28 July 2025

Saw this video "How Being Smart Can Ruin Your Life".  It's more How Being A Nerd Can Ruin Your Life. There can be comfort in being a nerd, and you get a kind of personal satisfaction learning a lot about something. But you can't expect others to share in that joy, and that's what you have to realize early enough. I realize that the REALLY smart people were Johnny von Neumann, Richard Feynman, Stanislaw Ulam, Albert Einstein, etc. who were not only intellectual giants, but also people who were personable. Being like Langan, in the video, gets you nowhere.

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Are universities becoming more stupid?  Looks like the collective IQ of college students has been declining for a long time, even before the coronavirus epidemic. Check out the two references given. Apparently, university officials didn't want this published. I think the problem is that universities now take just about anyone who had been able to get financial aid, which, since the Obama era, is now managed by the federal government, and is given to just about anyone who can fill out a form. If you look at figure 1, scores were stable until 2012 when they started the steady decline.

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When I saw the title of this article, I was intrigued that perhaps Lloyd Center was the location of business startups in Portland that I wasn't aware of. I was imagining AI startups setting up in that district, and had hopes that Portland was turning around and going to be the start of a tech renaissance. Not a chance. It's just an indoor Saturday Market, where kids hang out to play arcade games, or shop for quirky vintage clothes.

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Another reason to get rid of the Department of Education. This is exactly what we don't need: an education agenda set by the WEF.

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Amazing that the entire country of Tuvalu will be moved to Australia due to rising ocean levels. But what's going on? Climate change skeptics have said that sea levels have not been rising. What I was unaware is that sea level changes are not uniform: in some places the sea level has been sinking or staying the same, but in the area where Tuvalu is, due to some local factors, no doubt, the seal level has been increasing. The country is just in the wrong location. So it's not really global warming melting the glaciers. There's something peculiar to that area of the world.

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Now, Sam Altman is worried about massive fraud that he predicts will undoubtedly occur when the ability of AI to mimic humans achieves near-perfection. But he won't stop doing what he's doing, because of the Moloch effect, of course.
And some subscribers to Vogue are upset because the magazine is using AI-generated women, because today's real-life women are not quite up to their beauty standards. Yeah, well it's 2025, you know. 

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Lenacapavir, the first HIV prevention drug, is FDA-approved. Supposedly it's 100% effective.  There's an interesting article I read (which I can't find now) that stated that women in Africa would use HIV-positivity as a defense against getting raped. That excuse will no longer work when men know that they can get the drug and not get AIDS.  We don't all live in the same world.

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Speaking of which: who funds WHO? Turns out that they're little transparency. Most of the donations are anonymous, and it's thought that many are from entities such as the Bill Gates Foundation, who may be influencing WHO to direct policy that favors Gates' efforts, such as vaccines. I wasn't aware of the Emergencies Powers Treaty that the Biden administration favored, that would give the WHO power to direct American medical policy during "emergencies".  Forget that!

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Scientists at University of Washington were working with people in California to perform actions that would block the sun, in the name of climate change. The climate change wackos aren't satisfied with banning straws or natural gas stoves or cows farting. They want to seed clouds to block sunlight significantly. And they wanted to keep it a secret.

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Oregonians are out of work longer than before.  Nothing surprising there. There aren't enough business to provide them with jobs.

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27 July 2025

Does ChatGPT disproportionately hurt Hawaii more than other states? This person thinks so. 

Hawaii faces distinct risks from unregulated AI deployment. Recent analyses indicate that a substantial portion of Hawaii’s professional services jobs could face significant disruption within five to seven years as a consequence of AI. Our isolated geography and limited economic diversification make workforce adaptation particularly challenging.

Our unique cultural knowledge, practices, and language risk misappropriation and misrepresentation by AI systems trained without appropriate permission or context.

Well, Hawaii's not the only place where AI could eliminate jobs. I think that the author is stretching things. But shutting down ChatGPT isn't going to happen. And why just pick on them? How about Google? Anthropic? Hangzhou AI Basic Technology Research? It's like the climate change activists picking on the United States and not China or India.

