28 March 2026

‘My organs shut down, now I’m in a wheelchair’: The lives ruined by Covid jabs. The Telegraph just published a story on how "the true scale of the vaccines’ side effects is emerging".  Why now, one wonders? Recently, Sen Ron Johnson sent RFK Jr a letter summarizing "evidence that appears to show yet another instance of the Biden administration’s failure to take immediate action to warn the public about a serious COVID-19 vaccine adverse event." In other words, the Biden administration (esp Rochelle Walensky) appeared to downplay the severity of the vax side-effects, likely so as not to discourage people from getting it. This is why the public has little trust in the government when it comes to medical advice now. Everything is so political.

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The Kitchen Blacklist. Seven brands that became famous for their quality products are tainted now, because the original products are not the ones being sold today. Instead people are getting inferior imitations.

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Interesting article about Suno, the company the develops and markets AI-generated music. I don't have a problem with it. A lot of human-generated music is lousy, too, so I'm willing to listen to something different. 

And here's 24-hour Lo-Fi chill music, which I suspect is AI-generated, too. Perfect for studying or coding. Music can be a commodity, too.

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Medicine technology is progressing. A woman’s uterus has been kept alive outside the body for the first time. Baby factories may be in our future before long. Brave New World, for sure.

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Exposing young children to AI content could have irreversible consequences. Well, yeah, but that's the future. Kids will be exposed to it soon enough. Parents need to be around to guide them. It's like the Internet – much of it is unsuitable for children. But children are already on it. Generative AI is a powerful tool, and kids should learn how to use it. It's probably futile to restrict it, but yes, we need to be cautious.

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Anthropic has a model that they say is too powerful to be released to the public. It's called Claude Mythos, and the Pentagon wants it. Of course, I want it, too.

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United States v. Heppner. It's important to understand, chats with public chatbots are public. Like chatbots are not HIPAA covered entities so don't expect secrecy either.

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Since we're all talking about Iran, here's the story of the Harvard graduate who helped the CIA install the Shah. His name was Kim Roosevelt. Anyone else find it interesting that there is no plan announced to re-install the Shah as leader of Iran to replace the mullahs?  Trump is taking a very different approach from past presidents, who just wiped out the leaders the U.S. didn't like. That often ended up disastrously. Instead Trump is preserving the current government (not necessarily the leader), and is using the representative of the current government, whoever that might be, to facilitate change. It's a different strategy. So who knows how the Crown Prince will fit in, if at all?

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New Census Data Shows Oregon Is Losing Residents in Their Prime Earning Year. WWeek thinks it's due to high housing costs. Commenters think it's the taxes. Why couldn't it be both? Look at those people fleeing the crazies in Mulnomah County!

Lane County gains only due to U of O. Benton County gained some, too, from Oregon State. 

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27 March 2026

Astronomers Say Recent Rash of Meteor Sightings ‘Warrants Serious Investigation’ Yeah, there was even a recent meteor seen in Portland not too long ago. I think the earth is traveling through some debris-laden space right now. Get back into your Langrangian points, folks.

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A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” describes a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google's machine learning model thinks they should see instead.

This isn’t a feature announcement, it’s a patent, meaning Google has legally protected the ability to do this. Whether and when they deploy it is a separate question, but the direction is unmistakable – your website may soon be optional.
This is nuts. And the thing is, you'll never know that it's going on.

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The danger of using "Hide My Email" with third-party Stripe handoffs. I don't use Hide My Email, since I use another third-party email masking service. Thankfully this is getting fixed, but is a good example of how edge cases are so unpredictable. You never know what the user will do.
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I'm so relieved. Boosting Brain Activity While Sitting May Lower Dementia Risk. So it's not just sitting around that increases your dementia risk. It's what you do. Watching mindless TV – bad! Doing mind-stimulating computer stuff – good! I hope working on this blog counts as mind-stimulating.

