14 May 2025

Wow! In situ 3-D printing is possible now in the body, for structural tissue, like cartilage or bone. I doubt that organs will be amenable to this technology, as the cellular elements and architecture will need to be replicated.

––– 凄い –––

This guy thinks that LLM agents already possess free will. I still think it's just a simulation, and that we can see where it ends. But as complexity grows, it will be more difficult to find the margins of that simulation. Agents still depend on a central control module that triggers them. It's not quite free will.

––– 凄い –––

Toyota has made an EV that would finally make it make sense.  745 mile range. Fully charges in 10 minutes. That's what I need. Anything less is just "proof of concept".

––– 凄い –––

Is it sulfur amino acid containing foods that make you fat? There's a supplement, a glutathione biosynthetic inhibitor, DL-buthionine-(S, R)-sulfoximine that can mimic a sulfur amino acid restricted diet, and it takes the pounds off. This effect is abrogated by N-acetylcysteine, which produces glutathione.  It's impractical to avoid sulfur-containing foods (e.g. eggs, chicken, meat, dairy, legumes, allium- and cruciferous-vegetables and leafy green vegetables). It's not clear that taking the pounds off with this supplements is a healthy way to lose weight.

––– 凄い –––

Doctors are not well. Nearly 2/3 of practicing physicians feel depersonalized towards patients. 15% in the West consider themselves burned out. 25% feel emotionally exhausted. That's not a small amount. And long work hours alter brain structure.  “The observed changes in brain volume may provide a biological basis for the cognitive and emotional challenges often reported in overworked individuals." they conclude. 

––– 良くない–––

Prominent chatbots routinely exaggerate science findings.  Well, chatbots think they're great, you know. I understand why they promote themselves.

––– 凄い –––

Other states are luring Oregon businesses away from the state. And it's working. Nice job, Tina Kotek.

––– 良くない–––

The Trailblazers are for sale now.  What if the buyer wants to move the team out of Portland? Think that we will get a baseball franchise started here?

––– 良くない–––

Oregon agencies made a $1.8 billion accounting error. That's not a small number.  And now the Republicans want states to pay a part of the SNAP money that goes out, so Oregon will have to cover that, too. Not looking good.

––– 良くない–––
Portland City Council needs to watch this video.


––– 良くない–––

13 May 2025

Dozens of new obesity drugs are coming. Looks like Lilly has the bases covered.

––– 凄い –––

Electric eels can inject genetic material into organisms around it. They do this by a process called eletroporation. I remember doing this in the lab. Amazing that it happens in nature, too.

––– 凄い –––

Organic Maps is forking. The new version will be called CoMaps. It's not available on the App Store yet, and the download links aren't working. This one seems to be more privacy oriented. I'm willing to check it out when it's available.

––– 凄い –––

Nice. A guy built a robot to solve a 4 x4 Rubik's Cube. It took 45 seconds.

––– 凄い –––

An interferometer device can read text a mile away. Incredible! I would have thought diffraction would make it entirely unreadable. Not so.

––– 凄い –––

Microsoft is laying off 3% of its employees today.  It laid off 5% just four months ago. Looks like they're doing this to prioritize work in AI.  
Speaking of AI, Tsinghua University Hospital in China is going full AI. No more human physicians. Only AI agents to take care of you. We're not ready for this.

––– 良くない–––

The U.S. Treasury has a surplus surprise. This is from tariffs and DOGE cuts, unlike in 2022 when it was because Joe Biden raised taxes. Great, so maybe we can afford those tax cuts after all.

––– 凄い –––

Oregon's economy continues to decline and 42% of people can afford all that they need.

Another one bites the dust.  Next Adventure outdoor retail outlet is closing all stores. The cause? "...rising security costs due to increasing crime and theft."  Same old.  How much longer are people going to tolerate this?

Oreogn voted less business friendly than before.
––– 良くない–––

Washington State Library may have to shutter. Lack of funding, as usual. All the money going to support the drug-using homeless. More benefits being taken away even as taxes increase. Life in Blue Citites.