Dave Barry had a silly encounter with AI inaccuracy.

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Speaking of climate change, looks like only 4% of Canadians care about it now. There are so many more compelling things to worry about.

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Is RFK Jr tilting at windmills? There’s no autism epidemic. But there is an autism diagnosis epidemic. So the feared increase in autism numbers was just a change in definition and an eagerness to get grant money? I've noticed that a lot of the kids I grew up would have been classified as autistic today. The ones that kept to themselves, had learning disabilities, were not sociable and said "weird" things and weren't interested in normal kid stuff, or who were obsessed with weird hobbies. I grew up with them. Even had a few as friends. Nobody called them autistic at the time.

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Suzetrigine is out now – the first non-opiod pain killer. Well, if you don't count NSAIDs. I think they meant potent pain-killer. It's similar to lamotrigine, a seizure medication, sometimes also used for neuropathy. But this drug doesn't cross into the CNS. Maybe it'll be good for neuropathy, too.

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Ah, modern science writing. I was reading this article that stated that due to excessive groundwater pumping, the earth's tilt has changed by 31.5 inches!  Huh? What do you mean by 31.5 inches. Measured from where? I was expecting the tilt to change by a number measured in degrees. But 31.5 degrees of tilt change would be huge, and would change all sorts of things, like mean global temperatures and climate. It couldn't be that – no one else is getting excited.  So I went to the original study, and read that what is actually happening is that the axis of rotation has migrated 78.48 cm eastward, in the direction 64.16°E. So it's actually 30.90 inches. Even got that wrong. Science journalism is not what it used to be. 

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RIP Tom Lehrer.  Math teacher, singer-composer, genius. What a mind!

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26 July 2025

College Board is dumbing down the SAT tests, as student performance declines. This just hides the rot. Better to leave things as they are and show everyone how poorly kids are doing. Making the test even easier doesn't help anyone.

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Are investors pulling out of AI? There's been talk that after seeing how AI really performs, investors have a better idea of AI's limitations as well as the capabilities. It's like the dotcom era – there's a lot of fluff. You just have to discern which is going to be the eBay.com and which is going to be the Pets.com.

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This study is making the rounds. It concludes that:
Estimates in this study are substantially more conservative than previous calculations focusing mostly on the first year of vaccination, but they still clearly demonstrate a major overall benefit from COVID-19 vaccination during the years 2020-2024. Most benefits in lives and life-years saved was secured for a portion of older persons, a minority of the global population.
It was a tough study to do. They tried to estimate lives saved by the vax and looked at data from the whole world, with vaccines of all kinds – mRNA, DNA, with adenoviral vectors and others. As you know, every country reports things their own way. All the authors could say is that estimates of lives saved was, in their calculation, lower than what was promulgated.

Interestingly, the vax saved more lives during the Omicron era than before. That seems counter-intuitive to me. 
Perhaps the vax impaired the immune systems of the vaxxed so that getting the vax during Omicron made a huge difference. 
But prior to Omicron, maybe the immune systems of the vaxxed were still intact enough so that the vax didn't make a difference. 

Another conclusion was that the survival benefit was almost all in those 60 or older. So there was really no reason to give it to kids.

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Here's a video of Seattle City Council approving a new sales tax, and one member admits that they have no idea what this tax is going to pay for. They just approved it. New tax. Just because.

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25 July 2025

Do Dogs Know Who’s Good or Bad? Just watching how humans interacted with other dogs and who gave food, doesn't determine a dog's opinion.  It has to see for itself how the human is.

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Some insights into browser fingerprinting.  If you really want to resist fingerprinting, use the Mullvad browser with Tor. NordVPN makes this easy. Remember, practice privacy.

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It's starting. In West London, you can't build new houses because their grid can't support anything else above their datacenter. Power demand is too high. Neither wind nor solar is going to cut it.

And in Sacramento, they use smart meters to spy on residential power usage. Too much, and they call authorities to check you out. Real "smart", huh?

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Shall we let the Internet die and start over? Nah, we'll just build something else that will go to crap once we allow anyone to use it. But yeah, the Internet is a den of thieves now. Not as nice and fun as back in the old days.

