22 March 2024

Fusobacterium nucleatum has been found in about 50% of all aggressive colon cancers. Well, we know that finding Clostridium septicum is linked to colon cancer, too, so it may be just an association.

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Wow, Rudy Giuliani was right, the elections were not secure at all. Only now all this is coming out. Why didn't we hear about this before? Because roadblocks were in place.

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Hackers can break into hotel rooms that are secured by those plastic key cards. Do we have to provide our own security now?

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Apple has a new Documentations page, where you can browse manuals.

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There's a drug-free nasal spray that can protect one from viral pathogens. Too bad it's not commercially available.

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Soon to be Portland?

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21 March 2024

Hmmm. Too much energy spent combating stress linked to earlier death in men. 

The amount of effort expended by older men in coping with stressful events has the greatest impact on their mortality risk over and above how stressful an event is -- or the coping strategy employed to deal with it, new U.S. research published Tuesday indicates.

Most coping strategies were weakly to moderately positively correlated, and adaptive coping strategies were employed more frequently than dysfunctional responses, such as avoidance or confrontation.

Of these, only social coping, reaching out to others, was significantly associated with mortality risk with a 15% higher risk of dying from all causes. However, the study caveats this finding, noting social coping included "other-directed action that may deplete emotional and physical resources instead of bolstering them."

So don't reach out? But social isolation is bad for you, too. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I think this underscores the need to develop and train resiliency from a young age. Similar to the training that the samurai underwent. They needed their own brand of Zen, as described in the Kamakura Koans.
Also, people need to find their ikigai.
Instead, apparently Americans are crankier.

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Despite what the Biden administration says, the numbers tell a different story. People are hurting. Not only that, but California is hurting, too.

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Doctors Transplant Crispr-Edited Pig Kidney Into Living Patient. If this works, it will greatly lessen the waiting list for kidney transplants. May the days of dialysis are waning. That would be a good thing.

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Neuralink brain implant allows a quadriplegic man to play chess with his mind. This is truly amazing.

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Is this what being a far-right extremist means?

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So illegal aliens can carry weapons now? But regular citizens cannot?

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Well, there goes Star Wars.

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20 March 2024

Universities Have a Computer-Science Problem. What does that mean? It means that these days, universities put their computer sciences courses in their engineering schools, apart from other disciplines.

In other words, there may be downsides just to placing CS within an engineering school, let alone making it an independent college. Left entirely to themselves, computer scientists can forget that computers are supposed to be tools that help people.

A traditional CS department in a school of engineering would be populated entirely by computer scientists, while the faculty for a college of computing like the one he led at Georgia Tech might also house lawyers, ethnographers, psychologists, and even philosophers like me. Bala told me that her college was established not to teach CS on its own but to incorporate policy, law, sociology, and other fields into its practice. “I think there are no downsides,” she said.
Maybe that's why we are seeing so much harmful tech. The geeks have not been trained to be cognizant of humanity.

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Breakthrough Catalyst Turns Sewage Into Clean Energy. “We have developed a catalyst capable of purifying municipal sewage while simultaneously enhancing the efficiency of hydrogen production, a green energy source.” And it uses iron and nickel, which are abundant.

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And Oregon State University scientists discover metal capable of removing carbon dioxide from air. This one uses vanadium, which is not so plentiful, but still, this makes more sense than restricting leaf blowers.

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OHSU postdoc organize for better wages. Well, their salaries come out of NIH grants, and what you get is what you have. They don't pay all that well. So higher wages means they'll have to let go of some people. There's nothing that a union will be able to do. There could be more money if the University took a smaller bite to cover overhead costs, but with the way things are, I wouldn't bet on it. Sorry, Hannah, you should get a second job to make ends meet, or go into private industry, which pays better. Research technician jobs have never paid well. And you are in Oregon.

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Cheese enthusiasts are mourning the possible extinction of brie cheese. The bacterium that creates Brie cheese is in danger of dying off. So no more Brie cheese, unless they manage to rescue the bacteria. This would be really unfortunate.

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Yeah, we already knew this. Oregon is one of least ‘tax friendly’ states. I'm surprised that Washington is one of the best states. What a difference to live just across the Columbia River.

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A.I. is allowing scientists to design custom antibodies from scratch. Well, designing them is one thing. You have to create them, and do so in bulk. That's the trick. But it's a good start anyway.

