13 November 2025

This is a shocker. This German study showed that 

This implies that roughly only one in seven German individuals with a PCR-positive test later had detectable IgG antibodies, that is, was actually infected with SARS-CoV-2.

The IgG results observed and published by ALM have not been acknowledged or communicated by the RKI to date, despite the fact that transparency in reporting such data should be mandatory, both scientifically and in terms of public accountability. Second, the proportion of the German population with a detectable immune response to SARS-CoV-2 was already substantial by the end of 2020. Approximately one-quarter of the population carried IgG antibodies at that point, following a trajectory determined almost exclusively by natural infections. By the end of 2021, practically the whole German population could be considered IgG positive.
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I've noticed this. As you are falling asleep, there is a tipping point. When I've closed my eyes, I sometimes feel a sense of "here it comes" when I know that sleep is coming on. Lucid dreamers probably experience this, too.

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DNA sequencers now need to take into account all the non-standard nucleotides. Machine learning to the rescue!

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So this is what Yann LeCun left Meta for. Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun are independently seeking to produce world-models. Li's World Labs has produced Marble AI. It might be good for gaming, and if you were into creating an alternative universe experience. Is this the new trend? Web 3.0 was supposed to be something like this, but that fizzled. LeCun's model might have medical applications, perhaps in psychiatry.

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Three days ago, I mentioned how Portland City Council was figuring out if their limited money should go to cleaning up the homeless mess everywhere in the city, or giving housing and food assistance to refugees (probably illegal aliens). Angelio Morillo voted to support the refugees. Well of course, Keith Wilson are other city council members are upset and don't want $4.3 million cut from the homeless cleanup fund. Either way, this is throwing good money after bad, as the underlying problems will still be there. Homeless trashing the city, and "refugees" clamoring for food and shelter. Blue city problems.

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Yes! Getting rid of 340B pricing will level the playing field between hospitals and private doctors clinics. This program ballooned under Obamacare, and the original intent became abused to the great benefit of hospitals.  This is another example of how when the government gets involved in something and skews market forces to the benefit of a favored party, unforeseen consequences benefit those who are able to take advantage. Instead of just being able to help the poor, hospitals were able to become very rich.

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Well, it won't happen in Seattle, I guess.

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12 November 2025

Why can't Wikipedia explain math. Really. It's not just me.

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I agree with this: the decline of AI will not be a crash. It will be a burn, like the dotcom era. There's so much scrum, right now. Time for the fluff to burn off, and leave the strong entities standing. Yeah, it'll be painful, but ultimately, healthy.

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Venting doesn't reduce anger. I never thought it did. Only calming maneuvers do.

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Datacenters are hoarding up SSD drives. I still see them on the shelves at Apple stores, though. Probably talking about a different thing, no doubt.

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Here's something scary. People can be identified based on the way WiFi signals reflect off them. When you think about it, it's just a photon of another wavelength, so why not? But WiFi is ubiquitous and invisible. You'd never know. Bet Palantir is working on this. 

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How's this for hypocrisy? 
In northern Brazil, near the city of Belém, a strip of rainforest about eight miles long was cleared to build a four-lane highway in advance of the COP30 climate summit that began on Monday. The highway, dubbed Avenida Liberdade, is intended to handle the surge of delegates and dignitaries expected for the gathering.
...Critics are pointing out the blatant irony of cutting down a protected rainforest for a climate conference that is itself aimed, among other things, at halting deforestation.
“They ripped the hell out of the Rainforest of Brazil to build a four-lane highway for Environmentalists to travel.
Gavin Newsom will be there.
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Scientists at Stanford feel that lupus may be caused by the Epstein-Barr virus. Great. It's about time we found out.

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There's a FOSS alternative to Mathematica, called SageMath. It's not as polished as Mathematica. MatLab from MathWorks is another alternative.

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I missed this from last October, but GLP-1 agonists really lower colon cancer mortality. Lowering 5 year mortality from 37.1% to 15.5% is not shabby. Is something being done to build on these results?

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Look at these mysterious holes in the Andes Mountains. What were they? I don't buy the marketplace theory. These are too regular and too long to be the site of a marketplace. It's got to be something else.

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Portland is proof that socialism is destroying American cities.  Seattle, too. New York City will find out very soon.

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Don't ask. How attractive is Portland to real estate investors?

