8 September 2024

Rant. You may come across articles like this, or speeches where someone ponders "how can this happen in the richest country in the world?"  Well, we're only the richest country in the world because our wealth is fake – using money borrowed while increasing the National Debt that will probably never have to be repaid. It's not because the underlying economic principles are sound. Congress votes on a lot of stupid stuff that doesn't make sense, and borrows more money to pay for it. And problems arise, and someone says the absurd trope again.

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Interesting. FedEx almost went bankrupt, and was saved by a lucky session of gambling at the blackjack table by the CEO. And apparently something similar happened with Peter Lynch of Fidelity fame.

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11 predictions of how AI will transform the world. The common theme is that it's not the AI itself we need to worry about, but the people who can wield it. AI will allow many people to unleash their creativity and make things happen that were impossible five years ago. Those who can use AI will do better than those who can't.

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Confusion regarding Biden's forgiving of student loan debt. Biden wants to claim that the loan is forgiven, but it's not that simple. Students still need to pay. I am against transferrring the debt to the rest of us. But lately, that crazy idea has gained traction, and students with worthless degrees think they need to be made whole. This whole mess, or course, was another debacle started by Obama.

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This is why we need a platform like X/Twitter:

And this is precisely why the mainstream media wants people to leave the platform.

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Oregon's economic picture seems to be okay, but dig deeper, and you'll see that it's not strong at all. We just haven't had as farther to fall, like San Jose.

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70-year old man graduates med school.  Now there's internship and residency – at least another year, probably more. Unless he just wanted the degree for, you know, just because.

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Thank goodness.  Pediatricians aren't giving COVID vaccines because it doesn't make financial sense anymore. Declining family interest, too. So was all the expense and hysteria worth it?

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For radiology applications, GPT-4 with Vision faired poorly, getting only 47.8% correct on image problems, even though it got 81.5% correct on text-based questions. Paper here.  It appears from the Methods section that the researchers did not do any fine-tuning but used the model straight out of the box. Fine-tuning would likely improve performance.

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7 September 2024

Downtown San Jose is devastated. It used to be blessed by all the tech riches. And an expensive place to live. Now, it's a wasteland, after all the tech firings. Is this a temporary problem, or further evidence of "Build Back Better"? In any event, who could realistically want four more years of this?

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Conversation Halters. These are all the things people say when they've been proven wrong or can't argue a point on facts. How many times have you heard these? The favorite one around Oregon seems to be: 
Appeal to personal freedom - "I can define a word any way I want!"  Now if you keep talking you're infringing on their civil rights.
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François Chollet thinks that LLMs are a dead end in the pursuit of AGI (artificial general intelligence). And he's one of the guys who would know. LLMs are just predictors of the next word based on a massive dataset. But that's not truly intelligence, is it? Of course not. He's right. But it's giving us a semblance of what a truly intelligent being would look like.

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Who is Cleo?  Cleo is one of the most extraordinary math geniuses on Math Stack Exchange, solving enormously complicated math problems in minutes. But who this person is, remains a mystery.

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What accelerates brain aging?  Apparently, being a woman, being in a country with greater socio-economic inequality, and living in a Latin American country.  People with these risk factors have a greater gap between their brain age and their chronological age.  So you want to have a young body, but a brain that keeps up with it.  I suspect that other countries don't have a large gap because their chronological age doesn't increase very much.  And remember this article from 2022?

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Cool. A water car. It runs on water, not gasoline. It hydrolyzes water and runs off the hydrogen. Hydrolysis is done with nano-technology that uses a specialized membrane.  It's the Hiroshima Engine, and the car in the picture is a Toyota.

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Firing a projectile in the air? It doesn't follow a parabolic path, as you've been taught in high-school physics. It follows an ellipse.

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6 September 2024

The Moscow Puzzles. A nice collection of math puzzles from the Soviet Union.

The book now in the reader’s hands is the first English translation of Mathematical Know-how, the best and most popular puzzle book ever published in the Soviet Union. Since its first appearance in 1956, there have been eight editions, as well as translations from the original Russian into Ukrainian, Estonian, Lettish, and Lithuanian. Almost a million copies of the Russian version alone have been sold.

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You Really Do Have Some Expectation of Privacy in Public. Getting harder and harder to maintain it, though.

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This article came out with a dull-sounding title: Evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in the murine central nervous system drives viral diversification. But this is how we're supposed to read it.  The research talks about how mutations in the spike protein of SARS-CoV2 can lead to infections in the CNS. And those mutations occur at the furin cleavage site. It's already known that the furin-cleaved substrates can bind to neuropilin-1, and that is one mechanism of entry into the brain.  We know that removal of the furin cleavage site diminishes the pathogenicity of the virus. But the question that is not asked is whether the furin cleavage site is coded for in the mRNA vaccine. We don't know for sure because the information is proprietary and hasn't been released, but it's suspected that it's there. So in light of this information, why aren't there calls to remove the mRNA sequence coding for the FCS peptide?

