Sugoi & Yokunai

This bright high school student used advanced data analytics techniques and deep learning to discover 1.5 million deep sky objects, previously unknown.  What surprises me is that no one had considered doing this before. I guess there is a first time.

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This is a handy list of the companies with the largest market cap. Lots of basic info at your fingertips.

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If you're a Joe Rogan fan, this excerpt is important. Joe likes people to consider his podcast as a regular guy who is just seeking answers, but Douglas Murray brings up an important point. You have to know about the guests you select. Just inviting anyone who has a loud opinion on social media is potentially inviting the spread of flawed opinions, i.e. ones not based on informed or researched hypothesis. Joe has interviewed some flakes and that doesn't help his listeners. Dave Smith can sound smart but often it's just confidence. He's not to be trusted for information.

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Not healthy. 80% of Oregonians kept Medicaid benefits after pandemic protections expired. What the hell, man. We're over COVID now. These things weren't meant to be permanent. And pandemic relief for schools. C'mon guys, this is 2025. COVID is a mild cold now.

And here's the incompetent Seattle mayor, now realizing that cutbacks are necessary because the city forecast the budget so poorly. And Jeff Bezos has sold his house and has essentially cut off all ties to Seattle. Some of the commenters are saying that he didn't leave because of taxes, but it was to be near his family. Such idiots.

And why are federal grants supporting humanites in Washington and Oregon, like the Historic Trust? This is a state entity and should be funded by the state. Not the federal government, which has no business funding stuff like this.

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Speaking of COVID, have you noticed that a lot of teachers aren't showing up at school anymore? What's going on, and why doesn't the administration want to talk about it? 

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The Vacheron Constantin is a very complex watch.  Not bad for a $21,000 watch.

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I can't the FDA is fast-tracking a self-replicating mRNA vaccine for COVID-19 that will force your body to make spike protein forever and ever.  It's called the replicon shot, and I wouldn't volunteer to get this shot if they paid me a million bucks.

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WalletHub's ranking of tax burden by state.  Oregon is #20. Washington is #28. And Hawaii is #1.

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The neutrino's maximum theoretical mass has been reduced by nearly half to just 045 eV.  This is due to the results from the KATRIN experiments.

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I covered mitochondrial transplants, but apparently some athletes are already doping with this. What? How do you do this? And if it's that easy, why hasn't it been done before?

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Has Einstein's dream of a unified field theory been realized? These people say yes.

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You can't even trust real time videos anymore. AI can make things not appear while the video is being captured. You can't believe anything anymore.

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I knew it. Google couldn't resist. When kids use Google Chromebooks, their data gets taken by Google. California parents are suing.

Google embeds hidden "tracking" technologies to follow students' online activity across the internet as they use websites and apps, creating a "fingerprint" specific to each child, the lawsuit alleged.

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A new fluoroquinoline-based antibiotic, Jun13296, a novel PLpro inhibitor, has anti-inflammatory properties and also activity against SARS-CoV2.

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Tom Sellers is stepping down as director of the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute. Lisa Coussens is now interim director, but OHSU is now run entirely by interim people. What competent person would want to move in and take the helm at OHSU now?  Their reputation is destroyed. Now their leadership is just a bunch of nobodies.  Phil Knight's dream is gone after ten years.

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Wealthy retirees are fleeing Oregon. Isn't that what the liberals wanted? No more rich people? Well, wish granted.

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Newly-discovered Comet Swan is visible with binoculars now. It's in Pegasus and it doesn't look like it's going to be a great comet. Oh well.

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Multnomah County is facing a budget problem. So what do they do? Cut the Homeless Services Department, which pays for tents, tarps and other supplies that nonprofits then distribute to homeless people? Cut services to illegal migrants? No, they tell the district attorney to cut his staff.  Yup, cut services that help the people who pay taxes that support the city. Doom Loop.

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Oregon pays people not to work during the summer. Yeah, it didn't make sense to me, either.

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They admit it! Why isn't Oregon fighting back against the Trump administration cuts to Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program money? Because they realized that the programs that were funded weren't doing anything helpful anyway, and would be difficult to defend. Points for being honest, anyway.

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ChatGPT now has the ability to reference ALL your past conversations.Could be handy. Could be creepy.

