Sugoi & Yokunai

Gotta see this. Washington's election system is just screwed up. And in Vancouver, they don't know what to do.

Mail-in balloting is the source of so much disaster and confusion. It needs to be scrapped. 

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Someone thinks Multnomah County shouldn't be advertising that they're almost out of jail space. Well, it doesn't matter – Mike Schmidt is still in charge.

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Portland is getting ready for Antifa action. Isn't it weird – how we just accept that we have to plyboard the city whenever something happens? Nobody blinks an eye. It's just life now. Like we don't care that graffiti and trash are everywhere. It's the enshittification of Portland, and the problem is that it's not staying in the city. Real feel sorry for the shops downtown.

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PMS is real!  Scientist have found structural, brain-wide changes during menstruation. No surprises here.

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The Golden Bachlorette?  This the first I'm hearing about a bachlorette-type show for older folks. Making new friends does get harder at the far end of the age scale, too.

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Even AI résumé screener favor white males. Hey, when you optimize that loss function, you can't ignore the important covariates.

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Why is ancient Roman concrete so strong? It's the lime.

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Comet Tsuchinshan is no more. It disintegrated several hours ago. Oh well, I got to see it. Did you?

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Oregon is indeed a crucible for stupid out-of-state ideas. Dangle money in front our Democrat legislators and they'll do your bidding. There's Florida Man. And then there's Oregon Man.

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Now that's a tiny frog.

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Five geek social fallacies. Yeah, young geeks have a simplistic view of the world. Geeky friends are hard to come by, and it's totally understandable to have a modified sense of what should be. The world isn't like fantasy stories, with alliances that make sense.

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Multnomah County jail is almost full. So now what?  I don't see crime going down at all.

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This is why the government should get out of managing health insurance. What a waste of money. And no one gets fired for this incompetence.

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Jeff Bezos is experiencing the extinction burst. Don't give in Jeff. Eventually the crazy lefties will quiet down, once their behavior is no longer rewarded. But society has let them get their way for so long.

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Hmmm. Korean scientists develop a material that can absorb 99% of ambient electromagnetic waves. It would be useful for shielding to allow for less bulky Faraday cages.

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I remember one of my teachers telling me that static electricity wouldn't ever be used as a power source. Guess that person was wrong. Now static electricity apparently can be used to power air conditioners.

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Nobody wants to move to Oregon. The latest figures show that Oregon now ranks 45th in the nation ranked by in-migration. Plummeted, as they say.

What's interesting is that the number of households making >$200,000 has increased. Bet they're teachers and government officials.

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Wow, this is great.

Download GamePlan.mp4

Lefties self-silencing and supporting the Second Amendment. As if we needed another reason...

And Silicon Valley seems to be turning away from the deranged Left. Look at this, from Financial Times, usually a left-learning publication:

More cognitive benefit is derived from bursts of exercise than continuous low-level expenditure. So cycling might be better than just going for a walk.  Makes sense, since exercise promotes BDNF expression.

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Someone found a long-lost Chopin waltz.  Take a listen (played by Lang Lang):

Yes, there is a shortage of doctors. Florida is easing up on requirements for foreign doctors. Will doctor quality matter, once we have sufficiently good LLMs?  (Just kidding.)

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The science was not settled. Looks like plants soak up 30% more CO2 that previously thought. Plus, Berkeley scientists have found an organic material that can soak up CO2.  So can we keep our cars and gas stoves? Sheesh.

Update: 10 October 2024.  Oceans now soak up 7% more CO2 than previous thought.  So quick, re-do those calculations!

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Annoyed Redditors try to screw up search results and AI scraping.  This is another sign of how things may start out great, but start to enshittify once you offer it to the public at large.

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Another reason why mail-in voting is a bad idea. What are they going to do about all those burned votes now? Looks like some people got disenfranchised, doesn't it?

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Sabine Hossenfelder reveals what modern academics is all about. It's all about money and preserving the status quo. Just like the government. Research must be tailored to the narrative to keep the money flowing. We saw that with COVID-19. It's a wonder we still see occasional research breakthroughs.

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Hospital voice dictation systems powered by OpenAI's Whisper engine hallucinate. It happens in 1.4% of dictations. This is much too high, especially as some exhibit racist or inappropriate content.

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Someone tell Tina Kotek.  Hottest executive trend now? Bring back the White Guy.  Yeah, the diversity experiment failed. Let's admit it and go back to what worked.