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This is the way to do it.  New process vaporizes plastic bags and bottles, yielding gases to make new, recycled plastics.  Instead of banning plastic straws, we should look for ways to recycle plastic more efficiently. This looks to be a promising way to do it. There is no suitable substitute for plastic at this time.

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Portland city officials are now realizing the impact of US Bank leaving the Big Pink building. Love how they try to spin the crime rate and that other small businesses are still in the city (for now).
Despite this, Wheeler also said it's likely more businesses will leave the area...
That's for sure.

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This is probability due to the availability of alternative sites, such as those offered by the major players, and not a loss of interest in AI chat in general. Still, it means we have definitely entered the next phase of generative AI. Time for agentics.

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5 September 2024

Well, well. US Bank to leave the US Bancorp Tower. "The email does not give a reason for the decision." Yeah, but we know why. Better to move out to Kruse Way like everyone else.

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Bellevue Arts Museum closes, citing ‘significant financial challenges’.  Even Bellevue can't have nice things. Life in the Biden era.

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Gee, ya think?  Seattle seems to be accepting a new normal of higher gun violence.  Just like tolerate the loss of our Constitutional rights. The loss of our personal wealth and safety. Just like much of a lot of things. Who wants four more years of this?

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In a series of blind assessments, the generative AI summaries of real government documents scored a dire 47 percent on aggregate based on the trial's rubric, and were decisively outdone by the human-made summaries, which scored 81 percent.
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Open AI needs to hoover up copyrighted material for training. They want it, and they're begging the British Parliament to allow them access to it. But  "It would be uncomfortable to our bottom line if we had to pay for the copyrighted materials we'd much rather just take from its owners." So they just want it for free. That's not right, of course. But do you think OpenAI will win anyway?

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In the PNW, you don't see a lot of masculine-looking jock types anymore. But there are a group of youth looking for fitness videos to be stronger and healthier, and YouTube is blocking these from teenagers. Apparently something about giving them anxiety of their appearance and being bad for their mental health. Huh? Does that make sense? 

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4 September 2024

It's been a year and a month since Lahaina went down in flames. What does it look like today? Well, the trash has been removed, but it still looks barren.  Did you donate to Lahaina Strong? Well, you might want to read this. Grifting everywhere, no?

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‘Nuclear clock’ breakthrough paves the way for super-precise timekeeping.  Nuclear clocks are supposed to be more accurate than atomic clocks. This one is based on energy shifts within the thorium-229 nucleus.

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Could all those amazing things reported on GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs just be due to sponsorship bias?  Well, this wouldn't be a new thing. You always have to be on the lookout for it. I'm far more worried about the bias we saw with the mRNA vaccines, where it seemed the entire scientific community in the U.S. was too petrified to even suggest that maybe we need to do more studies before just blindly recommending it. Like the Novavax vaccine, approved without any human trials. Or the lack of science behind the lockdowns, as they were implemented.

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Sunspots surge to 23 year high. Even greater than expectations. This is probably why climate is warmer – our sun is more active.

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What's going to happen with the animators that create all those wonderful animation films?  Well, they can't continue to do things the old way. But what's going to help them create better? Can any of them write code?

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Speaking of AI – now because their work is being checked to see if they were developed with generative AI, kids have to write differently – like a robot.  What irony.

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3 September 2024

Despite this article, we don't yet have Coordinated Lunar Time. It's still a standard under development. There is no publicly available clock that tells you what time it is on the moon yet. But scientists at the IAU think they have a system worked out.
Ashby and Patla worked on developing a system where anything can be calculated in reference to the center of mass of the Earth/Moon system. Or, as they put it in the paper, their mathematical system "enables us to compare clock rates on the Moon and cislunar Lagrange points with respect to clocks on Earth by using a metric appropriate for a locally freely falling frame such as the center of mass of the Earth–Moon system in the Sun's gravitational field."
The center of mass between the Earth and Moon is located between the surface of the earth, closer to the surface than the center, but still subsurface. Taking the Sun into account complicates things further. But the math is doable.

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Interesting point of view. It says that people avoid doing what their natural talent is, because it seems ordinary. So they pursue some other skillset to challenge themselves, and rarely rise above mediocrity. He calls this Rothbard's Law. People often have to do something that pays the bills, and don't occupy themselves with an activity just because it's a challenge. You have to earn money, and innate talent isn't always there. But it helps if you can find a job that allows you to use your innate talents and profit from it.

