Sugoi & Yokunai

Harney County is the site of an 18,000 year old human site.  This would be the oldest in at least western North America.  Cool.

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Jack Reacher famously could measure time in his head down to the minute.  This is how the brain measures time.  Can this be enhanced? 

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Portland's racial demographics are changing.  There was still a numerically greater influx of whites, but clearly the trend is towards more diversity.  Hope that this will be a good thing, but that isn't guaranteed.

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Australlia is on the move.  The tectonic plate movement is amazingly fast.

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Near the bottom.  Here's a ranking of downtown recovery ratings.  Portland is third from the bottom.  Just a little better than San Francisco and Cleveland. 

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Two agencies with lousy reputations disagree on whether aspartame is a cancer risk.  Who do you believe?  The WHO or the FDA?  Given how they performed during the coronavirus epidemic, I'm not sure.

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How to use A.I. to do stuff - an opinionated user guide.  There is no user guide on A.I. - just a bunch of Twitter feeds by "influencers".  Well this is one attempt to be that guide.

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More indoctrination.  The gaslighting continues.  First we have to buy in to other people's delusions, deny biology, subvert English grammar to suit someone else's whims.  Now doctors are told that they can't view medicine as a science because the notes they write may trigger someone.  This nonsense needs to stop.  No one is telling transgenders that they can't be transgender.  They need to stop telling the rest of us how to live our lives.

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Unlike other tech fields, majoring in Computer Science is cyclical.  Dan Wang explains why.  Of course, there is an upswing again due to interest in artificial intelligence. 

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Student loan borrowers will have to repay their loans starting October.  Some of them are upset that they have to pay back a loan they signed on the dotted line saying they would.  Articles like this say that it's a 5% pay cut.  But they haven't had to make a payment for three years!  I never got such a deal.  It's like they got a free 5% raise for 3 years.  I find it hard to dredge up any sympathy. 

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Homicide rate nearly double after gun control measures put into place.  Hey, Dems, isn't it supposed to be the other way?

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Guess where Oregon is in cannabis use?  Number 2.  With Washington at Number 4.  Is this why we have so many crazies around here?  So many schizophrenics?  I could swear many hold political office.

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Biden wants a 40% reduction in A/C use, starting next year.  Wanna bet D.C. will be exempt? 

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About a year ago, Peter Schiff debated Alex Mashinsky about which is the better investment - gold or cryptocurrency.  What a difference a year has made.  Gold is about $200/oz higher than a year ago, and the SEC filed suit against Mashinsky and now he has reportedly been arrested.  Schiff has shown time and again that he has a better, more practical, sense about what's going on in the economy.

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FDA approves first OTC birth control pill.  It's a "mini-pill" - low-dose progestin only.  Less likely to cause blood clots, but you have to be super-compliant with taking it, same time, everyday, else your pregnancy rate will be 6% to 9%. 

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Chemically-induced reprogramming to reverse cellular aging.  Sounds good, doesn't it?  They used a cocktail of two special compounds, CHIR99021 and E-616452, along with valproic acid, sodium butyrate, and forskolin.  What they really did was just change the DNA methylation patterns to get the transcriptome of older fibroblasts to resemble that of younger fibroblasts.  The constitution of the transcriptome was obtained from the KEGG database.  Whether this truly indicates age-reversal remains to be seen, inasmuch as cosmetic surgery doesn't make you younger.  But it's a start.

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Hospitals were sued by using Meta's Pixel for analytics, not knowing that they were sending sensitive information to Zuckerberg's company.  Taxpayers, like H&R Block did not read this news, apparently, and used Pixel themselves. 

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If you're asymptomatic, taking a SARS-CoV2 rapid antigen test is worthless.  "Only 7.2% of the 69 participants with RT-PCR–positive results for shorter than 48 hours tested positive by Ag-RDT within 1 week; those with Delta infections remained consistently negative on Ag-RDTs."  Are people still testing themselves for this virus?

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Palestinian boy suffers decapitation.  Israeli physicians re-attach it.  Wow, is that not the best story of the day?

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The U.S. now has to import even more uncertified chemo agents from China.  India is no longer a reliable source.  Heck, they can't even meet their tomato demands now.  Yes, India is undergoing change right now.  Not good to be an unskilled worker there. 

