Sugoi & Yokunai

Seems to me that the sentiment of Providence in Washington is so different from the sentiment in Oregon. Almost seems like two different operations. Here in Oregon, Providence is viewed as basically benign (unless you are a private medical group). But in Washington, it seems people have no love for Providence. Look here and here and here. Does the Oregon part have a better PR division?

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Biogen is discontinuing Aduhelm for Alzheimer's disease, admitting that it isn't working. Lecanimab (Leqembi) is favored instead, but even that drug disturbingly causes brain shrikage. Do we really know what we are doing? Is amyloid-β the right target?

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"All kinds of crime are down in Portland". Does it seem that way to you? I agree with commenters – crime is just not reported as much anymore, because people don't feel that it will do anything. But if you look at X/Twitter reports of ongoing incidents, it seems that the city is on fire everywhere, and many folks downtown are stuporous walking zombies, passing out before they can pull the trigger.

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Mental health treatment is hard to come by in Seattle. That's not good when so many folks up there are mentally ill.

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Scientists keep discovering new things about the body. There are a network of lymphatics in the posterior nasopharynx that are critical for CSF drainage. Circulatory patterns for CSF flow had not been fully known.

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NTP TImelord passed away. Salute to David Mills, who made so much possible in coordinating time synchronization around the world.

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Oregon – the only state that did worse in Math after the coronavirus disaster.  What's going to turn Oregon around?

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Just one beer or glass of wine a day may cause your brain to shrink. There's probably more to the equation, but it's probably true to some extent.

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Why webpages all look the same. Page design is to make things more Google-friendly, not to make it human friendly. It's SEO, baby.

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• https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/created-unequal
• https://www.takimag.com/article/the-most-dangerous-conservative/
• https://www.takimag.com/article/the-ever-present-questions/

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This meme is circulating.

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Portland's graffiti problem worsened under Joanne Hardesty's leadership. She let the BLM graffiti stand, and from there it took off. This story should make you outraged, as it is a visible marker for Portland's decay.

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It's nice when young Seattleites get a first-hand economics education. 'Outrageous' food delivery fee angering Seattle app users. Apparently someone else was supposed to pay for the delivery driver's pay raise.

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Florida has made it easier to sue people who defame you by calling you racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. I'm not sure this is a good idea, actually. The goal is to promote civility, but knowing human natures, I am not certain that this will be the outcome. It will probably lead to even more lawsuits. Because people ultimately want money. Maybe if it were restricted to mainstream media, so that they are forced to report more responsibly. That would be OK.

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SCOTUS' Sotomayor is getting tired. The workload is too much. She doesn't have a summer break. Conservative victories traumatize "her stomach and heart". As someone on Reddit said, we don't have a neutral court. We have a polarized court, and one side "fights" against the other side. Judicial activism. It's no longer the rule of law and the Constitution, but rather feelings. We certainly saw that with the vaccine mandate legislation. Sotomayor should step down. She is not the "wise Latina" anymore.

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Remember those anarchist anti-Israel students at University of Washington who occupied the President's office? All charges dropped.

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Legacy Modern furnitures is closing in East Portland. Because foot traffic is abysmal. No one wants to shop around there anymore.

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Whenever someone votes for socialized medicine, show them this. The only renal dialysis unit in Tillamook is closing. Because Medicare reimbursement is so inadequate that it doesn't make sense to stay open and lose money.

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Portland is the best city to have a business and a family?  In all of the U.S.? Better than Boston and Denver? Houston doesn't even rate?

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How not to be a billionaire in Hawaii. The Aloha State is so different now from when I was there before 2000. And I'm not just talking about the new buildings. For a while, it looked like Hawaii was going to have nice things. Now, there are pockets of "Private Property – Stay Out" and everywhere outside of that is just homeless tents, squalor and seediness, amongst the reminders of the faded glory from days past. There aren't as many wealthy Asians to spend money, and the local government has big expenditure dreams. And the unions still rule.

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Shades of Theranos. 23andMe is virtually worthless now. The Forbes curse seems to be real.

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Colorado Dems decided not to go with nuclear energy. They'd rather go with wind, solar and hydroelectric power, because some guy from Conservation Colorado thinks that nuclear is more expensive than the other three energy sources. Really?

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Why is this coming up now? The EU has a problem with "where no man has gone before" in the original Star Trek. Shatner is livid.

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I know the answer. Why are so many American cities squalid?  When you don't even compare favorably with Sofía, Bulgaria, you know things are bad.

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Why everyone hates the electronic medical record. Well, the main reason doctors don't like it is because the people who are responsible for the design and implementation aren't physicians, and it's just another manifestation of doctors losing control over their own domain.

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The Smart Money doesn't just "buy low and sell high". Sometimes it "buys high", too.

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Harvard's not having a good week. Dana Farber and Harvard Med School retracted a whopping 6 papers, and corrected 31 other papers. And their DEI officer was also caught flgrantly cheating, too. What's Harvard's motto again?

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The U.S. sold its helium reserve stockpile. Yeah, the medical world is dumbfounded. Like Hillary Clinton selling uranium to the Russians. Who approved this?

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And in other medical news, NY's Gov Hochul will essentially make physician assistants practice much like regular physicians. Because, you know, there's a doctor shortage. In large part, inflicted by her predecessor, and continued by her. That's how Dems solve problems. By covering them up with new ones.

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This goes on in a public park in Portland every Sunday. Free drug paraphernalia. Without a permit. City knows about it but does nothing. This is Portland.

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Firefox browser has built-in spyware that can't be disabled? Hmm. I switched to the LibreWolf just in case.

