Sugoi & Yokunai

Oregon roads and bridges are old and damaged.  And too much of Oregon's money is just being wasted on the homeless, as the problem grows not decreases.  The homeless are a liability, and one needs to eliminate liabilities.

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There's a huge aquifer underground in central Oregon.  That's probably where the Lost Lake disappears into.  And where the water comes out at Crooked River. And from where water oozes out of the rocks at Tamolitch Blue Pool.

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More vacancies in downtown Portland. The rest of the nation is already recovering, but not Portland.

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Solar panel recycling isn't cost-effective. Isn't this why styrofoam was banned?

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Close but no cigar.  Portland is the top livable city in the nation.  Portland, Maine, that is.  Ooooo, so close.

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Five things privacy experts know about AI.  Basically, AI can't keep secrets, no matter how hard you try.

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Asimov's Three Robotic Laws needs an AI update.

You can make a law, but that doesn't mean it's possible to enforce.

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Portland doesn't have the money to crack down on graffiti.  So the city will remain ugly, and an embarrassment to visitors.

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Wow. Interim head of OHSU Health steps down after 5 weeks.  Must be toxic to work there.  Kotek wants a national search for the new OHSU president position, but who would want to take the job after all that's in the news?  Probably only someone who is desperate to leave their old job for whatever reason, and thinks that even moving to Portland is acceptable.  Paradoxically, it would be better for OHSU to hire someone from within.  Someone who is adequate and is already stuck in this city and isn't moving here to flee something worse elsewhere.  

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Ugh.  First the Hawaii Judge, now Maisie Hirono. Please stop. 

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United States Dementia Cases Estimated to Double by 2060. Anticipated Jump Especially Large for Women, Black People & Those Over Age 75. I think the increase in drug abuse is frying Americans' brains. Women have always been more susceptible to dementia for reasons unclear. We should be focusing on brain health. An increase in dementia is not society's best interest. 

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This made me laugh out loud.  The typical man disgusts the typical woman. Most men I see are pretty decent. Perhaps it's just the men who are on dating apps.  Maybe this is why the global population is decreasing.

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No blind person has been schizophrenic. Wow, they didn't teach this in psychiatry. What does this mean?  I don't think medical science knows just yet. But it's a clue.

Related to this: how does the brain distinguish perception from memory?  For most people, it's automatic, but perhaps for sighted individuals, the brain is fooled and hallucinates.

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This report suggests that Stanford researchers have developed a spiffy new AI application for precision oncology.  But this team has developed a model called CHIEF before, which garnered some serious criticism. Are these guys for real? 

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The Higgs Boson Seems To Prove That The Universe Doesn't Exist.  Well, that can't be right.

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Cool. TSMC's Arizona fab does 4 nm as good as Taiwan.  This is great!

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Healthcare AI isn't going to decrease the need for humans. Oncologists at the University of Pennsylvania used an AI tool to predict patients' chances of death.

A routine tech checkup revealed the algorithm decayed during the covid-19 pandemic, getting 7 percentage points worse at predicting who would die, according to a 2022 study.

...the tool failed hundreds of times to prompt doctors to initiate that important discussion — possibly heading off unnecessary chemotherapy — with patients who needed it.

“Everybody thinks that AI will help us with our access and capacity and improve care and so on,” said Nigam Shah, chief data scientist at Stanford Health Care. “All of that is nice and good, but if it increases the cost of care by 20%, is that viable?”

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What are the highest performing batteries in 2025?  Surprisingly, not Energizer or Duracell.  They are Chinese batteries (BlinkPower, Tipsun, Bonai and Powerowl). Duracell makes a decent alkaline battery, but lithiums outperform.

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JetPens has their annual review of the best pens for 2025. Seems like what they recommended for 2024.  The Pilot G2 is still the most versatile pen.  The Sarasa Dry isn't bad, but doesn't write well on Post-It notes.

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Emmanuel Mignot wins Breakthrough Prize for discovering cause of narcolepsy.  Not surprising, since it was the discovery of modafinil that led to this, since the drug works through orexins, and is used to treat narcolepsy.

