11 March 2025

Age and cognitive skills: Use it or lose it.  We knew about this, but it's nice to get confirmation about it, that it is possible to keep the gray squish working well.

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A breakthrough in the Internet of Things. It is possible to harness energy from the environment. No this isn't just solar power. It's power from other sources "including vibrations from equipment, machinery, and even entire buildings, or from temperature differences between pipes, radiators, valves, and their surrounding environments". Cool.

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Things are happening at the NIH. I can certainly see how people who are grant-dependent are anxious. But in the past, a lot of research funding was going to dubious causes, so I'm glad there's a bit of sanity now in the process. Everyone had to put some kind of DEI spin in their applications. Now, those things will come back to bite them.

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Some detective work in the French Alps links amyotropic lateral sclerosis to the consumption of the false morel mushroom (Gyromitra gigas). That's amazing. The books mainly focus on the nausea and vomiting, but not so much the neurotoxicity.  Certainly not ALS. Well, I don't eat those mushrooms anyway. Interesting that a mushroom with such neurotoxicity would look like a brain.

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How to sleep sitting up. Apparently that's how Tibetan monks sleep, and supposedly the quality of sleep improves. I am not yet convinced of that. I tried this, and I ended up more at a 45° angle. Does that count?

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Stupid.  Washington Democrats will give early release and free rent money for murderers and child rapists, provided they didn't kill more than two victims.  Because you know, more than two murder victims is really unacceptable. What are they smoking there?

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Doom Loop.  Oregon is the 12th unfriendliest state to start a business.  This is why the state will continue to go downhill. Just like the federal government, we are now seeing how much of the economy was just propped up by injected money. Taxing people will go only so far.  And everybody seems to weep for the fired government worker. Yet government policies led to private sector layoffs, and I don't recall any sympathy for those folks.

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Oregon lawmakers want the state to go back to having metrics to evaluate student performance. What for? So that they can be ignored?  We already have standardized tests. Why re-invent the wheel? 

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10 March 2025

Today is Mario Day, according to my son. Mar 10, get it?

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There's truth behind gender stereotypes. I knew it. Stereotypes don't usually form out of nothing. Humans observe and form opinions and develop preferences and bias, which are certainly understandable.

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Here's another ranking of the states, and if not for Oregon's scenic natural beauty, we'd rank at the bottom. Worst in crime, education and economy.

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The City of Portland can't find takes for a $250,000 /year job, because no one wants to move to the city.  The reputation is so bad. This is why we can't hire enough nurses or good doctors, either. Portland is a sh*t city. 

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And speaking of doctors, here's what some states want to compromise to get enough doctors – lower the requirements for foreign doctors to practice here.

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"While the agency concluded that dogs, elk and other animals may contribute to the pollution, the amount of bacteria of human origin was “higher than anticipated” and carries a higher risk of illness, the DEQ said."
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9 March 2025

Oregon is considering two options to prevent the switch to and from Daylight Saving Time. One is to stick with Standard Time. The other is to do whatever California and Washington wants to do. So lame. Do what's right. My prediction is that nothing will happen.

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I like the idea of billing datacenters for the increase use of energy and natural resources, like water. Instead of the consumer.

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No sign of any resolution of the impasse between OHSU and UnitedHealth. So if they can't come with an agreement, OHSU will lose 74,000 patients. This is a strong argument against OHSU and Legacy merging. This is precisely what people are worried about.

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8 March 2025

Congress is finally realizing that they can't continue to cut Medicare reimbursement for doctors, or there won't be enough doctors. But it took a Congressman who is a physician to finally bring it to everyone else's attention. Doctors long lost control over their profession, sadly.

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Medicaid scam. I covered this already, where the state government adds on a hospital providers tax, which they are glad to agree to, because they will get reimbursed from the state, who now qualifies to scam more Medicaid money from the government. It's a scam, and only works if the central government agrees to finance the socialism, and you know how to work the system. This kind of perverse incentive system needs to end, and I'm confident that Trump will finally put an end to this. And why are we listening to Al Green?

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Retirees become college kids again. I love this – it's a win-win. Keeps the mind stimulated and is certainly better than watching TV all day.

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Signals' Meredith Whittaker raises concerns about letting agent AI do all your tasks for you. Yeah, it's different for Tony Stark, because he designed his own system. For the rest of us, we are using a commercial, off-the-shelf software, created by someone else, that probably has other priorities in mind.

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Los Angeles can't account for $2.5 billion given to them to fight homelessness. I would bet that something similar is going on in Oregon and Washington. Nobody cares about responsibility anymore. The reset button needs to be pressed on California.  Oust everyone and start over.

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It's official. The Ritz-Carlton is a failure. But look on the bright side – the City of Portland has places to put the homeless now!