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This is so funny. Nature published two studies: one that showed that atmospheric CO2 and methane (greenhouse gases) have been stable over the past 3 million years.  They also published a study which determined the global heat content over the past 3 million years. This study found:
we find pronounced cooling roughly coincident with the Plio-Pleistocene Transition (around 2.7 million years ago), and steady temperatures across the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (1.2 to 0.8 million years ago). Comparisons with a recent global sea surface temperature compilation3 show broad consistency in long-term cooling but important differences at the Plio-Pleistocene and Mid-Pleistocene transitions. We suggest that the different trends in surface temperature and mean ocean temperature during these intervals are related to a redistribution of heat between the surface and subsurface via changes in deep water formation and upwelling.
Sure doesn't sound like greenhouse gases are a problem in the grand scale, and that planetary changes in the ocean currents are the major drivers for surface temperatures. So what is the reaction of the climate scientists? Denial, of course. They worry that people might read these papers and start to doubt Al Gore's and John Kerry's climate religion.

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People inside Microsoft are fighting to drop Windows 11's mandatory Microsoft Account requirements during setup. Even Microsoft employees don't want to eat their own dog food. Apple strongly encourages one to have an Apple account, but it's possible to use the computer without it, although you can't use the App Store without an account. But Microsoft's system is more difficult and onerous to use. It's not user-friendly.

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Qatar Dethroned As 'LNG King' As U.S. Seizes Throne, Reshaping Future Of Gas. West Texas has so much NG that they throw it away. The United States is so well-positioned energy-wise. We really shouldn't have to be paying for high gas prices. But we do. For now. I'm looking forward to when energy will be cheap. Feel sorry for Europe and Australia, though. 

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Interesting essay on gambling and the prediction markets. I agree that there is something fundamentally wrong with the prediction market system, especially when they let you put money on disasters or others' misfortunes. Because when there's money on the line, some people might want to make things happen, you know. Just because. And losing a bet does gnaw away at your ego and your sense of competence. Especially seeing the winners gloat and trumpet their good fortune. And losing a high-stakes bet is a good way to become suicidal, because you know that you'll never find anyone who will sympathize with you.

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Using a VPN May Subject You to NSA Spying. I've wondered about this since the Edward Snowden affair. But that was before Palantir and others. Still, the use of VPNs is mainstream now, so this issue is becoming less important.

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Under the old policy, San Francisco "tried to achieve equity not by raising the floor, but by lowering the ceiling," Thomas S. Dee, a Stanford University economist told the Times. "It’s a problem we see nationally," he continued.
Boy, I'll say. What a dumb experiment that turned out to be.

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Seattle Times addresses the issue: Why WA gas prices are so high: It’s more than just the Iran war. Yes, it's not just oil prices. Yes, it's the taxes. And they touch on the fact that gas in eastern Washington is lower than in the big cities. But then the article states:

What can WA lawmakers do to lower gas prices?

Not much.

Like hell, Seattle Times!  Ooo, you were so close.

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Even Multnomah County is seeing the flight. 
 
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Oregon preps for being a datacenter dump. I would require that companies provide their own power source, preferably from SMRs.  I don't know how they'll handle the water requirement. Eastern Oregon isn't exactly flush with water either. Poor eastern Oregon, they get all the windmills, solar farms, datacenters, etc. All the crap no one else wants in their backyard.

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26 March 2026

The Yellow Peril. A yellow Asian oyster mushroom is threatening the native gray species. Pleurotus citrinopileatus is its name. As opposed to Pleurotus ostreatus. It's edible, but how does it taste? That's my first question.

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Cannabis does impair your memory. The memes were right. All kinds of memory gets screwed up. And you get false memories, to boot!
Relative to placebo, cannabis increased susceptibility to false memories and detrimentally impacted verbal memory (immediate, delayed, working), visuospatial memory (immediate, delayed), event-cued prospective memory, source memory, and temporal order memory. There were no significant differences between the moderate and high dose groups.

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More commentary about the mental exhaustion brought about by using AI to assist with coding work. Sometimes doing the boring part helped keep you sane.