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So it's not just amyloid? Root cause of Alzheimer's may be fat buildup in brain cells, research suggests. Bad news if you have the APOE3 or APOE4 polymorphism.  The APOE gene promotes fat accumulation in neurons.

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Google's woke Gemini A.I. wasn't a mistake. And this is the A.I. model that Apple wants to use. Sick.
“The model is just a reflection of the people who trained it,” one former AI researcher at Google Brain, who asked not to be named, told us. “It’s just a series of decisions that humans have made.”
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Go woke, go broke. Harvard closes John G. Wolbach Library, citing 'financial considerations. I guess the boycotts from the wealthy donors is having an effect. So why pay all the expensive tuition money if you can't get the full Harvard experience?

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NVIDIA wants to take away all the nursing jobs that nurses want. The desired nursing jobs are not changing bedpans, starting IVs, checking inventory or making the staffing schedules, although they need to be done. Nurse love the human interaction, and that's what NVIDIA wants to relegate to A.I.

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19 March 2024

I remember when people said that only amphibole asbestos was a problem, and that chrysotile asbestos was OK. Now the EPA is banning chrysotile asbestos, too.

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We might need this in Portland, too. The Squatter Hunter will help you get rid of squatters – way faster than the police and legal system will.

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...we call the attention of medical professionals to the various risks associated with blood transfusions using blood products derived from people who have suffered from long COVID and from genetic vaccine recipients, including those who have received mRNA vaccines...
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18 March 2024

Maglev is possible on regular train tracks. That's nice in theory but I'd hate to see trains whizz by on some of the crooked tracks that are around. We'd see so many derailments.

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Why, Apple, why?  Apple is going to use Google's Gemini A.I. to power the iPhone. This has got to be the dumbest decision. Why can't Apple buy a better A.I.? Why use the woke A.I. that everyone's dissing? No wonder their stock is tanking.

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18 Questions to ask your VPN provider. It's so hard to evaluate VPNs now. So many that were thought to be good are lousy. Private Internet Access and HideMyAss were touted as some of the best, only to keep logs and betray privacy promises.

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Washington follows Oregon's direction downward in not requiring passing the bar exam to be an attorney. Because Democrats have to lower standards so that minorities have a chance, right?

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Claude-3 has a higher I.Q. than the average human. Is this the Singularity?

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Never eat a mushroom based on what a phone app tells you, even if it's A.I.-powered. The technology just isn't that good yet.

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17 March 2024

Who has been the closest and the farthest from the Sun? Surprising answers.

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Can Large Language Models reason and plan? Nah.

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Stanford is no longer the Stanford it was when I was younger. No more anarchy or craziness. Probably just as well. Back then, there was no Internet. You could afford to be "out of bounds". Wink-wink. Now, you might do something, and it'll be recorded forever. Wouldn't want that to happen, right? Times have changed.

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This article makes it sound like we should put it in the drinking water.  Psilocybin therapy alters prefrontal and limbic brain circuitry in alcohol use disorder. Seems like it fixes all that ails you.
Specifically, psilocybin treatment led to increased activity in the medial and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and left caudate — regions implicated in higher-order cognitive functions such as goal-directed behavior, decision-making, and emotional regulation.

Additionally, a decrease in activity was noted in the insula, motor, temporal, parietal, and occipital cortices, as well as the cerebellum. These areas are often associated with craving, automatic behavior patterns, and sensory processing, indicating that psilocybin may diminish the salience of alcohol cues.

The study also revealed unique responses to different types of emotional cues. For negative cues, psilocybin increased activity in the supramarginal gyrus, a region involved in empathy and emotional processing. For positive cues, there was an increase in right hippocampus activity and a decrease in left hippocampus activity, which may reflect changes in how positive emotional experiences are processed and integrated.

“Patients treated with psilocybin showed similar brain responses to pictures of alcohol and positive and negative emotional scenes,” Pagni told PsyPost. “This suggests psilocybin may have a general mood stabilizing effect, rather than altering processes specific to alcohol or negative emotions. The pattern of neural response was characterized by increased activity in the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex, brain regions associated with regulating emotions and behavior, and decreased activity in the insula, a brain region associated with craving for alcohol.”

