3 April 2024

Inhibiting UDP-diacylglucosamine pyrophosphohydrolase LpxH may lead to a new class of sulfonyl piperazine antibiotics. This is definitely needed, as bacteria are getting resistant to everything we throw at them.

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Why young men and women are drifting apart. In short, changing cultural expectations. This is something our ancestors never had to deal with.

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Guess how many people fess up to taking naps while at work? Try 46%. You heard right.

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Hats off to Oregon lawyers who feel that the Oregon Bar is overbearing. The Ninth Circuit is willing to hear their arguments again, and lately (since several are Trump appointees), they've been more conservative, and less likely to tolerate Oregon's Bar association blaming Trump for "white nationalism" whatever that is.

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Oh-oh. Looks like the eclipse path predictions might be a little off. They've been using an older, narrower arc-diameter figure for the sun. The newer figure makes the band of totality significantly narrower.

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The moon might have its own timezone. Apparently there's already a clock there, so in the future, it won't have to get its time signals from earth, where clocks run slower, due to the increased gravitations field of earth.

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Microsoft, the security vendor that the government buys from, is getting reamed due to security breach of government emails. This happened last year, but the scolding is being done just now. Security is just damned hard.

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2 April 2024

Plants really do scream – we just can't hear it. And I'm glad about that.

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You thought GPT-4 aced the bar exam? Think again.

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This is what happens when you don't fully understand the tech you are using. Google to delete search data of millions who used 'incognito' mode. You are not incognito in incognito mode. It just doesn't save traces of your search and online activities on your own computer. You were never invisible to Google.

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Google Street View can tell, from how your house looks on the street, what the risk of cardiovascular disease is. This is like radiomics. A bit far-fetched, but I can see how an A.I. model can be trained to detect this. But I bet it won't generalize.

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More like the Fab Two. The number of rising tech stocks has dropped, and the term "Magnificent Seven" no longer holds.

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If it's Boeing, I'm not going. Yet another Boeing mishap. What next?

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Only in Japan.  Everyone will be named Sato by 2531.

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31 March 2024

Memories are formed by breaking and reforming DNA strands. I always thought it was nitric oxide and NMDA receptos, reinforcing certain pathways. Or the virus-like ARC protein. Guess, we really don't know, do we?

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I think so. Is social media behind teen mental illness?

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Uh-oh. "informed consent has been quietly revoked just 77 years after it was codified in the Nuremberg Code." The DHS and FDA made last-minute changes to weaken informed consent laws when the risk is felt to be "minimal-risk". Of course, they determine what is considered minimal-risk. I'd bet more "look the other way" science is in the works.

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Birth Rates Are Plummeting in Most Nations. Except Africa and the Middle East. Those areas are still enjoying a birth rate that is more than just replacement numbers. Is Europe prepared for this?
Look at the countries that have the highest fertility rates.

Now look at the top countries in how much of the population got COVID vaccinations:

I'd say those countries did just fine not getting jabbed. Maybe this is why their fertility didn't get affected like that of Europe and the Americas.
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Nice helpful graphic for the upcoming (April 8) solar eclipse.

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Major security breach found in some Linux distros. And it was discovered because a Microsoft techie noticed an anomaly as he was playing around. Andreas Freund, you are a hero.

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Cocoa prices are going up a lot, after shortages are seen for the third year in a row. Hoard chocolate now!

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Where people moved to, as they fled Oregon. Kinda silly to move to Washington or California, if you ask me. Idaho, Texas, Florida or Arizona make more sense to me.

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30 March 2024

Things are moving so fast. Open AI has a custom voice cloning model, but in an unusual moment of ethical hesitation, they aren't going to release it to the public just yet. Well, that's certainly kind of them, but who knows how long the embargo will last.

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Testing the main AI Chatbots. What they won't tell you. Guess what? They're all afraid to tell you certain things because of, you know, goes against the narrative. And they don't want to trigger you with stuff that might trigger violence. Because we all live in the era of violence against speech we don't like, right?

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Plaid Pantry employees don't feel safe anymore, and don't want to take bottle returns at night. Can't blame them. They're so vulnerable.

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This is creepy. This AI app shows you in scenarios that you may never get to enjoy - because you have metastatic cancer (they call it secondary, for some reason). This could generate profound grief and sadness. Or maybe even anger. And maybe some will be triggered to go out and blame someone, because they feel that someone should pay for their not being to enjoy these moments.

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Ah, Lena, we'll miss you. After all these years, IEEE suddenly gets cold feet. Sheesh. Just use her head, already. So how about men? Will that trigger the snowflakes, too? You want to know why male engineers are happy without diversity? Because they would have to walk on eggshells now.

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No Evidence COVID-19 Vaccines Stopped Transmission When Authorized, Confirms Liberal Canadian Government. Yeah, for this, people had to lose jobs, or get jabbed against their will. All for nothing. Many of us knew this, or were at least skeptical enough to doubt that the vax should be mandatory. But the scared liberals wouldn't have it.

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We may have to have a negative leap-second. Because the earth is spinning faster. What's the opposite of leap?

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This is going on in Oregon. The attack on small farms.
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29 March 2024

CBD products don’t ease pain and are potentially harmful.  Well, well, CBD doesn't really lessen pain, and it may be harmful as well. And everyone was convinced that CBD was beneficial. Power of the placebo, is what it was.

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Oh-oh. Now that people have played around with chatbots, they're realizing that chatbots aren't really as accurate and trustworthy as it seemed. They were just really good and imitating coherent speech. But you had to double check their work. And they would hallucinate. I think people haven't learned how to use them. What you prompt them with is critical. But many of the ChatBots refuse to answer questions that might go against the left's narrative. Only Grok answered all questions. The others refused.
NYC's AI Chatboot tells you to break the law. Why not, breaking the law is OK in NYC anyway.

