21 December 2024

100% clinical complete response in rectal cancer? Wow, this caught my eye.  But it's dostarlimab, and it's for dMMR+ rectal cancer, and unfortunately, only a small minority are eligible for this treatment.  But still, if you're one of them, this is great!

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Britannica didn't fade away with the demise of the paper encyclopedia.  It transformed itself into an AI education company.  Intel needs a leader like this, who can foresee the future and adapt accordingly.

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a href="https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/537315/how-to-make-your-tech-devices-batteries-last-longer" target="_blank">How to make your batteries last longer. Don't let them stay depleted, and don't let them stay plugged-in fully charged. Aim to keep them around the middle.

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21 Portland restaurants closed last year.  All those jobs lost. The tax base reduced. More unemployment burden. And the collateral damage to nearby businesses, who won't see as much traffic. But not to worry – we have a new crop of Democrats who will solve the problem, I'm sure.

But here's what thriving in the Pacific Northwest:

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Microplastics are everywhere. Now you must watch out for polymer tea bags. Ugh. The price of convenience.

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Well, you reap what you sow.  In Seattle, it's hard to find primary care physicians now.  Gee, I wonder why. No don't blame the AMA or AAFP.  They not the main factor in medical school or medical residency enrollment. For many smart folks, it's just not worth the sacrifice you must make, now that most physicians are salaried employees and not in control of medicine anymore. This is thanks to Obamacare, which radically changed the economics of medicine. And, no, AI isn't going to replace human physicians. Not by a longshot.

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20 December 2024

Ginger ale and tomato juice do taste better in flight. That's why I find myself ordering ginger ale and blood mary mix.

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Crazy.  Spotify is no longer the music listener's dream app.  What they seem to be doing is shady, and artists are suffering from it.

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The human brain's speed of thought it really slow – only 10 bits/second.  Probably even slower for some people. So how could it even be called the "most powerful computer in the world"?

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Google Gemini 2.0 is being billed as an LLM that will "explicitly shows its thoughts".  In other words, be an explainable AI. We'll see.

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This came out last January, and I missed it, but for some reason, it's showing up in the news now.  This is about a new form of RNA, called an obelisk, discovered Andrew Fire, a Stanford researcher.  It's a circular form of RNA associated with the obelin family of proteins.  Fire never refers to them as a "form of life" like the popular press does. 🙄

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HuggingFace's BERT finally has a successor – ModernBERT.  It's better than DeBERTaV3, which the Kagglers have been using. BERT is just too big and too slow to use without having to resort to Colab.

OpenAI also has a new model – o3, which scored higher on the ARC-AGI PUB test for artificial general intelligence.

Despite this, the GPT-5 project has nothing they're ready to be the GPT-5 LLM.  Sounds like a big disappointment.  But a "six-month training run can cost around half a billion dollars in computing costs alone, based on public and private estimates of various aspects of the training." Is this sustainable? 

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The hidden toll of AI – the damage being done to human labelers. Someone has to watch all the crap that people produce, and label them as harmful. It's always the people in third world countries that bear the brunt of this, and it borders on the unethical.

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We've seen reports of this before.  Deoxyribose gel applied topically, seems to be effective against androgenic hair loss.  Seems to be as effective as minoxidil, but is still not commercially available.

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When you get IV fluids, make sure the nurse squirts out the first 12 mL or so.  Or else, you'll get an intravenous dose of microplastics.

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No more James Bond for a while.  It's a standoff between the Broccoli estate and Amazon.  It's just as well. The Broccoli/Wilson faction is open to a female, gay, or whatever Bond. 
Gregg Wilson has appeared to be more sympathetic to calls for an update to Bond, a role that’s so far been filled by white male actors. Some say a person of color in Bond’s tuxedo would better reflect the U.K.’s changing demography, and even nod to its ugly history of colonization. Take it a step further, others say, and cast a woman or a gay man.  
Broccoli has told friends that she doesn’t have any qualms with casting a nonwhite or gay actor, but does believe Bond should always be played by a man, and should always be played by a Brit.
If we wanted someone other than what Ian Fleming envisioned, we would have watched that instead. If you want to feature someone else besides a white male Brit, start your own franchise, I say.

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19 December 2024

The invasive murder hornet threat is officlally ended. See what happens when you address the problem quickly, instead of waiting until it is entrenched. 

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Well that's not we want to hear.  It's already time for Artificial Dementia?
Almost all leading large language models or "chatbots" show signs of mild cognitive impairment in tests widely used to spot early signs of dementia, finds a study in the Christmas issue of the BMJ.

...the uniform failure of all large language models in tasks requiring visual abstraction and executive function highlights a significant area of weakness that could impede their use in clinical settings.

"Not only are neurologists unlikely to be replaced by large language models any time soon, but our findings suggest that they may soon find themselves treating new, virtual patients—artificial intelligence models presenting with cognitive impairment."
Oh dear.   Original study here.


18 December 2024

What?  Google makes more money from Windows than Microsoft? Life is strange, sometimes.