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Lately people have been reporting the two coding tools, Replit and Gemini CLI, have been deleting files without permission. This is a big flaw, as one company discovered to their dismay. One guy reports that even Cursor feels the need to delete files, too.

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Japanese scientists feel that they are on the verge of repairing the genetic abnormality that characterized Down Syndrome. This is tricky because the problem is not a mutation, but just an extra copy of a chromosome. You don't want to destroy an entire chromosome. They'll be using allele-specific engineering.  They've had success with fibroblast cells. It probably won't fix adults, but perhaps it can catch things at a far earlier stage.

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This is the longest and most intricate Rube Goldberg chain reaction video I've come across. Watch The Pancake Flipper.

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This is BBC's hilarious racism awareness video, showing contrived situations where microaggression happens in the workplace. White people don't talk this way. Sheesh, the demand for racism outstrips the supply, I guess.

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Trump has issued an EO declaring that the homeless be removed off the streets. Not only that, but he recommended that asylums be brought back. I read that the NGOs in the Homeless Industrial Complex are upset. Their business model will dry up.  Too bad. But leaving the drug-addled homess to fend for themselves is not compassion.

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Oregon is going to proceed with the Rose Quarter road project anyway, even if there is no funding. Unions members gotta work, I guess. They're probably hoping that somehow they'll get the funding they need. Others are wondering why we're not fixing the potholes and damage in the roads first.

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And I like this characterization of AI: It's like an over-confident friend that doesn't admit that he's wrong. And doesn't learn from its mistakes. Because that would require retraining, which is too expensive and time-consuming.

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24 July 2025

Puhleeze. Is This the End of Google As We Know It?  How many articles have been written with this title? It's like "the walls are closing in."  Google will survive. 

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Earth's days are getting shorter by a millisecond. Does it really matter? I wouldn't notice it. But I guess the people who keep track of these things will.

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Fragmentary Latin inscriptions can be completed with AI. The technology is finding its uses. It's amazing to be able to deduce missing text from broken pieces of writing.

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Wow, I feel sorrry for the lower level employees at Windsurf.  The company didn't exactly reap the riches that startups typically do. It's becoming clear that low-hanging fruit has been picked. You gotta be smart and have something to add to technology to win the pay. Just being a low-level employee doesn't mean you'll get super rich. 
"Windsurf and others are really bad examples of founders leaving their teams behind and not even sharing the proceeds with their team," wrote storied investor Vinod Khosla on X. "I definitely would not work with their founders next time."
Here's more on this debacle: Looks like the engineers who went to Google are getting screwed, too. There were no winners here. It's not that easy to create wealth out of thin air in the AI age. It's not the dotcom world. 

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Proton is starting to move out of Switzerland due to their new laws that reduce the kind of privacy that Proton promotes. It's too bad, but Switzerland's new laws look pretty bad. But why is Proton going to the EU for protection? They're not known to be privacy-friendly either. 

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GLP-1 drugs may cause kidney injury if you get dehydrated. Sounds like acute tubular necrosis to me. You can recover partially from it, but sometimes not.

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Can you run a business solely relying on AI?  Apparently not. Anthropic decided to test this with Claude, and apparently it was "hilariously bad". And some have put down some good reasons why AI will not take most human's jobs.

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So does gold even have a melting point? It was thought so, but it's clear that it depends on how the heat is applied. It's crazy how we're still discovering some things about basic science.

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Using external CSS when designing a webpage can make seconds of difference, especially if your connection is not fast. I'm not sure it's worth cluttering up your code with all that CSS, which can take up a lot of space. I'll put up with the extra few seconds of loading time for now. 

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SurgeAI claims to have found out what datasets Anthropic trains its models on. This is ordinarily a trade secret, but it seems that Anthropic didn't care too much. They're sort of denying that it's authentic, but who knows?

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Supposedly, Washington state is in their worst budget crisis.  Kinda like Oregon, except they have a lot of billionaires and millionaires – way more than Oregon. They have much of the money they really need, don't worry. They just don't want to change what they spend it on.
Like Oregon is supposedly short of money, but they allocated $15 million for non-citizens. How does it feel to have to pay more tax and have services cut?
Even California is no longer paying for illegal alien's legal defense anymore. Why can't Oregon and Washington learn from this?