Are you paying attention, NYC?
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11 November 2025

FDA Strips Health Risk Warnings from Menopause Hormone Therapy. Boy, this issue is more nuanced. The real risk for breast cancer was the simultaneous use of estrogen and progesterone together, as in PremPro. The risk is lower with estrogen alone as it is more of a tumor promoter than a carcinogen. But there is still the risk of endometrial cancer. But it's nice that the FDA is reviewing the recommendation, as it should be doing. Long overdue. 

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The FBI wants to know who is running the archive.is website. I didn't realize it was a secret.

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This is funny. 60 Minutes had an episode where this Harvard breast cancer researcher is upset because her funding is cutoff, and the segment makes it seem like her research is absolutely vital and critical to breast cancer work. A colleague puts it into perspective:

It's refreshing to see such honesty.
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Who knew that blocking the thyroid receptor β would slow prostate cancer growth? "NH-3 produced dose-dependent tumor growth inhibition, reaching about 80 percent at 3 mg/kg with no overt toxicity in body weight or organ histology. Oral dosing was effective too." Sounds like a winner.

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Can Intel produce AI chips for Tesla at 10% of the cost of nVIDIA? That's what some are saying. We shall see.

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South Korean scientists think that the expansion of the universe is slowing down, contrary to the orthodoxy. Wonder what Sabine Hossenfelder thinks of this.

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Seattle's mayoral election has counted long enough so that Katie Wilson is now ahead. Now the Supreme Court is going to weigh in on whether counting ballots after election day is legal. It might end up being just for federal elections, though. Seattle will be Mamdani-doomed if Wilson wins. 

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The head of Tesla's Cybertruck program, Siddhant Awasthi, is departing. Leaving behind kind of mixed legacy.

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Japanese scientists can turn body fat into bone, that can be used to heal fractures, such as in the spine. This would be great for kyphoplasties and vertebroplasties.

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This is why I'm wary of AI. When a shipping company sends a tracking code to your iPhone, Apple will snatch that code and put it into the URL https://trackingshipment.apple.com/... that it wants you to click. Now they have a record of what you purchased. Creepy.

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Puter.js. Could this be the missing link between developing for AI and developing for the Web that I've been waiting for? That was simpler than using Vercel and more robust than using Gradio, and didn't resort to using Huggingface Spaces?

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Meta's Yann LeCun is leaving to start a startup. Seems like a lot of good people are leaving Meta. What does it mean? 

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Are anxiety and associated disorders tied to low brain levels of choline? Seems like something that would have been noticed long ago. And I doubt that anxiety can be ameliorated by increasing one's choline intake. What if lowered levels of choline was the brain's response to increased anxiety, rather than the cause? Are we fueling something we shouldn't be?

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How long is your oral presentation? Now you don't have to guess. You might be able to make fairly good estimates with this tool, Words to Time.

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10 November 2025

The PCSK9 inhibitor, enlicitide, is now available in oral form. Previous means of inhibiting PCSK9 involved infusions of an antibody, either evolocumab or alirocumab, given every 2 weeks. Now, treatment is much more convenient.

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Nevada is suing TikTok for addiction. This would be a first.

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Apple is planning to hide the camera under the glass in next year's iPhone. On a side note, Apple can't keep secrets anymore, it seems.

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Two articles: Elon Musk talks about Universal Basic Income and What does Elon Musk do with his extreme wealth?  Life would be quite different. 

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Could the cause of colon cancer in the young be due to colibactin toxin?  It was discovered in 2006 and is suspected as the culprit, as colibactin-linked mutations in A/T-rich motifs are characteristic.  Toxin exposure may have taken place in the young. The bacteria is produced by E coli, but how to decrease this risk factor is not clear. It seems like we need to start testing stool for colibactin presence and take appropriate preventive and surveillance measures. 10% of new cases of colon cancer and 20% of rectal cancers are now occurring in people younger than 50 years now. 

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9 November 2025

Trump proposes radical healthcare shake-up that would bypass insurers and hand cash directly to millions of Americans. No, this is not the way. The government is still there being a deep pocket. This does not encourage healthy market competition for excellence. There is another way.

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Free math books. No excuses now, Ramanujans-in-training.

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What's going on? Americans are getting shorter. 

Not only that, but Americans younger than 40 are facing progressive cognitive decline.

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The findings suggest that intensive meditation can trigger very similar brain activity to that which has been previously documented with psychedelic substances. 