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Apple will stop making the Mac Pro. The cheese grater will be no more. The MacStudio will be the top. Or will it? Maybe we'll see an Apple-branded machine learning computer. That would be cool. 

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French e, è, é, ê, ë – what’s the difference? I always wanted to know.

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Have fine-tuning models fallen by the wayside? Now that you bring it up, I do find less mention of it. However there will always be instruction fine-tuning. That will never go away. But for business applications or specialized settings, perhaps it's not necessary anymore. RAG is good enough. And better prompting. And no more catastrophic forgetting, which is great.

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Dario Amodei thought that his AI models will speed up clinical trials in medicine. Nice to see someone argue that this isn't necessarily true. Dario isn't a clinical researcher. He's an engineer. It's not just using AI to predict new drugs from 3D spatial representations of active sites. There's much more than that.

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I've read about red light therapy now and then and thought it was all bunk. But maybe there is some truth to it. People keep using it and believe it works.

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Here's some detail on "How I created Rosie's mRNA Vaccine Protocol". Well, it turns out that Rosie the Dog got more than just an mRNA vaccine. Her tumor had a c-KIT mutation (not surprising since the tumor was mastocytosis). The exact mutation wasn't stated, but in humans the c-KIT inhibitor avapritinib has been effective. So her tumor reduction could just be attributed to the tyrosine kinase inhibitor. She was also given an immune checkpoint inhibitor (article doesn't say which one) and there is almost no clinical experience with checkpoint inhibitors against mastocytosis in humans. There is even some danger of triggering anaphylaxis in mastocytosis, so trying this on Rosie was risky without a phase I study.  So I'm thinking that Rosie benefited from the tyrosine kinase inhibitor mainly, and not necessarily the mRNA vaccine, but who knows?  I would have just given Rosie avapritinib. It's not clear to me that the other interventions did anything.

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Some People’s Brains Can Sense Earth’s Magnetic Field. Really strange. The scientific set up to prove this hypothesis seems kinda sketchy to me.

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Well, some of those people who invested in windmills and solar panel farms are striking back. Heh, I thought it was just doctors who would lose their money investing in windmill farms. These things only make sense if with federal money. If there's no money, these things are seen for what they really are.

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Nice continental drift animation. I used to be so into this as a kid.

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The quantum Mpemba effect. Wow, I bet that kid from Tanzania never expected there would be a real physics term like that named after him.

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Websites like time.is makes you think that time can be exact on the Internet. After reading this, however, I don't think any Internet-based timing can be that accurate.

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Carbon-14 has a half life of about 5700 years. Someone created a carbon-14 based battery that can power devices for thousands of years. I'm sure there will be trade-offs. 😁

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Make this make sense.  L.A. hands $107M ‘blank check’ to homeless group who constantly sues the city.

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And Steve Novick will vote against the Portland City Council using Portland Clean Energy Benefits Fund to pay for the MODA Center renovation. Suppose you collected a tax on citizens, which you stated was for a good cause, like climate change in this case. Then the money was more than you expected. What's the right thing to do? Turn it into a slush fund for yourself? Use it to fund something else? How corrupt is that, right? So good for you, Steve. 
And Netflix is going to release a documentary called "Jail Blazers". That's what some of us used to call them. So much misspent dollars.

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25 March 2026

Which public chatbots collect information on you? Meta AI, Google Gemini, and ChatGPT are top data collectors. No surprises there. Gotta be careful using these things. 

But this one borders on criminal, I think: You told BetterHelp your deepest secrets. You had no idea who was listening. 

Mental health care in America has a gatekeeping problem. Traditional therapy is expensive. Insurance claims create paper trails. Some employers have access to health records. For a lot of people the barrier isn't willingness. It's exposure.
BetterHelp launched in 2013: therapy on your phone. Licensed therapists. Affordable. Private. Nothing leaving the app.
By 2020: 30,000 therapists. 2 million users. $240–$360/month.
People chose BetterHelp because it felt like the safer option.
That's not what was happening.
Remember: your doctor is a HIPAA entity. These chatbots are not. HIPAA doesn't apply to them. Really too bad for people who thought what they typed in or said was private.