Just what people living in modern society need right now.

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Moderate to severe sleep apnea was found in a quarter of women and half of men. This is probably linked to all that obesity. But likely people need to fix how they sleep. It's a vicious cycle, and being sleep-deprived can make you fat, too.

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Anxiety drug pregabalin linked to rising number of deaths. A lot of folks are takig pregabalin for treatment of neuropathy. Only now we realize how dangerous it can be?

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If you like Bach's Cello Suites, you definitely need to check out this page.

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The TikTok Problem Is Not What You Think. We do need to come to a consensus about what constitutes invasion of privacy. TikTok is not alone in what it's doing. We will need to talk about Google and Meta, and data harvesting companies, and define what it is that they should not be doing. Again, the adage is true – if the service is free, you are the product, not the customer.

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The Atlantic writes about Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed. As I type this, though, Tina Kotek still hasn't signed the bill. What is she waiting for?

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Techies are getting laid-off. It seems strange that with all the boom in artificial intelligence that there is less of a need for them. It's because the current techies know little about artificial intelligence. They're old-school techies. The ones that are in demand need to know how to implement LLMs and Computer Vision and data science.  That's what matters now.

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What are the worst paying jobs five years out?  No surprises here. The article doesn't talk about what the best ones are. To get that info, you need to go to the source.

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As A.I. tools get smarter, they get more racist. 

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16 March 2024

Read the "In summary" statement at the bottom of this article. Someone forgot to hide the A.I. Where was the copy editor?

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The United States gained some territory at the end of last year. Didn't hear about it until just now.

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17 year old Phillips Exeter Academy student thinks he's figured out how convolutional computer vision models do feature extraction. This is cool.

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I saw the video taken of Starship, and was amazed at how far SpaceX has come. But then I read that Elon Musk's SpaceX is going to help U.S. intelligence agencies build their spy satellite network. Probably that's what they required of him, in order to be left alone.

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So they are being responsible? The more powerful language models are being red-teamed before they get released. If that's supposed to make me feel better, it doesn't. There already too much out there capable of generating trouble.

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Hospitals are still hurting. Adventist is closing three rural health clinics, in Welches, Lincoln City and Sheridan. Meanwhile, the OHSU-Legacy merger is up in the air.  Is it going to happen or not? Every day they delay, they lose money. And why is Kathryn Correia still out of commission for the fourth month from just hip surgery? So Legacy is without a leader, and OHSU...well.

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Portland's commercial real estate market still has some embers of life yet, according to the PBJ. That's good, but things are still far from healthy.

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Will PGE get that rate hike? Maybe, maybe not. We need some competition. PGE shouldn't be the only game in town.

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Why we can't have nice things. Sumner, WA just can't have an EV charging station. Someone keeps stealing the charging cables.

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FDA approves Rezdiffra as treatment for fatty liver (steatohepatitis). Resmetirom is a liver-directed thyroid hormone receptor beta–selective agonist. Interesting mechanism.  You need to have biopsy-confirmed NASH and a fibrosis stage of F1B, F2, or F3.

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What? Dr. Sam Parnia thinks he can resurrect people for up to three hours after they have died. That's crazy talk, man. But body cooling has been incorporated into the ACLS resuscitation cycle, so maybe if more people start doing it quickly, it may change things. But you've got have died from something that hasn't destroyed your body, or it's not going to work. Think this guy will get the Nobel Prize?

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Memory changes as we age. The peak is in the mid-20s. Really? So young. So eat your veggies, exercise, and sleep well.  Probably go easy on the alcohol, too. And stress-relief. Very important. So nothing new, really.

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OpenAI isn't going to wait on NVIDIA's GPU chips. Sam Altman wants a Dubai company to make special ones for him. Well, OK then.

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Physics lesson.
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15 March 2024

Thanks, Joe. Leprosy is on the rise, brought in by migrants. Right now, it's concentrated in the southeastern U.S. but Biden is shipping them all around. Had enough, yet?

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Creepy. A neighborhood snooping tool has been created by religious evangelists, and it looks like the product of a sick mind.

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Be wary of websites that let you leave anonymous commentary to inform others. At Glassdoor, this policy changed, and now they have blackmail on people who used their sites.

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What happens in your brain when you're "in the zone". Beta- and gamma waves in the left posterior cortex.

