22 September 2025

Happy Autumnal Equinox!

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Yikes. Michigan is seeking to ban VPN usage. Something about "Anticorruption of Public Morals Act".  They say it's the Republicans that want this, but true Republicans don't want to take away your freedom. These are likely the same RINOs that supports vaccine papers, etc. This won't work – give it up.

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Here's map of many different musical genres that you can explore and sample. It's called Every Noise at Once.

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This is why legislators aren't good at passing laws legalizing marijuana for recreational use. They don't take care of loopholes. It just made stuff like this proliferate. Now people are using delta-8 THC in places where delta-9 THC is still illegal, because that's all the law covered.

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Acesulfame-K is one of the safer non-caloric sweeteners. It's funny how just about all these sweeteners were discovered by accident.

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Here's another story of how using AI helped a patient to a diagnosis.  This guy had six feet of small intestine removed, and I call bluff that he was never told about short-bowel syndrome. I am sure he got a flyer telling him about foods to avoid or watch for after he had surgery. He probably didn't read it. And I can't believe he saw nutritionists and gastroenterologists who ALL missed the cause of his ailments. This is not some rare syndrome – it's short bowel syndrome. Who could have missed it??? But still, the point is about doctors not using AI tools, and that's another discussion.

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Oh-oh.  A Mysterious Jupiter-Sized Planet Is Heading Toward Our Solar Neighborhood. Quick, before the Democrats start giving the inhabitants benefits and free housing.

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Disturbing. Oregon doesn't want people know how many genital mutilating surgeries they've been doing. They're afraid it might be used for political purposes. Really? What would make us think that?

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Heh.

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21 September 2025

There are three AI bubbles. I'm not sure that they are bubbles. This is the direction we need to go. The question is only whether it can be achieved. This is why I'm invested in nuclear as well.  Did you see how these two stocks shot up recently (NuScale (SMR) or NANO Nuclear Energy (NNE))? Wow!

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Scientists Say a Newly Discovered Immune Cell May Drive Inflammation as We Age.  Wow, when I took immunology way back when, there were just a handful of known immune cells. Now there over a dozen! The immune system is complex, as it should be.

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The Metaculus Cup is an award to forecasters, and an AI model won eighth place, even beating humans. I can see that. But will it keep winning? Who's going to feed it the right data?  And how often?  Until I see repeated success, I'm going to call this a one-off.

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Here's a list of imminent layoffs: Washington and Oregon.  Since the law says you have to give people a lot of advance notice, it's public knowledge now. There's a lot of people slated to be jobless. It's going to hurt both states, and the new H-1B visa laws are going to trigger a new batch of layoffs, too. Just in time for the holidays.

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What? Google is pinching pennies? What happened? They were supposed to be rich. What does this say about the tech sector? Or is it just Google?

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Join the club. Well, well, now the Kaiser healthcare workers are striking. I guess they were jealous that OHSU, Providence and Legacy workers were getting all the strike action. So why not? Let's all raise hospital expenses and put Oregon's healthcare industry and the region's largest employers out of business.  Or make them suitable takeover targets.

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The West Coast Vaccine Alliance announced that anyone can get the vax if they want it.  But why would anyone want more mRNA gene therapy injected into them, increasing their risk for myocarditis and sudden death, without any real meaningful benefit from infection with COVID-19? Are the pharmacists going to risk their licenses, because they may not have liability protection. It's not like Oregon has extra money lying around to cover this. It's amazing that some doctors still remain sold on the benefits of the mRNA vax. Get the Novavax vaccine if you must. It's not completely free of side-effects, but at least it's not gene therapy. 

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In 2024, Oregon’s Medicaid Insurers Got a 3.4% Rate Bump. Their Costs Jumped 10%. Yeah, who didn't see that coming. More people are going on Medicaid because that's all they can afford. Of course, expenses will increase.

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Gordon’s Fireplace Building is Again Headed for Auction. I'm going to miss that symbol of Portland when it comes down. It so represented what the city has become better than the Elk Statue or Big Pink. The anarchy. The filth. The impotence of law enforcement. The ineptitude of city leadership. All in one ugly building.

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Is it true that ~30% of medical residency slots are filled by international graduates on H-1B visas? That's insane. Why can't we fill those slots with American medical school graduates? This needs to change, and should have been done sooner. Also side note, don't use Grok to fact-check. It wasn't designed for that purpose.

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Yes, I'm all for making Standard Time permanent. Let's do it finally.

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For computer science, if you just graduate with a degree and nothing else, you’re going to be working at McDonald’s....That’s just a reality; this isn’t an overstatement.
Unbelievable. CS schools really need to change, but I bet the professors don't know how to teach the new stuff.