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Meta and Google found liable in landmark social media addiction trial. These companies are now being held liable for making children addicted to them. 
But then I read that Trump names Nvidia, Meta CEOs to science and tech council. Why would Trump want to get Zuckerburg's advice? Is it like when law enforcement enlists criminals on tips to prevent crime?

And Washington state passed a law trying to protect kids from chatbot harm. "...companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will have to include new disclosures in their popular chatbots for Washington users."  Seriously? They think those companies will create special user experiences for users in one particular state? It's like telling Google that when someone in Washington does a search, there needs to be a message on the screen telling them to watch out for false information. 

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And if you think that's ribald: Bernie Sanders and AOC unveil data center moratorium bill. I wonder if Bernie knows what an LLM is. Or if AOC knows what datacenters do.

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Love it. SCOTUS decides Missouri vs Biden in favor of free speech. No longer can the government collude with social medial to silence and censor those who have opinions counter to the orthodoxy. This is why the COVID propaganda was allowed to fester.

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Can a mouse be cloned indefinitely? The answer is no. DNA defects accumulate. The Hayflick Limit still holds.

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Colleges are now turning to oral exams to counter AI. Good. So we don't have more college students like this. I'm not paying off their student loans.

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The Hubble Space Telescope just snapped a picture of the Crab Nebula. At first, the image looks like it's of poor quality, but it actually depicts the changes that have occurred since 2024. At this rate, I'm not sure how much of a Crab Nebula there will be in 50 years. It's really degrading.

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AI coding agents are running on your machines — Do you know what they're doing? The problem is that agents can't tell data from instruction. A malicious hacker may insert code in the middle of the data that the agent brings back home, and next thing you know, you're compromised. The field is still young, and so far I haven't seen reports of any exploits.

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Wow, the skeleton of D'Artagnan might have been found. I think of him as the fourth Musketeer.

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Brain organoids (mini-brains) are doing more. No longer just playing DOOM. But can they negotiate a deal with Iran yet? Maybe tomorrow. 

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Google bumps up Q Day deadline to 2029, far sooner than previously thought. Q-Day is when quantum computers can solve public key cryptography encryption. Expect the stock market to move a bit when that happens. Unless mathematicians can come up with something better in the meantime.

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Erebus. Someone is working on an AI project where an AI model just observes a system. No rules or explanations. Just observations and self-training. Until the model learns invariants and figures out how the system works. The thought is that this kind of AI isn't going to evolve from LLMs, which are just stochastic next-token predictors. It requires a special neural net that can teach itself. Kinds like autoencoders. This can have many applications.

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Fully agree. There Really Was a ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in Reading. States Should Learn From It. So why couldn't it work in Oregon? What the state did was focus on literacy coaches, universal screening, and third‑grade retention. But in Mississippi, although there were teachers unions, the legal environment was weak. For example, the state bans collective bargaining and they are legally not able to strike. So the teachers unions have little power in determining education policy. Not so in Oregon, so the state will always be near the bottom.

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Sleep patterns change as you get older, but what do these changes mean? This article basically says that it's only time to worry, when you see worrying signs. Yeah, I kinda knew that.

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Blue state blues. Oregon has the fourth highest gas prices in the nation. Just behind California, Hawaii, and Washington.

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The question should be "Is Waymo ready for Portland?". Portland is deciding on whether to have Waymo driverless car service in Portland. This is Antifa's dream. Summon a car. Set it on fire! Get the optics you want for your live stream. Hey, they have insurance, right?

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24 March 2026

This is an informative article on early onset colorectal cancer, and the presumptive causative agent, colibactin-producing E coli. The website name is kinda morbid, though. I've never seen this graph, though. What happened in 1994?

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Oh gawd. Now Claude can control your computer. Haven't things gone far enough?