“We're seeing the same mystical experiences and neural connectivity patterns that typically require psilocybin, now achieved through meditation practice alone,” added Patel. “Seeing both central nervous system changes in brain scans and systemic changes in blood chemistry underscores that these mind-body practices are acting on a whole-body scale.”
Interesting.

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PDFs will now incorporate the JPEG XL spec. Lots of advantages as this video will show.

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AI isn't replacing jobs. AI spending is. Could be true. One does get the sense that the CEOs aren't really sure what to do.

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Dems vs Dems.  This is so funny. Keith Wilson wants to use Portland's money to build more homeless shelters. Council member Angelita Morillo wants to use that money to protect "refugees" (wink-wink). Homeless shelters? Or "refugees"?  One way or another, Portland is doomed.

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8 November 2025

Urolithin A supplements rejuvenated the aging immune system in just 28 days. It's rare to see a clinical trial demonstrate something like this, instead of just in vitro or in mice/rats. I don't usually link those articles. But here, it was shown that in a healthy middle-aged cohort, urolithin A supplementation expanded the CD8+ lymphocyte population, enhanced mitochondrial biogenesis, and modulated inflammatory pathways towards a more youthful profile. Paper here.  

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This is indeed a very elegant proof of the infinitude of primes. I asked Claude Sonnet to explain the proof.

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Is Sam Altman "desperate"? I don't get that sense. But even he has to know that distrust is building up, and it's going to have to be proof time fairly soon. There needs to be more than just promises. Most of us have had experiences with LLMs to know that they don't really understand things, and that they can hallucinate pretty convincingly.

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Oregon lawmakers quietly hire their family members with taxpayer money — and little oversight. It goes all the way up to the top with Tina Kotek and her wife. Nice grift you got there.

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Watch where you eat in Seattle. The food cart vendors may be unlicensed. Caveat emptor.

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A Morrow county solar project is doomed. The company that is behind it, Pine Gate Renewables, has filed Chapter 11. Renewable energy requires government subsidies to survive, and this is becoming less certain. Germany is learning that lesson with hydrogen.

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7 November 2025

This report has been on the news, claiming that the mRNA vax was associated with less inflammatory complications than getting COVID-19 itself in those younger than 18.  Paper here. Is that really true? Let's dive in.

First of all, I noticed that the study population was from the cohort 1/01/2020 to 12/31/2022. While the vaccination cohort was from 8/06/2021 - 12/31/2022.  The latter period was when the original dangerous strain was largely gone and we were starting to see the milder omicron strain. So already, the vaccinated group consisted of those who were infected by milder disease than the "non-vaccinated group".  They recognized this, and tried to introduce adjustments that they thought would compensate for this. They should have just studied both from the same time period. 

The second thing, is look at the raw numbers:

Really not a whole lot of difference between the two populations. The highest difference is in Kawasaki disease, which is not even connected to COVID-19.  For myocarditis and pericarditis there was LESS incidence with COVID than with the vaccine!  The reason they included Kawasaki disease is because they thought that some cases of heart inflammation might not be counted as COVID but as Kawasaki, so they didn't want to miss the diagnosis – so they threw it in and counted it!  

So it would seem that there is no big difference whether you got the vax or not. But then they did something questionable (to me). They based it on the observation that when you got sick with COVID you were mildly ill but there were a more drawn out period of events. Whereas if you got the vax, you got really sick in the beginning, but afterwards there were very few events. 
So they make calculations of what they called aHR (adjusted hazard ratios) and found that the risk of getting some complication was higher in non-vaccinated than vaccinated, just because the vaccinated got all their bad events at the beginning. 

The main conclusion is based on this figure:

where you can see that the main disadvantage of getting sick with the virus was just in the inflammatory conditions, but most of these children had Kawasaki disease. I haven't heard anyone saying that the vax prevents Kawasaki disease in children, so I would attribute this to a difference in how this diagnosis was made.
These are calculated 6-month absolute excess risk, and makes the vaxxed group look worse because the events are scattered out over the year, rather than bunched up at the beginning like with the vax. The selection of 6 months as the estimation point was arbitrary. I would have used another technique called "area under the curve" to see overall differences, rather than just at one timepoint. 

The bottom line is that the incidence of adverse events is very low in both vaxxed and unvaxxed. The authors admitted these problems were "rare". You would have to vax 20,000 to 35,000 kids to prevent one episode of inflammation.  Is it worth it?  I'm not sure everyone would agree.

