7 July 2024

It may now be possible to recycle close to 100% of solar panel materials. That would be very nice. Paper here.

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There's a Change.org petition to blow up the Nehalem whale.  Some people value spectacle more than anything else.

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Oregon made a $2.9 billion mistake in 2023. We're just finding out about it now. And no one will get fired.

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This is a problem with academic publishing. Reviewing other scientist's manuscripts is an unpaid job.  So who gets to do it? And how well is the job done?

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Firefox Privacy checklist. Things you can do to tighten down security.

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A new generation of kids are growing up thinking that ChatGPT is the fountain of truth. Nope. It's the fountain of what looks like it could be truth.

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In early 2023, the government introduced Bürgergeld (citizens’ benefit), which works like an unconditional basic income. With the state paying rent and other benefits, transfer payments for a family with two children in a city such as Munich, where housing costs are particularly high, can be as much as 3,400 euros per month.

At the same time, illegal work increased sharply in Germany. That’s because the combination of citizens’ benefit, for which no work is required, plus a few hours of undeclared work often means people have more money in their pockets than they would after 40 hours of hard work.

The paradox: while there are 2.7 million unemployed people in Germany, for companies it is extremely difficult to find employees. Many restaurants, for example, can no longer find enough workers and the number of insolvent restaurants increased by 27 percent last year.
Sounds like what's happening in the U.S.  And it will get worse if we have universal basic income.

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Yes, you should be worried about AI taking your job - but not in the way you might think. The real threat isn’t AI itself, but rather your colleagues who can use it effectively.
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6 July 2024

There is (at the time of this typing) a live fundraising YT video for Physics Girl, who has ME/CFS. I liked the interview with her physician, Dr. David Kaufman, who provided what is probably the latest on defining what LongCOVID is. Towards the end of the interview is a strong indictment against how medicine works in the U.S., where physicians have 15 minutes to interact with a patient. That's not enough interaction time for some diseases, and is not how medicine is supposed to operate. This is because of the corporatization of medicine, where doctors are employees of some large organization, instead of the independent practitioners they used to be.  This person even goes as far as saying that doctors are trained to think critically. That's just based on her medical school experience, and her lack of such development shouldn't be generalized. Doctors are certainly trained to think critically. But they just don't have time now.

Then, there's Thailand, which has a better healthcare system.  Their life expectancy is significantly higher than regional counterparts, and is even slightly longer than that of the U.S. The reason is that they focuses on distribution of care throughout the rural areas, where it is needed. Much of healthcare is a delivery issue – getting medicines and healthcare personnel to the people that need it. In the U.S. so much time and effort is spent developing formal healthcare plans, and incorporating the plan into a complex system which is integrated with a complex insurance reimbursement program that allows the system to continue to function. So much money and effort is devoted to maintaining the system, than to actual patient care. Note that Dr. Kaufman says that he operates outside the insurance system, allowing him to practice the way he does. That works for some situations, such as his telemedicine practice, but doesn't work for more complex and technologically involved areas such as surgery or oncology. You need some kind of insurance program or risk-sharing arrangement for things like this. But for primary care, availability and care delivery is probably most of the battle.

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Oregon can't have nice things. So we have a heat wave, and a pool gets shut down because someone pooped in the pool. And an American Airlines flight is diverted because an Oregon man exposed himself and peed in the aisle.

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Good for Hermiston. Petition to legalize cannabis sales falls short.

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Microsoft is working to stop the Skeleton Key jailbreak. It's hard to stop this generative AI jailbreak when one doesn't really understand completely how generative AI really operates. Yes, you can lower hyperparameters like temperature, but by increasing predictability, chat becomes less creative and more like a playback device.

But some are worried that AI is progressing so quickly that we only have about 8 years of life as we know it. It's interesting that in other countries, AI is already taking away many jobs, more so than we see in the U.S. 

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Washington state is seeing an "alarming" surge in EBT scams.  Another example of Democrat "solutions" that beget more problems.

This will be fun to watch. Many Chinese millennials are now quitting their jobs without anything to fall back on.  "Naked resignation" they call it.  Hey, Chinese hippies – I haven't seen those before.

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Glaze, and other solutions to prevent AI from stealing the work of artists, has been cracked. It's an arms race, and now new algorithms need to be developed to protect artists' IP.

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Signal stores its encryption keys in plaintext. I find it hard to believe that this is accidental. I'm already off Signal.

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5 July 2024

Fascinating video by Nick Zentner on the history of the great rivers of the Pacific Northwest.


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Memories erased by lack of sleep can be restored by medications.  At least in mice. With roflumilast, an asthma medication, and vardenafil, also known as Levitra.

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AI can read your mind, at least in terms of imagery recall. This may just be supervised learning on a defined target set, but I'm not completely sure. Can't access the original research article. 

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$504 million allocated to create a dozen tech hubs?  Are you kidding me?  I'm not even sure this would completely fund even one tech hub, much less a dozen.  Who budget this? All it will pay for is office space and stationery. What a joke.