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LLMs are bad at some simple tasks. Like list comparison.  This could be a tokenization problem. Needs further study.

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Your earwax could be the basis for a new class of diagnostic tests. It's a way to get body cells sampled for analysis. Kinda messy, though. Why not stick with blood tests?

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Portland relies on Urban Alchemy for a lot of homeless services, but the company seems to be mismanaged.  
San Francisco officials accused the company of having “knowingly overspent” hundreds of thousands on pay bumps last fiscal year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. 
Of course, it's the Homeless Industrial Complex. They don't want homelessness to end. It would mean the end of their business model. Mayor Keith Wilson loves them, though. Thinks they're doing a great job.

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Portland ranks 22nd in U.S. for income growth, outpacing national average. It seems to be good news, until you realize that it's because all the hospital employees go on strike for higher wages, and they win. Won't be forever, though.

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20 September 2025

Alcohol can damage the liver so that it is unable to repair, even after one stops drinking.  RNA splicing capability is permanently impaired, making repair impossible. Explains why some people seems to develop bad cirrhosis while others seems to do OK for a while longer before it hits. 

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How accurate is your calculator?

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Taking ergocalciferol (vitamin D2) will lower your levels of cholecalciferol (vitamin D3), which is what you really want elevated. Another reason to take cholecalciferol.

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I’ve spoken to dozens of employees over the past few months, and they all told me that morale inside Microsoft is at an all-time low. If there’s fear at the top of Microsoft, then employees will undoubtedly feel that through the constant rounds of layoffs and change. It’s why I said in July that Microsoft risks creating a culture of fear.
Microsoft CEO Concerned AI Will Destroy the Entire Company.  Yeah, someone was talking about this. 
It takes several millions to train each model, and it takes months to train. So to avoid being left behind, you train multiple models at once.
Then when you're done, people can use it for free or for very low cost. I never understood how that made sense.
Of course you can't stop, because OpenAI or Anthropic or China will beat you.
It's a new rollercoaster of expenses that didn't exist before. And companies can't get off.  
So I can understand why Microsoft is scared. It's a new money sink. But they don't dare stop. 

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Holy crap! Doctors almost harvested the organs of a man who was not dead. Someone needs to revise their organ donor protocols, that's for sure.

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Apparently in Washington state, they don't hide it anymore.  If you are conservative, you don't get hired. They don't attempt to hide it.

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Here it is! They got the video of the guy who jumped the open ramp of the University bridge in Seattle. I was expecting Dukes of Hazzard, but was kinda disappointed. They left the cops throwing their caps on the ground, though. Legend.

And here's more proof that Seattle is a city in decline. The thieves are taking the city apart, copper wire by copper wire. 

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iPhone 17 buyers are noticing that the paint scratches easily, especially the deep blue color. Could it be because all the production moved to India?

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Bad AI.  HMSA in Hawaii will use AI to make insurance coverage determinations. They're calling it the Experience Cube.
An intelligent data hub that brings together disparate sources of information into a single source of truth.
Yeah, right. Good luck with your new system. The folks in Hawaii should read this article.

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Why we don't trust doctors and scientists anymore.
The medical profession has lost its mind and is so fixating on deviant sex. I can't believe that so much time and effort has gone into promoting sex change and genital mutilation, and basically everything that the transgender coalition wants. Who would have thought this would be the state of "mainstream" medicine, say twenty years ago. What nonsense and craziness.

And here's a study that supposedly links the ability to critically identify health misinformation with political ideology.  Paper here. Supposedly conservatives are less likely to be able to spot bad health information when they see it. The study, of course, is heavily weighted to COVID matters specific to ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. There are no questions regarding transgender nonsense or with regard to the mRNA vaccines. Those are examples of medical misinformation. I would consider this study heavily biased, and am surprised it passed peer review. 

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Well, much to the dismay of certain people, "just by telling somebody that their intelligence can grow if they work hard, it does not actually grow". Isn't this obvious?

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North Portlanders are finding that having a homeless shelter in their neighborhood increased vandalism and drug use.  Really? We were told this wouldn't happen.

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19 September 2025

Wow, nobody wants today's college grads.  

They told us that giving scholarships to kids for college was an "investment in our country's future" or something like that. And now the want us to pay off their student loans? 

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Canary in the coal mine: With just days of cash left, remote California hospital nears crisis point. Sure, Bernie can say that healthcare is a human right, but that doesn't match reality. This may come to pass for some Oregon hospitals.