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Palisades residents are discovering a new horror, as they try to recover from January's fire – squatters. And the police aren't helping. What a nightmare.

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The resulting $147,187 incentive payment for Rex Kim, the chief investment officer, boosted his total pay to $663,271. Michael Langdon, then the director of private markets investments, received $123,105, lifting his total pay to $533,459. 
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23 July 2025

Are we in an AI bubble? Someone else wondered about this, too. I've wondered about that myself. AI benchmark achievements have been remarkable, but really, would we be surprised if we developed a search algorithm that was able to retrieve things more efficiently than the old TfIdf or PageRank type algorithms. AI chatbots do seem to do much more, but ultimately that is how they're trained. We're slowly giving them more reasoning capacity to handle more complex problems, but they can't truly replace humans doing complex tasks just yet. Fact retrieval is one thing, but I am skeptical about decision-making. Plus, to approximate or surpass human thinking, we need datacenters that would need to be huge, but also have energy demands we couldn't possible meet for long.

Anthropic also posted results that suggest that too much thinking makes LLMs dumb. So they can overthink things, just like humans, I guess.

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Proton has developed a privacy-focused chatbot called Lumo. This chatbot uses open source LLMs, so everything can stay enclosed within their system. It can provide RAG if you turn on the Web Search tool. It was last trained in October 2023, however, so from then on, everything is web search.  And it will probably still be subject to hallucinations, like all models.

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Google's AI bot and OpenAI's bot scored gold medals at this year's International Math Olympiad. But the top scores still went to humans. That's good for now, I guess.

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Amazon buys AI wristband that listens to everything you say. Really, who would want something like this?

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I saw this about the unexpected brain boost that comes with muscle-building exercise. Then I was reminded of this post by Scott Alexander about what nootropics really worked, and which were just placebo. I was surprised that weightlifting scored so high. Only dextroamphetamine and amphetamine/dextroamphetamine were better.  Does muscle-building really work?

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Duh. Having a higher income boosts your chances of finding a romantic partner.  Heh, this is literally the only hope for less-than-handsome men. It's also probably a factor in the drop of global fertility – the income disparity has been increasing, especially in the U.S. Look at the Gini coefficient.

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More than half of adults admit to peeing in swimming pools. That's where the chlorine smell comes from. Pristine pool water shouldn't smell like that.

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Wow, you can have a kidney transplant and not have to take immunosuppressants. Injection of stem cells can induce immune tolerance.

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Oregon’s seasonally adjusted nonfarm payroll employment declined by 4,300 jobs in June.  No surprise here. Business are closing or fleeing Oregon in droves, it seems. The government has relied too heavily on taxes and federal subsidies to keep the state running.

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Whoa, if this is true, the United States is giving out way too much welfare money. Eliminating the $200 billion spent on remittances would be great savings for the country – money that we shouldn't have to be spending.

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22 July 2025

How things stand 6 months after the Palisades fire. You basically have a neighborhood where people just gave up. Lesson learned. You can have insurance and think you're prepared. But you're not. There's no protection against a total house fire when you live in a Blue state, especially in a Blue city.

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"Unfortunately, I think 'No bad person should ever benefit from our success' is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on," Amodei wrote in an internal Slack message to staff, obtained by WIRED. "This is a real downside and I'm not thrilled about it."
There is a word for this – realpolitik.  But this is how power gets into the wrong hands. Because of people like Amodei. It's really sad that the West doesn't have enough billionaires that could have shepherded this technology.

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What factors cause lung cancer in never-smokers? Two things: second-hand smoke and air pollution.  There are signature mutations that are seen with different causes and in different locales, so you can almost predict what causes the lung cancer.

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Yes! Yes! Are Hospital Acquisitions of Physician Practices Anticompetitive? This was one of the worst things that came out of Obamacare. Hospitals were handed gobs of money and it became very hard for individual physician practices to compete against them. In Portland there were new glass-and-steel monstrosities that came up. Meanwhile, doctors sold their practice and became employees subject to the whims of hospital administrators, and in OHSU's case, the governor (Kate Brown).