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Hidden disaster. WordPress-based websites account for 40% of the world's websites. There is an ugly dispute going on between WordPress.com and WordPress.org and because of this, important functionality in WordPress was recently turned off, in a fit of pique. They're going to court. Looks like someone one would rather see the world burn.  Here's some background.

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KIBRA anchoring the action of PKMζ maintains the persistence of memory.  Short-lived molecules are responsible for making memories last. Fascinating story.

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I read this and was startled that Shaken Baby Syndrome has been discredited. I was also surprised to read that "Accidents result in more severe intracranial pathologies than shaking, aligning with biomechanical studies that have shown that impact exerts greater force on the brain than violent shaking." Wow. So maybe some of the accused were innocent?

––– 凄い –––I saw this article about why we are so badly governed.  It postulates:

Government and non-profits do not select for managers with the ability to deliver results. They select for people who are good at playing the game of status and power within an organization.

Well, it turns out maybe we don't know who is even governing us.  We certainly haven't had a president for the past several months, and no one seems to care.  This is why Trump is feared. He will actually be a real president. Not the phony government we have now, and some are afraid they will lose their hidden power.  The clues have been before us all, and we just haven't been paying attention.

GPNMB again!  This protein has been important player in anti-cancer immune responses, and now it may help repair cardiac muscle.  Actually, it has been known to be involved in tissue repair, so this may not be surprising to some.

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I don't understand the degree of money that it being poured into Ranked Choice Voting support, except that its supporters know how it can dethrone those with the greatest support by building up votes from the bottom by sequential accumulation. The loony bin candidates may drop out, but their votes are preserved and assigned to the next worst loony bin candidate until someone wins. That's now how it should be done. The winner is almost always someone you didn't expect to win. I guess that's by design.

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Is the AI bubble worse than the dotcom bubble? I don't think so, but I agree that many people expect it to deliver more than it's capable of doing. It will deflate some, but people will still need nuclear power, GPUs for crypto and AI models, which aren't going to go away. NVIDIA is now the world's most valuable company.

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I knew it. I was surprised when Dr. Nate Selden was going to be offered a 3 year position as OHSU's new president. Sure enough, Tina Kotek wants to pause this. It's no surprise that she's not satisfied with a cis-hetero while male.  She wants a national search, probably looking for a minority female. But OHSU needs a credible leader now, not some DEI candidate. The Legacy merger is starting to fall apart and needs a capable hand at the wheel. What makes her think that a capable person will appear, and want to move to a wacko place like Oregon has become, and take the reins?

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Portland will start 2025 with hefty budget cuts.  Tax base declining as people move out and business close. And wait till Antifa destroys the city when Trump is elected.  Apple, Starbucks, downtown businesses – you might want to start purchasing plywood now.

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There's a new way of removing frontal lobe tumors without having to create that signature curvilinear scar right above the forehead.  The tumor is removed through the eyebrow.  This is a game-changer.

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Danny Jacobs has resigned from OHSU.  Nate Selden will be the new OHSU President. With Wayne Monfries no longer being OHSU Board chair, Jacobs lost his main support. Well, now OHSU can get back on track being a center for medical research excellence, instead of being an "anti-racist" organization, whatever that means. I remember when Jacobs came on board in 2018, and for the first time, OHSU employees found out that they had "unconscious bias" and needed to be rid of this affliction. Wow, all these years and no one realized this before. Soon, OHSU embodied all that is wrong with the Democrat Party, from DEI training to offering gender-mutilative surgery and abortion-on-demand, since Oregon has no term restrictions.

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Cool, OHSU did manage to show the brain's glymphatic system, apparently for the first time.

––– 凄い ––– More evidence that universal basic income does more harm than good.  After people got $1000 /month for three years:

The transfer caused total individual income to fall by about $1,500/year relative to the control group, excluding the transfers. The program resulted in a 2.0 percentage point decrease in labor market participation for participants and a 1.3-1.4 hour per week reduction in labor hours, with participants’ partners reducing their hours worked by a comparable amount. The transfer generated the largest increases in time spent on leisure, as well as smaller increases in time spent in other activities such as transportation and finances. Despite asking detailed questions about amenities, we find no impact on quality of employment, and our confidence intervals can rule out even small improvements. We observe no significant effects on investments in human capital, though younger participants may pursue more formal education. Overall, our results suggest a moderate labor supply effect that does not appear offset by other productive activities.

Wells Fargo is pulling out of Portland, Hillsboro and Salem. There go the jobs, the tax base. Up go the unemployment claims. How much more of this can Oregon withstand?

