10 October 2024

AI can do sentiment analysis on text, and when they read doctors' chart notes, they saw a lot of burnout. When doctors do notes, especially when they know that patients can read them, they often become very terse and use a lot of abbreviations and jargon, contrary to what they are told. Their main priority is not to communicate with patients, but to get the work done, and make sure that it captures all the necessary components to justify the E/M code for billing. Sorry that it sounds like burnout. Maybe it is.

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Air-gapping isn't guaranteed to be safe anymore.  The vulnerability is in the hidden apps on USB drives that get inserted.

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What kind of childhood increases the likelihood of winning the Nobel Prize?  Clearly there are factors that cannot be discounted. Having a wealthy businessman father really improves your odds.

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Ugh. A robotic finger might do your next rectal exam. But at least a human doctor wears clean gloves. Will it work to cover a robotic finger with something similar, or will it have to be uncovered to preserve sensitivity? Then you really have to depend on good sterilization.

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Seattle Children's Hospital is among the nation's top child genital mutilation centers. Remember when we used to condemn genital mutilation when other primitive cultures did it?  Can't wait for this national insanity to pass. No wonder many people don't trust the medical establishment anymore.  How did they buy into this crap?

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There's a lot of press about Comet Tsuchinshan, but not much about Comet ATLAS (C/2024 S1) which looks to be way brighter. And it'll be later this month, around Halloween.

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New report just dropped. The homeless population is definitely on the rise.  Due largely to the Biden-Harris policies.

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Lars Larson nails it on the fraud generated by the motor-voter law in Oregon.  The public had no idea until a Chicago activist group discovered the problem. Now more illegality has been discovered.  But we really don't know how pervasive the problem is.

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9 October 2024

Another AI-based Nobel Prize.  This time in chemistry, for their work on AlphaFold2. Interesting how they divvied up the prize. Half went to David Baker, and the other half split between Dennis Hassbis and John Jumper.
I'm still waiting for the Nobel committee to recognize the LLM and transformer developers. They're really transforming the world.

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Daily Sceptic reports that Pfizer is apparently hiding a very concerning report about myocardial risk that develops after their mRNA vaccine. If you look at Interim Report 5, however, the data are not as alarming as what they make it sound. Here are the most egregious data:
For myocarditis within 21 days, the adjusted HRs were
0.94 (95% CI: 0.46, 1.94) in NHR,
1.23 (95% CI: 0.13, 11.84) in PHARMO,
3.64 (95% CI: 0.41, 32.53) in EpiChron,
1.05 (95% CI: 0.35, 3.16) in SIDIAP,
2.30 (95% CI: 0.94, 5.66) in CPRD Aurum.

For acute cardiovascular injury the adjusted HRs were
1.38 (95% CI: 0.73, 2.61) in Pedianet,
1.01 (95% CI: 0.99, 1.04) in NHR,
1.38 (95% CI: 1.31, 1.45) in PHARMO,
1.10 (95% CI: 1.03, 1.18) in EpiChron,
0.99 (95% CI: 0.96, 1.03) in SIDIAP,
1.23 (95% CI: 1.18, 1.27) in CPRD Aurum.

For arrhythmia the adjusted HRs were
1.75 (95% CI: 0.88, 3.49) in Pedianet,
1.03 (95% CI: 1, 1.05) in NHR,
1.36 (95% CI: 1.29, 1.44) in PHARMO,
1.12 (95% CI: 1.04, 1.21) in EpiChron,
0.99 (95% CI: 0.96, 1.03) in SIDIAP,
1.27 (95% CI: 1.21, 1.33) in CPRD Aurum.
HR is the hazard ratio and the 95% CI is the confidence interval.  For myocarditis, and cardiovascular injury, although the hazard ratios are greater than 1.0 in several cases, the confidence interval is wide, and the lower value is less than 1, so the values don't reach statistical significance. However, for arrythmias, the confidence values are nearly all greater than 1. So this deserves follow-up.

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HOB thinks Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto.  The claim seems to be just based on a thread in a discussion board where they think Peter forgot to cloak his identity in a post. Seems weak to me. I'm really amazed that Satoshi has managed to keep his/her identity safe all these years.

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Oregon in the news again. The number of illegal aliens registered to vote is greater than 1500. The election system is so corrupted, and yet Oregon doesn't want to just go back to paper ballots filled out in-person again. Where you get the results the same day. Much harder to cheat that way.

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Oregon prescribed more puberty-blockers than the California. 613% more per capita. Holy crap. And "the majority of those charges came from two facilities: Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Facility and Legacy Emanuel Medical Center."

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Must see video on climate change.  Interesting theory, that's it's warming that has increased CO2 levels, not the other way around.


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8 October 2024

Someone found unseen Thunderbirds film footage in a garden shed.  I watched Thunderbirds as a kid, and would love to see newer episodes. FAB!