––– 良くない–––

Renton Landing Urgent Care and Maternal Fetal Medicine Clinic is closing. No money. Same reason as usual.

––– 良くない–––

12 May 2025

Some trivial about Nobel Prizes. What caused the marked shift from 1985 to 1995 in terms of which universities and institutions the winners came from? It's probably political, but what was it exactly? I'm happy to see that you don't need to be at a university to do prize-worthy work. I suspect an increasing amount of science is probably going to be done by privately-funded scientists.

––– 凄い –––

Pectra lets hackers drain wallets with just an offchain signature. This is the reason I avoid crypto. Changes can be made over which you have no control, and suddenly, all your wealth is gone. People like Elysium because it's newer and it's like being at the start of Bitcoin again, which you could profit from being an early investor. But Bitcoin's advantage is that its protocols are set (mostly). So people can't tamper with it nearly as much. The wallet is the vulnerability, though. Crypto itself is too fragile a mechanism to store wealth long-term. My opinion, of course, but stories like these confirm it.

––– 良くない–––

Tina Kotek insists that green energy will prevail, but her lack of action makes it so that it won't happen.  Now BPA, which owns most (75%) of the power lines, and so essentially controls the power grid, has decided to align with an another company instead of the California-aligned one. BPA doesn't want competition and wants to make sure hydropower dominate. So plans for solar and wind will probably meet strong resistance. Too bad, Tina.  And BPA is self-funding – it doesn't need Oregon's money. Unlike Oregon, which so badly needs federal money to operate.

––– 凄い –––

This is why Oregon's schools don't want to discipline unruly kids. We'd probably hit that "unsafe school" designation really quickly. Then the dominance of public schools and teachers unions will disappear.

––– 良くない–––

Lots of ruffled feathers amongst academics about termination of NSF grants. But take a look at the grants that have been terminated here.  Do you think they should have continued?
  • Advancing Indigenous perspectives to address climate vulnerability
  • Culture Change for Inclusion of Indigenous Voices in Biology
  • Equity and Inclusion in Open Access Publishing: Workshop to explore barriers and solutions
  • Collaborative Research: Gender-Inclusive Open Source through Gender-Inclusive Tools
  • A qualitative inquiry into sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming students
  • A Catalyst for Intersectional Gender Equity in STEM at the University of Nebraska at Omaha
  • Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM
  • Spartan Adaptations of Best Practices for Faculty Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG)
  • Exploring the Participation of LGBTQ Undergraduates in STEM
  • How Do Unrepresentative College Grades Shape Race and Gender Gaps in the STEM Pipeline?
Should taxpayer money be really spent to support this research? It's not the Biden/Kamala era anymore.

––– 凄い –––

Why were men hit harder by COVID-19 than women? I remember an early explanation was the difference in cigarette smoking habits. But it seems to be that in men, upregulation of IL-18 is higher, and there is more neutrophil activation. 

––– 良くない–––

11 May 2025

Whatever it takes. How political attacks could crush the mRNA vaccine revolution. This technology is such as disaster. It should never have been launched. COVID-19 wasn't the problem. It was the management. And now, the virus is like the common cold, at least for those who have good old-fashioned natural immunity.  Now there are reports that vax spike protein mRNA can be found in the placenta. How many pregnant women would have agreed to taking the vax if they had known.

––– 良くない–––

Everyone is cheating in college. As the saying goes: Cheaters with AI with outperform cheaters without AI. 

––– 良くない–––

Caffeine can lower body fat and BMI, and diabetes risk.  Sounds good. 

––– 凄い –––

Solar cycles are getting stronger. Perhaps we'll see stronger auroras. This is probably why global temperatures are increasing. Higher levels of CO2 might contribute to some of that warning, but it's just trapping what's already being put out by the sun.  Lowering CO2 levels will likely have just a small impact.