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Can't believe they built this. A rocket launcher aims to get rockets into space without propulsion, and instead will fling them into space with a giant sling.

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This is a cool way to link to specific text, using a new HTML feature called text fragments.

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Well that's good to know.  Chinese quantum computers haven't actually cracked military encryption. And likely not financial system encryption as well.

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Also good to know. A physicist shows that it's better to run out of the rain than walk. Good thing we have physics, eh?

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Ever since Peter Todd was unmasked as Satoshi Nakamoto, he's been in hiding. He denies it, and people should just leave him alone.

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We saw yesterday that anyone can just print a Washington ballot online. So the GOP is suing. Turns out Oregon has something similar. There seems to be so much potential for cheating during this election. Because the Dems are determined not to let Donald Trump win, even if he gets the votes.

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This person thinks that coding using AI-assistance will make you a bad coder. I'm not so sure. I use it to help interpret jupyter Lab's cryptic error messages. Most coders use Google and Stack Exchange anyway, so why not cut to the chase and get the answer quickly? I have learned a lot from seeing what Claude 3.5 Sonnet recommends. If I don't agree, I challenge it, and it provides alternate code. But you have to know the basics, or else it's just mindless copying.

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Here's another paper suggesting that we take another look at the potential harms from mobile phone radiation.

Wallet Hub ranked states by how much employers are struggling to find employees to hire. They looked at the number of job openings, and the worst was California, then Hawaii, then Washington. Oregon was ranked #21, just above the middle, which surprised me.  Why aren't there many job openings? Maybe because labor is too expensive.

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Denny's plans to close 150 locations.  Locations weren't disclosed but some could be in Oregon. All that lost tax base. More to apply for unemployment benefits.  Yep, it's that lousy economy again.

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WikiCrow is great resource for looking up technical information about various genes.

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Grrrr.  A study showed that puberty blockers don't really improve the mental health of kids with "gender distress" as the activists believed. But publication was withheld because "it might be weaponized by opponents of the care."  What??  Shouldn't the public know?  So kids have continued to be injected by potentially harmful and completely unnecessary drugs.  And to reveal the truth is weaponization? Woke science needs to be overhauled.

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In the interest of studying the consequences of cardiac arrest, Chinese researchers were successfully able to revive pig brains that suffered cardiac arrest and hypoxia for up to 50 minutes, but only if the liver remained intact.  The presence of hepatic ischemia meant that the brains were not recoverable. So the question is: what is the providing to the brain, or what is it detoxifying? And I finally know why they call it the liver.

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Everyone wants to strike!  It looks like hospitalists at Prov St Vincents Med Center may strike.  Doctors at the outpatient Women's Clinic may strike, too. This looks like something Providence could weather. Providence will probably hire someone from across the river to pinch hit for a day. No big deal. Pay that person enough and there will be takers. This is what happens when doctors became employees. It's not like the old days, when they had professional status and power. Now, they are just sheep.

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Great article on solar energy.  The case for solar is broken down into simple terms that everyone should be able to understand. It really all comes down to batteries, and how power utilities are forced to shoulder the burden of expensive battery storage. Every solar customer needs to have regular power available, as my neighbor realized during the last winter storm, when there wasn't enough sun to power anything. I was wondering why there aren't a lot of solar panels on roofs in Bend, Oregon, where there is a lot more sun than in Portland. The situation reminds me of California, which faces drought situations quite often, yet when there is heavy snow or rain, much of that is wasted, and just goes down the rivers to the ocean, and very little is saved in reservoirs.

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LongCOVID is related to brain injury. You can see it with 7 Tesla MRI scanners.  In another study, brainstem damage was assessed with immunological markers for SARS-CoV2 nucleoprotein (not just spike protein) so this is injury related to the virus, not the vaccine.

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Actions have consequences. Very likely due to Newsom's battle against oil companies, Chevron is moving out of California and Phillips 66 is shutting down a refinery in Los Angeles.  All those lost jobs. Pity. Nice going, Gavin. 

Another one bites the dust.  Shari's Pies is closing all restaurants. They started in 1978 and were still going strong just 7 years ago. And apparently this is going to majorly affect Oregon Lottery sales as well.  Lots of moving parts.

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Ridiculous.  Insuring a teenager's car has gotten really expensive.

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And right on schedule, Antifa plans to tear Portland down on November 5. They openly announce what they are going to do, since they know they have impunity.  I really feel bad for businesses downtown, especially Starbucks and Apple. You know they will see damage. Wonder when insurance companies will just stop insuring Portland.

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