2 December 2024

Not good.  There may be a LOT of lead in Portland's soils due to degraded telecom cables. Kids play around in the dirt all the time.

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Google is for old people.  I use a filtered form of Google, and the results are still fairly decent.  Younger folks want answers directly, and use ChatGPT or Perplexity instead. That's fine as long as you check for hallucinations. Search is beginning to get interesting again, as reliance on Google is proving to be disappointing. Bing may be as good or better now.

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Oregon economist talks about Oregon's Doom Loop.  If Oregon doesn't change its ways, there will be no recovery.  The homeless industrial complex is Oregon's Ukraine, where money keeps getting dumped, with little return.
Rampant drug use has a lot to do with Oregon's decline:

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Multilingual learners have the poorest test results.  "Multililngual learners" – that's a new way of describing them.

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1 December 2024

Self-driving Tesla T-bones another car while in self-driving mode.  I really think self-driving cars still need testing and are not ready for general use. Luckily no one was killed, but that may not be the case next time. Self-driving cars are the solution to a problem we really didn't have. How Honeycrisp Apples Went From Marvel to Mediocre

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How Honeycrisp Apples Went From Marvel to Mediocre. Always make sure the honey crisp apples you buy are from Washington state and nowhere else. 

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We need to have Wetherspoon bars here as well.  But here's the thing, these bars only succeed because of the patrons. Here in the U.S., we'll get folks that will spoil  the ambience, and make it rowdy and noisy and it'll just turn into crap. Ronin's Second Law. So let's keep it the way it is, and don't publicize it (like this article just did).

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Cancer cells can impair monocyte-mediated T-cell stimulation, and impair antitumor immunity. It turns out that monocytes can also stimulate T-cells, just like dendritic cells, with tumor peptide and the MHC class 1 complex. But if there is more prostagladin E2 and less interferon type 1, then this costimulation is inhibited, and the T-cell response is blunted.  This suggests possible strategies, such as cyclooxygenase inhibitors to decrease prostaglandin production.

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30 November 2024

Sora is on pause because artists have been complaining. What's pausing it going to do? It'll open up again later.

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The deterioration of Google. Search results quality, not so much the company, although one wonders about that, too. Everything seems to be deteriorating and degrading in the era of Biden-Harris.

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British people are using X/Twitter as much as before, and are not as interested in AI. Well can you blame them?  If you like something or post a reply, you might get arrested, or at the very least, have constables come visit you. Is it worth it? Of course not. And they were only using AI for searching stuff anyway. Doesn't seem that novel or exciting now. Just another tool.

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The Puget Sound area sees orcas swimming around. Gotta check to see if the local group puts salmon on their heads, too.  Why they do it is unclear.

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29 November 2024

The ras oncogene – a key player in many cancers – has long been "undruggable" with no treatment to suppress its harmful mutations.  But slowly and surely, scientists have been able to get at that oncogene and stop its harmful signaling.

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Ukraine is the nursery for the world's most dangerous and drug-resistant bacteria. They probably overuse antibiotics there, and breed resistance. Not good for the rest of the world.

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A scientst believes that he has found the gene that codes for a cat's orange fur. I know, earth-shattering, right?

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Only 2-3 AI companies would be allowed to exist.
Complete control over development. 
30 tech founders were secretly debanked.
No warning. No explanation. No appeals.
Pure, silent government power.
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Oregon Dept of Transportation "says it has a massive budget hole of $1 billion to $1.7 billion due to a host of factors (lawsuits, declining gas tax revenue, inflation, cost over-runs, exploding labor costs, rising county needs, government pension, etc.)
So they actually mapped out a possible 75-cent gas tax increase plan. Dems create the problems. Citizens pay for the solutions.

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Question asked and answered.  We have the third-highest per capita homeless population in the nation and Oregon lawmakers just approved “a $376 million housing and homelessness package and $211 million for substance abuse and behavioral health services,” yet the homeless population grows.  Why is that?

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Some people light their cigars with money. Others eat the banana they paid $6.2 million for.  It's just money, right?

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_Sure, blame the coronavirus epidemic.  Portland Japanese Garden is offloading the White Shield Center they bought two years ago, because they don't have enough money to complete a renovation.  The figures aren't mentioned but I bet they lost money in the deal. It's a bad time to invest in Portland.

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"When you look at the lineup of stories in WW recently and over the past several years, do you see any themes emerging? Portland, once the envy of the country can't generate even one substantial positive story over the course of years."  This is a comment on this article that wait times at several Oregon hospital EDs are far longer than the national average. Lots of finger-pointing, but no solutions.

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This is why AI won't ever be suitable as judges. It's not that difficult to figure out how to con them. So you might as well stick with human judges because you can always impeach them.

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28 November 2024

Happy Thanksgiving! If you had Thanksgiving dinner at one of these famous artists' place, here's how your dish might look.

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Makes sense, I guess. HIV-positive patients can now be organ donors for HIV-positive recipients.  Why not?

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Claude's quality has been dropping. I've seen this, and apparently others have noticed it as well.  It can't help me with coding as well as it used to. Apparently Microsoft is to blame, for incorporating it into Github Copilot.  These days, I almost exclusively use o1 as my coding assistant. It's so much better and I don't waste time.

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New breathrough for asthma.  It's benralizumab, a monoclonal antibody against the IL-4Rα chain (CD125). It can obviate the need for steroids, which is a major benefit.  