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This preprint led to this enthusiastic X post that doctors better start packing it up because AI is going to take their jobs away. Taking a look at that post, it's clear that if doctors follow the advice of o1-preview, they will bankrupt insurance companies, or be met by firm denials for several of the suggested tests.  In fact, the justifcation for some of the recommended tests is quite weak. Others have critiqued OpenAI's Strawberry model, and their findings are very interesting. OpenAI has never published on what data their models have been trained, but it's likely that they were trained on New England Journal of Medicine's CPC cases. As such, their uncanny ability to predict may be nothing more than data leakage – performing inference on data that you've already seen and have been trained on.  I, too, get the sense that this makes o1 overestimate the likelihood of very rare diseases it sees, making them seem more common than they actually are. Plus, there is this observation that if you query it again, it may give you a different answer.  We don't know how the prompts were constructed, or whether this was a zero-shot or one-shot query, but still.  But the paper does reveal that there are cases where o1 gets the diagnosis that GPT-4 missed, so what if you relied just on one LLM?  Some have suggested that doctors consult two LLMs in tandem, but has time for that?

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Scientists have discovered a protein that helps cancer cells become resistant to CAR_T cell therapy. This protein is YTHDF2, and is a N6-methyladenosine reader, and regulates antitumor functions of macrophages.  The precise mechanism of this is unclear, but blocking can lead to tumor death, and these scientists have identified an agent that can achieve this, called CCI-38. Blocking YTHDF2 enhances CAR-T cell activity. Original article here.

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MIT scientists may have found a way to magnetize antiferromagnetic materials with terrahertz light (high end of infrared, just before microwave).  Could have applications in memory storage technology.

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I remember there were high hopes that metformin was going to enhance breast cancer therapies. That hasn't panned out.  There's still hope that it has antiaging properties, and many in the field are already taking it.  We'll see.

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17 December 2024

Magnus Carlsen lives in Norway, and his 2022 tax obligation was more than he earned that year.  And we're supposed to emulate this? Is this what having "free healthcare" is supposed to be worth?  It's said that healthcare should be free, high quality and universal, but in truth, you can only have at most two out of the three. You just pick which two you want.

And here's what someone posted about their insurance denial. Yeah, sure, a lot of the time, you can treat pulmonary embolism as an outpatient, but not all the time, and a physician may want to be safe and not risk making the wrong judgment. This is what's wrong with healthcare. Don't make the patient suffer from the physician's decision.

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9 Bad Examples of Government Waste in Oregon.

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You mean it hasn't already? Google will train its AI on YouTube videos. 

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I know I'm not.  Most iPhone users uninterested in Apple AI.  I never really had a need for AI on my phone. I prefer to choose my own LLM, thank you.

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There's a website dedicated to saving Standard Time.

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Scientists at NovoNordisk have created a smart insulin, NNC2215, whose activity changes with the glucose level. Right now, the studies are only preclinical. This could be a game-changer for insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus.

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Oh, brother. Climate scientists report that the earth is warming faster than they can explain. The best explanation is that because ocean-crossing ships produce less cloud-generating emissions, there is less sunlight reflectivity, and more heat absorption. Can't win for losing.  But not a single mention of the fact that we're at solar maximum now. Nope, everything's gotta be anthropogenic, or else there's no justification for carbon taxes, right?

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16 December 2024

Text messages are definitely not really secure.  Use Telegram or Signal. 

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How they select the next Prime Minister of Singapore.
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The invention that gave rise to all those McMansions.

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Too much iron is not good for you. Well yes there are iron-storage disorders, but blood-letting? Too much of that can lead to iron deficiency. There is a happy medium. 

15 December 2024

Stablecoins could eventually grow to 10% of the U.S. money supply.  It's all fiat currency, but once enough people trust it, it'll be close to being as good as the dollar.

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Many student loan borrowers are in for a big, bad surprise in 2025.  This may help reduce the national debt somewhat, but I suspect so many people will default. But they do need to pay it back. If their degree is not worth it to them to pay back, why should it be worth it to the rest of us?

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USNWR recently ranked the states in terms of livability, and Oregon was tenth from the bottom. The state scored poorly on crime, education, economy and opportunity.  WalletHub put Oregon at 9th from the bottom, so it's not just one publication's opinion. And here's a report that overdose deaths grew 33% in 2023, even as national rates decline.  Non-profits, which have been sucking up so much government money, are going broke.  But Portland is going to spend $300 million on climate change related projects. Oregon is gearing up to provide free health care to illegal immigrants.

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a href="https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/energy/just-a-fraction-of-the-hydrogen-hidden-beneath-earths-surface-could-power-earth-for-200-years-scientists-find" target="_blank">Hydrogen in the ground could be a source of power for 200 years. The problem is to locate the reservoirs of hydrogen and extract it, without expending too much energy in doing so. I can't believe that such a light has would avoid dissipation for this long.

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Gilded age of medicine? Not for most doctors, that's for sure.
Meanwhile, in some places in the U.S., private-equity firms now own more than half of all medical practices within certain specialties. “We are being picked clean by private equity,” a New Jersey-based radiologist said at a recent meeting of the American Medical Association.