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Did you know that the NIH held the patents for the mRNA vax? And you thought it was all the geniuses at BioNTech, Pfizer and Moderna. No it was developed by the DoD, and licensed to the pharmaceutical companies. This is why they wanted everyone to get the jab. See it now? Now they want BioNTech to pay up, and they can't. Even Novavax has to pay $80 million/year until 2028 to Gavi, and no one is even using their product anymore. Womp, womp.

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The Francis Scott Key Bridge is estimated to take 10 years to rebuild. Incredible. They must have consulted with California or Hawaii. The bridge is never going to get rebuilt until they have a new mayor. Not the DEI one.

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Multnomah County lost 14 people/day in 2023. That's 5110 total. Doesn't seem like much, but it's probably the one's who could afford to leave. And just about everyone else in the neighborhood saw gains instead. That's an increase in the tax base.

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Ah, I remember when McCormick and Schmick's was one of Portland's top seafood restaurants. Now they've closed all their Portland locations, and is only in Tigard. Portland can't have nice things anymore.

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Biden wants every federal agency to have an AI chief. Why not just have one to oversee everybody. Now you have a multitude of conflicting policy and an expansion of the government. Just what we need – more government. Here'a an example: Even The Most Well-Meaning Internet Regulations Can Cause Real Harm. You don't need more well-meaning but dumb politicians making life more difficult with their ill-thought out legislation. 

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The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency. Guess what, grade inflation only encouraged truancy. You can't get something for nothing, I guess.

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This could come in handy. An AI tool can give you an approximate geographical location of an image. Like a geo-guesser.

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How Meta/Facebook intercepts your web traffic.

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28 March 2024

The Pentagon has a Silicon Valley problem. Several, actually. For one thing, many in the Valley don't want to work on anything that might help the war machine. The second is that they're depending on A.I. which isn't quite smart enough to rely upon for military purposes, and it showed. Plus, our enemies know how to defeat it.

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Amazon One is gearing up to use palm recognition technology to authenticate you. Those who give up security for convenience deserve neither security nor convenience. -- Ben Franklin, probably.

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More than half of chickenpox cases are misdiagnosed. More than half? Really?

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Emergency rooms are hell now. In some areas, they've turned into a jungle. Like an urban MASH unit. What happened? And why can't things get back to the way they were?

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It's been a little over a year since we've been introduced to ChatGPT. How are things now? Not so good as we thought. There have been some dazzling things, for sure, but a lot of overblown hype. And already, performers are being replaced by A.I.

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27 March 2024

That's wild. About 34% of Americans have never heard of ChatGPT.

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All of a suddenly, fusion drive technology is here. I must have been asleep.

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Speaking of sleep. Two nights of broken sleep can make people feel years older. I believe it. I think the way you age is that when you are sleep deprived and look like crap in the morning, you eventually stay that way all day into the next day, then that's your new permanent until you are sleep deprived again. That's my theory and I'm sticking with it.

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But human brains are getting larger, and that's supposedly good for dementia outlook, but it gives us more time to lose brain matter, I guess.

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A.I. could take away 8 million jobs in the UK alone. Bet that's similar to that in the U.S.  Women and younger workers are expected to get hit the hardest.

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The Polar Vertex is spinning backwards. Man, doesn't anything work right in the Biden era?

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Scientists have found several parts of the brain that come online early, and then die out early (last in, first out), leading to age-related and Alzheimer-related dementias, as well as schizophrenia. The most significant modifiable risk factors for degeneration in the LIFO network were diabetes, traffic-related pollution (nitrogen oxides) and alcohol.

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26 March 2024

Oregon needs money. You thought you were being smart taking steps to reduce your gas consumption. You thought wrong. Lemme repeat that – Oregon needs money. You have it, they want it.

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Modern problems call for modern solutions. Squatter Hunters is a real business now. Check them out:


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Scientists have created artificial human chromosomes. This is huge.

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Another reason to beware of ordering fried food at restaurants.  Reused Deep-Frying Oil May Cause Neurodegeneration.
Deep frying is a common method of food preparation around the world and involves completely submerging foods in hot oil.  Due to the amount of oil used in this process (and to reduce food waste) restaurants and food vendors usually reuse their frying oil. However, according to new research, this not only removes many of the oil's natural antioxidants and health benefits, but can also increase its content of harmful compounds such as acrylamide, trans fat and peroxides.
Not only are these harmful compounds thought to increase our risk of various cancers and metabolic disorders, but they may also increase our risk of neurodegeneration.
Fry your brain, too.

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25 March 2024

The Danes have an ambassador to Silicon Valley. That shows you how much power the tech industry has.

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Japan is hoping that A.I. will boost their dismal birth rate. Worth a try. Anything's worth a try at this point.

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Stability AI founder and chief executive Emad Mostaque has stepped down. This is the company that developed Stable Diffusion. I'm not sure of his reasons – he didn't want a concentration of power in A.I. so he decided to fix it by stepping down. Does that make sense to you?

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Turn this off on your iPhone. Apple added the Journaling app and by default, makes you connected to everyone around you.

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Just one gene, TBXT, prevents humans from having tails. With mutations happening all the time, I'm surprised we don't see tailed humans more often.

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Gresham's Law 2.0. Internet content is deteriorating faster than you realize. So much content is garbage now. So far, it's mainly social media sites, where the kids lap it up, but it's heading to the second-tier "news" sites, too. Caveat emptor, baby.

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How universities lost the Internet. Yeah, I remember spending days at the terminal on the early Internet. It was the only place you could get access. Then came AOL, and the Eternal September.

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