Sugoi & Yokunai

Ponsegromab is an antibody against GDF-15 (growth differentiation factor-15) and inhibition halts the severe weight loss, anorexia and decline in physical activity seen in patients with advanced cancer.  There is a potential treatment using this antibody that may help improve the quality of life of cancer patients. (I just wish it weren't Pfizer that's developing it, though.)

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Ten-year follow-up on the CheckMate-067 study was recently published, and the improvement in survival still holds. No surprises there.

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MacOS 15 (Sequoia) is out. I remember the days when Apple's stock rose when they came out with new stuff, as people were excited and sales soared.  Now Apple's stock sinks on the disaapointment. The ArsTechnica review makes it sound like more of a 14.6 version than a 15.0 update. Looks very minor. The AI stuff isn't ready and is expected to roll out later this year.  So nothing that's truly new and transformative. Just incremental improvements.

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Throwing good money after bad. Measure 118 just steals money from large corporations and essentially scatters it over the state. And everyone, including criminals, can have some of that money.  Oregon is the nation's leader in really dumb ideas.

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Where the wealthy are coming and going in the world. And which countries are seeing the largest increase in millionaires. Japan seems to be very well-poised. More millionaires and more millionaire immigrants.

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Terence Tao has played around with the latest ChatGPT-o1, and he seems to like it. Better than previous versions, but there is still room for improvement (obviously).

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Hey, it's not just me. Other people also think that the iPhone 16 is a symbol of how boring Apple has become. Tim Cook needs to be more innovative.

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This is why people are afraid to openly discuss gender dysphoria. And it needs to be discussed.

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Just say no. NW Natural is adding hydrogen to natural gas lines. Right now, it's only 0.2% hydrogen, but the goal is to increase it to as high as 20%. This could corrode gas lines and could lead to explosions. All this is done to reduce CO2 emissions.

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Did someone discover a new impact crater in Canada? The whole Cóte Nord area has many circular structures. I imagine the whole region was bombarded with meteors at one time.

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The 34th Annual IgNobel prizes have been awarded.

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Elon Musks security detail is getting very complicated. The price you pay for being the world's wealthiest person, and who relishes fame.

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When doctors estimate remaining life in terminally ill patients, they are often overestimate survival by a factor of 5.3. Why is that? Why are so many so unrealistically optimistic?

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Good to know. iPhones and iWatches can be disabled in the presence of helium. It harms the internal clock.

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Some people can't lose weight after exercise.  Now we know that this is due to a variant of the PGC-1α protein. 

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Metformin decelerates aging in male monkeys.  Well finally demonstrable changes in primates, instead of just fruit flies and round worms.

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Responding to work emails after hours contributes to burnout, hostility. I could see how this would happen.

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Another one bites the dust. Santa Fe tacqueria on 23rd Ave is closing this month.  It was a fixture on 23rd. No more. They're not saying exactly why except the rent/lease increased.

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Medical turmoil in Salem. I knew that Eugene/Springfield had only one hospital, but didn't know that Salem was like that as well. Now the hospital wants to own all medical care in the city, and a cardiologist group isn't having it.  This is similar to what Providence has been trying to do in Portland. This is not a healthy situation for any city with just one functioning hospital.

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SpaceX takes a billionaire for a private space walk. NASA probably wouldn't do this. Cheers for private enterprise.

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Using Apple's VisionPro might inadvertently reveal your passwords and other things you type.  Your eye movements can be tracked. Seems like an exploit that might work in the lab under controlled conditions, but difficult to achieve in the wild.

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Donald Trump was "corrected" by David Muir who claimed that the FBI statistics say that violent crime is going down. Not only does that not jive with what we can see with our own eyes, but trusting government statistics can be risky. But take a look at stats from the National Crime Victimization Survey. I'd say these numbers are far more believable. Once again, Trump was right.

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OHA to Crack Down on Insurers That Don’t Offer Gender-Affirming Care. With all the other things that they have to worry about, this is what they prioritize.

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OpenAI plans to release Strawberry AI in two weeks. This is AI that supposedly "thinks" before it responds, whatever that means. I guess we'll see.

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I wasn't aware of the Wallace Barrier until I was today years old.

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Most Portlanders don't feel that anyone on the city council represents them.

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So this guy thinks Apple is morphing into a service company. That's the strategy that IBM took. What happened to IBM?  Tim Cook seems to be just about at the end of the Steve Jobs momentum. Where will the company go next? iPhones are "not exciting enough for an upgrade". Isn't it time for Cook to retire yet? When I re-watch at old Steve Jobs videos, it was clear that the company had a real innovator. Not so anymore.

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Are Harris and Trump really neck-and-neck? I wondered about that, too. The real reason for reporting a close race is so Dems can cheat and have plausible deniability. If the polls reported the truth, no one would believe that Harris really won. But if people were to believe the race is close, well then, when they report the winner, no one should be surprised, right?

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Portland healthcare quality continues to ratchet downwards.  Labcorp, which now does the labs for Legacy and Providence, is going to downsize for efficiency, and consolidate, resulting in layoffs. And testing that is being done at the $20 million facility Legacy built in 2016 is being transferred to Providence's Halsey facility. And all those union gains from last year? Sad trombone. It's due to "rising healthcare costs".  Speaking of rising costs, health insurance rates in Oregon are increasing a lot.

