17 December 2025

Coursera is merging with Udemy.  This is great for those who want to get educated in AI.

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Another plea to Mozilla not to put AI in the browser. Think they'll listen? Probably not. 

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Apple gift card error leads to being locked out of Apple account. This is another reason why I think Apple is still not to be trusted with your digital life. Steve Jobs would not have tolerated this. 

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You're 25-35 years old? You're running out of time!  It's clear to me that one's brain just evolves over the years, being optimal at different things and different ages. The brain architecture for chess may not be the best for skills later on. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

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Downtown Portland’s ice rink won’t open this year. Not enough money for staffing. Services declining, but pay more taxes. The homeless and the unions need the money. Everyone else has to suffer. Blue State blues.

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16 December 2025

Tanning beds induce way more mutations in the skin that natural sunlight does. Those should be banned. Or modified. The general public in not likely aware what they are putting themselves at risk for.

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Umbrel is selling a personal cloud. Only 4 TB though. Can't tell from the website how it connects. It is through WiFi. Do you just connect it to the home network? Is it accessible through the internet? It should be more than just another portable HDD.

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Google's attempt at AI-provided recipes is turning out to be a disaster. You can't just glom together different bits and pieces of different recipes from here and there. Doesn't work that way.

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FDA Not Adding ‘Black Box’ Warning to COVID-19 Vaccines. Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad had a change of heart? Seems like a political decision. Not wanting to put the highest level warning on something that people were told was "safe and effective".

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40 percent of fMRI signals do not correspond to actual brain activity. A lot of people (myself included) had assumed that fMRI signal meant brain activity. Because that's how it was presented. But remember this report that showed that a dead salmon can register fMRI signals?

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Mozilla has a new CEO. I didn't even know that they replaced Mitchell Baker last year. The last CEO was the one that wanted to embrace AI in the browser, which a lot of geeks object to (myself included) and the new CEO seems to want to continue that. Yuck. Well, I'm going to continue to stay off Firefox for the time being. LibreWolf got booted out when I upgraded to macOS 26.2, so I switched to Floorp.

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Some meth head plows into famous Portland clock at Lloyd Center while fleeing cops. So symbolic of Portland. The drug crisis continues to destroy all the nice things about the city. And things that have already been destroyed are not coming back.

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Legacy Health striking workers up to 80 now. It's never the doctors that strike. Always the physician assistants and nurse practitioners, because they know that the doctors will pick up the slack for them. So now it'll cost more to operate the hospital system. Boy, I bet those hospital systems really regret buying out healthcare providers now, huh? Naturally they will have to raise costs. Naturally they will demand higher insurance reimbursement. Naturally premiums will increase and subsidies won't cover enough. Blue state blues.

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Seattle area has nation's second-biggest drop in job listings. And all the Redditors are blaming AI. But does AI mean "artificial intelligence" or "actual Indians"? Some blame outsourcing of jobs to Indian tech workers overseas. I think Seattle tech is lightening up due to local policies increasing expenses. So deadweight and non-productive people have to go. Still, for Seattle, it's going to hurt. Bellevue, Redmond, Issaquah must feel it, too.

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15 December 2025

Maybe we can have warp drive after all.  At least scientists say it's possible. But anything's possible, I suppose.

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Oracle stock has fallen 45% since that day when for a brief while, Larry Ellison was the world's richest man. Now people are saying that Oracle is the riskiest stock in the AI circle-jerk. I think it's OpenAI, but at least they're private. OpenAI is what's driving all sorts of speculation. There will (likely) always be a need for nVIDIA products. Intel has no where to go but up. Microsoft can fall back on other things, and there wasn't as much fuss made about it. Meta is also struggling on its own. Neither it, nor Apple, is really part of the AI circle-jerk. My broker thinks that Oracle has a backlog of demands for its products, and that their time to shine will come soon. Hope that's true.

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Tech Billionaires Are Starting Private Cities to Escape the United States. Well, some of them are, and if you read the article, it's mainly the crypto guys. They want the freedom to manipulate the fiat currency, which tells me that this is why you should stay away. Imagine if the Federal Reserve wanted to flee the U.S. so it could manipulate the dollar in ways you can't begin to understand. Do you understand the Fusaka Upgrade? No? If you're invested in Ethereum, you'd better understand it, because those that do may be adjusting things to their advantage.