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Elite athletes have another way they could make money – selling their feces.  Apparently, it's got some good stuff in it.

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Google might be back on the AI winning track. Yeah, I've played around with Google's Gemini-2.5-Pro and it's really good.  I like it, actually.

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Apparently the Nissan Leaf can be hacked. Hackers can take over your car, listen to conversations, see where you've been, etc.

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Cannabis smoking can effect long-term epigenetic changes in genes related to aging and cancer. But you didn't really care about those things anyway, right?

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Yikes. The UK is creating a precrime murder-prediction tool, to determine who is most likely to kill. What a dystopian country the UK has become.

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Oregon Tier1 retirees are still enjoying ridiculous benefits. Isn't it so Oregon that the Oregon Supreme Court judges wouldn't allow it to be shut down, and they themselves enjoy its benefits? How is that not a conflict of interest?

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The Ritz-Carlton hotel building is "underwater". Investing in Portland was never a good idea at the time. It's even worse now.

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Tumors like fructose that has been metabolized by the liver. The liver has ketohexokinase-C (KHK-C), and tumors like fructose metabolites produced by this enzyme.

Wow, Microsoft was briefly the world's most valuable company again. Sic transit gloria mundi.  They used to be, but not anymore – Steve Ballmer took care of that.

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Dr. Mehmet Oz likes AI Healthcare.  AI technology is not ready for this.

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Big development in legal circles yesterday: the death of district judges putting a nationwide hold on presidential EOs. No more "Hawaii judges". This never made sense, and I'm glad it's now clarified and on the books.

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A Cleveland Clinic study suggests that getting this year's flu vaccine might increase your risk of getting it. I wish that they checked whether people who got the vax developed antibodies, and whether they were IgG1 or IgG4.

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Why Trump's tariff policy makes sense. In historical context, it makes sense. The status quo is not acceptable to the U.S.

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Wow, five million "voters" were cleared from voter rolls. The mainstream news wouldn't report this, of course.

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Because of federal funding cuts, Oregon is eliminating math and literacy programs. Rather than eliminate services for non-citizens. It shows where the priorities are. They've got money for this, but choose to spend it foolishly.

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A community review board unanimously rejected the OHSU-Legacy merger. And OHSU rejects Tina Kotek's request to shut down the Primate Center.  It's not looking good for merger prospects.

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North Korean tech workers are struggling to get jobs at American tech companies, but there's an easy way to identify them. 😁

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Hmmm. Why people struggle with computers. It's not just the lack of training.

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Science's big problem is not a loss of trust, it's a loss of influence.Well, they blew it with Fauci and COVID, and they're still blowing it big time with gender crap.

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Lasso peptides may be a new class of antibiotics.  Lariocidin B is a member of this class, and binds to ribosomes, much like other antibiotics we already have, like macrolides, but they interact at the 16S subunit, not the 30S or 50S subunits.

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MathStudio is a different kind of calculator, that's for sure. As a student, I would have had a lot of applications for this. As an old ronin, it's a diversion. I could use something like this for data analytics, though. Anyone know of anything like it?

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Meta dropped Llama 4 over the weekend, and I, too, got excited. But it's not on Ollama.ai yet, and I haven't gotten around to getting it from Huggingface. Seems like it's more like Llama 3.4 than a 4.0. The reaction has been "meh". The models are large, though, but apparently they haven't been trained that thoroughly.

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China has a lot of datacenters that were built in anticipation of a high AI demand, but that feel through. Don't blame DeepSeek, though. There's still room for a lot of research and growth. You think NVIDIA is saying that all the works has been done?  Heck no. China could rent out all that metal for geek hobbyists in the world, but who trusts Chinese datacenters to run or host your stuff? No one, that's for sure. Only the Chinese would trust the Chinese.

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Must see. I think Kevin O'Leary has the right perspective on tariffs. The reporter typifies people who like to rev up the panic for the views. You have to have someone who knows how to play a longer game, because that's how you change the world. The tariff's have certainly gotten people's attention, and that's the first step.

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There's Portland, ready to raise taxes on businesses again to fill those recurring "budget gaps".  And Portland's non-profits don't have enough money to provide free legal assistance to illegal aliens, now that federal money isn't coming in.