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Portland social services are like the "best friend" you thought was helping you.  Only to find out they made your life worse in the long run.  The city is turning into one big drug den.

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What is the heat-emitting blob on the far side of the moon?

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Bullshit blindspot.  This study claims that those who think they can't be fooled fall the hardest.  It basically compared motivational quotes with made-up pseudo-profound BS, and asked people if they could tell which is which.  Those who thought they could tell, failed the test to a greater degree.  Looking at the questions in the study, it seems pretty clear which are which.  It can be harder to detect bullshit when it really matters.

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Genetic variants associated with the FOXP4 gene are associated with LongCOVID, according to a genome-wide association study. This is the first step in figuring out what is causing the disease and how to clearly identify it. 

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People are fleeing Oregon.  Actually the whole West Coast.  Looks like they're going to Idaho.

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Multnomah County reverses decision to hand out tinfoil and plastic straws.  Public National ridicule works.  This is why Portland fails.

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Fish is generally good for you, but be careful about eating fish (and shellfish) from around Oregon.  Mercury and PCB levels are elevated now.  And folks around HIllsboro are getting exposed to a lot of airborne lead.  Yikes!

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Electrons are really, really round.

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Why are so many people on disability?

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Portland writer advocates for not using the Ring doorbell security camera, because it's racist.  Is she implying that people who commit crimes might more likely to be "of color"? 

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Yikes!  It appears we have our own mini-Chernobyl out in Richland.  Thankfully it's not in the groundwater (yet) but they'd better not delay any longer.

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Do other people have a right to take some of your earned income?  Well, thanks to Oregon's liberal healthcare insurance law, they will.  Even illegal immigrants.  (Remember when they said that wasn't going to happen?)

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Great video on the Dobbs decision.

Download Dobbs.mp4

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Transparent mice.  Didn't know you could do this to mice. 

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The mysterious Cleo.  Who is this mysterious mathematical wizard?  Here's the original StackExchange post.

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Everything you post online will be scraped by Google to train its A.I. models.  The spirit of the Internet sure has evolved a lot since the days of its inception.  Remember how we thought the Internet was going to be for the benefit of all, and we'd all be smarter for it?  How quaint now, huh?
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GenZ and Millennials dumping rich friends because those friends are making them spend more.  They're missing out - there's a lot that can be learned hanging out with the wealthy.  Especially old money.  Not to mention the connections you can forge.  Oh well.

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90-year mortgages?  You might as well rent.  Guess banks haven't learned lessons from 2008.  People, too. 

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Oregon continues down the path of socialized healthcare.  Once you do this, there is no turning back.  Sad.

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Important news for this aging ronin: sleep and exercise keeps the aging brain sharp, but if you chronically don't get enough sleep, it's like you didn't exercise.

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Scientists achieve breakthrough in how our olfactory sense works.  Amazing that it took this long.  Also amazing is that its based on a flexible looping molecule that wraps around the molecule to be detected.  And it's similar to other G-protein coupled receptors. 

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Fecal transplants may improve melanoma immunotherapy?  This is only a phase I study, so you can't say this benefit is proven, but this would certainly be a paradigm shift. 

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One good thing at least.  Oregon's Consumer Data Privacy Law was passed.  The link to the actual law isn't working for me, so I couldn't examine it, but it's probably better to have than not to have.

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People would be foolish to sign up for Meta's Threads app.  Well, Zuckerberg famously called his customers "dumb f*cks".

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Is GPT chat just like a mentalist's illusion?  After seeing it in action for some time, I'm beginning to think so, too.  It seemed scarily like real intelligence for a while, I'll admit.

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Gruesome.  The CDC has no problem with hormone-using men taking estrogens to induce breast development to have the breast-feeding experience, thereby exposing babies to sex hormones and drugs like domperidone so early in life.  If the CDC doesn't care about babies' health, do you think they care about yours?

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A message to enterprising 14 year olds.  This is like that hypothetical question of what if you could go back in time to your teen years and re-live your life with all the knowledge you have now.  Almost no teenager today would heed this guys advice, probably.  But this is like Scouting for real-life, not survival in the outdoors.  This stuff should be taught in school, alongside the standard curriculum.

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