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I never heard of Jazz Kissas before.  Would have been really nice to have gone to one, while they were around.

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Is a masters degree worth it? It depends on what you get it in. And how much you spend to earn your degree.

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27 November 2024

Just like what's happening in Seattle, thieves are targeting Asians in the Portland area as well. They are assumed to be affluent and weak. Dangerous assumption.

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Like a weird sci-fi story. Calilfornia explorers mapping Greenland come across a Cold-war underground installation that even the Danes had no idea were there. The site had diesel fuel, biological waste and nuclear waste. What else is there?

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They don't fool around at the Bank of Shikoku. To work there, you have to sign a pledge that if you are found guilty of commiting fraud, you not only have to pay back the bank, but you commit seppuku as well.  A sign of the old ways. 

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The problem with benchmarks for AI models. How do we measure progress with LLMs?  It's a very tough question, because the LLMs, learn the benchmarks. Kinda like human kids try to do.

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Portland continues to be a national joke. 

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26 November 2024

Makes sense.  The body doesn't all age at the same rate. I agree – the right side seems to be aging fast than the left side. Weird.

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9.5% of software engineers are ghosts. They don't do hardly anything at all. Just punch in, punch out.

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OHSU Ranks Among Worst in Country in Employees’ Confidence in Leadership.  For years, OHSU was doing fine. It was enjoying a rising reputation and put out good research. Then Danny Jacobs came along, and suddenly OHSU learned that they were unconsciously racist, and needed instruction on how to change that. The Woke people climbed on this and gained power. Things became toxic and some good people left. This is no surprise.

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Social media "influencers" about to find out that their brand is empty.  What is a vibe, and can you patent it?

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The combination of AI and CRISPR will be transformational. Certainly more efficient. Maybe dangerous, though. We'll see.

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India's filter coffee is now rated best in the world from TasteAtlas’ ‘Top 62 Coffees in the World. It's looks like a winner, but it's too labor-intensive for me.

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Here's a first.  Antimatter to be transported outside a lab for first time — in a van.  Maybe we'll get warp drive after all.

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25 November 2024

Always learning something new.  It's known that women get bladder infections all the time, but they rarely get pyelonephritis. Why is that. Well, scientists recently discovered something called neutrophil extracellular traps—NETs, that are "sticky webs of wispy strands that quite literally serve as traps that ensnare bacteria that attempt to migrate northward to the kidneys from the lower urinary tract."

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The study, conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) in collaboration with Rutgers University, found that certain DEI practices could induce hostility, increase authoritarian tendencies, and foster agreement with extreme rhetoric.
That's why.  And boy, have we seen this to be true.  Here's the DEI paper.

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The Japanese have invented a human washing machine. You'll be clean in 15 minutes. This might have some applications for disabled people, who need help bathing themselves. However I imagine some bizarre accidents from this thing.

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The seedy side of AI. To get labeled datasets, someone needs to label the data, and the tech industry has been using low-paid African workers to consume all kinds of images and video and label them.  And some of that media is really horrible. And it's psychologically scarring them.

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Chinese scientists claim they have invested a Death Star type weapon.  Well, they're always copying stuff, so...

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Google is under siege. I think they need a new CEO. Sundar was a guy for a different era of Google. Times have changed.

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Overthinking what you say all the time? It's your lizard brain. But then, your lizard brain developed that habit for a reason. Never dismiss the lizard brain completely.

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Lens breakthrough can lead to thinner cameras.  Tim Cook's ear pricked up.

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Never trust generative AI completely. They hallucinate like hell. As Professor Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, “well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology,” has learned to his chagrin.

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24 November 2024

How to give a good 20 minute math talk. I'm bookmarking this, because...you never know.

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Here's what happened at a hospital when they tried to solve their physician shortage problem with nurse practitioners. Yeah, people died. There's a looming physician shortage. It doesn't look good.

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Amazon wants to bring nuclear reactors back to Oregon. It's Eastern Oregon. And the reactors will be different from the one that used to be in Prescott.  I think it's about time, actually.

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Good to know.  Stem cells grown in space have extra regenerative capacity.

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The Liver X receptor has been shown to promote tissue repair and suppress colorectal tumorigenesis. Original paper here.

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23 November 2024

New theory reveals the shape of a photon. Not exactly what I was expecting to see.  A photon is supposed to be a point. So what is this thing?  Here's the original paper, and the diagram doesn't appear anywhere.

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it is now understood to have worked by hacking into the antiquated technology mobile phones companies use to give access to phone taps for law enforcement agencies
This is why it's not good to give backdoors to law enforcement. Smarter people know how to exploit it, too.

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Immaculately preserved sabretooth tiger cub is uncovered in Siberian permafrost.

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Nice review of AI hallucinations for lay people. What are they, and how to avoid being snared by one.

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Funny. curl -v google.com

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Portland has 13 million square feet of vacant office space as of mid-year, with an expected lost rent value of $436 million.
But city officials don't seem to be concerned about this. They just want to make sure the homeless are comfortable, and have enough tents, clean syringes and boofing kits.

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OHSU employees have low trust of leadership. Most would like to be around in the OHSU of three years from now, but that depends on whether things improve. Steve Stadum, I hope you're able to bring back the excellence and meritocratic values that were lost in the past 6 years.

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University of Washington is one of the top antisemitic colleges in the U.S.  They let it happen.

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