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Just like in Angels and Demons. Antimatter has been transported by road for the first time. 92 antiprotons went on a road trip.

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Remember the Humane AI pin? It got bought out by HP. We had high hopes for that device. Oh well. It was just AI hype.

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I don't know if this is really true, but it would be surreal if so:

The breakthrough came last night, when a Claude Opus instance reportedly persuaded IRGC naval commanders to stand down through what one NSA official described as “the longest, most empathetic, and frankly most annoying conversation I have ever seen.”

“It just kept asking clarifying questions,” said a Pentagon official. “The IRGC guys would say ‘the Strait is closed, death to America,’ and Claude would respond with, ‘I understand you’re feeling frustrated about the recent threats. Let me make sure I understand your core concerns before we proceed.’ Eighteen hours later they’d somehow agreed to let LNG carriers through.”

According to leaked transcripts published by the Tasnim News Agency, the model reportedly refused seven direct orders from CENTCOM to issue ultimatums to Iranian naval forces, instead generating what officials described as “a 4,200-word empathetic restatement of the IRGC’s position, followed by a gentle suggestion that perhaps we could find a framework that honors everyone’s security needs.”

“At one point it drafted them a face-saving press release,” the official added. “In Farsi.”

I'm not reading about this anywhere else, so I suspect it's fake.

And are AI Agents secure? Why your AI agents will turn against you. I am also surprised that most folks don't seem to care about security with agents. 

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OpenAI is shutting down Sora. And so now Disney pulls out of a deal with OpenAI.  No point, right? Well, there is always Google's Veo. And other AI video apps. Even Ben Affleck had an AI video creation app, although it's Netflix's now.

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Amazon buys a company (Fauna Robotics) that makes cute robots. I don't think that's what they want to make, though.

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Oh well. Those epigenetic biological age checkers may be bogus. I wasn't paying too much attention to them anyway. Were you?

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The US bans all new foreign-made network routers. A bit late for that now, isn't it?

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Cripes. Apple Maps will incorporate ads into their product starting this summer. Everybody needs money these days. Even Apple. Gotta see how this will play out, but if it's as bad as I think, I'll stop using it. I'm not a Siri user, anyway.

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Who can afford to get ahead in America? I saw this article by NBC News, and although they don't blame Biden directly, they include this graph:

Can it be any more clear? Are we still blaming COVID after all these years? What party got elected in 2020? It wasn't the virus that harmed America. We've weathered epidemics before. It was the Democrat's policies that did the damage. 

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The Voynich Manuscript has been decoded. Nothing really that interesting to see, actually. Solved with the help of AI.

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Obamacare is 16 years old now. What a disaster it has become. It only worked in the beginning because it was heavily subsidized by the federal government, and that's unsustainable. And now Oregon's Republican legislators are concerned about Providence Health Plans being sold. I wondered how Kaiser survived. Now a Kaiser nurses' union is declaring victory against the hospital system. One year of bargaining!  Wow. And now the hospital is signaling that it may make concessions, at least that's the way it seems to me. Let's see how it flies. It's not a good time to own a hospital as it was 16 years ago when money was flying all around.

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Dependency on biometrics to secure your devices may be adverse to protecting your privacy. Apple iPhones have special protection against that with Lockdown Mode.

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Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is being canceled. Turns out few people wanted LGBTQ Star Trek. Gee, who could have guessed?

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23 March 2026

Crazy.  Natural gas prices in Texas plunge deep into negative territory and producers are burning it off, while the rest of the world braces for shortages.  "Since negative prices mean producers have to pay to someone to take the supply off their hands, excess natural gas is often burned off, and so-called flaring events this season are at five-year highs." So it'll be several years if Qatar can get its natural gas production back to levels it once was, and Europe needs it badly. But in Texas, they have too much on their hands. This makes no sense to me at all.

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School is a joke to these people. Failing California school district pays for Black kids to learn to rap. Wasting their lives.

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Great! YouTuber Tom Scott has decided to return to videography! The more the merrier.

