18 September 2024

Oregon could have had in-person voting, but the bill to enact this died in committee due to the inaction of Senate President Rob Wagner. Instead, Oregon lets illegals vote.

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"The Justice Department should immediately call in the beginning investigation of the medical boards and the collusion between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical boards that are delicensing these physicians who actually try to heal patients and try to treat them."
Apparently this could happen under a Trump administration. All those wrongs will be addressed.

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This is ridiculous. Holographic cancer doctors will be used for patient interaction. So patients have to arrange for a complicated setup just to get medical care. Who has money to pay for this? Remember, nothing is really free. Will this improve care? What's wrong with direct visits? Oh, we don't have enough doctors now? What happened?

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Mitochondrial dysfunction may underlie some autism spectrum disorders. So many ways the body can go wrong. Are humans that fragile now?

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Always discovering something new.  There a new blood group, AnWj, in which AnWj-negative patients must receive blood from AnWj-negative donors.

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17 September 2024

Today is Chuseok – Korean Thanksgiving.

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Just what America needs - more dementia. There appears to be an uptick in dementia, and the suspicion is that it's COVID-19. Funny, if you look at the graph, it's just the younger folks. I suspect it's not COVID-19 but something else that afflicted the younger set selectively. Like alcohol and drug use. Depression. Disruption of social connections.

And SwissRe is confirming excess mortality in the post-COVID era. I thought the vaccines were supposed to have prevented that.

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Larry Ellison has dystopian ideas for Oracle. 

"The police will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching and recording everything that's going on," Ellison told analysts. He described police body cameras that were constantly on, with no ability for officers to disable the feed to Oracle. 

Even requesting privacy for a bathroom break or a meal only meant sections of recording would require a subpoena to view - not that the video feed was ever stopped. AI would be trained to monitor officer feeds for anything untoward, which Ellison said could prevent abuse of police power and save lives.

"Save lives". It always starts that way, doesn't it?

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Even with Altman removed, there’s little to suggest the Safety and Security Committee would make difficult decisions that seriously impact OpenAI’s commercial roadmap. Tellingly, OpenAI said in May that it would look to address “valid criticisms” of its work via the commission — “valid criticisms” being in the eye of the beholder, of course.

In an op-ed for The Economist in May, ex-OpenAI board members Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley said that they don’t think OpenAI as it exists today can be trusted to hold itself accountable. “[B]ased on our experience, we believe that self-governance cannot reliably withstand the pressure of profit incentives,” they wrote.

And OpenAI’s profit incentives are growing.
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Nobel Prize winner has to retract 13 of his papers. And this is in cancer research. At Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering, too. Not a good look.

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Amazon wants workers to go back to work, but the workers aren't having it.  Why? This is one of the reasons:
Flexibility gives people more energy and more chances for individual self-expression, growth and subsequent creativity. This violet-glitch due to covid gave us a glimpse of an alternative lifestyle and we see a utopian world that can become real forever.
Yeah, well I don't think Amazon cares much that you can't self-actualize at the office. If you can't work, then you gotta find someone else who is willing to buy what you have to sell.

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Is ChatGPT getting better at math? Some think so.

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Scientific American makes a political endorsement for the second time in history. Some people think that this means science is on Harris' side. Well, remember that their first ever endorsement was for Biden. How'd that turn out?  SciAm should stay in its lane. Avoid politics and stick to science. No matter how hard you want to trumpet your personal ideology. We don't want to hear it.

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Intel is trying to downsize and is even looking to split the company into independent factories with their own governance.  What a bad time for Hillsboro, which cleared a bunch of land for Intel. There's apparently no one else to use that land. All that revenue-generating farmland, now all gone. And for nothing.

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This is exactly why you don't hear as much news about vaccine injuries. It's only due to brave reporters like this guy, who are willing And then there is Francis Collins, so obsessed with immunizing against misinformation, making sure that only his version of the "truth" goes out. After all the lies about "safe and effective", how can we trust medical authority anymore?

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Misinformation poses a smaller threat to democracy than you might think.  It's so nice to read a contrasting and calming rational voice to counter the rapid media voices and politicians. All the efforts to counter misinformation ends up being verschlimmbesserung.

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16 September 2024

Ponsegromab is an antibody against GDF-15 (growth differentiation factor-15) and inhibition halts the severe weight loss, anorexia and decline in physical activity seen in patients with advanced cancer.  There is a potential treatment using this antibody that may help improve the quality of life of cancer patients. (I just wish it weren't Pfizer that's developing it, though.)

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Ten-year follow-up on the CheckMate-067 study was recently published, and the improvement in survival still holds. No surprises there.

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MacOS 15 (Sequoia) is out. I remember the days when Apple's stock rose when they came out with new stuff, as people were excited and sales soared.  Now Apple's stock sinks on the disaapointment. The ArsTechnica review makes it sound like more of a 14.6 version than a 15.0 update. Looks very minor. The AI stuff isn't ready and is expected to roll out later this year.  So nothing that's truly new and transformative. Just incremental improvements.

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Throwing good money after bad. Measure 118 just steals money from large corporations and essentially scatters it over the state. And everyone, including criminals, can have some of that money.  Oregon is the nation's leader in really dumb ideas.

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14 September 2024

Hey, it's not just me. Other people also think that the iPhone 16 is a symbol of how boring Apple has become. Tim Cook needs to be more innovative.

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This is why people are afraid to openly discuss gender dysphoria. And it needs to be discussed.