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Portland Street Response now has permission to go just about everywhere – government buildings, libraries and restaurants, to deal with the mentally ill.  What the hell? Who would have thought we would need this crap ten years ago, when we had a normal city?  This is the new normal, and is why Portland is in a Doom Loop.

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7 March 2025

A company called Bolt Graphic made a GPU called Zeus that is supposedly 10X faster than NVIDIA's RTX 5090 GPU. I haven't seen benchmarks, though, Nothing except what Bolt claims. Competition is good!

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A Safeway in north Seattle (CrownHill) tries to protect itself against theft. Instead, it gets into trouble with the city. I don't know why companies want to operate in Seattle anymore. They should get out of the city, and not bother dealing with Democrat policies.

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And here's a nice cartoon summary of how Oregon doesn't need to tax us more. They have the money – they just misspend it.

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Good! Venture Portland, a large enabler of the Homelessness Industrial Complex, might go under. 80% of their money was going to administration, staff, and operational costs, so I say good riddance. They made the homeless problem worse, not better.

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6 March 2025

Still more on the fiasco of Mozilla's new terms of use. I keep hoping for some clarification of misunderstanding that might make me want to go back to using Firefox again, but no dice. They apparently can see what you browse, and will use it however they want.

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Aspirin might prevent tumor metastasis by unblocking T-cell mediated immunity. I wasn't aware aspirin could do that. Thromboxane acts on T cells to trigger an immunosuppressive pathway that is dependent on the guanine exchange factor, ARHGEF1, suppressing T cell receptor-driven kinase signalling, proliferation and effector functions.

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If OHSU and Legacy merges, their foundations will combine and will be the largest "health equity foundation," whatever that is. So naturally agencies and NGOs want a piece of it. Not only that, but they want "to ensure that community members lead the process to determine its governance and mission, not Legacy and OHSU".  Why in hell would OHSU and Legacy agree to just give this money away, especially seeing how poorly these groups have managed their own money. But Oregon's AG may have a say in this matter.

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Yep, Portland is in a doom loop. No question.

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Crazy. Those stranded astronauts were not allowed to return back to earth by Elon Musk because it would help the Trump team, and Biden (or his team) wouldn't have it. So they were political prisoners. I wondered why they weren't screaming to get back, and why they seemed like it was no big deal. Because if they made Biden look bad and if Kamala had won, they would be made low priority forever. Now they can tell the truth because Trump won. This is evil.

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Portland is removing culturally offensive sculptures from Chinatown. I don't go downtown so I didn't see this, but who would think that a statue of an upside-down wok, a duck and a calculator would be something the Chinese community would be proud of?
The first two, in red granite on NW Fourth Avenue at Davis, depict a stainless steel structure atop an off-white stone dais. Caught in the tight grip of one structure is the neck of a small, wacked dragon; on the opposite, only a severed neck protrudes. Below is various “Asian” debris, both patronizing and ignorant, a duck head, a chicken head, a pocket calculator arrayed with an abacus. Other stuff.
Maybe he could have put on some chop suey lettering on, too?

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5 March 2025

Cutting waste in healthcare is hard. This is why I lamented the passage of Obamacare. Once you pass it, government bloat grows, and it's nearly impossible to change the course of this disaster. Like implementing a cemetery – once you inter the bodies in the ground, it's very difficult to plan to use the land for something else. I remember the words of a Democrat strategist who recommended implementing a socialist type of system quickly before the Republicans took over, because once it was in place, it would be too difficult to remove. He was right about that. It will take a very brave leader to reverse our socialistic healthcare system and make it more efficient and less wasteful and promote excellence.

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Google really wants to make it difficult to use uBlock Origin in Chrome. Luckily, I don't use Chroma.

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Why do colleges make people unhappy? Why do you think? The outcome is not stacked in people's favor, most of the time. This is another socialist system that needs to be fixed.

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Democrat solutions to Democrat problems. Kotek supports a bill letting sex offenders skip being registered as sex offenders. 

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Told you so. Portland's downtown Ritz-Carlton may be foreclosing. Bad timing, with COVID, and trying to bet on Portland. We knew something was up when he had the estate sale to raise cash.

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Physicists detect signs of dual time arrows emerging from quantum interactions. So what you're saying is that I have a chance.

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No surprise.  Oregon is involved in grift again, with pop-up NGO shells".  Instant grift devices, fast, convenient, ready to take government money. Is there no end to this?

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Crazy. Now Congress want to let AI prescribe medications. 

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4 March 2025

Regarding the outbreak of Shigellosis dysentery in Portland, ZeroHedge says that 56% were seen in homeless people,  while KGW puts it at 44%. It's not that large of a difference, and I imagine that it would difficult to get precise stats, but what caught my eye was that 46% were in gay men. Ewww!  Portland is such a sick city. There is nothing that would entice me to go there.

