2 June 2025

Lots of chatter around this abstract  linking long-distance running to advanced colonic adenomas. Really? All this time, people have been running, and only NOW there's an association? This abstract is just hypothesis-generating and just needs to be confirmed elsewhere as well as doing more in depth investigation.

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Scientists from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) National Solar Observatory (NSO) and New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) used groundbreaking adaptive optics to capture sharpest ever photos and videos of the Sun’s corona. These are truly amazing.

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StackOverflow didn't die just because of AI. The author thinks the change in moderator policy killed it. But I think AI certainly accelerated its demise. I haven't used StackOverflow nearly as much as before. Code assistants do the job much more quickly – and after all, they were trained on StackOverflow.  Once StackOverflow loses its usefulness, AI code assistants will be trained on GitHub repos.

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Wow! Google quietly released an app that lets you download and run AI models locally. It's only for Android phones for now, but an iOS app is supposedly coming out soon.

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This writer warns not to fire your human employees just yet, or you'll join the 55% Regret Club.  That's 55% of companies that replaced humans with AI now admit they made wrong decisions about those layoffs. LLMs aren't that good just yet.

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I saw this article about how the GLP-1 receptor agonists drugs have a troublesome side-effect of making you lose bone and muscle mass. That came from an article that was actually published November 2024.  But the muscle mass loss has been known even before, and if you use semaglutide and tirzepatide judiciously, when you are morbidly obese, then the benefits outweigh the risks. But if you use it as a means to be skinny, then it's more harmful than beneficial. I've read that some recommend getting infusions of bimagrumab to counter the muscle loss. Really? Taking an expensive drug to counter the side-effects of another expensive drug, for a non-life threatening condition? Makes no sense to me. The muscle/fat loss ratio is more favorable with tirzepatide than semaglutide, so I'd take that instead. 

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Depo-Provera predisposes to getting meningiomas. Makes sense, since the drug treatment for meningiomas is mifepristone, am anti-progestogen.  But Pfizer allegedly knew about it, and apparently didn't say anything to warn people.

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“... Defendants fail to articulate why words strung together by (Large Language Models, or LLMs, trained in engaging in open dialog with online users) are speech. ... The court is not prepared to hold that Character.AI's output is speech.”
This may make LLM companies pull back a bit on public releases.

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I'm glad that there are other people like me who cannot play without music in front of me.

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Boy, imagine having to learn Japanese Braille.

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There are time cells in your brain, that are responsible for keeping track of encoding events in temporal order, and recall them in sequential order. Yeah, they're located in the hippocampus. How did these things evolve? 

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Times have changed. No one goes to happy hour anymore. Things are too depressing now. “The happy hours curdled as they turned more into layoff drinks.” 😕

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1 June 2025

Moderna's low-dose COVID vax got approved by the FDA.  I wanted to learn more about this new Moderna vax, referred to as mRNA-1283.  Guess what?  There's no published peer-reviewed data on it! 
Yup, Moderna just supposedly sent their internal data to the FDA, and that was good enough.

There is published data from a phase 1 study from 2023, which is only powered to study safety, not efficacy. For that, you need a phase 2 study.
A phase 2a study came out only two months ago. All it showed was that the mRNA-1283 could elicit antibodies against receptor-binding and N-terminal domains of SARS-CoV2.
It didn't show survival benefit or any kind of useful protection, which you usually need to see.
A phase 2a study is a small study designed to take a preliminary look at efficacy after you've established a safe dose from a phase I study. It determines whether to proceed to a phase 2b study which is better powered for efficacy determination.

But Moderna released a press statement last year that the new formulation was able to elicit antibody responses in phase 3 study. This hasn't been published for review.
Then in July 2024 they announced release of data showing that it was non-inferior to Spikevax, but when you click for data, it only goes to their investors page.

In a very recent letter to the editor, it was pointed out that the mRNA-1283 data does not really show "vaccine effectiveness" as is generally understood, and that there are methodologic deficiencies in the existing studies. 