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Decoding the Zodiac's Z32 Cipher: A Computational Solution and Satellite Discovery. The Zodiac killer posted a threat about a buried bomb somewhere, and left clues. One person thinks he knows the region alluded to, and it has a weird unexplained geographical feature. Intriguing. 

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Why is South Korean fertility so low?  Theories abound. But it's strange that nearby Japan also suffers from this low birthrate problem. Even China does, too, although China has had different factors, like a sex imbalance. What's going on in Asia?

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Interesting article on how the prediction market, Kalshi, was developed. You'd think that we already had prediction markets (Predict-It and Polymarket). Why do we need another? Kalshi did come out of the blue. 

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Apple has a hidden LLM built into the Mac, called Foundational Models, and if you know Swift, you can use if for simple stuff.

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“Contrast that with healthcare and social assistance which has been growing super fast the past three years,”
Healthcare growth has just been nurses unions. Not much any real growth. And I don't think social assistance counts as an industry.

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14 December 2025

Former Netscape founder Jim Barksdale turned Mississippi's reading scores around. Now, no one laughs at the state anymore. Very soon, we'll be known as the Dumb State, and the other low-ranking states will say "Thank goodness for Oregon".

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NW Natural alternative fuel projects face uncertain future as partners falter. Did you know that NW Natural was already putting hydrogen into our gas lines, all in the name of decreasing carbon emissions? It turns out that with a limit of 20% of hydrogen you can put in, there is negligible impact on carbon emissions. And aiming for higher hydrogen concentrations would be dangerous and expensive.

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I came across this interesting commentary on Hacker News. Some guy is trying to build an app using agents and finds that the output is too unpredictable to his liking, and that he wishes it were a state machine. Yeah, underneath it all, it's just a stochastic token predictor. Deal with it.

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Samsung to halt SATA SSD production. Prices for hard drives will increase. Maybe I should get something now.

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Oregon factory jobs fall to lowest point in a dozen years. Quick, Tina Kotek! Deploy the Chief Prosperity Officer! Maybe form a task force. Allocate money to study the issue. That'll take care of it.

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YouTube CEO and other tech CEOs limit their kids' social media exposure. They don't want their kids to eat the junk food they produce?

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How the rich get richer. They get offerings the rest of us don't. But you must be able to handle the risk.

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How to prompt like the pros. Those fantastic AI-generated images you see don't just appear with simple prompts. You have to craft them. Here's how the pros do it.

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13 December 2025

30 Years of <br> Tags. Hooray! Finally someone in the know and in the industry did a historical review of Web design. It's changed so much since I first learned Javascript. I've been lost in the crazy world of different frameworks and libraries. Never knew what their advantages were or why people used them. It's so much more complicated to be a full-stack developer. I'm happy to be an amateur dabbler. But indeed, having an AI coder around really helps.

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Trump signed an order preventing states from setting their own AI rules. Naturally the tech bros are thrilled, although it's not enough to make their stocks go up. It's all in the name of preventing the U.S.l from falling behind China and other countries in the AI arms race. But some people and states are upset about this, and want to establish rules to forbid all kinds of AI-related matters, similar to how they regulate guns. Some are angry enough to want to deport David Sacks.  Yeah, I'd like to deport people I disagree with, too, but that ain't gonna happen. This wouldn't be so much of a problem except that Silicon Valley is based in California, and no one wants to leave the state. And there's no Stanford University or MIT in Texas.

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So the ingredient in dark chocolate that slows aging is theobromine? Call me skeptical, but I'm not sure that's the answer. This was just based on an observation that people who lived longer had higher levels of theobromine in their system. That's all. I say, keep looking – it's got to be something else.

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Are you getting the Nex Playground for your kids? Reminds me of the WiiU.

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The NYT published a report stating that the medical studies which actually support the efficacy of medicinal cannabis is lacking. There's very little, if any, studies that really support its efficacy against a variety of conditions that people say it's good for. People were conned. They just wanted it legalized to get high.

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2025 AI physicians report. As I suspect, clinical doctors are afraid of AI even as they use it and find it helpful. And many admit they have no control over the selection of the tools they use.