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Just say no. NW Natural is adding hydrogen to natural gas lines. Right now, it's only 0.2% hydrogen, but the goal is to increase it to as high as 20%. This could corrode gas lines and could lead to explosions. All this is done to reduce CO2 emissions.

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Did someone discover a new impact crater in Canada? The whole Cóte Nord area has many circular structures. I imagine the whole region was bombarded with meteors at one time.

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Elon Musks security detail is getting very complicated. The price you pay for being the world's wealthiest person, and who relishes fame.

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When doctors estimate remaining life in terminally ill patients, they are often overestimate survival by a factor of 5.3. Why is that? Why are so many so unrealistically optimistic?

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Good to know. iPhones and iWatches can be disabled in the presence of helium. It harms the internal clock.

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Some people can't lose weight after exercise.  Now we know that this is due to a variant of the PGC-1α protein. 

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13 September 2024

Metformin decelerates aging in male monkeys.  Well finally demonstrable changes in primates, instead of just fruit flies and round worms.

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Responding to work emails after hours contributes to burnout, hostility. I could see how this would happen.

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Another one bites the dust. Santa Fe tacqueria on 23rd Ave is closing this month.  It was a fixture on 23rd. No more. They're not saying exactly why except the rent/lease increased.

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Medical turmoil in Salem. I knew that Eugene/Springfield had only one hospital, but didn't know that Salem was like that as well. Now the hospital wants to own all medical care in the city, and a cardiologist group isn't having it.  This is similar to what Providence has been trying to do in Portland. This is not a healthy situation for any city with just one functioning hospital.

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12 September 2024

SpaceX takes a billionaire for a private space walk. NASA probably wouldn't do this. Cheers for private enterprise.

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Using Apple's VisionPro might inadvertently reveal your passwords and other things you type.  Your eye movements can be tracked. Seems like an exploit that might work in the lab under controlled conditions, but difficult to achieve in the wild.

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Donald Trump was "corrected" by David Muir who claimed that the FBI statistics say that violent crime is going down. Not only does that not jive with what we can see with our own eyes, but trusting government statistics can be risky. But take a look at stats from the National Crime Victimization Survey. I'd say these numbers are far more believable. Once again, Trump was right.

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OHA to Crack Down on Insurers That Don’t Offer Gender-Affirming Care. With all the other things that they have to worry about, this is what they prioritize.

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11 September 2024

OpenAI plans to release Strawberry AI in two weeks. This is AI that supposedly "thinks" before it responds, whatever that means. I guess we'll see.

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I wasn't aware of the Wallace Barrier until I was today years old.

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The Subaru Telescope discovered a second distinct Kuiper belt, beyond the first one.

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10 September 2024

So this guy thinks Apple is morphing into a service company. That's the strategy that IBM took. What happened to IBM?  Tim Cook seems to be just about at the end of the Steve Jobs momentum. Where will the company go next? iPhones are "not exciting enough for an upgrade". Isn't it time for Cook to retire yet? When I re-watch at old Steve Jobs videos, it was clear that the company had a real innovator. Not so anymore.

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Are Harris and Trump really neck-and-neck? I wondered about that, too. The real reason for reporting a close race is so Dems can cheat and have plausible deniability. If the polls reported the truth, no one would believe that Harris really won. But if people were to believe the race is close, well then, when they report the winner, no one should be surprised, right?

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Portland healthcare quality continues to ratchet downwards.  Labcorp, which now does the labs for Legacy and Providence, is going to downsize for efficiency, and consolidate, resulting in layoffs. And testing that is being done at the $20 million facility Legacy built in 2016 is being transferred to Providence's Halsey facility. And all those union gains from last year? Sad trombone. It's due to "rising healthcare costs".  Speaking of rising costs, health insurance rates in Oregon are increasing a lot.

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Not much sympathy for union workers at Fred Meyer.  Judging from reader comments, it seems that Portland Fred Meyer workers regard their clientele as "classless, rude and threatening" and they want to be paid at least $27/ hour. And your shopping experience at Wilsonville or Lake Oswego is far superior. Blue city blues.

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Another one bites the dust. The Community Cycling Center in Northeast Portland is running out of money and may have to close. Sucks to run a business in Portland, doesn't it? Who did you vote for?  Yeah I read that there are 16,000 more unemployed in Oregon compared with last year.  Soon to be more, I guess.

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What's with Portland's candidates?
Can't we have, you known, normal people run the city?

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9 September 2024

Sigh. In disciplines like oncology, genetics are playing a bigger role in diagnosis and treatment. But in cardiology, they're going backwards. Why is the AHA denying the obvious, calling decades of clinical observation signs of "structural racism"? Sorry, but biology is not a Disney movie.

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The world's first eye transplant has been performed. It's not functional just yet, but wait...

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Here's a glimpse at Apple's underground Observatory. This sort of thing would have made sense around 2016, when Apple was flying high. I wish Apple would pivot from constructing art galleries and build more innovating phones and computers. Now that they've maxxed out on phone thinness and pixel density, it seems they don't know what to do next. The next Macbook is going to look like the previous ones. The next iPhone is going to have the same design. Nothing new, Apple? Was Jony Ive's last design idea from 2019 going to be it from now on?

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How not to be fooled by viral charts. Part 1 and Part 2. I enjoy articles like these that debunk charts that people create to manipulate thought. In some cases, though, I think the creator was still correct, and Noah should print out the corrected graph so we can see the difference.

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As we get older, N6-Methyladenine progressively accumulates in mitochondrial DNA during aging.  At least for roundworms, fruit flies and dogs.  So it's a biomarker for aging, but perhaps it will be something to target to reverse mitochondrial functionality.

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