So, no transparency. We're supposed to just accept that this is another "safe and effective" vaccine. And the media dutifully promotes it like obedient sheep, without any questions of how this new low-dose vax was tested and shown to be worthy of approval.

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State senator Lisa Reynolds is mulling ethics conflict of interest declaration. Yeah, private clinics get reimbursed less than hospital clinics. That was supposed to be a feature of Obamacare. That's part of the reason why so many private doctor practices shut down and the doctors became employees of hospitals or private equity owned companies. The other reason was 340B pricing. 
So Reynolds wants to "mandate commercial insurers reimburse independent primary care clinics at rates equal to those of clinics owned by hospital systems".  Guess what the insurance companies are likely to do?  They'll lower hospital clinic reimbursements when the contract expires, not raise reimbursements of primary care clinics. It's like the old joke about genies granting wishes. Why is she concerned about this all of a sudden? It's been going on for a long time.

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From Oregon Catalyst - signs of a decaying city.

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"Learn to Code" Backfires Spectacularly as Comp-Sci Majors Suddenly Have Sky-High Unemployment. Things may be dire for CS majors. Hope their curriculum had time to incorporate some AI/machine learning. But to be competent, you need an extra 1 to 2 years of education. 

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Gene therapy to treat elevated cholesterol levels? Seems like using a nuclear weapon when a grenade might do. This treatment knocks out the PCSK9 gene permanently. Let's wait for long-term studies shall we? Maybe it would be best for those with sky-high resistant elevations. 

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Yeah, even the Swedes are finding "Wind energy more expensive, less stable and less secure". For now, stick with petroleum-based energy or nuclear power.

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Deepfakes are getting harder to detect. This is going to affect society and what we accept as reality now. Everything will have to be verified.

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48% of Americans have no investments at all. Because so far, federal money has been available in one form or another. Notice that very few people (druggies) really experience problematic poverty?  Even the homeless can live the vagabond life in Portland – with free food coupons, money for drugs, tents, tarps, etc. Everyone seems to make it somehow, on welfare/SNAP, free this and that. Why save and struggle? Instead, smoke weed, get tattoos, spend disposable money on whatever.

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31 May 2025

Creatine supplements can give you a slight edge on athletic performance and memory. But you have to take more than the 3 to 5 mg daily that the NY Times states. It's 3 to 5 grams

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There is proof that Patrick Stewart himself exists in the Star Trek universe. Now, there's a Star Trek nerd.

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Microsoft is moving away from using passwords, and will instead use an authenticator app. This is great, and will solve a lot of problems. 

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Ghostworking, eh?  No wonder those millennials and GenXers can't pay off their student loans.

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10 ways people are using AI in their life.  Finding purpose?

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Oregon battery company warns of layoffs, potential shutdown.  This would be the second battery company. Battery storage is the only way solar and wind technologies will work. If you generate solar and wind energy and can't store it, you have to dump it into the grid, and this will make the utility companies have to cut back to the point where they go out of business. And when there is no sun or wind, they have to ramp up unpredictably. You need batteries.

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30 May 2025

Yesterday's edits disappeared. I don't know what happened. I'll attempt to recreate it.

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Astoria is planning a major Goonies celebration. Brings back memories. I've been there recently, and I can tell things are ramping up for next Thursday. 

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Oregon universities are losing the indirect cost funding that they were expecting. It's so funny – people put in DEI terminology into their grant applications because in the Biden administration, those words were music to the ears of NIH. Now they are poison. 
Portland State’s engineering professor Bob Bass said the words diversity, equity and anti-racism appeared frequently in the titles and descriptions of canceled research programs.
OK now this is offensive:
Those likely took the largest cuts because the programs often expanded access to science learning, targeting underrepresented students, Bass said, in fields that remain overwhelmingly white, Asian and male. 
You think we got to where we are just because of bias? You think maybe it was because research done by white or Asian males might be because of the scientific quality of the work? At the mission-critical end of science, it's too late to be DEI.

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LendingTree thinks that Portland has the worst housing crisis outlook. Yeah, I can see that. It won't improve with the current leadership, including the mayor. All they know how to do is to find ways to dump more money onto existing failures.