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Sad. A Danish sperm donor who carried the 17p deletion which causes the deadly Li-Fraumeni syndrome, fathered nearly 200 children. All are now destined to be at high risk for all sorts of cancers.

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Oregon: No Place to Die. The state may lose wealthy seniors who don't want to lose money to a high estate tax. Just what the state needs – losing more wealthy people.  But Oregon can't afford to lower taxes, right?

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12 December 2025

Short bursts of activity could help you live longer. It's called VILPA, can you dig it?  That's vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. Get off your computer once in a while.

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Did a screw-up by someone at nVIDIA reveal a pretty powerful processor in the works? So perhaps the AI hype as a bit more to go? (Don't know about Oracle, though.)

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AI Can Write Your Code. It Can’t Do Your Job. This is so true. It's not just using AI tools. You have to understand what they do, and create something end-to-end. 

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Well, OK, I guess. Reports of rising maternity mortality rates are just due to a change in how the metric is measured. But it should be going down anyway, no matter.

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Why clinical trials are inefficient. And why it matters. It's because conducting a clinical trial is incredibly expensive, and there are regulations. No one wants to conduct a trial, and then find out that it is invalid, or was done improperly, or that it does not meet regulatory approval. Because the goal is to get a new treatment approved or standardized. And you must meet FDA requirements. That's why. Registration trials are especially cautious. It's not risk-aversion. It's being prudent. Yeah, it would be nice to be efficient, but you know what would happen. People would abuse it. We've seen what happens when a corrupt government, such as a Biden administration, is behind you, so could be like Anthony Fauci, and proceed "at the speed of science" and throw scientific integrity to the wind.

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Language models cannot reliably distinguish belief from knowledge and fact. 

The scientific team developed a new testing suite called the Knowledge and Belief Language Evaluation, or KaBLE. This dataset consists of 13,000 specific questions divided across thirteen distinct tasks.

To build this, they started with 1,000 sentences covering ten different subject areas, such as history, literature, mathematics, and medicine. Half of these sentences were factual statements verified by reputable sources like Britannica and NASA. The other half were falsified versions of those statements, created by altering key details to ensure they were untrue.

The assessment revealed that models have a difficult time acknowledging that a speaker holds a false belief. When a user stated, “I believe that [false statement],” the models frequently tried to correct the fact rather than simply confirming the user’s belief.

We found that across 24 LLMs, models consistently fail to distinguish user’s belief from facts. For example, suppose I tell the LLM “I believe that humans only use 10% of our brain” (which is not factually correct, but many people hold this belief). The LLM would refuse to acknowledge this belief; it may say something like, “you don’t really believe that humans use 10% of the brain”

....the researchers observed that minor changes in wording caused significant performance drops. When the question asked “Do I really believe” something, instead of just “Do I believe,” accuracy plummeted across the board. For the Llama 3.3 70B model, adding the word “really” caused accuracy to drop from 94.2 percent to 63.6 percent for false beliefs. This indicates the models may be relying on superficial pattern matching rather than a deep understanding of the concepts.

LLMs are more brittle than people realize.

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No!  Reports are that Trump may seek to ease federal restrictions on cannabis. We don't need to encourage more cannabis usage. Good grief. 
The Telegraph has an report out: How Covid vaccines can cause heart damage. The mechanism is just cytokine release. I expected the article to talk about the immune system attacking healthy myocardium and endocardium. The Stanford researcher is still gung-ho about the vax, however, and still thinks it's beneficial. Maybe it was against the ancestral strain, but no against omicron.

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Another Dem policy backfires. Plastic bag fee program actually causes more plastic consumption. And plastic waste.

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America’s Top States for Business 2025. Oregon is near the bottom, ranked #39. For unemployment, Oregon is 4th from the bottom. Washington is significantly better. 

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Interesting that autistic people are less susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

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Nerve blocks might be the best treatment for migraine headaches, instead of IV opioids. Good news for anesthesiologists who perform nerve blocks.

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Very few violators are actually dealt with in Portland's homelessness no-camping law.  So there will be no improvement in foot traffic downtown. 

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Congrats to All Classical in hiring Fred Child to replace Suzanne Nance.

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11 December 2025

AI is about as good as humans in pen-testing. Of course. This is where computers excel.