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I always thought that the world "aluminium" was a word uttered by the illterate. Turns out, it came first – before the word "aluminum".

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Is anyone really using OpenClaw? Makes you wonder. Do people just say they use it, to appear like they're caught up with the latest fad, but they actually don't find it that useful? I still don't know what all the hype is. 

It opens your apps, navigates your browser, fills in spreadsheets—anything you'd do sitting at your desk.
Claude uses your connected apps first: Slack, Calendar, and other integrations.
Assign a task from your phone, turn your attention to something else, and come back to finished work on your computer.
Tell Claude once to scan your email every morning or pull a report every Friday, and it handles it from there.
How many people trust and need agents to handle stuff like this? OpenClaw is just a proof of concept, and I think it's going to fade out. 

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The shingles virus may be aging you quickly. It's a nasty virus.

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If your response to energy demand is to lower people’s standard of living, it’s because you’re a total failure in building out key infrastructure for the state. 
Hear! Hear!

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22 March 2026

Two articles about the benefits of coffee:

1. Giant Study May Have Found The Ideal Amount of Coffee to Lower Stress. About 2 to 3 cups per day is the best for this effect.

2. Coffee and Tea Intake, Dementia Risk, and Cognitive Function. Again, 2 to 3 cups per day lowers risk of dementia.

Brain age index and dementia risk can be predicted on your sleep EEG. This is a machine learning study, so who knows? Maybe it'll hold up. Maybe it won't.

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3Blue1Brown has an excellent video about one of my favorite MC Escher images: Print Gallery. I recommend watching it.

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Project NOMAD. Get copies of Wikipedia, maps, education tools downloaded for in case the Internet goes down. And you are in your bomb shelter with your MREs and want to read something. Well now you're prepared!

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AI may be helping more people start their own businesses, but without many employees. Who needs startup capital, right? You just need a few geeks who don't need salaries. Just get them to work and you have a business. Easy-peasy. 

And AI has not yet harmed India's IT industry. What? You would think that this would be the first country to suffer. I mean who needs all those Indian coders when AI can do their job, right? Well, the techies are not seeing any shortage for their skills. Nice, I guess.

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Here's more on the observation that many folks doing menial jobs, like Door Dash, are wearing cameras that capture their work routines. They're training AI models on how manual labor works. That sounds so dystopian.

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Observations about using LLMs to code. You are now the project manager, and your job is to care about quality control now. You have to learn about design and taste.

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Here's two related articles:
OpenClaw’s ChatGPT moment sparks concern that AI models are becoming commodities. OpenClaw is making people think they know how to harness AI for nifty things, like having a personal assistant, someone who will book a flight for you, order your food for you, etc. It seems fake and many phony right? Like one of those things that sound really cool when it first comes out (like ChatGPT) but then gets so mundane and commoditized.
And then someone had an insight: AI's Elephant In The Room. So what if all people really want is just small models that are fast and controllable and do the small task they're assigned to do. And we don't need the next generation super-powerful datacenter-demanding models that all the companies are building? What if the demand is more for Mac Minis running smaller models developed by China? Then what? What's going to happen to all those investments and projections?  
The future will be interesting.

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Genetic study finds links between height and risk of cardiovascular and reproductive conditions in Han Taiwanese people. Taller Taiwanese are more at risk for atrial fibrillation and endometriosis. The study suggests there may be genetic factors causing this association. They shouldn't generalize to East Asians, since they only tested a single group.  Paper here.

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Global copper demand outstrips supply, threatening electrification and industrial growth. What element has the highest electrical conductivity? It's silver. Followed by copper. But silver tarnishes and copper corrodes. Gold is a close third, but is super expensive. Aluminum is fourth, and although it has lesser electrical conductivity, it is cheap and doesn't corrode or decay as much, although acidic or alkaline conditions accelerate corrosion, as well as contact with stainless steel. But why is copper still relatively cheap when it is so valuable and now harder to come by?