––– 良くない–––

AI hallucinations are getting worse and are here to stay. No one has yet discovered a good way to control it.

––– 良くない–––

A $100,000 annual income doesn't cut it in Portland anymore.  Only the homeless are thriving now, as the wealthy leave the city. Or at least try to. There are a lot of homes being offered for sale in Multnomah County now.  Time to get out.

––– 良くない–––

10 May 2025

Living next to a golf course might increase your risk of getting Parkinson's Disease. Chlorpyrifos and maneb may be to blame.

––– 良くない–––

Chinese research is taken as seriously as research done elsewhere.  Gee, wonder why?

––– 凄い –––

If you admit to using AI, people don't think as highly of you. Unless the other people are AI users themselves.
When evaluating descriptions of employees, participants consistently rated those receiving AI help as lazier, less competent, less diligent, less independent, and less self-assured than those receiving similar help from non-AI sources or no help at all.

...the study showed that evaluators' own experience with AI significantly influenced their judgments. In the study, those who used AI frequently were less likely to perceive an AI-using candidate as lazy.
––– 凄い –––

Prompt engineering is no longer a job. AI companies expect everyone to know how to write good prompts. How are your skills?

––– 凄い –––

Safe and effective. COVID-19 mRNA Shots Destroy Over 60% of Women’s Non-Renewable Egg Supply. I recall when authoritative doctors would appear on TV saying that the COVID vax was absolutely safe for pregnant women to take. No problems. This news item will get no press. I don't know if anyone in the Trump administration will look into this. It seems like those who were vocal in favor of investigating the mRNA vax and at least pausing it on the market, now are silent once appointed.

––– 良くない–––

Frequency of papal names. Which name is the most common? Which is the least common?

––– 凄い –––

Materials that are harder than diamonds. The hardest on the list is graphene. I would not have guessed.

––– 凄い –––

Portland's TriMet ridership drops $30 million each year.  I didn't realize it was in that range. No one wants to venture into Portland and no one wants to sit down on those filthy chairs or risk something happening with other criddlers riding TriMet. It seems like TriMet's main function is to bring the criddlers out to the suburbs, where flying a sign might be more successful.

––– 良くない–––

Legacy's unionized doctors are here with their demands now.  Interesting that the pediatric group saw 40% attrition and they blame it all on poor working conditions. Maybe it has to do with working in Portland, especially in the unsafe area around Randall Childrens.  What are you going to do when Legacy is just unable to meet your needs?  Quit?

––– 良くない–––

The amount of lithium in southern Oregon and northern Nevada is estimated to be $1.5 trillion.  Well, that probably settles it. Environmental concerns will be second or third tier. There's money to be made!

––– 良くない–––

9 May 2025

Perhaps an unforeseen consequence of solar energy, the French government is facing negative power costs, as too much solar power enters the grid. This may seem like a good thing, but if the power companies lose money and have to pay consumers, then there is no reason for them to stay in business.  If there is no money in maintaining the grid, then this infrastructure will decay eventually. It's like when oil prices dropped too low, oil producers struggle. There needs to be a balance. The problem is that battery technology has not advanced enough to store all the energy that is produced. So it just floods the grid. There needs to be efficient storage that is affordable.

––– 良くない–––

Prompt engineering is dead. It's expected that you can do it now. Or else use AI to help you. But only those already in the field know how to do this. Many still don't.

––– 良くない–––

There's a new clinical trial for those who have end-stage solid tumor disease. It uses an immune checkpoint inhibitor strategy directed against the PRL3 antigen, an intracelluar protein present in 80% of solid tumors but not healthy ones. This is interesting because all the current checkpoint inhibitor therapies work against a surface protein, like PD-L1 or Lag3. The mechanism depends on some of the PRL3 protein being externalized.

––– 凄い –––

Coffee shops are starting to discontinue WiFi service now. A good idea, since people don't keep drinking coffee. You want paying customers, not folks taking up space to do office work. Plus most phones have private hot spot capability.