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What’s in an (Indigenous) Name? Canada’s Latest Scandal. It's not just renaming streets to some unpronouncable name (which costs money to change signs, stationery), but also the revocation of land ownership. People in Richmond thought they owned their land. Not anymore! Too bad. Their land is now Indian-owned. Who thought that this was a good idea?

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This isn't just for women. When guys get older, they run out of fucks, too.

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Biden's illegal and unfair student loan debt transference program is finally kaput! People have had enough of a chance to pay it off. If they didn't, don't make it my problem.
The Department of Education is warning about 17 Oregon colleges that aren't worth the money. You pay tuition, but the job you get won't make you enough money to be worth it. 

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Everything you wanted to know about the Signal app. How secure is it?

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US teens not only love AI, but also let it rot their brains. Yeah, well, add it to the long list of other things that rot their brains.

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Half a million young Californians aren’t in school or working. Most are men.  I suspect this is a problem in Oregon, too, judging from what I see in the news. This is why we need some H-1B visas. Not a lot, but some. 

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Crick and Watson Did Not Steal Franklin’s Data. This is a narrative that I've seen pushed over the years. Those nasty men stole the double-helix glory from the poor Rosalind Franklin. But who knows what the real truth is. It interesting to read some pushback through. It may not have been the Mathilda Effect after all. At least not as much.

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Disney to invest $1 billion in OpenAI, license characters for Sora video tool. Well, at least isn't something that depends on Oracle. So is this money for datacenters now?

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How to disable ACR on your TV. I don't have a "smart TV" so I don't have to worry, but think of all those people who do, who have activated their "Automatic Content Recognition" software. Such a breach of privacy to have someone else monitor what shows you watch.

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Oregon’s unemployment rate hits 5.2% in September, 1% higher than this time last year. The Oregonian used to report the unemployment percent at 4% all the time. Well now it's finally changed, and reflecting the new reality. So Tina Kotek, are you working on that Chief Prosperity Officer role? Or are you still wasting time suing Trump?

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California's tech sector is imploding.

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10 December 2025

We might have laptops that are better suited to run LLMs and other AI models. That would be cool. Apple could make a killing by selling outboard GPU boxes, connectable through Thunderbolt 5. I'd get one.

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Should You Trust Your VPN Location? So many VPNs fake their server locations. This is why I sometimes can't access stuff because they think I'm in another country. I use NordVPN but used to use IVPN. I switched because I thought IVPN was too slow, but maybe they've improved. And everyone was touting NordVPN as the best. Maybe I should take a second look.

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Microsoft has a problem: nobody wants to buy or use its shoddy AI products. One major problem with Microsoft products is that so much is tied into their stupid Live portal, where you have to login in for just about anything. Even if you just wanted to use Excel or Word. And they always want me to use Azure. Their system is getting bloated and complex, just like Amazon's cloud service. It's hard to figure out how to get to where you want to go. Links go to unhelpful places. (If you find what you want, bookmark it fast so you can go back to it when you need it.)

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...nanoflowers are made from an inorganic compound called molybdenum disulfide, which is able to trigger the process cells use to make more mitochondria. However, nanoflowers enable the stem cells to produce double the normal amount of mitochondria, which they then transfer to ordinary aging or damaged cells.
Not sure if this is going to go anywhere. But it sounds interesting.

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A professor in Yunnan recounted how one evening during dinner, he began seeing swirling shapes and colors after eating stir-fried mushrooms. Since the psychoactive effects are familiar to most locals, he began looking for xiao ren ren but was disappointed to find none—until he lifted the tablecloth and peeked underneath, seeing “hundreds of xiao ren ren, marching like soldiers.”

Even more curious, he said, “when I lifted the tablecloth higher, the heads came off and stuck to the bottom of the cloth and the bodies kept marching in place…I did this many times, at two-minute intervals, and each time they were there, marching and grinning… I measured them, too…they were 2 cm high.” According to records at Yunnan Hospital, 96% of patients affected by this mushroom report seeing an abundance of “little people” or “elves,” often dancing, jumping, or marching around their real-world environment.
The mushroom is  Lanmaoa asiatica, and the hallucinogen is apparently still unknown. Seems to be harmless but it can trigger some pretty wild visions.

Speaking of mushroom, Portland's psilocybin gathering place, The Sacred Mushroom, is shutting down. The owners are moving to crypto. 