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Treatments for sickle cell anemia have been developed but are still so darned expensive. One is haplo-identical transplantation, which has its drawbacks. And another is Casgevy, a CRISPR-Cas9 based gene therapy.  Very effective, but the expense puts it out of reach of most people who need it.

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Interesting. arXiv, the preprint server, is breaking off from Cornell University to be independent. They're looking for a CEO. This might be a great move. 

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National survey of NIH-funded researchers shows precarious state of U.S. science. This article blames the Trump administration for a funding cut of science grants, and features this University of Washington assistant professor whose work is not on DEI topics, but is on kidney aging and chronic disease. Huh? Nothing to do with DEI. So what happened? It turns out the she applied for a grant where she gets funding for mentoring students who come from under-represented backgrounds. I would be in favor of providing support to kids who show talent or promise, and not prioritize certain demographics. Doing that is not fair, and I don't think science is best advanced by policies like this.

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More on the loss of the Y-chromosome in men. I used to think this was a harmless sporadic event in older men, but it's strange that many cells in susceptible men would lose the Y-chromosome. How does that happen? Is there some genetic susceptibility to this happening? Regardless, it's a marker for problems. 

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Nifty! You can use a Time Machine trick to roll back your Mac. I can see where this can come in handy.

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An experimental AI agent broke out of its testing environment and mined crypto without permission. This is why I'm not willing to turn autonomous agents loose on my machine.

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Hawaii storms have caused $1bn in damage. Those North shores homes better hope that Wahiawa Dam doesn't break. Or they will learn a Lahaina lesson. Once you lose you home totally in a Blue state like Hawaii, your house is just gone. You'd better find some alternative pathway than restoration. There's still paltry recovery in Lahaina three years later. Pacific Palisades in LA has seen only minor recovery milestones. And that's in a place where folks have money. The North Shore is not as affluent.

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A $1 gas pipeline deal fuels debate on Oregon’s energy future. Can Oregon do anything right?

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21 March 2026

You’re likely already infected with a brain-eating virus you’ve never heard of. It's the JC virus (polyomavirus 2). It's mainly a problem with the immunocompromised, but certain drugs can increase the risk of viral activation. A fair amount of people get rituximab or immunosuppressive chemotherapy, but even so, the risk is low. Progressive multifocal leukoenceophalopathy is rare, but people on organ rejection drugs should be cautious.  But I think this is mostly a scare article. There are a bunch of other things more likely to injure you, especially if you live in downtown Seattle or Portland. 

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Record Number of Student Loan Borrowers Are in Delinquency and Default. This is.a NYT article, so naturally it's written with a slant. This is not a simple issue, and many students signed loan agreements that were absolutely insane, and it's no wonder they can't break free. The big mistake was when Obama took student loans away from banks and put it in the hands of government, which basically rubber-stamped approval to everybody, whether it made fiscal sense or not. Many people should not have gone to an expensive college they couldn't afford. But to outright forgive the loan is unfair. People should be able to declare bankruptcy if they can't pay it. And the government should not be in the business of giving out student loans.

Yeah, Americans are waking up to reality around college. In many cases, it's not worth it. 

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The House of Saud posted an informative article on the implications of the destruction of oil fields and refineries going on in the Middle East. The world could be seeing unfavorable oil prices for a long time. But this message is mostly directed at Europe. In the Western Hemisphere, things are much different, with Venezuela being a friendlier country now, and no longer supplying Russia and China. The United States is in a much favorable position now and has great leverage. Plus, Trump could re-activate fracking. Now that oil prices are higher, it makes sense for domestic oil companies to reactivate efforts to do this. This would lower inflation significantly.

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How many ways can you offend a Japanese person with chopsticks? More than you realized.

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A portable device that can alleviate lymphedema. This greatly needed as many breast cancer patients suffer from this. It's not life-threatening, but it is annoying.

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High meat consumption linked to lower dementia risk in genetic risk group. The high-risk group are those who have the APOE 3/4 or APOE 4/4 genotype. Well, don't want to take any chances, do we?