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The JWST has shown that the Hubble Tension problem is real.  So why is the expansion of space not uniform?

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Wow, the real estate world has been disrupted. The home buying/selling process will be a little different. It may not be as easy to find an agent now. We shall see.

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That's the way to deal with in the road protestors who refuse to budge:
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14 March 2024

People are noticing. Why are so many young people getting cancer?  I think I know why, but it's verboten to say.

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What's up with Nature these days? They're not sticking to science anymore.  Check out this article: Why the world cannot afford the rich. The reason? It's because all those rich people cause anxiety. And they drive up consumption. Geez.  Stick to science, Nature.

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AI reveals prostate cancer is not just one disease. Something like this has been suspected for a long time. Prostate cancer specialists have theorized that even at the start, there are seeds of cancer cells that exhibit androgen-independent growth, and eventually they predominate. It's nice to see that A.I. has drawn the same conclusions.

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Amazing fact.  Most of our taxes now just pay off interest on the national debt. It's also amazing that no one seems to care.

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Just like the meme.  Oregon Legislature allocates $4 million for graffiti removal. Graffiti should be gone any day now.

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Hmmm. United Healthcare's Optum wants to hurry up and acquire Corvallis Clinic.  Seems like a win-win for both parties: Optum purchases an asset which they really need after paying off hackers, and Corvallis Clinic is apparently on the financial ropes and needs to be bought out. But if both parties are hurting, how are they going to sqeeze money from a stone? This statement bothers me:
Corvallis Clinic "simply doesn't have time to undergo continuing regulatory review without necessitating further cost-cutting measures that would almost certainly impact care before the time that the clinic would be potentially forced to close its doors"
Imagine the "cost-cutting" that it's going to implement in order to remain profitable. How will that affect healthcare delivery? I agree with the concerned residents who see problems with this.
This is yet more fallout from Obamacare – the disappearance of the physician-owned practice. Now just about everything is owned by hospitals, private equity, hedge funds, large insurance carriers, etc.  Individual private practices are finding it tough to make it work on their own. Even hospitals are struggling.

Edit:
Well, it seemed like a win-win in paper.  The reality turned out to be far different. What a miscalculation.

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If you're a rat, exposure to the scent of females will shorten your survival. Is that true for humans? Maybe it's just as well that men and women are drifting apart. I disagree with the author of the article – I don't think that it's because men are less educated. It's just that they're not getting the woke indoctrination that women are. The rise of liberal women, especially in politics, has been the worst thing for society over the past decade. Here's an example, featuring Rep. McLain regarding her desire to "change some behaviors" with freeway tolling, despite everyone opposed to it:

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This could be interesting.  Steve Mnuchin is looking to buy TikTok.  Somehow, I think Mnuchin owning TikTok will end up destroying the brand. We'll see.

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Speaking of mentally ill. Check this out. This is kind of nutcase that works at the Pentagon in Biden's administration. Holy crap. I sure hope the transgender fad is fading. Can't happen soon enough.

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Devin. Have you seen Devin, the new coding agent?  Who needs software engineers anymore. Just kidding, I think. Software development has changed. And it's only six years since the publication of that paper that started it all "Attention is all you need".

Update:

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We may have a Great Comet in the sky in October.

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Soon to be Portland. Canadian cops recommend just giving criminals the keys to your car so they can steal without confrontation.

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CAR-T cell therapy works wondrously against glioblastoma. Fantastic news, as this is one of the most feared and resistant malignancies. Cell-based therapies are so much better than chemotherapy or radiation.

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Boy, I wonder what Jack Reacher would have to say about this:

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13 March 2024

Regence submits final offer to Legacy. The deadline is April 1. Who will blink?

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Tina Kotek canceled 205 tolling but don't relax. Dems are working to get around it. And we're still going to have I-5 tolling, and the status of the Abernathy bridge is up in the air. When the tax base has been reduced and the Dems still need money for spending on illegals and providing the criddlers with drug paraphernalia, union member salaries, etc. you know that this will happen.

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Gender-affirming surgery does NOT decrease suicide. In fact, creating fake vaginas has been found to double the suicide rate. Because it does nothing to fix the underlying mental illness.

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Comparing different composers at the end of Mahler's climactic Second Symphony.

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