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Will AI take people's jobs away? Here's one guy's take on this.  He thinks that there will just be changes made, new jobs and some reshuffling. One of the points that he uses to bolster his argument is this graph.

Notice something? The author says that the drop in jobs occurred before AI became a thing, around 2012, so it's not just AI. But who was president during that time? What was set in motion during that time that might have led to a loss of jobs? It wasn't AI, but I think the presence of AI now will make this worse.

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Seattle has got the nation's highest inflation rate, according to WalletHub. Not only do things cost more, but services cost more, especially as the minimum wage has increased again. Luckily, there is Bellevue and surrounding municipalities.
And Oregon was ranked by CNBC as the most expensive state, mainly due to housing. And Portland wants a 75% increase in the property tax, to support parks, trails, community centers. 
 
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Intel Raptor Lake hardware crashes in the heat wave. The last thing Intel needs now is that their chips are defective and underperforming. It's like a Boeing situation. People will ditch Intel for something else.

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Omega-3 fish oils can reduce aggression in people by up to 28%, whatever that means. I don't think fish oil is going to make a difference.

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Humans can be tracked based on how their bodies block WiFi signals. Yeah, basically they trained an AI model on a dataset and got predictability. We see so much "science" like this.  Just because you do that doesn't mean it can be used generally.

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Why government-funded media is a bad idea. It started with noble intentions, but people are people, and leftists took over.

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Pretty soon, the choice is going to be AI or A/C. AI energy demands will mean less electricity for the rest. We cannot rely on low energy density sources like wind and solar. It's just not going to cut it. We need petroleum- or nuclear-based electricity. It's clear to anyone who has studied energy production. 

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21 July 2025

Supposedly just listening to this Mozart piece (K.448) enhances your working memory.  I would get distracted by the music and forget what I was supposed to be doing.

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Here's all the Epstein stuff that has ever been released. In case you were interested.

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Ancient DNA origins explain why the Finnish and Hungarian languages are so different. I always wondered about that, especially the Finnish language being so unlike that of their German neighbors.

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PERS is in trouble.  Too much money in illiquid private equity. All locked up in real estate, hedge funds, commodities. Who's in charge anyway? 
To make ends meet, they’ve also sold a swath of private equity investments – $4.5 billion worth in recent years – at a discount to their reported value. Officials won’t say exactly what those discounts were. Most of their dealings with the funds are exempt from disclosure under the state’s public records law. 
Ouch. This is not good fiduciary duty. Update (22 July 2025): more here.


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Look at how Oregon employment compares with other states. Not favorably. What do you notice about the leadership in the highly employed states?

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This is Oregon collegiate education. What a joke. Can't pay off your student loan? Gee, I wonder why, college grad.

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Telomir-1 fully reversed epigenetic silencing of the STAT1 tumor suppressor gene in aggressive prostate cancer cells, outperforming Paclitaxel and Rapamycin. For prostate cancer, they usually use docetaxel and rapamycin isn't standard therapy. But still, targeted therapy being better than a taxane is remarkable. Maybe I should get me some TELO stock. It sure shot up last Friday.

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Chinese scientists figure out how to do photosynthesis without plants. Turn methanol into sucrose. The title suggests it's CO2 to sugar, but you gotta turn the CO2 into methanol first. Boy, the Chinese are sure solving a lot of life's problems lately. Is it for real, though?

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What do you think?  90% of all the scientists that ever lived are alive today.  Were things better when it was harder to be a scientist?  Maybe it's like being an artist today – we have so many, and the standards are much lower. That's why we see so much crappy art.

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20 July 2025

Prexist is supposed to check to see if your startup ideas has already been though of before.  What a great way to get people to divulge what they are planning to do. It's just like when people who submit possible URL names to register. If you found a great name and don't purchase it, it might be gone later if you change your mind and decide to go back and register it.

