Democrat problems. Washington state considers eliminating interest on medical debt.

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Major decision made on metal detectors at Portland’s busiest library. What a city we live in now, where you have to be screened for weapons just to enter the public library. And the only reason it was voted down was the city can't afford it.

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No one has been convicted of violating Portland’s public camping ban. I never want to hear about "No one is above the law." It's all crap.

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It must be peak time to be a fraudster in a Blue city. The Seattle Parks Superintendent was living a jet-setter life in his public job. Flying all around the world to bullshit conferences. "Individual trips routinely cost taxpayers, with some international travel exceeding $6,000."  And meanwhile: "While the Harrell administration allowed Diaz to travel extensively, Seattle residents were sounding alarms over deteriorating and unregulated parks."

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21 January 2026

Meta lays off hundreds in the Seattle area. Oh well, too bad for Seattle.

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Someone coded a password guesser. You have to input some personal information about the target, and it was try to guess likely passwords. This wouldn't work on me.

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This is interesting. URL shorteners store snapshots of the websites permanently. So when you type on a shortened URL, the site you go to may be an older version of the site that was stored at the time the shortened URL was created. Scammers know about this, because suppose you created a webpage that looked a lot like a genuine page of something else. If you click on a shortened URL, you might get redirected to a fake page, and you didn't pay attention to details and started entering sensitive information, you'd be screwed.

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The Coriolis effect does manifest at scales down to kiddie swimming pools. It's great when science sites collaborate like this. But these guys showed it, too a while back. 

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AdGuard VPN released their TrustTunnel protocol to open source. Hopefully it will get incorporated into the products of the big vendors. I hate getting detected.

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C'mon, this has got to be fake. Thinking positively about your vaccine makes it work better.  How the hell did this pseudo-science get published in Nature?  I love that they call positive thinking "upregulation of reward mesolimbic activity". Kudos to their bullshit science terminology generator.

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OHSU scientists discover a new autoimmune condition known as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis which can cause people to be become confused, forgetful or paranoid and be treated for mental illness before doctors realize the underlying problem isn’t psychological at all.  Maybe that's what causing this outbreak of insanity in Portland. And here I thought it was just Democrat politics. "We were seeing this disorder long before we knew what it was," the researcher said. Mm-hmm, so did we.

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Portland Public Schools Proposes Cutting About 290 Positions Amid Budget Gap. Well that's what happens when you give everyone unsustainable pay raises. How is this helping students?

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No more giveaways. Oregon needs to meet the new SNAP guidelines, and it will cost them – $340 miilion!  About time. 

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Despite shelter improvements, Oregon’s homelessness crisis is growing.  But the Democrats will stick to their losing gameplan, until Portlanders have had enough and start electing some Republicans for a change.

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OHSU's Dr. Shereef Elnahal seems like a likeable guy. He's only 40 and he reminds me of a lot of young people I used to know. The best comment in the article: "a young outsider, 'somebody who doesn’t know what they can’t do.'" It was meant to be a compliment, I'm sure.

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An audit has confirmed Washington State gave away $500 MILLION dollars without adequate controls, and did it all without a SINGLE provider record...across a 4-year period. And all AG Nick Brown wants to do is to make sure the agencies start taking this seriously, and don't make mistakes like this moving forward. No one gets arrested or fined. No one is fired. It's (D)ifferent in Washington state.

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