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OPB says that hiking in Oregon may be racist.

I certainly never felt that way. So what do they propose to change this?

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4 July 2024

Thieves in Seattle are wiping out a lot of charging stations, adding to charging anxiety.  Give it up, guys. EVs are not for everyone. There are so many things that tell us that the concept doesn't work yet in the America we live in. Where people break the infrastructure you need to make the idea work. Not to mention battery disadvantages.

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Thank goodness. Judge blocks Biden's rule adding gender identity protections to healthcare. Treating obvious mental illness as a condition that requires irreversible mutilative surgery is also a mental illness.

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German researchers have noted that all-cause mortality increases after two doses of the COVID-19 mRNA vax product. And Italian researchers have noticed it, too.  So when will the FDA pull the product off the market and order safety investigations?

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People are now realizing that AI is going to require large supplies of energy. Resources we don't currently have.

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There are neurons that encode a word's meaning. These are like the embedding matrix space in a large language model, where a single vector encodes a word in the context of its meaning.

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3 July 2024

Portland can't enforce anti-camping ban because they have no money for enforcement.  Incompetency in action.

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Oregon passes laws to enhance consumer data protection. A good start.

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OHSU is letting nurses go. Makes no sense at all.  There's supposed to be a nursing shortage, after all.

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Self-publishing has never been easier. Two options: Writebook and Softcover.

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2 July 2024

Is there a link between gut bacteria and Parkinson's disease? Some think so, but I doubt that supplementation with riboflavin and biotin will be the answer. Might help in some, perhaps.

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Remember when the medical experts were telling everyone that the mRNA vax just stayed in your arm and maybe a few adjacent lymph nodes?  Well, scientists have just found that the mRNA vax accumulates in the ovaries, too.  And that's what causes the menstrual irregularities. Would women have agreed to the vax if they knew?  Scientists had already determined that the mRNA vax was widely distributed, so it's not clear why people were told otherwise.

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1 July 2024

The shadowy new way employees are cheating their way to the top. Some workers are outsourcing their jobs to others. Could be a security hole, among other things. But a new cottage industry.

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Speaking of cottage industry, there is a business of buying up winning lottery tickets, when you'd rather have the cash than the headaches that go along with it. Pretty clever. But when you ruin it for the state, then maybe they'll shut it down. Because it's not fun anymore.

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Just being near a blast can injure your brain.

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What will Oregon do in response to the recent SCOTUS Johnson v Grants Pass ruling? Right now, Oregon is hamstrung by HB 3115, which was written around Martin v Boise, which no longer holds. Something needs to happen. But Democrats, including Tina Kotek, aren't yet persuaded to do anything. This is why we lose.

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EVs are a headache in terms of problems needing repairs. EVs aren't ready yet for general consumer deployment. They only make sense in certain locales, and only if you're very wealthy.

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Did you notice when Jake Tapper said that inflation under Biden has gone up only 20%?  Yeah, it wasn't just the candidates that stretched the truth 

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Nice to see that some progress is being made in fixing Lahaina.  It will be nearly a year since the August 2023 fire.

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30 June 2024

Skeleton Key is a hack which allows chatbots to bypass safety guardrails.

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Maurice Ravel has been declared the legal sole composer of Bolero.  I didn't even know that it was contested.  It's interesting how the current inheritor of Ravel's intellectual property acquired this right:
When he died in 1937, Maurice Ravel had no children. His property and copyrights went to his brother, Edouard Ravel. He died in 1960 and, to everyone's surprise, he bequeathed everything to his housekeeper and caregiver, Jeanne Taverne.

When she died in turn, it was her husband, Alexandre Taverne, former driver of Ravel's brother, who inherited. He took a new wife, Georgette, his late wife's former manicurist. It was her turn to inherit when Alexandre Taverne passed away. Finally, when Georgette died in 2012, it was her daughter from a first marriage who received the inheritance.

The daughter from the first marriage of the second wife of the driver of Maurice Ravel's brother is named Evelyne Pen de Castel.
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There was no statistical difference in people’s reported use of illegal drugs. On average, people reported using illegal substances somewhere between zero and four times per month, both at the start and the end of the study.
And it seems that $50/month produced about the same results as $1000/month.

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Oregon makes things more difficult for itself. Even though SCOTUS overturned Martin v Boise, Oregon is unable to make changes due to HB 3115. 

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29 June 2024

Overturning Chevron deference was the best gift to America. Remember when the CDC got involved in prohibiting evictions? Or when OSHA got into the business of mandating masks and vaccines?  No more!

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Oregon only added 4000 jobs in May, and much of it in healthcare and social assistance.  That's making up the loss of jobs in healthcare and adding to government staff to help dispense for welfare and unemployment payments. Manufacturing, construction and retail saw job losses. Not a sign of a healthy economy.