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What happens to medical debt when a hospital is acquired by private equity? See for yourself in this interactive infographic.

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Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work in pioneering neural networks.  That's fine, but there should be a prize for the Attention is all you need team.  They transformed the world, too.  Hinton is to the Internet like Transformers are to the World Wide Web. Come to think of it, why hasn't Tim Berners-Lee gotten the Nobel Prize?

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Face Poke.  This is fun to play around with. 

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Cannabidiol (CBD) can cause liver injury.

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With the Chagos Islands being handed over to Mauritanius, there goes the beloved .io to-level domain.  I never liked it, because you couldn't mask your registration.  But it was a favorite of geeks. 

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OpenAI's o1 model is apparently pretty impressive.  I've used the preview version, and it is indeed pretty good, sometimes finding code solutions were Claude 3.5 Sonnet threw up its hands.

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Why is the Philippines still poor?


Contrast with the approach taken by Singapore. Make note that in Singapore, not just anyone can run for political office. You must be excellent.  In the Philippines, you just need to be well-known, and you will be voted in again, over and over.  This is much like what's going on in Hawaii, and to some extent Oregon and California.  We have term limits on the Presidency, but not so in other elections, and I think we should.  You can't trust voters to be smart enough to know. 

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7 October 2024

Starlink connects to cell phones, agnostic to platform. This is even better than Iridium phones, because there are more Starlink satellites than Iridium satellites.  Even more than the GlobalStar satellites that Apple iPhones use.

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Why would anyone want to buy a Google phone? It tracks your movements every 15 minutes even if you have GPS tracking disabled. It's like those crosswalk buttons – they don't actually do anything; just a button you can push. And it constantly checks to see if it can download new assets. What a security nightmare!

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6 October 2024

How well are solar panels recycled? The sad answer is: not very well at all.  Very few get recycled.  The rest go into a landfill. And they don't last 30 years, like they're supposed to. Because that's just the theoretical lifespan.

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Hurricane Helene damage is going to be very long-lasting. And the government under Biden-Harris is strangely doing very little to help. In fact, they are hampering private efforts, instead of working side by side. Something sinister is afoot.

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23 and Me seems to be in a bind. They want to ensure customer privacy, but the value of the company is in that data. Without it, no one is interested, and the company will have to shut down.

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I've never heard of the Warburg Institute.  Sounds like a fascinating place, where you would expect to find a copy of the Necronomicon, De Vermis Mysteriis, Cultes des Goules, the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Unaussprechlichen Kulten.

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5 October 2024

Drug overedose deaths are increasing in Oregon, despite decreasing in most other states.  Thanks to M110. What was that term people were using? Oh yeah – "harm reduction".

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Lung cancer patients live about 50% longer after treatment with amivantinib and lazertinib.  This is only in EGFR-mutated lung cancer, which has relapsed after prior treatment with osimertinib. Only a minority of patients fall in this category, but for those that do, this is a good option to have.

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Another wrinkle in the OHSU-Legacy deal. I knew that the vast majority of OHSU workers were unionized, but didn't realize that only about 22% of Legacy workers were. OHSU made a secret deal with unions, and now Legacy workers are finding out about it after the fact. How's that for transparency?

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The moon might have a viscous liquid core. I love that they call it "unexpected movement". I was thinking it might be something else.

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It's now harder to track executive jets. Nike added its jets to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed list. I'd bet Elon Musk's planes are on that list.

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A new molecule called LaKe mimics the effects of exercise and fasting by boosting lactate and ketones. It's only been tested on rats so far, though.

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As marijuana use increases so do problems associated with its use. As I've been saying, the marijuana that legislators envisioned they were legalizing is not what's out there now.

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A Nordic-based engine developed in conjunction with Volvo is using biogas, and supposedly spews less CO2.  Details are scant, but it seems to be a step in the right direction.

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Seattle's Grand Illusion movie theater is closing. Ah, fond memories. All good things must come to an end eventually, I suppose.

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4 October 2024

Glassholes again. Now Meta has their own version of Google Glass, and concerns about security/privacy dangers arise once more.

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Glucose in the brain is necessary to have, but it can suppress activity of older neurons.  The key gene is Slc2a4, which codes for the glucose transporter protein GLUT4. But promoting growth of older neurons is more complicated than just decreasing glucose intake, as the article suggests. But at least this discovery is hypothesis-generating.

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The huge toll on PhDs. It's the pressure to publish. Finding jobs. Especially when all around you, folks are starting families and having comfortable lifestyles. It can be tough being an academic.

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So, will we finally find out who Satoshi Nakamoto is?  I'm skeptical. Satoshi has proven that he's not dumb. (And I hate the trend of modern journalists to use they/them as a singular pronoun. It's not. Stop it.

