18 January 2025

This is a post from 2022 but I just discovered it.  The opening statement is so true.

I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn’t trigger a golden age.

Yeah, instead we got social media and all the garbage associated with it. It mostly brought out the worst of humanity, and allowed the dumbest ideas to make front page news instead of dying on the vine in obscurity, as it would rightfully have in the past.
But the main idea is that one-on-one teaching is the key to the intellectual advancement of the great geniuses of yore. It even has a name: Bloom's 2-sigma principle.

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Speaking of social media.  Interesting interview with the trio that runs Community Notes on X. It's one of the best things on X, but the Left hates it. So they are moving to BlueSky or Mastodon, which doesn't have Notes. Mastodon is more difficult to use, and so far it is boring, and populated by people who really have nothing to say.
They also loved TikTok, but since that will be banned starting tomorrow, they are migrating to RedNote, which is a privacy and security nightmare.

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a href="https://www.dailydot.com/news/tillamook-cheddar-cheese-not-real/" target="_blank">Is Tillamook Cheese real? Here's a deep dive into modern cheese making. It seems that it comes down to rennet.

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Portland is doubling down on just providing housing for the homeless, and not tackling the drug crisis behind it. Much of the homeless really don't want housing. They just want to be left alone, and provided with food and cash subsidies, along with tent and tarp and drug abuse kits and Narcan, that the city and county are happy to provide.  This is why the homeless problem will never be solved.

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And here's what Portland always has to deal with, again and again.  How much longer are downtown business going to put up with this?

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17 January 2025

High Taxes Are Hurting Portland Job Growth and Prodding Wealthy People to Leave. And that's only one reason why the rich as fleeing the city. It's also crime and all those tents everywhere. Why pay taxes for a city you can't enjoy? So businesses are reluctant to invest in the city as well.  Downward spiral. I think it's too late.

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Nice summary of Tina Kotek. She's on par with Newsom – we just haven't had our major disaster yet. The state is in a downward spiral, too.
Kotek is doubling down on having Oregon be sanctuary state. Maybe we'll get to see her arrested.

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Interesting rumor about GPT-5 and Claude 3.5 Opus. Could be true, but who knows?

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16 January 2025

Google's search market share drops below 90% for the first time. This is the start of the fall.

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A new gene editor, ARCUS, was used to cure a boy with ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency.  ARCUS is different from CRISPR and uses a different endonuclease enzyme along with homologous recombination.

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Scott Alexander discusses global variations in IQ. This paragraph is notable:

A normal person with 60 IQ will seem . . . normal. If you try to engage in difficult conversation, they won’t be able to follow, but most of them can do simple low-IQ jobs like manual labor, basic retail, or writing for the New York Times. A country centered around people at this level may not win any space races, but it can certainly continue to exist.

Scott still carries a grudge against the NYT for doxxing him, but he's right – lower IQ people can seem like normal people. But when you have a society full of people like that, it's apparent that they can't accomplish much. One big clue is Singapore – a blue dot in the map surrounded by lime-green and yellow. Genetically, I would bet the Singapore is very similar to surrounding countries, and although it is richer, I wouldn't expect the nutritional status to be substantially different. What makes Singaporeans so bright? I suspect it's the education and training that the kids receive. So that is evidence to support environmental factors. And also Hispaniola, where half is Haiti and the other half is Dominican Republic, both largely Blacks, but the IQ difference is substantial. Why is that?

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Look at all the damage cause by RIchard Nixon dissolving the Bretton Woods agreement in 1971.  The Nixon Shock took us off the gold standard and made the US dollar fiat currency. That was the start of when middle class Americans were screwed.

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What Trump 2.0 means for science.  Space exploration, artificial intelligence, quantum science will thrive.  But not climate science. The NIH will be overhauled, and that's a good thing.

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New Portland police data shows steep drop in reported shootings in 2024.  Duh, that's because people aren't reporting these crimes to the police anymore.  The key word is "reported".

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OHSU is now led by an interim CEO of OHSU Health, along with the interim President, and not long after the resignation of the leader of the Knight Cancer Institute.

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15 January 2025

Oregon roads and bridges are old and damaged.  And too much of Oregon's money is just being wasted on the homeless, as the problem grows not decreases.  The homeless are a liability, and one needs to eliminate liabilities.

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There's a huge aquifer underground in central Oregon.  That's probably where the Lost Lake disappears into.  And where the water comes out at Crooked River. And from where water oozes out of the rocks at Tamolitch Blue Pool.