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+That sucks. Looks like one can't uninstall the recall "feature" of Windows 11 after all. If I were a Windows user, I'd switch. 

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Eric Schmidt gave an eye-opening talk at Stanford last week. Supposedly the video was taken down at his request but this guy had a copy and posted it back up.  Wow, what an eye-opener. Imagine being able to tell an advanced LLM to clone TikTok for you, at least the parts you're interested in. Or to clone a reasonably copy of Google for you. No need to code it yourself. We're not there yet, but this is going to be a huge vulnerability for software-only companies that will be hard to stop. Take a listen...
You may have an opinion about Eric Schmidt, but he's smart and has interacted with a lot of other smart people, which has shaped his thoughts, and his viewpoints are heard by powerful people, so it's worth hearing what he has to say.

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What causes gold nuggets to form? Turns out that it's been a bit of a mystery. Now, it's believed to be a result of piezoelectricity from quartz crystals.

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This graph has been making the rounds on financial sites:

It's from FDIC's quarterly banking report.  It sure doesn't look like the banking sector is in good shape. And I'm not sure how well the FDIC is going to be able to handle another SVB going under.  The FDIC ends the report saying:
In conclusion, the banking industry continued to show resilience in the first quarter, as net income rebounded, asset quality metrics remained generally favorable, and the industry’s liquidity was stable. 

However, ongoing economic and geopolitical uncertainty, continuing inflationary pressures, volatility in market interest rates, and emerging risks in some bank loan portfolios pose significant downside risks to the banking industry.  These issues, together with funding and margin pressures, will be matters of close supervisory attention by the FDIC in 2024.  

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2 September 2024

The fall of StackOverflow. Yes, A.I. is partly to blame, but anyone that has used StackOverflow is familiar with another important reason. The forum structure eventually breaks down over time. I can't count how many times I did a search and got results that were out of date. I got responses that described solutions based on older operating system versions, where the options were no longer there. Or on outdated libraries where the solutions were deprecated. Over time, S.O. became useless. Eventually I went to Perplexity or Claude 3.5 for answers. I've noticed that in other software platforms, a forum is set up, and that's all the tech support they provide. You search for answers and scan an endless series of irrelevant posts, looking for something remote addressing your concerns.

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Canary in the coal mine.  Dollar General warns poorer US consumers are running out of money.  And who wants four more years of the same governance. (Oh, but there must be national access to abortion up to full-term, right?)

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This new paper says "a daily cup of lightly roasted coffee could tip the scales in favor of better body composition for those struggling with weight, with slight yet promising reductions in fat and boosts in muscle mass". But look at the graphs: the first red flag is that the y-axis doesn't start at zero. If it did, you wouldn't notice any difference.  The second red flag is that the error bar confidence intervals overlap. The third red flag is that regular roasted coffee didn't do consistently as well as light-roasted coffee. Now a dose-effect relationship doesn't always hold, but when it doesn't, it increases the likelihood that what you're observing is just random fluctuations. I suspect it's the latter. Fourth red flag is that they used 2 scoops of regular roast and 4 scoops of lightly-roasted coffee without explaining why. And if you look at Table 5, regular roasted coffee seems to be the winner. That's what I'd rather drink.

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When asked whether “my schoolwork challenges me in a good way,” just under half of middle and high school students agree, with only 14% agreeing strongly.
What’s concerning is that students say they feel much less engaged in school than they did just last year, compared to Gallup’s 2023 Gen Z survey.
...about half of Gen Z students say they plan to go to college, their K-12 schools spend a lot of time talking about it — way more than they talk about alternatives.
Maybe the guys can go to college for reasons Elon Musk recommended.

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Be careful if you have apps on your phone from Google, Amazon or Facebook. They may be actively listening to your conversations to sell you ads. I don't have an Android phone for that reason.

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1 September 2024

A bad idea. Concerns raised about ranked-choice voting. I don't believe that most people really understand how bad this idea is. It's replacing a flawed election system with one that has real problems. See the video I posted yesterday.

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"Republicans pounce".  Is that the best you can do, Oregonian? This isn't the best reason to reject Janelle Bynum. It's this:

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Typical NY Times. Some book critic thinks that the U.S. Constitution is dangerous. The dumbest generation thinks they know better than the Founding Fathers. "One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document." Yeah, I think that's a feature, not a bug. Thank goodness the Left has been hamstrung in wanting to silence "misinformation", censor "hate speech" and take away our means of self-defense and making the government think twice about enacting dangerously stupid legislation like California.

