Sugoi & Yokunai

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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This study purportedly linked cheese consumption to reduction in sleep apnea. They used Mendelian randomization instead of a randomized controlled trial. They found that cheese consumption was associated with a decreased sleep apnea risk, and that it affected 23 biomarkers they identified.  Interesting that the cheese nutrition dataset was UK-based, and the sleep apnea dataset was from FinnGen, a Finnish biobank. Is it legitimate to look at cheese consumption from one country and link it to disease risk from people in another country. I couldn't even find a list of what cheeses were eaten, since cheeses are not all the same.  I have my doubts about this study. Eating too much cheese will make you more obese, and that will make sleep apnea worse.

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People who are anxious and worried can't sleep well, and the lack of good sleep hampers their ability to keep intrusive, unwanted thoughts away.  This often makes the situation worse. I believe that resilient people have the ability to dismiss harmful and unhelpful thoughts, and thereby keep going, and doing what needs to be done. Whereas many people are held captive by their thoughts which destroy productivity and make life worse. Perhaps a good soporific is just the thing to help deal with anxiety, provided it's just temporary. 

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Long ago, England tried to make New Years Day be March 25. It actually makes sense (read the article). But the people didn't like it, so the government caved. Fascinating historical item.

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Most people don't care about quality.  My opinion is it's convenience that always trumps quality.  People are willing to sacrifice quality to get "good enough" if it's convenient. Most of the time, quality doesn't make a difference.

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One of the first Starbucks locations is permanently closing due to lack of safety.  Crime is winning.

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Washington Dems wants to codify gender extremism in public schools. Read the room, Dems. This crap isn't working anymore.

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This won't work.  Anthropic signed a deal with a music publisher group to not provide lyrics to songs when asked. So what about about websites that provide lyrics?  What difference does it make? LLMs are just an interface.

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The writer here doesn't give his age, but I suspect that he's in his late twenties or early thirties. I suspect he is experiencing that feeling that life has told him it no longer needs his contributions, and he feels adrift. But even if one has a job, does life really need one's contributions? Having a job provides the illusion that you're wanted and needed, but it's a tenuous concept. He should mingle with others in his situation. This is why the world's billionaires go to gatherings like Bilderberg and Davos and even Monte Carlo. Where else are they going to find social equals?

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Oh dear. Three year med schools are being considered again. Remember, you get what you pay for.  This has been tried twice in the past, and each effort lasted only a short time.

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Sigh. Siri records your conversations and sells them to advertisers. So now Apple lost a class action and has pay.

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Mission creep. What is Oregon Health Authority supposed to cover? Home repairs, now?

Back in the old days, you sold your home if you couldn't maintain it. You didn't ask taxpayers to pay for it.

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Another blood group? Back in September 2024 I wrote about the MAL blood group.  It's due to the absence of the AnWj antigen.

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How many minerals are required to build an EV battery?  It's more than just lithium.

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Volcanic activity under Yellowstone is "on the move".  Well, they've been saying that for a while now.  Others think it's not a concern.

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Why is U.S. healthcare so dysfunctional? Because it's based on the socialist model, instead of the competitive capitalist model, that's why.

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City of Portland Projects a $27 Million Budget Shortfall, but It Will Balloon to Much More.  More taxes and fees in the future. And more homeless:

Looks like the U.S. is already cutting carbon dioxide emissions substantially. So why do we need to act like we're not?