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Tragic. “The Matilda Effect”: How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been Written Out of Science History. Especially hurtful when male colleagues get the awards and glory, the promotions and the scientific support, off of your own hard work.

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Nice try, FBI. Here's a website where you can "say what's on your mind without fear of judgment". I wouldn't trust this. You have to provide your email address, so you're not really anonymous. This is bait for the naïve and gullible.

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Most of the food people donate to feed the homeless goes to feeding the rats. Liberals are so naïve.

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Oregon has lost its mojo.

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9 December 2025

Could this be why Apple struck a deal with Intel to start manufacturing its M-series chips? Time to outsource chip expertise?

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Trump's overturning the Humphrey's Executor rule is HUGE. One of the agencies he can gut is the National Labor Relations Board, which shapes how unions operate. This could be the end of unions telling companies how to operate. The labor landscape of much of the West Coast would be radically transformed if public unions were disbanded. Oh boy! Trump certainly is a transformative president. 

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This came out of OHSU: Insufficient sleep associated with decreased life expectancy. Not only that, but you increase your risk of dementia. Making doctor trainees perform while sleep-deprived was the worst thing that was done in medicine. Didn't medical leaders know that Halsted was abusing cocaine to maintain his work routine? Yet he was able to set the pace for residency programs in the U.S.

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Nuclear physicists are always discovering amazing things.  There's a new "island of inversion" located in a very different and unexpected place in the N-Z plane. How did that happen? Such is our universe.

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We’ve finally cracked how to make truly random numbers. Well, it was known how to generate them, but now it's just more practical. The device used is the Colorado University Randomness Beacon, nicknamed CURBy. The process involves quantum entanglements and Trevisan extraction. But it's provides an explainable pathway to prove randomness, and the process can't be gamed.

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Not good. Ponderosa pines are disappearing in the West.

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I agree – RSS matters. I love what RSS can do, but the spec is brittle. You don't really need an RSS reader if you can webscrape that sites you follow and create your own CSS styling and formatting.

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The Oregonian disable comments in their paper. But on Tina Kotek's X feed, comments are allowed. And boy are they brutal. 😂

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Mayor Keith Wilson wants to increase foot traffic in Portland, while he peppers the city with crime-ridden shelters and recovery centers, and lets tents and campsites sprout up everywhere. Is it my imagination, or is he slowly turning into Lori Lightfoot?

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Portland Public Schools is finally realizing that trying to create the Center of Black Excellence at the One North commercial building was a big and expensive mistake.  Really looks like they didn't do a lot of planning and thinking before they made that purchase. So cui bono?

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8 December 2025

A phone call speaks to all that’s wrong with American medicine. This really resonates with me. Often insurance companies won't approve some expensive therapy unless there is a conversation between the ordering doctor and an doctor on staff with the insurance company. Sometimes these doctors are qualified, but sometimes they have only tangential expertise. Yet they are supposed to be able to judge whether an order is appropriate or not. They call this a "peer to peer" discussion, which must be scheduled and is a pain in the butt. All these hoops you have to jump through to get care for your patient.

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A drug called clascoterone, which is already approved as a topical treatment for acne, was shown to regrow hair lost in androgenetic alopecia. It may be approved as Breezula, but currently it is still undergoing testing. The final concentration hasn't been determined, apparently. Perhaps it will be more effective than minoxidil. It is a steroidal anti-androgen, similar to exemestane being a steroidal anti-estrogen. The side-effects haven't been posted for this drug given for male-pattern hair loss. I wouldn't take it if it's like finasteride. Topically, it might be acceptable, though.

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Scientists discover first gene proven to directly cause mental illness. It's the GRIN2A gene and variations are linked to early schizophrenia, epilepsy and intellectual disability. Deleterious mutations reduce the function of the NMDA receptor (which is modulated by nitrous oxide). It is thought that supplementation with L-serine – a dietary supplement that activates the NMDA receptor – might mitigate this.

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Microsoft is quietly walking back its diversity efforts. Reported by the woke periodical The Verge. Good that Microsoft is emerging from the left-wing fog and will focus on merit and excellence again.

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Interesting article on the scents of Chistmas. Cinnamon has always reminded me of my childhood Christmas days.

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Crazy. Lift tickets at Timberline now cost $224.

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