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Reddit is now using a fake AI user called Astral to supply subreddit posts. This isn't why people use Reddit.  The new CEO is turning his product into trash.

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Apple refuses to get of its DEI initiatives. Figures.

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Someone posted this yesterday, the anniversary of the day Aaron Swartz ended his life in 2013.  I didn't know that Swartz and Sam Altman knew each other.  Interesting to see how similar were there actions, and how different were their fates. What a loss.

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Bigmouth Buffalo - the fish that doesn't decline with age. What is the secret to its longevity?

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Lenovo demoed a roll-up ThinkBook laptop. Looks really cool. I could use this. Wish Apple was rolling this out.

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Wall Street may eliminate 200,000 jobs as a result of AI. Could there be a good angle to this? I predict job roles will evolve.

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Scanning ultrasound removes amyloid-β and restores memory in an Alzheimer’s disease mouse model.  This sounds too crazy to be real. How would scanning ultrasound remove amyloid-β?  Supposedly microglia are activated to turn out phagocytic activity, but how does ultrasound make this happen?

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What is this glowing ring of metal that fell in Kenya? It's definitely man-made for sure.

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Anyons. There may be a third form of atomic particle, besides fermions and bosons.

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Could we switch off a dangerous AI?  I'm not sure. Dr. Charles Forbin wasn't able to. But at least he knew it was being dangerous. We may not be able to tell.

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There is a specific protein involved in the conversion of white fat to brown fat, produced by beige adipocytes.  When a gene coding for Krüppel-like factor 15 (KLF15) is shut off, fat becomes more brown. Now the trick is to figure out how to do this on demand.

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South Koreans (what other kind of Korean could do this?) developed a nitrogen-doped porous carbon material that boosts lithium–sulfur battery performance, achieving rapid charging (12 minutes) and long-term stability (82% capacity retention after 1,000 cycles). This is what we need to make renewable energy work.  Otherwise, it doesn't make sense, and is not practical.

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Childhood stress can lead to epigenetic changes in a man's sperm, leading to brain developmental changes in offspring. That's just crazy. Study here.  The stress included "emotional neglect, emotional abuse, physical neglect, physical abuse, and sexual abuse". Abusing children can have lasting effects, more enduring than previously thought.

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Making coffee out of thin air? Soon it will be possible.

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Creepy. The Bee will record and transcribe your life for review later. I'll bet that if it catches on, Google or Meta will buy it. 

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In about 6 weeks, Google will enable digital fingerprinting across devices. Naturally, e-marketers think this is a great idea.

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The Prodigy Paradox. Maybe it's better to be a generalist knowledge rather than a deep but narrow specialization? 

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A retrospective of Steve Jobs and charisma. Truly amazing what he was able to accomplish, but at what cost?

Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital. This article suggests that a hidden consequence of depriving some children of challenging education is that they never get to develop cognitive endurance, which would serve them well as adults.

This indicates that the experience of effortful thinking itself—even when devoid of any subject content—improves general cognitive capacity. ....indicating that an additional year of schooling improves cognitive endurance, but only in higher-quality schools. Our findings suggest that schooling disparities may further disadvantage poor children by hampering the development of a core mental capacity.

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When you change the world and no one notices. This is true – sometimes the recognition that something profound has been achieved doesn't happen for years.  This happened with the World Wide Web, too.

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A couple years ago, it seemed that every AI enthusiast was into vector databases.  Now, not so much. What happened? Embeddings. These are similar to vector databases, but they store the results of data trained on a deep learning network.

OpenAI is a vast network of datacenters with embeddings.

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Arson wars. Now the homeless in Portland are setting fires to each others' tents for revenge. This is a disaster waiting to happen.

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Washington's new governor opposes a wealth tax. Guess he saw the light, or something. Yeah, it's not going to produce the revenue they thought it might produce.

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Nice.  7 planets will align in the sky over the next few weeks.  And in the evening sky, too, which is nice.