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More vacancies in downtown Portland. The rest of the nation is already recovering, but not Portland.

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Solar panel recycling isn't cost-effective. Isn't this why styrofoam was banned?

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Close but no cigar.  Portland is the top livable city in the nation.  Portland, Maine, that is.  Ooooo, so close.

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Five things privacy experts know about AI.  Basically, AI can't keep secrets, no matter how hard you try.

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Fourth Law: A robot or AI must not deceive a human by impersonating a human being.
You can make a law, but that doesn't mean it's possible to enforce.

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Portland doesn't have the money to crack down on graffiti.  So the city will remain ugly, and an embarrassment to visitors.

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Wow. Interim head of OHSU Health steps down after 5 weeks.  Must be toxic to work there.  Kotek wants a national search for the new OHSU president position, but who would want to take the job after all that's in the news?  Probably only someone who is desperate to leave their old job for whatever reason, and thinks that even moving to Portland is acceptable.  Paradoxically, it would be better for OHSU to hire someone from within.  Someone who is adequate and is already stuck in this city and isn't moving here to flee something worse elsewhere.  

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Ugh.  First the Hawaii Judge, now Maisie Hirono. Please stop. 

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14 January 2025

United States Dementia Cases Estimated to Double by 2060. Anticipated Jump Especially Large for Women, Black People & Those Over Age 75. I think the increase in drug abuse is frying Americans' brains. Women have always been more susceptible to dementia for reasons unclear. We should be focusing on brain health. An increase in dementia is not society's best interest. 

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This made me laugh out loud.  The typical man disgusts the typical woman. Most men I see are pretty decent. Perhaps it's just the men who are on dating apps.  Maybe this is why the global population is decreasing.

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No blind person has been schizophrenic. Wow, they didn't teach this in psychiatry. What does this mean?  I don't think medical science knows just yet. But it's a clue.
Related to this: how does the brain distinguish perception from memory?  For most people, it's automatic, but perhaps for sighted individuals, the brain is fooled and hallucinates.

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This report suggests that Stanford researchers have developed a spiffy new AI application for precision oncology.  But this team has developed a model called CHIEF before, which garnered some serious criticism. Are these guys for real? 

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The Higgs Boson Seems To Prove That The Universe Doesn't Exist.  Well, that can't be right.

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Cool. TSMC's Arizona fab does 4 nm as good as Taiwan.  This is great!

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13 January 2025

Healthcare AI isn't going to decrease the need for humans. Oncologists at the University of Pennsylvania used an AI tool to predict patients' chances of death.

A routine tech checkup revealed the algorithm decayed during the covid-19 pandemic, getting 7 percentage points worse at predicting who would die, according to a 2022 study.

...the tool failed hundreds of times to prompt doctors to initiate that important discussion — possibly heading off unnecessary chemotherapy — with patients who needed it.

“Everybody thinks that AI will help us with our access and capacity and improve care and so on,” said Nigam Shah, chief data scientist at Stanford Health Care. “All of that is nice and good, but if it increases the cost of care by 20%, is that viable?”

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What are the highest performing batteries in 2025?  Surprisingly, not Energizer or Duracell.  They are Chinese batteries (BlinkPower, Tipsun, Bonai and Powerowl). Duracell makes a decent alkaline battery, but lithiums outperform.

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JetPens has their annual review of the best pens for 2025. Seems like what they recommended for 2024.  The Pilot G2 is still the most versatile pen.  The Sarasa Dry isn't bad, but doesn't write well on Post-It notes.

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Emmanuel Mignot wins Breakthrough Prize for discovering cause of narcolepsy.  Not surprising, since it was the discovery of modafinil that led to this, since the drug works through orexins, and is used to treat narcolepsy.

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Reddit is now using a fake AI user called Astral to supply subreddit posts. This isn't why people use Reddit.  The new CEO is turning his product into trash.

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Apple refuses to get of its DEI initiatives. Figures.

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12 January 2025

Someone posted this yesterday, the anniversary of the day Aaron Swartz ended his life in 2013.  I didn't know that Swartz and Sam Altman knew each other.  Interesting to see how similar were there actions, and how different were their fates. What a loss.

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Bigmouth Buffalo - the fish that doesn't decline with age. What is the secret to its longevity?

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Lenovo demoed a roll-up ThinkBook laptop. Looks really cool. I could use this. Wish Apple was rolling this out.