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This is a discussion of how doctors do knowledge management. As you can see, it's not uniform, and everybody does it a different way. I would bet only a minority uses a reference manager (Zotero).

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This is how the "unbreakable" RSA key security was broken. With knowledge of number theory. This is why you study math.

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Scientists got a pig brain to survive 5 hours outside its body. Boy, this will be one for the ethics committee, for sure. Technology shows what you can do, but not whether you should be doing it.

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ChatGPT can be broken, for sure. Despite all the safeguards put into place, you can't control it all. Someone will find a way to extract all the secrets you instruct it to hide. And now there is a black market for jail-breaking prompts.

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Looks like Oregon students can join the Army now. They've dumbed down the requirements - HS diploma is no longer needed. We're going to have a such a military going up against the likes of China now, with some of the highest IQs in the world.

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Wireless providers wanted to build their wireless towers in areas with the least potential for climate and weather disruption. Inadvertently, their research has provided a nice resource for climatologists and the climate-curious, to see how their area fares in terms of risk to weather extremes. You can explore their data here. Or jump into a climate projections map of your desired location here.

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Another tech company (Trimble) leaves Portland for Lake Oswego.

You can be sure that Portland will look at "creative" ways to make up for the revenue loss. Pity for those that are stuck in the city. You're going to start feeling more pain.
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I can vouch for this. And this is not just music. It's everything, once you're an adult.

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And why is there a split in ideology between men and women?

And not just women in general – it's the unmarried women, specifically. Why? Could it be because so many own cats, and are at risk of Toxoplasmosis infections in their brains.

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The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run. I had a shortwave radio as a kid. It was fun discovering mysterious stations, where someone would just say numbers over and over, or read meaningless speeches to no one in particular. Or weird sounds.

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San Francisco's oldest toy store closing after 86 years.This is the one that inspired Toy Story. And yes, it's because of crime. Good going, SF, pretty soon you'll have nothing.

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Humans can get their pets sick: Reverse zoonoses more common than once thought. I'm convinced a pet dog I had died of swine flu.

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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This.  Oh, yeah. Those were the days. How innocent the Web was then. Good times...

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Why didn't the CDC warn people about the risk of myocarditis from the mRNA vax? Because "because officials were concerned they would cause panic".

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What you should know if you’re about to fly on a Boeing Max 9. Already people are canceling or avoiding flights if they know it's going to be on a Boeing plane. If you want to know, get the FlightView app.

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Oregon graduation rate flat, with setbacks for Black, Indigenous students.

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All good things seem to come to an end. So Japan is retiring the Hadaka Matsuri, because there aren't enough young men to participate, and women want to join in? This year they're allowing fully-clothed women to make a ritual bamboo grass offering, but that's it. Not the momiai, which would have made it ... interesting.

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The Lone Star Rebellion is growing!  Enough is enough, already.

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The 9th Circuit Is Wrong: There’s No Homelessness Protection Clause in Constitution. Fully agree.

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So PGE is going to charge us more because of the ice/wind storm?

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Portland city leaders ask residents to renew 10-cent gas tax.

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iPhone Apps Secretly Harvest Data When They Send You Notifications. Well, it's a good thing I don't have accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok or X/Twitter.

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The new Miss Japan is Ukranian. And some people are upset about that. So what, I say.

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Why did the National Education Association (NEA) and the Oregon Education Association (OEA) donate a combined $575,000 dollars of membership dues to the Oregon Votes Yes PAC?  This money paid for online advertisements and canvassing in support of four constitution-amending ballot measures related to healthcare, criminal justice, quorum requirements, and firearms, such as:

Measure 111, which redefined healthcare as a fundamental human right to the Oregon State constitution.  
Measure 112, which removed language in the constitution related to indentured servitude or slavery as a punishment for crime—previously used to reduce prison sentences in the criminal justice system.  
Measure 113, which prohibits a member of Oregon’s legislature from holding state office for one full term, if they have 10 or more unexcused absences, effectively ending a procedural move for the minority to deny quorum.  
Measure 114, which altered the state’s firearm and purchasing requirements, in addition to adding a magazine capacity limit.   

Under the framework, Measure 110 would not be repealed, but drug decriminalization would be effectively ended. As things currently stand, being caught in possession of user amounts of drugs can earn a Class E violation — a ticket for $100 at most, which can be waived if the person fined contacts a substance use helpline. The new proposal would change that to a Class C misdemeanor, the lowest-level misdemeanor crime under Oregon law.

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Incredible!  Someone went to a lot of trouble to create an online infographic of Star Wars IV: A new hope. Very cool.

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The City of Portland's boundary is a business kill zone.  Everyone blames someone else for ice storm ineptitude.

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How Euler did it.  Leonhard Euler was the greatest mathematician who ever lived, I think. No one has matched his output. This is a nice resource for those who want to understand his work.

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This is what happens when people overly rely on artificial intelligence. Computer vision is not yet foolproof. Poor guy has a good legal case for wrongdoing, in my opinion.

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Cool. There's an accurate blood test for making the diagnosis of Alzheimer's Disease. It probably needs to be confirmed, and if so, would replace the need for spinal taps to sample CSF.

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Beautiful waterway map.  LTC Rolt would have appreciated this.

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The Boeing plant in Renton was responsible for misinstallation of the door that blew off. Some of the commenters wonder if the workers were stoned or on other drugs, or if they were part of the DEI hiring process that afflicts so much of Seattle. "Boeing’s 737 production system is described as 'a rambling, shambling, disaster waiting to happen.' ”

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