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The ARC Prize verified was announced. This will reward whoever develops a GenAI model that demonstrates artificial general intelligence.

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How men and women spend their time.  Men do more work, social activities and sports/exercise. Women certainly do more household activities, consumer purchases, and phone calls. That I can vouch for. 😂

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Even Mullvad had to shut down Leta, their privacy proxy search engine. Getting search results from the major search engines is not only more expensive, because of the need to get through their CAPTCHA solvers, but also because the search engines themselves are changing, and more AI-generated crap is being retrieved. I've noticed that it's harder to get good tech reviews to read before making a purchase. And content from Reddit or Stackflow doesn't appear quite as much anymore in tech related questions. I get a lot of results from many years ago, which are not relevant to me now.

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Because they have no money, Green Fridays are being canceled in state parks. Illegals win. Citizens lose. 

6 November 2025

Open Health and Research Compass are two initiatives where someone downloaded papers from PubMed and other sources and hooked up a chat query interface. The Open Health site has a lot of claims liked 135,000+ users trust it. Sounds like typical marketing. I wasn't impressed with Research Compass. The response to my inquiry was superficial and was based on a handful of citations from really obscure and questionable sources. Open Health's responses seemed more solid and evidence-based. But I asked it a question about "What should I know about taking bortezomib for my cancer treatment?" and it gave a long response delving into the drug and its mechanism. But I couldn't find any mention of avoiding taking vitamin C on the day of treatment, as it may abrogate its efficacy.  No substitute for a good doctor or nurse.

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Here's what's scary as an employer:
  •     65% use unauthorized AI tools at work
  •     30% have fed sensitive company data into ChatGPT
  •     Retail workers are the worst offenders: 72% using shadow AI
There's the usual trust issues, and concerns about return on investment. I'm not that interested in this because I know that many or most companies are still feeling their way with AI and many are just using public chat bots with no prompt training. And that generative AI tools we have now are still fairly early, despite their already impressive achievements. We're not where we need to be, and much of what we see is illusory, in terms of real comprehension and understanding, which is what we really need to see.

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Brave explorers. 110,000 spiders in a giant web.  It's on the border of Albania and Greece, so that's good.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang backtracks after saying China will win AI race. What, did someone talk to him? Now he's saying that China is "nanoseconds" behind the U.S. but that's not exactly contradicting what he said earlier.

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AI smart ring lets you record your voice. It is meant to “capture thoughts in the moment” but it has a greater potential than that. But if you have an Apple Watch, do you need this, too?

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OpenAI Usage Plummets in the Summer, When Students Aren’t Cheating on Homework. So what good is AI? To help students cheat.

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Here's Oregon's economic forecast for the foreseeable future. What can we see?
Revenue is declining. Payroll is declining. Unemployment is increasing. 
Oregon is below the US average in GDP, but the US GDP is declining to Oregon levels. 
And that the General fund was really well-funded under Biden. There was such a huge flow of Federal money. More than even during Obama and Clinton.  Oregon had a subsidized life. No wonder they hoped Kamala would win. 
Well, an Oregonian writer wants Oregon to be a "magnet of opportunity".  Yeah, that ain't happening under Democrat leadership.

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5 November 2025

Microsoft CEO says that they don't have enough power to use all their AI GPU chip hardware. Energy is clearly going to be the bottleneck factor. 

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Is metformin a cognitive enhancer? That's the tease of this article, although all that was demonstrated was that it improved his reaction time. 

Did I notice any practical improvements in cognition? The short answer is “no”: I didn’t notice any obvious differences in concentration, memory, or performance under cognitive load.

Yeah, clickbait title.

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In California, they are making their math geniuses get fingerprinted and entered into a criminal database. Students, teachers, as well as anyone who interacts with them. Also UC system students must affirm transgender ideology under the SHAPE program in order to stay enrolled. Because they have so many perverts and groomers?  How about letting students just be students? And being more selective about who you admit to these programs?

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The molecular underpinnings of Crohn's disease advanced by machine learning. They didn't use generative AI, but just good old-fashioned machine learning tools. They found that the NOD2 protein fails to suppress the inflammatory girdin protein, due to missing or dysfunctional binding site. Paper here.

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Some Substack writers are switching to Patreon. Some are switching to Ghost or Beehiiv. Competition is good.