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18 September 2025

Isaac is a multimodal AI that specializes in interpreting features on images and performing inference on them. I gave it a picture of a meal, and it calculated the caloric content and glycemic index. It's a 2 billion parameter model – quite small, and could fit in a mobile phone. This could be a game changer for people with diabetes.

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The editor who allowed this article to be published was fired. It's called Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems. Is that science, when you disallow viewpoints countering the narrative?

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John Cook posted a set of mental math tricks to help you look like Feynman. Just the thing to impress the girls at parties.

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Some scientists are working to bring back the dodo bird.  Proof of concept?  This is going to be done by a company that specialized in this sort of thing: Colossal Biosciences. They already brought back the dire wolf, but they'll use CRISPR technology to add adaptive diversity so that the resurrected animals don't die so easily. 

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Trump promised No Tax on Tips. Oregon Democrats are scheming to take it away. Oregonians will finally get to know how well the Dem party cares about them.

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Seattle Childrens Hospital is going to lay off 150 staffers. They'll be mostly administrators. Seattle is facing the same headwinds as Oregon hospitals. Providence lost $260 million in the last quarter.  Gone are the Obamacare heydays. 
It's like the City of Portland, facing their own cash crunch. It's all due to the same underlying problem, really. Think about it.

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Ugh, Dean Sidelinger is back, telling the Oregon Health Authority to be pro-vax again. Just when I thought I didn't have to worry about that guy again. It's still unclear to me if pharmacies are going to participate in this charade. 

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Anxiety Grows at Knight Cancer Institute as Leaders Float Big Budget Cuts. Apparently the Knight gift money is going to restricted expenses, and not to fund and support existing programs.

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17 September 2025

Microsoft favors Anthropic over OpenAI for Visual Studio Code. I used to code mostly with Claude Sonnet, and I still think it's the most fun to work with. Always pleasant and human-like. But there were more than a few times I had to switch LLMs because it couldn't help me with a vexing problem, and I found solutions with Gemini or GPT-5. Kiri-K2 is also good as a first pass coder. I'm very impressed. But I think Microsoft would never use Gemini for business reasons and so with Meta.

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Earth has a new quasi-moon, 2025 PN7. Way too small and faint to see without really powerful equipment. Welcome to the family, 2025 PN7.

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In the wild, chimps likely ingest the equivalent of several alcoholic drinks every day. They love their fermented fruits.

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Apple has developed with own wireless protocol, SPR AVS. Great! I hate Bluetooth – so slow and unreliable.

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Are we heading for a future of superintelligent AI mathematicians?  If AI proves the Riemann Hypothesis, will we feel the same frisson of discovery? I think not, especially if humans can't fully understand the proof.

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Too late Tina.  Tina Kotek tells state agencies to cut their spending, travel now in response to Trump tax cuts. The politicians have already done all their traveling.

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Semiconductor industry supplier, Edwards Vacuum, is exiting Hillsboro. No more manufacturing in Oregon. 140 will be laid off. They're going elsewhere.  You paying attention, Tina?

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The City of Portland found a 6% drop (-$12 million) in business tax income this past year.  So they are $16 million in the hole. So go on, spend more money helping the homeless fund their lifestyle. Defund the police. Let Antifa be a pain in the ass for everyone around the South Waterfront. 

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16 September 2025

Today is Pythagoras Day. Because it is 9/16/25 and 32 + 42 = 52.

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Some critiques about Apple's Liquid Glass look.  I just upgraded yesterday, and so far, it seems to work OK. I'm not unhappy with it. I don't like that they put some unasked-for widgets on the desktop, which messed up my icons, but apart from that, I haven't encountered anything horrible. Apple is saying that iOS 26 might slightly shorten battery life, but perhaps in the short term. Hmm. 

Here's a list of all the new features of iOS 26 and macOS 26. I don't recall them doing this for any other release. Is it that radical? And here's the ArsTechnica review of macOS 26.

FileVault will no longer let you store the Recovery Key in iCloud. The title of the article is very misleading. 

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Sleep boosts growth hormone levels and increases muscle and bone. It's one of those asymmetric factors where sleeping more doesn't help you, but sleeping less hurts you.

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China is quietly saving the world from climate change. I think China is turning their countryside into a blight. All those solar panels – yuck!  Is that a "solution" to something? For climate change?

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Google releases VaultGemma, its first privacy-preserving LLM.  At this point, I don't know if anyone can be sure how private an LLM is.

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The Japanese landscapes that inspired Studio Ghibli films. Wow, what a delight it would be to visit those locales.