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Wall Street may eliminate 200,000 jobs as a result of AI. Could there be a good angle to this? I predict job roles will evolve.

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Scanning ultrasound removes amyloid-β and restores memory in an Alzheimer’s disease mouse model.  This sounds too crazy to be real. How would scanning ultrasound remove amyloid-β?  Supposedly microglia are activated to turn out phagocytic activity, but how does ultrasound make this happen?

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11 January 2025

Google wants to create a real-world simulation.  Probably to get insights into how to consolidate more power.  Don't trust 'em.

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What is this glowing ring of metal that fell in Kenya? It's definitely man-made for sure.

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Anyons. There may be a third form of atomic particle, besides fermions and bosons.

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Could we switch off a dangerous AI?  I'm not sure. Dr. Charles Forbin wasn't able to. But at least he knew it was being dangerous. We may not be able to tell.

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There is a specific protein involved in the conversion of white fat to brown fat, produced by beige adipocytes.  When a gene coding for Krüppel-like factor 15 (KLF15) is shut off, fat becomes more brown. Now the trick is to figure out how to do this on demand.

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South Koreans (what other kind of Korean could do this?) developed a nitrogen-doped porous carbon material that boosts lithium–sulfur battery performance, achieving rapid charging (12 minutes) and long-term stability (82% capacity retention after 1,000 cycles). This is what we need to make renewable energy work.  Otherwise, it doesn't make sense, and is not practical.

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Childhood stress can lead to epigenetic changes in a man's sperm, leading to brain developmental changes in offspring. That's just crazy. Study here.  The stress included "emotional neglect, emotional abuse, physical neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse". Abusing children can have lasting effects, more enduring than previously thought.

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Making coffee out of thin air? Soon it will be possible.

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Creepy. The Bee will record and transcribe your life for review later. I'll bet that if it catches on, Google or Meta will buy it. 

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10 January 2025

In about 6 weeks, Google will enable digital fingerprinting across devices. Naturally, e-marketers think this is a great idea.

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The Prodigy Paradox. Maybe it's better to be a generalist knowledge rather than a deep but narrow specialization? 

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A retrospective of Steve Jobs and charisma. Truly amazing what he was able to accomplish, but at what cost?
This is a well-recognized problem with technological utopias: goods that are simple and elegant to use are often difficult and dangerous to make.
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Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital. This article suggests that a hidden consequence of depriving some children of challenging education is that they never get to develop cognitive endurance, which would serve them well as adults.
This indicates that the experience of effortful thinking itself—even when devoid of any subject content—improves general cognitive capacity. ....indicating that an additional year of schooling improves cognitive endurance, but only in higher-quality schools. Our findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage poor children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity.
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When you change the world and no one notices. This is true – sometimes the recognition that something profound has been achieved doesn't happen for years.  This happened with the World Wide Web, too.

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A couple years ago, it seemed that every AI enthusiast was into vector databases.  Now, not so much. What happened? Embeddings. These are similar to vector databases, but they store the results of data trained on a deep learning network.
OpenAI is a vast network of datacenters with embeddings.

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Arson wars. Now the homeless in Portland are setting fires to each others' tents for revenge. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

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Washington's new governor opposes a wealth tax. Guess he saw the light, or something. Yeah, it's not going to produce the revenue they thought it might produce.

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9 January 2025

Nice.  7 planets will align in the sky over the next few weeks.  And in the evening sky, too, which is nice.

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Doctors beware! Medical LLMs are susceptible to data-poisoning attacks. Medical LLMs are especially the one place where we shouldn't tolerate hallucinations or data-poisoning. Yet it seems we do. People are willing to sell their LLM product to healthcare systems as if we've solved all the problems.

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I had great hopes of seeing Comet ATLAS C/2024 G3, which has a peak magnitude of -4.9. Alas, I couldn't see it this morning, and there will be clouds for the rest of the week until it emerges from behind the sun for the southern hemisphere.

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Global Influence Index.  Which parts of the world are influenced more strongly by China vs the U.S.A.

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These videos are fascinating to watch, if only to remind us that enormous wealth can still be fleeting.

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Hard to keep up with so many establishments in downtown Portland closing, but add Afuri to the list.  The reasons: "continued safety perceptions and foot traffic levels that have not returned to pre-pandemic numbers". And likely won't for a very long, long time.

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This is what happens when people use LLMs without getting proper instruction on how to use them. Teachers need formal education on the use of Generative AI.

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