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Apple may introduce their foldable iPhone next year. Sigh. Apple used to be able to keep all kinds of secrets when Steve Jobs was alive. Now, it's like Tim Cook doesn't care. Insiders find out and leak all the time.

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Starting next year, you'll have to pay for a permit for anything you bring to the water to float on. So desperate they are for tax money.
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19 July 2025

Mitochondrial function may be the key to why we sleep. 

Here we report that transcripts upregulated after sleep deprivation, in sleep-control neurons projecting to the dorsal fan-shaped body (dFBNs) but not ubiquitously in the brain, encode almost exclusively proteins with roles in mitochondrial respiration and ATP synthesis. These gene expression changes are accompanied by mitochondrial fragmentation, enhanced mitophagy and an increase in the number of contacts between mitochondria and the endoplasmic reticulum, creating conduits for the replenishment of peroxidized lipids. The morphological changes are reversible after recovery sleep and blunted by the installation of an electron overflow in the respiratory chain. 

Sleep, like ageing, may be an inescapable consequence of aerobic metabolism.
So it's all in the mitochondria, then. The paper still doesn't explain the why. Why does this need to happen? Why can't we replenish peroxidized lipids all the time, instead of just while we sleep?

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Meta has poached two key AI experts from Apple. Why does it have to be Meta? Why couldn't it be some less invasive company? I just don't trust Zuck to own the next generation of AI developments. 

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Tirzepatide seems to slow breast cancer growth. Well, since breast cancer growth is associated with obesity, it's not surprising that this happens. Elimination of obesity will likely improve lots of things. Maybe your career, your love life, etc.

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Diamonds are not worth the expense anymore. Even De Beers has thrown in the towel. It was a good run while it lasted. Progress is a good thing, right?

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Dead EV batteries can be recycled now. That's some good news.

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Scientists are developing a universal cancer vaccine that can kills "any tumor". This seems to be the wrong approach to me. I would rather we figure out how to put multiple copies of the TP53 gene into the genome. Seems to make better sense to me than subverting the immune system to attack some onco-antigen.

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Eating eggs is good for your cholesterol now. It doesn't cause harm like conventional wisdom has said. Nutritional wisdom always seems to change radically every ten years or so. Things that were considered good are now bad, and vice versa.

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Erythritol is now linked to brain injury and strokes.  Shouldn't we take this off the market? Are you seeing this, RFK, Jr?

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Space travel can permanently damage your eyesight. There is a condition called Spaceflight Associated Neuro-ocular Syndrome, and it causes edema of the optic nerve, due to microgravity. Once it causes damage, it is irreversible.

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Lost cause. Voice actors demand that AI regulate voice generative AI.  Yeah, that's not going to happen. You're not that special, and this is going to go the way of the buggy whip. Sorry, but it was fun while it lasted.

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Most old folks, like this ronin, have a scar on their arm, and we were told it was a smallpox vaccine scar. But wait.
Many foreign-born persons have received the bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine for TB disease. This vaccine is administered at birth in many countries outside of the U.S. to prevent childhood tuberculous meningitis and miliary disease. BCG leaves a scar like the smallpox vaccine. But it doesn’t protect against smallpox.
So if you have a positive TB test, it might be from the BCG you got, not from actual tuberculosis.

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OpenAI has scored well enough on the International Math Olympiad to have won the gold medal. Who needs MIT students anymore, right?

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Yeah, crime rates do go up around overnight homeless shelters. Thought so.

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Why is Oregon still blaming the pandemic for poor school performance? The rest of the country has moved on. Man, the coronavirus epidemic was five years ago. Enough, already. Look in the mirror to see who deserves the blame.

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Portland city government force the Gateway Fred Meyer to close.
Also since last year, Portland went on a property tax increase binge as well as enacted a 10-cent gas tax hike.  Just months ago, Portland pushed through a billion dollar property tax hike for schools.   Just weeks ago, Portland City Hall jacked up parking fees and doubled the Uber tax.

A full year of non-stop financial blows both from within by workers and from the outside by politicians hurt the Gateway Fred Meyers too much.

Now those union workers don’t have a job.
Good going, folks. The Doom Loop continues.

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