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Doctors beware! Medical LLMs are susceptible to data-poisoning attacks. Medical LLMs are especially the one place where we shouldn't tolerate hallucinations or data-poisoning. Yet it seems we do. People are willing to sell their LLM product to healthcare systems as if we've solved all the problems.

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I had great hopes of seeing Comet ATLAS C/2024 G3, which has a peak magnitude of -4.9. Alas, I couldn't see it this morning, and there will be clouds for the rest of the week until it emerges from behind the sun for the southern hemisphere.

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Global Influence Index.  Which parts of the world are influenced more strongly by China vs the U.S.A.

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These videos are fascinating to watch, if only to remind us that enormous wealth can still be fleeting.

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Hard to keep up with so many establishments in downtown Portland closing, but add Afuri to the list.  The reasons: "continued safety perceptions and foot traffic levels that have not returned to pre-pandemic numbers". And likely won't for a very long, long time.

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This is what happens when people use LLMs without getting proper instruction on how to use them. Teachers need formal education on the use of Generative AI.

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Update from Physics Girl.  She's definitely improved.  Gonna be a bit before we see any more physics videos, though.

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And the third award goes to...... Arizona!  Sorry, Oregon, looks like you're going home empty-handed again.

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Oregon is #8 in the nation for inflation. Notice that they're all Blue States?

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Now Legacy nurses are going to unionize. Which will make them more expensive. Which will make the merger more expensive. There's no room for error on the merger, yet things keep getting worse.

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Interesting – Warren Buffet isn't going to put his money into the Gates Foundation after all. Apparently the two have had a falling out.

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Autonomous driving has a way to go. A guy almost missed his flight because his Waymo car kept going around in circles and wouldn't let him off.  AI can't beat humans just yet.

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Scientists have captured the first events in the endosymbiosis process. Really fascinating. Why do these organisms submit to this kind of behavior?

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‘Precocious’ early-career scientists with high citation counts proliferate.  Gee, what could be the cause of this? Hmmm....

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Funny. How aging rock drummer cope with their demanding sets. 

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Japanese researchers figure out how to stimulate the growth of the third set of teeth. Yes, it seems that we do have a dormant third set.

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Have the Chinese succeeded in recreating the human brain digitally?  Not really, but they are striving to get there. The brain's complexity is probably much more than 14,000 GPUs.

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AI out of cotrol. Grant Sanderson received a copyright takedown request for a Bitcoin video he created,  He suspects that a bot mistook his own original for a copy.  If he gets two more takedown notices, his whole account gets closed.  Bots are being given too much control. This is crazy.

Update (7 January 2025): Error acknowledged. Takedown request retracted. All is well (sort of).

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Is being 70 the new 60?  Is science making inroads into aging biology?

a 68-year-old born in 1950 had a similar capacity to a 62-year-old born a decade earlier, and those born in 1940 had better functioning than those born in 1930 or 1920. Beard noted, “If we had compared someone born in 1950 with someone born in 1920, we would have likely observed even greater improvements.”

These are incremental improvements, and would probably not be obvious to a casual observer. Even if presented with an individual from decades ago, the inter-individual variability would be such that it would be hard to discern improvement. I'd bet Ray Kurzweil wishes things would be speed up.

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You can use LaTeX to put coffee stains on your papers.

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There is some evidence for the (former) existence of a solar twin.  Double stars are common in the sky, this wouldn't surprise me.

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By implementing agentic frameworks on computers and phones, AI companies begin the process of harvesting people's digital life data to train their models. This is like having microphones on to record conversations. Not good.

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I don't think the elevator system in this Portland apartment building is going to be fixed anytime soon.  It's not just Portland, apparently, but nationwide. 

Yup, all the usual fallout of the Biden administration.  The nation goes to hell.  But at least today is January 6!

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Oregon Health Authority is "preparing" from a Trump administration. What they will realize is that without federal subsidies, we are actually quite a poor state. Many people need subsidies of some kind to survive. Instead of growing the economy, the government is looking for ways to shift money around.  But this period of pain will actually be good for Oregon, as subsidy-dependent people move away from the state. But until then, expect pain. Not a good time to own a hospital in Oregon.

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