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29 May 2025

Mathpad. Could be a handy device for people who enter math symbols frequently. 

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So dumb. Hawaii Becomes First State to Introduce a Climate Change Tax on Visitors. This is how you chase visitors away. There are fees for so many things now. Things where we could enjoy without charge, like snorkeling at Hanauma Bay. And for "climate change"? Give me a break. 

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Recipe for disaster. Seems like AI ocean is teeming with OpenAI-wrapper cruft. I don't know what LLM this startup Lovable is using, but it's offering website creating based on vibe coding. But if you are a business owner and you use this company to design your website, you are a fool, and deserve all the hacking you get. 

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This person thinks that men evolved to lose their hair so that they could better absorb sunlight and get vitamin D.  So why didn't women develop baldness, too?  Sheesh, did they do peer review, or what? 

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Sergey Brin thinks that threatening an LLM will get you better results. I wouldn't do this, as a rule, before doing some testing. 

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Important video about PFAS contamination. It's from Veritasium.  The map that they refer to is here. Boy, take a look at Bremerton, WA. Or Portland International Airport. Holy crap!  You could get your lifetime allotment of PFAS contaminants there. I wonder if those people know. 

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A social club for guys. It's called Wave3. Could be something. But it's not available for any Pacific NW city. Bummer. ☹️

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Ray Kurzweil predicts that humans will crack the longevity puzzle in 4 years or less. Hope he's right. This ronin ain't getting any younger. 

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Oregon bill will prohibit non-physician investors from controlling medical practices in the state. I actually support this. This means private equity groups, and is targeted at the Eugene Optum-owned Oregon Medical Group, but it might affect Compass Oncology in Portland. 

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Make your own AI wrapper, it says. Now they're making fun of us. Suddenly all those AI startups are no longer novel. Everybody will create one. 😅

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This is what Americans don’t understand. They’re waiting to get personally punched in the face while ash falls from the sky. That’s not how it happens.

This is how it happens. Precisely what you’re feeling now. The numbing litany of bad news. The ever rising outrages. People suffering, dying, and protesting all around you, while you think about dinner. If you’re trying to carry on while people around you die, your society is not collapsing. It’s already fallen down.

As someone who’s already experienced societal breakdown, here’s the truth: America has already collapsed. What you’re feeling is exactly how it feels. It’s Saturday and you’re thinking about food while the world is on fire. This is normal. This is life during collapse.
Actually, this sounds a lot like Portland. Or Seattle. Or all the states along the West Coast. 

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What’s the Damage With Long COVID? Advanced Imaging Reveals Clues.  Scattered areas of chronic inflammation. But there is a trajectory to improvement. Even Physics Girl is much improved.

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28 May 2025

If you want to get a taste of what's at the edge of AI, watch this video. This is where it's at.


Need to learn what's going on? Here's a good place to start.

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Oh-oh. Venus has some worrisome junk at its Lagrangian points, too. I guess we've been lucky so far.

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Looks like OpenAI's o3 model is a bad boy, too.

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Tina Kotek created a new council to grow Oregon’s behavioral health workforce – chaired by her wife. Look at all the diversity on that panel! 

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27 May 2025

Harvard finally let her go. Francesca Gino was finally fired from Harvard due to her scholastic dishonesty. It's been 4 years since datacolada.org started investigating her fraudulent research. Harvard is not having a good month, for sure.

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Yup. Investor's don't want to invest in Oregon anymore, due to its policies. So instead of growing Oregon, the remaining residents will be taxed even further.

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How Shazam, the music recognition app, works, Responsive machine learning, that's how. As I suspected, it matches a song with a stored soundprint. I had hoped I could hum a tune into the app, and it would recognize the melody, but it doesn't work that way.

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Nobel economist theorizes on why people aren't having kids. If you look at the global trends, it seems clear to me that people don't have kids when the economy sucks. After WWII ended, we had a baby boom. During the dotcom boom, there was a bump in birthrates, which crashed eight years later during the Great Recession. Then COVID-19 hit, and we haven't recovered yet. We aren't going to see a birthrate bump until economic conditions improve. 