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Brain drain.  A top AI scientist leaves for China. This feeds the paranoia that you can never trust any Chinese national. They're all just a likely to flee the U.S. for China, taking research developments with them. Is it worth the security risk? This is the common attitude where the first people to flee just think for themselves, never considering how it might affect those others left behind, being viewed as security risks. Trump will be proven right, and people will scream "racism".

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Trump is going to do away with quarterly corporate earnings reporting and make them semiannual. People think that's too infrequent. Hey, about every four months instead?  Ah, no one listens to me.

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Bad Blender. Someone gets it about using AI for medical purposes.

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Mullvad VPN is going to use the QUIC protocol to hide WireGuard signals in normal encrypted traffic, to help evade detection and filtering.

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Clothes from chicken feathers? An engineer from Hawaii makes it possible. Curious to know how durable it really is. We have a lot of chickens, so it would be great to make use of that resource.

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RFK Jr is going to add some obscure ivermectin-promoting Maui doctor to his vaccine panel. This is why the medical profession complains that RFK Jr is not serious, or that he's a dangerous joke.

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Prov St. Vincent is going to eliminate their neonatal ICU.  Little by little, services are being chipped away.

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Now they are teaching robots martial arts. That's not good. Today, they are beatable, but in the future, probably not. Look how fast it gets off the ground!
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15 September 2025

Synthetic clincal data is increasingly being used because it is simpler to generate than getting real clinical data. And oversight boards think it's safe because it doesn't use real PHI, and therefore ethics review is not necessary. But is that really true? It may be possible that traceable data can be found if the synthesis is not done properly.

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India's tech economy is being gutted, due to AI replacing lower-tier jobs. The dreams of many are evaporating. This will impact America's tech industry as well, since it has depended on the availability of such cheap outsourceable labor. Bad timing, bros. 

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As I predicted, the South Koreans are halting U.S. investments as a result of ICE wrongfully raiding the Georgia Hyundai plant, suspecting illegals. The State department apologized but the damage has been done.

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Japan has more centenarians than ever before. Or do they?  Could it also be bad recordkeeping?

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Colleges are about to see a big drop in enrollment. Probably just as well. College is no longer the "good investment" it used to be. A lot of kids seem to be just becoming activists and little else. And going into massive debt, because no one wants to pay for what they have to offer.

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Why is Taiwan the poorest of developed countries? Reminds me of India. So many brainy people working themselves to death. Yet they have very few billionaires. And the country has that bleak urban vibe. Somebody is getting rich, that's for sure. That's why it costs so much to live there. But it ain't the vast majority of workers. And fertility is very low, understandably.

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California is going to implement age verification.  All the big tech companies are in support. But it sounds weak and easily bypassable. 
It also doesn’t mandate photo ID uploads — a controversial feature that sparked outrage from privacy advocates when the United Kingdom implemented age-gating rules earlier this summer. Instead, Wicks’ bill asks parents to input their kids’ ages when setting up a smartphone, tablet or laptop; groups users into one of four age brackets; and sends their age info to apps like Facebook and Instagram.
Is that it?

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Museum of Failure. A place to remember past tech failures. A lot of them anyway.

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Scientists Have Summoned a Massless Demon Particle. Popular Mechanics is different from when I grew up. They should rename if Popular Quantum Mechanics.

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Seattle is losing their Blue Ribbon Program. The program reward schools "that have successfully narrowed academic gaps between student groups." Of course, Seattle's strategy has been to get rid of gifted students' programs and promote the lowest quintile. But it's so easy to game the system. Narrowing gaps shouldn't have been the goal. How about just raising everybody?

And in Portland, the Reynolds School District is facing tough times. Lots of layoffs, while senior employees get raises. That's the public sector!

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Marques Brownlee reviews the Air Pods Pro 3. He likes it. On my shopping list. 

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The West Coast Health Alliance, formed to be the vaccine voice of the western Blue states, looks like it might be led by Dean Sidelinger, the bow-tied dude that directed Oregon's insane COVID-19 policy. I had thought he was gone for good, but like a bad penny, he's turned up again. So are we going to have to mask up again, Dean? Six-feet distancing? Plexiglas shields? Stickers on the floor? Fire doctors and nurses who won't get boosters?

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14 September 2025

Did NASA scientists finally find life on Mars? Maybe.

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Knowing less about AI makes users more likely to accept it in their lives. 

On the other hand, those with less understanding may see AI as magical and awe inspiring. We suggest this sense of magic makes them more open to using AI tools.

When it comes to tasks that don’t evoke the same sense of human-like qualities – such as analysing test results – the pattern flips. People with higher AI literacy are more receptive to these uses because they focus on AI’s efficiency, rather than any “magical” qualities.