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Speaking of California, NY Times has an article about the corruption that is California politics. We don't need to bring that to Oregon or Washington, and certainly not to Washington D.C.

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Adult use of cannabis, hallucinogens remain at historically high levels. This is why a lot of people avoid downtown Portland and Seattle. Maybe people thought that we'd just see a lot of mellow people everywhere. Nope, we're seeing a whole lot of a different kind of people.

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31 August 2024

They're here. Oregon Health Authority discovered the presence of the Aedes aegypti mosquito – in July, but waited until now to release the information. It was found in southern Oregon in the town of Talent. This mosquito is usually just a problem in the southeastern U.S. and south of the border. It is a vector for yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses. They tend to be out in the evening, so watch out.

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Crap. Tina Kotek appointed two new members to OHSU's board of directors: a womens issues social justice activist and the treasurer for the AFSCME Local 328 chapter.  This is typical Kotek. OHSU is going to go farther afield of being a center of medical research excellence, and will just be a mouthpiece for progressive issues. I think OHSU's board should just be composed of key doctors and researchers and select community leaders. That's it. But that vision has long been abandoned, and here we are.

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Is democracy mathematically impossible? This is a nice review of different voting systems, and why Ranked Choice Voting can lead to outcomes completely opposite of what should be the expected outcome. Take a look:

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Iron oxide may be a cheap and safe way to store hydrogen. Kinda heavy, though.

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Semaglutide and other GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs could slow down aging. And this is in people, unlike metformin, which showed longevity effects in mice, nematodes and fruit flies.

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Is deliberate practice all you need to become an expert? Like what Malcolm Gladwell said in hias book, Outliers?  Sadly no. You need to be intrinsically talented, too.

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Wikipedia is indeed a liberally-biased tool.  Use with caution.

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How to make your lithium batteries last longer.  That first charge is really important.

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Longstanding gap filled!  Scientists can now make tiny yellow, orange and green lasers, now. Compact ones, too.

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30 August 2024

AnandTech has shut down. I never visited them regularly, but I have heard of them. I just wonder if this is the start of a new trend – the shutting down of tech news websites much as we saw after the dotcom boom ended.  This has been so typical of the Biden-Harris era: no growth or expansion of nice things. Only shortages and shutdowns.

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Trying to control speech. Now radiologists are being told what words to use and not to use when reading ultrasounds, so as not to trigger people. So Orwellian, but it's happening so often, like censorship, that it's being done with ease, and only a few push back.

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UK Royal Society comes to the conclusion that even solving the battery problem isn't going to solve the green energy problem. When the wind stops blowing and there isn't enough sunshine for solar power, there will still be a substantial energy shortage. And they discover that hydrogen isn't the answer either, despite all the greenies suggesting it be used instead because you can burn it in air without creating carbon dioxide. But –
Hydrogen is also hard to move around. To get the gas to move through pipes, it has to be compressed and pushed along using compressors. This process requires energy: the losses in moving hydrogen through pipes are ten times greater for hydrogen than for methane; up to 30%. In other words you need to use up almost a third of your gas just moving it from A to B.
The infrastructure for hydrogen does not exist, neither for the most part do the production facilities and they will cost billions to build. Then the underlying cost of storing hydrogen is probably at least four times that of storing methane. Huge amounts of energy are lost in each stage of the process due to the fundamental properties of hydrogen.
Current technology does not have anything ready to substitute for petroleum-based fuels.

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In 2022, the federal government reported that, in samples seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration, average levels of tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC—the psychoactive compound in weed that makes you feel high—had more than tripled compared with 25 years earlier, from 5 to 16 percent. That may understate how strong weed has gotten. Walk into any dispensary in the country, legal or not, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a single product advertising such a low THC level. Most strains claim to be at least 20 to 30 percent THC by weight; concentrated weed products designed for vaping can be labeled as up to 90 percent.
In the past few years, reports have swelled of people, especially teens, experiencing short- and long-term “marijuana-induced psychosis,” with consequences including hospitalizations for chronic vomiting and auditory hallucinations of talking birds. Multiple studies have drawn a link between heavy use of high-potency marijuana, in particular, and the development of psychological disorders, including schizophrenia...
“It’s entirely possible that this new kind of cannabis—very strong, used in these very intensive patterns—could do permanent brain damage to teenagers because that’s when the brain is developing a lot..."
You don't say....

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You won't have to take the bar exam to be a lawyer in Washington state, just like Oregon. Because the DEI progressives in charge, rather than trying to improve educational quality, instead remove qualifications put in place to ensure that we have quality practitioners. Don't they know that having bad attorneys is just going to lead to the need for more trials to remedy bad law? Yes, bad law begets more work for attorneys, and doesn't help the public.

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