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Tech is working on developing holographic doctors.  Has this actually been shown to improve health? This seems to me to be working on the shell, the outside, but not working on the inside, the infrastructure of healthcare. The lack of practitioners will be dealt with by creating shadow-practitioners. 

Amazon is going all in to transform doctors into commodities, whose time is worth $49 for a video visit. Well, if that's all that the market will bear, so be it, I guess. It'll be interesting to see what kind of doctors sign up for this.
 
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OHSU Board formally approves job cuts. And the union goes wild.  This bit of dialog was enlightening:
At one point in the presentation, someone shouted to Jacobs, “Why did you take a bonus?”

“I haven’t had a bonus — that was retirement,” Jacobs shot back.

“You’re not going to lose your house or car,” a voice cried out.

“I might,” Jacobs responded.
That's disingenuous. If Danny Jacobs is at risk of losing his house and car on his salary and retirement account, he's basically admitting to gross financial incompetence.

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I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world? I have no clue and this is what makes me really worried about them.
Well, we old folks have something under our belts. Not sure if they are tricks anymore, though.

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Try not to lose both ovaries if you're young. And just supplementing with estrogen is not enough.

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Love this article on TED talks. I've felt the same way.  The old Scientific American approach doesn't appeal to modern Americans. We don't have Huntley-Brinkey Report or MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour or Ted Koppel's Nightline anymore.  No daytime shows where they bring on Milton Friedman. Today, we have Brian Stelter and Don Lemon type shows. We have The View.  America has gotten dumber, and TED talks are how we get high-brow science.  There are a lot of pop-math and pop-science videos which are fun to watch, but they're aimed at high school kids. Wish there was something for grown-ups.

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28 June 2024

SCOTUS overturns Chevron deference. This is the big news of the day. A lot of Democrats will find that what they've been doing is no longer allowed. Hopefully this will mean a reversal of a lot of agency over-reach crap. More here.

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SCOTUS also upholds Grants Pass government, overturning Martin v Boise. A lot of people seemed to have missed the point. Sleeping out in the open may not be a crime, but camping out and turning public property into one's own personal yard, should not be legal. If you want to sleep, then sleep. But by morning, pack up all your stuff and leave that spot pristine.

I'm waiting for these other rulings.
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The College Board has changed SAT testing. The tests are now digital, and the level of difficulty will change depending how well you are doing. If you are ace-ing the test, then apparently it will get more difficult. This sounds like equity efforts to me. Instead of everyone facing the same challenges, some people will get obstacles placed in their way to slow them down, to let the others catch up.

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Diversity Was Supposed to Make Us Rich. This was based on a study that now seems to have been more random luck than principle-based. Just being diverse doesn't generate excellence or competence, which are what really makes you rich. I've always believed that diversity is just good for art, food and music. For everything else, it's merit.

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Laid-off OHSU employees are getting half the severance pay than that Chief of People and less benefits. They don't continue to get paid like she is. They don't get COBRA benefits, like she is getting for just 19 months of work. OHSU probably just wanted to avoid expensive legal wrangling.

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Fentanyl is costing Oregon hospitals around $6 billion.  What are the hospital CEOs doing about this?

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Ambulances are being stolen now in Oregon. Because why not?

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There been a pause in the dismantling of Ha'iku Stairs. Because it's the home of the hoary bat, Hawaii's only native terrestrial mammal.  There's still the problem that the base of the stairs are in private property, though.

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This is dumb. Multnomah County is enforcing a camping ban, but will still give out tents and tarps. Does that make sense?

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Google Translate added more languages to its repertoire.  Almost double the number. I still use just a few.

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Interesting interview with Chris Cuomo and Dr. Robert Redfield, formerly head of the CDC.  Around 46 minutes into the interview, he suggests that LongCOVID is due to the vaccine. A lot of what he is saying would have been considered heretical and grounds for losing one's license in 2021. Wish guys like him spoke up more back then.  It would have avoided a lot of grief and headache.

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Nyobolt has developed a car battery that charges really fast – 80% in 5 minutes (under ideal conditions). I still won't buy an EV. Not until they make replacing the battery easier and reasonably inexpensive. And available in many retail outlets.

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Now the Biden administration wants to regulate research integrity.  Someone's got to do it, but I don't want Biden's government doing it.
...the Office of Research Intregrity has posted only 32 cases since 2008. No wonder there have been recent calls to criminalize research misconduct. No wonder, too, that some scientists are suspicious of the government’s attempt to solve with an oversight body a problem that has been besting established oversight bodies for years.

There is a bigger picture in play, however. As demoralizing as research misconduct is, we should hardly be surprised by its occurrence. The unscrupulous, like the poor, will always be with us. More demoralizing is how research misconduct is actually incentivized in our modern science ecosystem. Few people want to acknowledge that.
No easy answers, but the government should stay out.

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According to climate scientsts, a lot of tiny islands were supposed to be underwater. Some are but 89% are not, and some are enlarging.

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