––– 凄い –––

8 May 2025

It may soon be possible to identify micro-organisms in a few minutes, rather than a few days. This uses mass spectroscopy, and analyzes the metabolites of micro-organisms to identify them. Seems similar to metagenomics.

––– 凄い –––

Apple is getting into the "smart glass" business. Something tells me this won't sell – just like Vision Pro. It will have niche value. Do people really want this? I don't.

––– 良くない–––

Obstructive sleep apnea is associated with memory loss, as parts of the hippocampus undergo degeneration, possibly due to damage to the microvasculature.

––– 良くない–––

Portland needs money. So Steve Novick wants to revive the CEO tax idea that was cast aside years ago. Democrats view business as their piggy bank, not as something to grow and nurture. Down Portland goes, riding the Doom Loop.

––– 良くない–––

Easy come, easy go. The Large Hadron Collider converted lead into gold for a fraction of a second, before it got destroyed in collisions with other atoms.

––– 凄い –––

7 May 2025

That Signal clone story gets even worse. TeleMessage, the Israeli company behind the app, had access to all the messages, and the message logs are in plaintext. You would think a National Security Advisor would know this. Or should know this.

––– 良くない–––

Oregon State's Open Source Lab is "running on fumes".  I didn't realize that so many open source applications were hosted there. 
  • Provided hosting for Mozilla Firefox when they needed help in the early days and hosted the release of 1.0
  • Was the home of the Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, Kernel.org, Mozilla for many years
  • Offers fast and reliable software mirroring for projects
  • Currently provides infrastructure hosting for projects such as Drupal, Gentoo Linux, Debian, Fedora, phpBB, OpenID, Buildroot/Busybox, Inkscape, Cinc and many more!
  • Virtual machines for x86, aarch64 and ppc64le are used by many projects for CI and other hosted services
––– 良くない–––

How to get your paper accepted.  Good general writing advice for science writers.

––– 凄い –––

This is how we know the Chinese economy is hurting: they're hiding the probably-bad data.

––– 良くない–––

Multnomah County has no leadership. Get this:
Multnomah County will pay up to $250,000 for an outside contractor to draft the government’s new strategic plan after budgeting out over $1.1 million last year to form a five-member internal team to complete the same work.

Consulting firm Coraggio Group was tapped to create new goals and a roadmap for the county after the strategic planning, agility, reinvention and knowledge unit struggled to get off the ground, officials said.

The county also hired Coraggio last year to write its mission, vision and values statements — a project that also cost $250,000.
DEI at its finest!

––– 良くない–––

We know that OHSU is a big loser after the failed merger effort. They have to pay Legacy a $25 million break-up fee. But Legacy is a loser, too. Only the unions won, and now Legacy has to deal with that fallout.

OHSU and Legacy both have interim leaders, who came out of retirement to keep the plates spinning until the merger took place. Now they have to find permanent leaders. Who wants the jobs now? Anyone?

––– 良くない–––

This is too funny!  Cardinals are watching ‘Conclave’ the movie for guidance on the actual conclave. Hokay!

––– 凄い –––

Google wants to go nuclear, too.  I guess they have to, because energy demands will overwhelm the current system.

––– 凄い –––
Dem solutions to Dem problems. It's well known that Obamacare wasn't a great deal for healthcare after all. Sounded good to some people when it came out, but we are seeing now that the consequences are a mess. One of the bad outcomes was that private clinics had to close, and private doctors had to allow themselves to be employees of hospitals or private equity firms. Those that survived have had to endure lower insurance reimbursement. Now, Rep Lisa Reynolds, herself a pediatrician and part owner of a childen's clinic, wants to increase the pay of private physicians to that of hospitals. Legislating wealth, in other words.
The thought process for reimbursing hospitals better was that...
 hospitals must serve all comers, including those on Medicaid or who have no insurance. Independent providers can reject such patients, leading to what Hayden calls “cherry picking.”
The extra pay to private clinic doctors will come out of the pocket of private insurance companies. So they will have to eat this cost, or get out of Oregon, which will hurt Oregonians.
Sen. Cedric Hayden (R-Roseburg) ...told the Oregon Journalism Project he was surprised Reynolds introduced a bill that would benefit her personally. “I thought the optics were pretty bold,” he says.
Yeah, this ronin thought so, too.