Private-equity firms have learned that they “don’t have to make things better or make them more efficient. You can just change one small thing and make a ton more money.” They are hardly the only corporations to learn this lesson. Increasingly, health insurers, private hospitals, and even nonprofits are behaving as though they aim first to extract revenue, and only second to care for people. Patients often are viewed less as humans in need of care than consumers who generate profit.

Berwick said that his own physician’s practice had recently been acquired by UnitedHealth. One day, he asked his doctor, “Anything different now?”  “Two things,” the doctor replied. “I have to see more patients each day. And my patients have new diagnoses that I didn’t put there.”
Obamacare made it harder for independent practices to survive. So physicians have had to sell their clinics to hospitals or private equity.

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Speaking of healthcare, here's an interesting chart:

The ronin has discussed this before. Wealthier nations spend more on healthcare, because they can. it's not necessarily an indictment of the healthcare system itself, but inefficiencies and profiteering do exist.

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14 December 2024

There are people who need far less sleep than average. Several mutations have been identified in certain genes that could explain this. But what these genes do is unclear. I am not so blessed and need my sleep time, but I can get away with less for a while, before the need for sleep returns and I must nap. Short naps seem to be restorative, but there is more to it, depending on my emotional state, etc.

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A third kind of magnetism has been discovered - altermagnetism.  There's actually three other types, though: diamagnetism paramagnetism and ferromagnetism.  Anti-ferromagnetism and ferrimagnetism are just variants of ferromagnetism. But altermagnetism is different, and could have practical applications.

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Wow! I love perpetual calendars as a kid and thought they were works of genius, until I found out how regular the calendar is. But this one really takes it to the extreme, and is designed with so much thought and planning. Seeing such genius and then looking at the world today, knowing that there are a lot of people who would destroy it in an instant, in the name of some stupid cause, is really depressing. We live in the world where we can't have nice things. Even the Chapel of Bankers and Merchants is a work of art. We have truly regressed.

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How to hack an electronic road sign. I've seen this before. This is why people are able to hijack these things, and I'm surprised that they haven't improved security.

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About 1 in 7 science papers are fake.  And it's going to get worse. I read the paper mainly out of curiosity to see how the estimate was determined, and it's just a metasurvey.  No one really knows, and this is really disturbing.

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You can't trust AI-generated news headlines, even from big names, such as Apple.  This is really sad.

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Speaking of not being able to have nice things, this is an example of the Ronin's Second Law again. People wanted BlueSky to be like the old Twitter days, when left-wing viewpoints predominated. But open it up to the public, and you know there will be stuff you don't like. But they want to ban free speech, instead of just ignoring it, like adults. Welcome to the real world.  Nothing stays nice once everyone gets access. Get used to it.

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Could skin bacteria be turned into a vaccine?  Staphylococcus epidermidis seems to be suitable for something like this.

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Some people think that Apple will revive making WiFi routers again, like the Apple Extreme.  This could be interesting.  My old Airport Extremes are still working and doing fine. Great workmanship.

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13 December 2024

Oregon is number one again, and not in a good way.  The Portland Clean Energy Fund is a first-of-its-kind climate, social- and racial-justice program.  The climate change religion is one of the biggests grifts in history.  So much needless waste of money and resourced.

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Black plastic kitchen utensils aren't bad for you after all.  It was just a math error by the science reporter. The reporter who made the mistake (a Chinese person, too, ironically – thought they were supposed to be good in math) defends the report:
“However, it is important to note that this does not impact our results,” Liu told National Post. (It doesn't?) “The levels of flame retardants that we found in black plastic household items are still of high concern, and our recommendations remain the same.”
Modern journalism, right there.

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U.S. automobiles aren't getting spiffy efficient laser headlights. Why? Partly because of regulations and partly because of improvements in LED lights. Oh well.

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MediSearch just launched, as a chat-interface medical Q&A engine. Seems better than the run-of-the-mill ChatGPT, but I didn't try the Pro (paid) version.

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How does that work?  Electrons in the pentalayer graphene layer exhibit fractional charge.

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There's an independent nervous system surrounding the heart.  At least in zebrafish, in which the research was conducted.

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This is one of the reasons why drug manufacturing needs to be done in the U.S.A.  Watch out if you're taking potassium supplements!

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I've heard this before.  AI is running out of data to train on. The question is, does it have enough already? Data is always being generated but apparently it's not going directly to train new models. Could that be a good thing for humanity? Should we start being careful how much data we send?

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The Dunbar number is 4. The optimal number of people to have a good conversation is 4. Any more and it splits into two separate conversations.

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Doctors Say Dealing With Health Insurers Is Only Getting Worse.  So only now are we seeing articles like these?

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5% of all Canadian deaths are by suicide.  What a sick country.

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Something else to worry about: mirror bacteria. These are bacteria with chiral structure that renders them impervious to existing antibiotics.  But these are the very scientists working on it. They need to stop themselves!

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12 December 2024

Tori Kelly's Sleigh Ride from a couple of years ago is notable for the amazing jazz chords. This guy really brings out the harmonies – what a treat. 


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