People are still nervous that the AI hype bubble will burst. Star Trek featured episodes where a civilization finds that their magical "gods" were just advanced technology. But we never saw the aftermath of what happens next.

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Trump officials will reveal connections between the COVID vax and child & infant deaths.  Aaron Siri and others have already done some of that. Slowly, people will hear the truth at last, although it's 2025 and this should have happened in 2022.

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Telepathy is a thing now.  The article doesn't say explicitly but I bet the system is based on machine learning of brain waves and words and phrases. Much like speech recognition. So yes, it will need to be fine-tuned for every individual. That might make it too impractical for off-the-shelf use.

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Polylaminin can help heal spinal cord injuries, and restore motor function. This paper is a year old, and I've heard nothing more. Plus, it comes from Brazil. So who knows?

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This is the best opinion I've heard regarding all the people fired because of their anti-Charlie Kirk postings.
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The Portland Trailblazers are being sold to the Tom Dundon and the Panda Express founders.  Tom Dundon owns the NHL team Carolina Hurricanes and Panda is based in Rosemead, California. So there's no guarantee that the team stays in Portland.

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Oregon's mass layoffs are now comparable to what was seen during the Great Recession. Except this time, there won't be inflation-generating "stimulus" money, which created a fake sense that everything was OK. And I'm sure since the Charlie Kirk affair, there are even more layoffs and firings.

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Obamacare always depended on subsidies to survive.  And now that those subsidies are going away, Obamacare will probably collapse. It needs to replaced by a more sustainable market-driven model.

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...a few years ago, I purchased access to the 2019 data for a federally funded study. I found that while Oregon had estimated that only about 175 patients would obtain taxpayer-funded gender transition services at a total annual cost of no more than $200,000, more than 7,585 patients had done so at more than 100 times the initial cost estimate. That included 160 children using “puberty blocker” drugs and approximately 370 children taking cross-sex hormones. There were also 33 biological girls who had mastectomies – including some as young as 15 – and two 17-year-old girls who had their uteruses and ovaries removed.
Barbaric.  What ghouls.

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Boy, this guy is showing how when crazy TikTok users post Charlie Kirk sentiment on that platform, it's not difficult to find out where they are.  People think they can post anonymously, but in actuality TikTok collects tons of identifying data, and a site on the Dark Web exposes all that information for hackers to utilize. This is how many of them are getting exposed and reported to their employers. He's collected a lot of scalps so far.

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13 September 2025

Scientists unveil a rubber band that generates electricity from body heat. Paper is here. Apparently there is enough temperature difference from body heat to generate useful electricity.  Still seems belief-defying.

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Watch out when riding e-bikes. They are prone to serious injury. It seems people go too fast riding them.

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Failed Machine Learning.  A collection of all the ways AI has failed. Some are funny:
Amazon's voice-activated digital assistant unleashed a torrent of raunchy language after a toddler asked it to play a children’s song.
Many have to do with racial bias. Well, it is supervised learning, you know.

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Transformers are the engine of LLMs, but they suffer from that fact that training time increases quadratically with the data size. This is not scalable forever.  So people are looking at other techniques, and one such technique is Low-Rank Attention. It's based on looking at lower resolution versions of the training data. Supposedly, it's "good enough" for most purposes.

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Geoffrey Hinton says that his girlfriend broke with him using AI. First of all, I'm impressed that Geoff had a girlfriend at his age. 

"She got ChatGPT to tell me what a rat I was," he told the newspaper. "She got the chatbot to explain how awful my behaviour was and gave it to me."

"I didn’t think I had been a rat, so it didn’t make me feel too bad," he added, in his own defense.

You deserve better, Geoff.

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Portlanders wasted a lot of money on failed hotel efforts. And now Portland wants to build the James Beard Market. Fix the city first, Portland.

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A Redditor is unhappy that the Safeway in the Rainier district locks up the ice cream, now. I'm sure, being a Redditor, that you voted in support of this. 

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Another Redditor wonders why gas prices increased to much this weekend in Washington. That person suspected that it was the carbon tax that voters supported. Another Redditor was quick to point to an article that blamed it on a shortage of refineries and pipeline issues. But if you read down in the article, it says:
And environmental programs in this region add to the cost of production, storage and distribution.
Yeah, about those "environmental programs". Like the one causing Phillips 66 to shut down their refinery because it no longer made sense to stay open. That special tax that was imposed on them.  Yeah, why is it that:
this region is located relatively far from parts of the country where oil drilling, production and refining occurs, so transportation costs are higher.
It's no coincidence.

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Nice tornado video. This shows how a rope tornado being born. I love tornado videos.

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