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Nearly half of Oregon's healthcare workers are not vaccinated against the flu. It may just be too early to expect everyone to be vaccinated. Best to get vaccinated for influenza in late November, around Thanksgiving, because the flu season can last until April, and you want to make sure you have immunity that lasts that long.

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Where are the homeless from? It's hard to get accurate data, but the figure seems to be that around 20% came to Portland from elsewhere.

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Oregon has dropped further to 35th place is state tax competitiveness. Competitiveness and Oregon seem to be two words you'd not find in the same sentence. Hard to believe that we were #7 in 2019.  Reminder Kate Brown was in office from 2015 - 2023. COVID-19 hit and because of Dem policies, the state has never recovered. It seems that Oregon has slipped past an invisible event horizon, and there is no other path that toward the center of the black hole.

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4 November 2025

Amazon and Perplexity are fighting over agent use. Perplexity knows that the value of their Comet browser will be markedly diminished if people can't use it to access the world's biggest marketplace. But Amazon can't harvest all the valuable user data if it comes from a bot. So, we'll see who wins. It's an arms race.

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Umatilla is experiencing a little excitement as Amazon injects money and job growth in the little town. Enjoy it while you can. It won't last forever. And who knows how much it's going to raise your electricity and water bill, once the datacenter goes online.

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OpenAI is going to stop pretending it's your doctor. It will still give out health advice, but it will recommend that you see a real doctor. That's good, but we'll see how it's really put into practice.

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Orvis is closing half its stores by next year. They blame it on Trump. 169 years – they endured WWI, WWII, the Great Depression, Great Recessioin, COVID-19. And Trump's tariffs are derailing them? I don't think so.

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Another tragedy of the commons. arXiv is going to require review articles and position papers to have been accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. It used to house preprints, but made the change because it was being flooded with a lot of AI junk. Make something nice, offer it to the public, and idiots will ruin it. Happens all the time.

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Cheese Consumption reduces incidence of dementia in community-dwelling older Japanese adults. This is the JAGES 2019–2022 Cohort Study. The benefit provided by cheese was really small, and I wouldn't be surprised if this just proves to be a random effect. It just ain't that easy. There's also very little info about what kind of cheese provided the benefit. Most of the people ate processed cheese, which probably isn't healthy anyway. 

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Here's a report associating melatonin use to heart failure risk. Biologically, that doesn't seem to make sense. But who takes melatonin? Those with insomnia.  And what is insomnia associated with? Heart failure! And heart failure reduces sleep quality, so when you find you can't function as well during the daytime from insomnia, you're more likely to take something "safe" to help you sleep.

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How embarrassing. Meta was found to be heavy ingesters of porn.  Of course, they would be accused of using it to train AI. Content providers would be understandably upset. But Meta had to confess that it was for "personal consumption". But one of the plaintiffs is known to be aggressive, and probably isn't going to just drop this. Could be messy.

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UnitedHealth pays its own physician groups 17% more than outside ones. It's not clear if this is legal, and may get them into deep trouble. It's already more costly to patients.  
The entire medical system needs to be overhauled. Trump, Mehmet Oz and RFK Jr may be correct in not facilitating Obamacare continuation, but as of today, that's all that many people have. If they don't have it, they have nothing. There is an alternative, and now is the best time to have a discussion.

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This article makes me think that one's vision of how one looks can have profound effects on one's outlook on life. If you think you look young, you will think younger thoughts. If you think you look old, you will think like an old person.

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Some sugar substitutes linked to faster cognitive decline. These are aspartame, saccharin, acesulfame-K, erythritol, xylitol, and sorbitol but not tagatose. They did not test allulose. This was a survey-based study, so who knows how accurate it really is? The negative impact on cognitive decline didn't affect those older than age 60, and affected diabetics worse than non-diabetics. Paper here.

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Good. Trump's immigration policy is hurting the remittance economy.  We give out far too much welfare money.

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Oregon is suspending it's program to provide Electric Vehicle rebates for low-to-moderate income Oregonians. So Oregon taxpayers were buying electric vehicles for low-income people?  This is why I don't think Oregon needs to raise taxes. They have enough money – they just misspend it.

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Oregon sure can pick 'em. Check this out:
An illegal immigrant convicted of sex crimes in Oregon, a sanctuary state for unlawful immigration, held various advisory positions on state policymaking committees as a so-called “Latinx” community leader.
This was published in the Washington Examiner, and not in the local papers.

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