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This hero passed away recently. We should celebrate James Harrison. At least as much as some celebrity, or even a celebrity's spouse. Here's to you James!  You were truly a great man. Saving 2 million babies is something I'd be proud of.

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Boy, wouldn't it be neat if this were true.

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The 50 most uneconomical majors to study in.

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For tattoos larger than the palm of a hand, the ink raises risk of non-melanoma skin cancer and lymphoma. The latter had a hazard ratio of 2.73.

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The TCL NXTPAPER 11 Plus is a cool device. Why isn't it getting much publicity?

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Some mRNA can repair DNA damage. Non-coding mRNA of the NEAT1 gene, when highly methylated, helps the cell recognize and repair broken DNA strands more efficiently.  Sometimes non-coding parts of a gene are important. Truly amazing.

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Well, this looks like the beginning of the end of those Lake Oswego lakefront homes. The rabble now can go right up to your house. What fun, given today's propensity for hostile activism. This is a perfect place to post this graphic:

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Portland Public Schools is downsizing their Summer Catch-Up Program. So much for kids' future. Well, fortunately Oregon doesn't care whether you learn anything. You'll see get a diploma. So good luck.

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World's first "Synthetic Biological Intelligence" runs on living human cells. This has been in the news before. Today, it plays Pong, but tomorrow it may do more. 

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Another article about the Mozilla debacle. Mozilla is being run by an ex-Facebook guy. That explains it.

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3 March 2025

DeepSeek was trained on 12,000 live API-keys and passwords. Well, we've seen secrets exposed on the Web by Google.

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The U.S. is going through the same thing Argentina went through when Javier Milei got elected. And now they are flourishing. There were rough times in the beginning, as there are now. But ultimately, this is the best for society.

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Is it premature to cancel Google search? It's definitely premature to cancel search, but you can certainly cancel Google and use something else. The best approach would be to use a hybrid of RAG and search.

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This poor Chinese man. I wonder if he's still with his girlfriend after this.

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2 March 2025

Trust in Mozilla and Firefox is gone. Yeah, a lot of it anway. Here's a comparison table of alternative privacy-focused browsers. I picked LibreWolf as my privacy-focused Gecko-compatible browser. It's taken some time to tweak it to how I wanted, and I now realize how much privacy I was compromising to get access to certain content. Oh well, I guess.

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And here's Google. They don't care what users say about privacy. They'll just put apps on your phone to scan your photos. Unannounced, of course.  Google and Mozilla users sure are different, aren't they?

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Cannabis addiction can destroy lives. Yeah, in medicine, doctors were told that cannabis was less dangerous than alcohol. This led to marijuana being legalized. But man, all the problems that came afterwards...

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Belly fat is different from fat elsewhere in the body. It is more pro-inflammatory, which is why many obese people have chronically elevated white blood cell counts. 
Most adipocytes were fairly "classical" — meaning storing excess energy was their main purpose. But a small proportion of the fat cells were "non-classical," as their RNA suggested they carried out functions not typically associated with fat cells.

Among these cells were "angiogenic adipocytes," which carried proteins usually used to promote blood vessel formation; "immune-related adipocytes," which make proteins related to immune cell functions; and "extracellular matrix adipocytes," which are related to scaffold proteins that help support cells' structures.
We're still discovering new things.

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Senators Merkeley and Wyden want to create a permanent Office of Environmental Justice.  What is environmental justice? Why anything you want it to mean. And for Democrats, it means dollars and federal funding. Yasss......

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Incomes are rising everywhere except Multnomah County.  Doom loop.  And here's the New York Post telling everyone about the city's dysentery problem – another reason not to go to Portland.
Umatilla wants to install a small modular nuclear power installation. I bet Amazon has something to do with it.

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Wow, Oregon legislature was actually contemplating not prosecuting theft of "basic needs items".  They haven't learned from the Measure 110 fiasco and what the Bay Area suffered. How idiotic can that be?

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Women talk a lot more than men, and quite a lot more.  We needed a scientific study for that?

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Cliff Bentz is getting a lot of hate. We're coming to realize how much of Oregon's economic well-being was fake, and dependent on continued flow of federal support. There was so much fat and bloat and money going to support all kinds of poorly-managed efforts. There was a lot of initial pain when Millei instituted measures to trim government waste and fraud, as well, and now the country is better off for it. We're still in that initial phase, and I understand that it is painful for a lot of people. But ultimately it will be to America's benefit. And we have to work to prevent the waste and abuse from building up again.

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Another study showing that gender-affirming surgery, while beneficial in affirming gender identity, is associated with increased risk of mental health issues. There's no justification for this mutilative surgery.

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