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3 October 2024

It's been over a year – we finally have an answer.  Downed active power lines were felt to be responsible for the Lahaina fire.  Auwe.

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There may be a way to prevent runaway thermal lithium battery fires. Still, it's not going to help one at home when one of these fires starts. Are you prepared to deal with a lithium ion or lithium polymer battery fire? Ordinary extinguishers may not work – lithium ion fires need a Class B extinguisher. Some say just let these fires burn out since they tend to be short-lived, but the fumes can be toxic.

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Oregon doesn't have enough doctors and nurses. But in Oregon, these professionals can't cross state lines to work.
The source of his frustration: lawmakers’ refusal to join what are known as “interstate licensing compacts.”  ...at least 40 states are members of these physicians and nurses compacts. But not Oregon.
Why not? An Oregon Medical Board spokesperson did not directly answer the question. But leadership has been largely critical. “We have been actively engaged in discussions about the compact, and remain concerned for patient safety,” said the board’s executive director, Nicole Krishnaswami. “When a person is licensed through the compact, we are not able to review their criminal history.”
So we get all kinds of unvetted illegals in our state. But doctors and nurses are under greater scrutiny because they might be criminals. Forty-plus states have solved the problem, and I don't see any issues. But not Oregon.

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Here comes more inflation.  A federal judge removes roadblock to let student loans be discharged to the rest of us to pay off.  Unfair!

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Dismantling Google is a terrible idea. If you are a shareholder, I guess. Google has becoming a company to be feared. They have so much data on everyone.

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Elevated plasma markers related to neuronal damage and accumulation of phosphorylated tau suggest the presence of ongoing neuropathology in the chronic phase following a single moderate–severe TBI. Plasma biomarkers were associated with measures of microstructural brain disruption on MRI and disordered cognition, further highlighting their utility as potential objective tools to monitor evolving neuropathology post-TBI.
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The moon's orbit is weird. This video will change how you look at the moon.

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2 October 2024

So much to unpack in this article. They gave a group of doctors clinical vignettes as a diagnostic challenge and half the group was allowed to access GPT-4 for help.  How did they fare? Here are the score:

Doctors w/o GPT-4:  73.7%
Doctors with GPT-4: 76.3%
but GPT-4 alone: 92.1% grimacing

Not looking good for human doctors.  It was a timed test, so maybe some anxiety caused wrong answers, but the control group was allowed all their usual online resources except an LLM.  The study says that the doctors were selected from various institutions, but didn't disclose where.  First, machine learning models are great when you present them with nicely packaged clinical vignettes. The trick is to tease out the salient elements. But secondly, that doesn't exonerate the human doctors: they deliberately chose to ignore the right diagnosis in favor of something else. This dispels the notion that AI can help clinicians be better doctors.
Thirdly, it foreshadows the future of medicine – that diagnosticians will be replaced by human nurses who are paid to create clinical vignettes for a model to parse. Real geniuses will go into research and industry, and eschew clinical medicine, also largely because it will pay far less than their earning potential.

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Yikes!  Taking the mRNA vax product wipes out the long-lived plasma cells from the bone marrow.  This explains why the vaccinated tend to get COVID-19 over and over again. What a mistake it was to get it.

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The artist that won an art contest with an AI-generated creation based on other people's work is now upset because his own work is being copied by AI.  He scorned detractors when he won the contest, but he's not so relaxed about morals now that tables have turned.

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HaLow WiFi has a range of 9.9 miles away. That's an improvement. My next question: how safe is it? Will I be able to have children?

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A casualty of Hurricane Helene.  
Spruce Pine is one of the only places in the world to mine high-purity quartz.The mineral is an essential ingredient of chips in countless products, including medical devices, solar panels, cellphones and the chips powering the latest tech craze: artificial intelligence. A few weeks of shutdown is not the end of the world, Conway tells Axios. However, longer than that could put the industry into "another crisis." The semiconductor industry would need to find alternatives.
Yikes.

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Do Canadians lack ambition? The president of Shopify thinks so.

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1 October 2024

This is not good.  More than ever, Americans are reliant on government aid. We are on the path to communism.
And Oregon continues to lead in the West in the proportion of people dependent on SNAP for food.

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Loneliness has been blamed for several diseases. Now, more recent research suggests it might not be true. That's good I guess.

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New vaccines could prevent tumors before they form. This is for those with Lynch Syndrome, which is not a rare condition. It's known that checkpoint inhibitors work on tumors that arise in these people. So it makes sense to stimulate immunity to key antigens. I still wish they used a different platform than mRNA vaccines, though. Or at least have them developed by companies that have better transparency and quality control standards.

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This is a great idea. So much of critical software depends on open source code.  Why not pay developers of these important components we all depend on?

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