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Me want! NVIDIA's DGX Spark looks awesome. A machine learning powerhouse about the size of a MacMini. I bet this will be a winner. At $3999, it's not cheap, but it will save on time, and encourage people to create more complex models.

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Not everyone is a fan of Google's new AI-powered Overview feature when you search on Google directly. I think if people wanted a good overview, they'd head on over to Perplexity or Faro. Does is worsen search results? YMMV.

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What's in the bright red fire retardant?  You don't want to know. But you should, especially if it's sprayed all over your house.

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As predicted, companies are fleeing Seattle. I guess they don't like being viewed as the city's piggy bank. And in Oregon, the high estate tax is making the wealthy elderly flee the state, too.

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Apple wants to create an AI doctor with Project Mulberry. I think it's going to take jobs away from nurses and nurse practitioners more than doctors. Those are the roles that will go first.

But in Portland, it's a reall challenge to find primary care physicians. And the OHSU-Legacy merger may exacerbate that problem.

Even Rochelle Walensky (remember her?) sees a problem.

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Oregon House passes bill allowing landlords to evict squatters. Can't believe we didn't have this law before. But it doesn't cover those who overstay their lease.

Update (2025-04-11):

The law is ineffective.  Read why.
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More on the PP405 agent that supposedly reverses androgenic hair loss. It's supposed to be "promising" but I haven't seen pictures of before and after. At least it's not debunked.

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Saccharin may kill multidrug-resistant bacteria. If I can't get monkfruit sugar or allulose, this would be the next best thing.

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Why are so many young adults getting cancer?  And not just cancer, but aggressive, turbo cancer. I don't think it's just obesity or even plastics. It really suggests some toxin or some genetic alteration. I think I might know what it is.

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I've noticed this, too. Sites like Techdirt are so politically left now, that I'm turned off to going there. I want tech, not lefty politics. I thought it was strange that the astronauts said that they were OK with staying stranded in space, and that it was no big deal. Really? Now we know how things were , and why they said that. They didn't know who would win the 2024 election, and being on the wrong side of history could be fatal.

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Most think artificial intelligence won't improve their lives. They're probably just thinking of LLMs, but that's not all of AI. In other areas, AI has made things easier and more convenient. But suprahuman intelligence will be a threat, and there is no good way of stopping it.  The main advantage to slowing things down is for the USA to keep its rivals poor and make it so they have to divert their resources to infrastructure and basic needs. So that they don't have money to spend on developing AI. We have a limited time to do so. Or else, we will have to play the Moloch effect game.

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Even Spokane is falling into the Doom Loop.

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Look at all those new Oregon taxes. And the City of Portland is adding some of their own, too. You get to use less of your city and state, but you have to pay more for the privilege. How fair is that?

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The Napavine billboard has been sold. Hope they add new messages. It's been pretty stale lately.

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I've never heard of a sun candle before.  Interesting.

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Oregon is going to sue to resist making Voter ID a requirement to vote. Are they admitting that they need illegals to vote? Seems like it.

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CAR-T cells were made even more effective by using focused ultrasound to activate heat-shock protein promoter engineered cells integrated with a positive feedback loop from CAR signaling to create these EchoBack CAR-T cells.  These cells were able to suppress glioblastoma cells in a mouse model. 

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They say "Never meet your heroes." I hate these exposé writing against famous mathematicians and scientists, always written by women, that seek to take a man down by telling about his "scandalous" treatment of women. Now Roger Penrose is the target. Give the man a break. He's a true genius – don't expect him to think like a normal man. If you want to write about him, just discuss his work. The rest is gossip.

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What we're finding out is that so much of Oregon government's ability to function is dependent on federal money. Take it away, and so many things fall apart. Now Oregon Department of Education ends math, literacy programs after federal funding cuts. Well, there go one of Tina Kotek's plans, right? We have the money – it just get misspent.

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Here's another money-waster: The City of Portland will now be in the business of renting housing to people who can't afford homes. The city has no shortage of these people, and who gets to have an apartment?  Why do the rest of us have to pay for their rent? This should come out of charity or the lottery, not taxes.

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Oregon can't stop wasting taxpayer money. Now school employees get unemployment pay for summer and winter breaks. The rest of us don't get this benefit – we just find seasonal work.

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