––– 良くない–––

I never understood the practice of confessing one's sins to a Catholic priest. What does that really do? Now priests in Washington are legally required to report child abuse confessions to the law enforcement for investigation, but if they do so, they will get excommunicated. How about putting the child's safety at the forefront? Knowledge of child abuse should never be shielded. Just ask Pam Bondi, right?

––– 良くない–––

6 May 2025

The latest OpenAI models, o3 and o4-mini hallucinate a lot!  Yes, a lot.


––– 良くない–––

MIT physicists visualize "free-range atoms". They look like farm-raised to me.

––– 凄い –––

Nice. 22-inch foldable screen. Could be useful.

––– 凄い –––

Google is now in the movie business. A lot of the big tech players are doing it. Meta will be next, probably.

––– 凄い –––

Watch this video on amazing inventions.

––– 凄い –––

A mutation in the AIK3 gene allows some people to get by with less sleep. In mice experiments, mutating this gene didn't cause a major reduction in sleep duration, suggesting that this may not be the major player involved.

––– 凄い –––
I agree with this opinion – the federal government should NOT be involved in patronizing art, just because it has a lot of money.

––– 凄い –––

5 May 2025

Happy Childrens Day! 

––– 凄い –––

Someone else recognizes the excellence of GPT 4.1. I haven't tested it as a coding assistant. But I think it's a better geoguesser than o3.

––– 凄い –––

The Economist writes that bowel cancer is increasing amongst young people. And they blame it on common bacteria that produce a toxin called colibactin. "It may be too early to lay all the blame at colibactin’s door." Indeed. Any mention of the COVID-19 mRNA vax product? Nope.

––– 良くない–––

Ex-security advisor Mike Waltz wasn't using the Signal app. He was using an Israeli-made app based on Signal. Not something I would approve. 

––– 良くない–––

I didn't know that. There are no thunderstorms in the UK.

––– 凄い –––

Some people want to perform experiments on live humans that are brain dead. I'd rather not, unless it was to try to save them in a meaningful way.

––– 良くない–––

Three things that are driving hospitals to bankruptcy.  Expensive nurses, excessive Medicaid presence in the payor mix, and excessive usage of healthcare resources by illegals. This is on top of dumb COVID-19 policies, dumb DEI and "anti-racist" policies that created a toxic environment that drove doctors to leave, and the inability to attract talent to Oregon (especially Portland). Good doctors are what drive patients to seek care at hospitals and clinics. Good doctors are what gives a hospital its reputation.

––– 良くない–––

I saw this and wondered if the Dolly Parton Imagination Library was her gift, or was it a program designed to steer more tax dollars to her personal program. It's a nice idea, but it should have been just fully funded by her money. Thanks, Dolly, but Blue America can't afford nice things right now, can't you see?

––– 良くない–––

OHSU and Legacy called off the merger effort.This is for the best. The only people that seemed to want it were the union members and OHSU & Legacy leadership. Everyone else was opposed to it, or at least expressed grave concern. Now OHSU has to pay Legacy a $25 million cancellation fee, adding to their financial woes. And Legacy can begin efforts to replace their interim leader, who was probably hired just to helm the organization until the merger took place. Legacy clearly scored a win, and actually, so did Providence.

––– 凄い –––

Wow. The DoD conducted its first audit, and guess what someone found. A secret bunker for all the political elites, costing $21 trillion. In case of a near-extinction event, like in the movie Greenland.  Incredible. So many questions now.

––– 良くない–––