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Not much sympathy for union workers at Fred Meyer.  Judging from reader comments, it seems that Portland Fred Meyer workers regard their clientele as "classless, rude and threatening" and they want to be paid at least $27/ hour. And your shopping experience at Wilsonville or Lake Oswego is far superior. Blue city blues.

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Another one bites the dust. The Community Cycling Center in Northeast Portland is running out of money and may have to close. Sucks to run a business in Portland, doesn't it? Who did you vote for?  Yeah I read that there are 16,000 more unemployed in Oregon compared with last year.  Soon to be more, I guess.

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What's with Portland's candidates?

Can't we have, you known, normal people run the city?

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Sigh. In disciplines like oncology, genetics are playing a bigger role in diagnosis and treatment. But in cardiology, they're going backwards. Why is the AHA denying the obvious, calling decades of clinical observation signs of "structural racism"? Sorry, but biology is not a Disney movie.

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The world's first eye transplant has been performed. It's not functional just yet, but wait...

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Amazing. Nano-scale silicon exoskeletons on erythrocytes may allow transfusions across species.

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Here's a glimpse at Apple's underground Observatory. This sort of thing would have made sense around 2016, when Apple was flying high. I wish Apple would pivot from constructing art galleries and build more innovating phones and computers. Now that they've maxxed out on phone thinness and pixel density, it seems they don't know what to do next. The next Macbook is going to look like the previous ones. The next iPhone is going to have the same design. Nothing new, Apple? Was Jony Ive's last design idea from 2019 going to be it from now on?

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How not to be fooled by viral charts. Part 1 and Part 2. I enjoy articles like these that debunk charts that people create to manipulate thought. In some cases, though, I think the creator was still correct, and Noah should print out the corrected graph so we can see the difference.

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As we get older, N6-Methyladenine progressively accumulates in mitochondrial DNA during aging.  At least for roundworms, fruit flies and dogs.  So it's a biomarker for aging, but perhaps it will be something to target to reverse mitochondrial functionality.

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Rant. You may come across articles like this, or speeches where someone ponders "how can this happen in the richest country in the world?"  Well, we're only the richest country in the world because our wealth is fake – using money borrowed while increasing the National Debt that will probably never have to be repaid. It's not because the underlying economic principles are sound. Congress votes on a lot of stupid stuff that doesn't make sense, and borrows more money to pay for it. And problems arise, and someone says the absurd trope again.

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Interesting. FedEx almost went bankrupt, and was saved by a lucky session of gambling at the blackjack table by the CEO. And apparently something similar happened with Peter Lynch of Fidelity fame.

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11 predictions of how AI will transform the world. The common theme is that it's not the AI itself we need to worry about, but the people who can wield it. AI will allow many people to unleash their creativity and make things happen that were impossible five years ago. Those who can use AI will do better than those who can't.

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Confusion regarding Biden's forgiving of student loan debt. Biden wants to claim that the loan is forgiven, but it's not that simple. Students still need to pay. I am against transferrring the debt to the rest of us. But lately, that crazy idea has gained traction, and students with worthless degrees think they need to be made whole. This whole mess, or course, was another debacle started by Obama.

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This is why we need a platform like X/Twitter:

And this is precisely why the mainstream media wants people to leave the platform.

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Oregon's economic picture seems to be okay, but dig deeper, and you'll see that it's not strong at all. We just haven't had as farther to fall, like San Jose.

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70-year old man graduates med school.  Now there's internship and residency – at least another year, probably more. Unless he just wanted the degree for, you know, just because.

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Thank goodness.  Pediatricians aren't giving COVID vaccines because it doesn't make financial sense anymore. Declining family interest, too. So was all the expense and hysteria worth it?

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For radiology applications, GPT-4 with Vision faired poorly, getting only 47.8% correct on image problems, even though it got 81.5% correct on text-based questions. Paper here.  It appears from the Methods section that the researchers did not do any fine-tuning but used the model straight out of the box. Fine-tuning would likely improve performance.

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Downtown San Jose is devastated. It used to be blessed by all the tech riches. And an expensive place to live. Now, it's a wasteland, after all the tech firings. Is this a temporary problem, or further evidence of "Build Back Better"? In any event, who could realistically want four more years of this?

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Conversation Halters. These are all the things people say when they've been proven wrong or can't argue a point on facts. How many times have you heard these? The favorite one around Oregon seems to be: 

François Chollet thinks that LLMs are a dead end in the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence). And he's one of the guys who would know. LLMs are just predictors of the next word based on a massive dataset. But that's not truly intelligence, is it? Of course not. He's right. But it's giving us a semblance of what a truly intelligent being would look like.

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Who is Cleo?  Cleo is one of the most extraordinary math geniuses on Math Stack Exchange, solving enormously complicated math problems in minutes. But who this person is, remains a mystery.

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What accelerates brain aging?  Apparently, being a woman, being in a country with greater socio-economic inequality, and living in a Latin American country.  People with these risk factors have a greater gap between their brain age and their chronological age.  So you want to have a young body, but a brain that keeps up with it.  I suspect that other countries don't have a large gap because their chronological age doesn't increase very much.  And remember this article from 2022?

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Cool. A water car. It runs on water, not gasoline. It hydrolyzes water and runs off the hydrogen. Hydrolysis is done with nano-technology that uses a specialized membrane.  It's the Hiroshima Engine, and the car in the picture is a Toyota.

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Firing a projectile in the air? It doesn't follow a parabolic path, as you've been taught in high-school physics. It follows an ellipse.

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