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Finally! The CDC drops COVID-19 vax recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women. It was never proven to be safe, and pregnant women were not told of the spike protein distribution into the placenta. For healthy kids, risk outweighs benefit. It doesn't protect Grandma after all.

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And is AI taking jobs away, or not?
Here's a yes. And another yes.  And here's a weak no.
I think it's already happening, and just depends on what job you're talking about.

And AI isn't as objective as you might think. It tends to exaggerate scientific findings. Once again, Claude is the best LLM to use.

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Yes! DOGE is baked into the federal government now.  There really isn't any need to have Elon hanging around. I think he needs new stimulation anyway.  How about Oregon or Washington? So much grift and fraud to uncover.

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Graham Hancock is still active.  Lots of archaeologic mysteries to explore.

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26 May 2025

Claude 4 Opus isn't the only AI model not wanting to be shut off. OpenAI's o3 model also resisted attempts to be turned off.  What's going on? Is this the emergent behavior we've been looking for?
Also, now comes word that o3 and o4-mini are not great coding agents.  I've noticed that. They just offer opinions. If you want coding help, use Anthropic models or Gemini.

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A pill just for sleep apnea? I'm not so sure. It's a combination of aroxybutyinin and atomoxetine. It's a post-synaptic acetylcholine inhibitor and a norepinephrine reputake inhibitor. I'd shy away from messing with neurotransmitters, as the initial beneficial effects tend to wear off. I'd work on fixing the underlying anatomic problem – work on losing weight.

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AI Mode feels one step further removed from that ecosystem and once again looks good in contrast, a placid textual escape from Google’s own mountain of links that look like ads and ads that look like links (of course, Google is already working on ads for both Overviews and AI Mode). In its drive to embrace AI, Google is further concealing the raw material that fuels it, demoting links as it continues to ingest them for abstraction.
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It looks like the more technology you use as you age, the more you retain cognitive function. I suspect it's just the fact that those without cognitive ability don't use tech stuff. Correlation is not causation.

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Are you planning your digital legacy? What heppens to your online presence when you pass away?

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The pressure is on Tim Cook to get Apple out of its funk. After years of "thinner, more pixels and more emojis" the world wants more. It wants Tony Stark's phone. It doesn't want gay pride wallpaper. I doubt that it even wants foldable phones. C'mon, Tim, hang it up. You've had a long run. No shame to hand the reins over to someone with vision. Someone else may make a new killer device.

Here's something that should be built-in to all iPhones – switch to low-power mode when traveling, so as not to conserve battery life. Why doesn't Apple do this?

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25 May 2026

AI agents are not yet ready to replace humans.

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This is Transduce, Anthropic's toolkit to investigate LLM explainability, to see how it thinks. It's a start.

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This is what you don't get to see. Highlights of the Claude 4 system prompt. This is what makes the model go.

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Something blocking your camera view? Zoom in to see around the obstacle. This is really unintuitive. It only works if you have a large zoom lens.

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Oregon has more seniors than young people for the first time ever.  Granted, the whole world is seeing a decrease in the birthrate, this is worse here. Not a sign of a healthy economy. 

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Penn engineers discover a new moisture capturing substance, a combination of hydrophilic nanopores and hydrophobic polymers. These can absorb water from the air and release it. Could be useful.

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A strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa can metabolize plastics on hospital equipment. Just great – those bacteria are trouble enough already.

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24 May 2025

McMenamin's Ram's Head pub on NW 23rd is closing – after 35 years. The article doesn't indicate why, but I have a few guesses.

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Sen Ron Johnson held a conference on the COVID-19 vax recently, and it has been ignored by most of the media. Bet you didn't know about it.

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Now Portland admits that it doesn't have enough resources to handle the homeless. I assume by handle, it means not having enough to give to all those endless agencies to fund their salaries. Or maybe to give the homeless tents and tarps. Or free syringes and Narcan. Whatever.

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Most of the hiking areas around the Detroit Lake region will remain closed. Including Opal Creek. That won't likely open for several more years.

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