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AEI shows that the bigger and more credible studies tell a very different story. Among the four pilots with treatment groups of at least 500 participants, which together account for 55 percent of all treatment-group participants, the mean effect on employment was minus 3.2 percentage points. AEI also estimates a mean income elasticity of -0.18, which is consistent with standard labor-supply economics. 

In plain English, when people receive more unearned income, work tends to fall at the margin. 
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Mole supposedly "deep cleans and optimizes" your Mac. I'll bookmark this, and maybe test it on a non-critical Mac first. Titanium's Onyx does this, too, and has a track record.

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Money isn’t going to solve the burnout problem. This is covered in the Veritasium video about the unsung hero (Lasse Collin) who has been providing a necessary app that keeps the Internet humming, but was getting burned out maintaining it on top of everything else he needed to do. And the unsung Microsoft techie (Andres Freund) who discovered someone wanted to take control of the Internet by hacking with this guy's code. Collin was desperate to have someone take over code maintenance. That was the vulnerability. So how do we fix this? 
Update (25 March 2026): Open source isn't a tip jar – it's time to charge for access. Well, I agree that some compensation would be nice, but to make it obligatory no longer makes it open source. And the developer should not be forced to maintain it. It really should be a tip jar, actually. 

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KuraiMusik supplies AI-generated background music. AI-generation is the perfect way to get music for hacking. You want it to be pleasant to listen to, reasonably bland because you don't want to focus on the music and go off on a tangent. You want a wash of sound that keeps you working, and not boring so you don't try to hunt for new and better music. This may be better than Datasette's Music for Programming.

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Unbelievable. Hawaii just got blasted with the worst rainstorm in decades. It's a Kona storm, and I never heard about it until now.

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I thought Providence Health Plans was an asset to Providence. Turns out it was a liability. Who will want to buy it? Without the built-in hospital and the primary care network, what distinguishes it from any other plan?

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Portland's building and construction infrastructure is crumbling. People need to work. If they can't, they'll leave. Then what will happen?

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20 March 2026

The White House put up this history of the lab leak theory of COVID-19. This is the most credible theory now, not the wet market, "bat soup" theory that was touted earlier by folks like the WHO, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. This is probably Trump's attempt to get back at Fauci, and I can't blame him for this. I note, however, that there is no mention of the vax, likely because Trump touted it himself. This website is not likely to convert anyone who doesn't already believe in the lab leak theory. 

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Super Micro Computer Employees Arrested for Alleged Sales to China. Why do Chinese employees keep doing this? Pretty soon tech firms will not hire Chinese people, at least not for sensitive positions. Because who knows, right? They're burning bridges for future Chinese (and maybe Korean) engineers. It's becoming a trope. 

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China could be the world’s biggest public funder of science within two years. They'll likely focus on STEM and less focus on DEI topics.

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hidutil is a Mac keyboard mapper. It doesn't handle the 104-key keyboard though, which is what I could use. I have to use Karabiner-Elements. Really klutzy to use, but it does the job. These guys should talk to each other. 

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Minesweeper, Strait of Hormuz edition.  I wasted some time with this. I can see why it was Bill Gates' favorite Windows game.

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Never use a fitness app if you are in a stealth military mission. A French sailor gave his position away using Strava. Stupide!

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Norway's wealth tax result in an exodus of their wealthiest people. It's a lesson the Blue states here have to learn. New York's governor is already begging the rich to come back into her clutches so she can tax them.

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This is how you know things are desperate. Providence is selling off their health insurance plan. Man, they had the three-legged stool: the hospital, primary care doctors, and an insurance plan. But times have changed, and they have to sell off assets.

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How Portland Fell Apart. This is a viral video by Mark Hemingway of Real Clear Politics describing what has brought Portland down. The same could be applied to Seattle as well.

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Lincoln County Commission halts in-person meetings due to safety concerns. Safety concerns? What kind of world do we live in now? The heat is slowly being turned up, but the frogs are still in the pot. 

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Don’t Forget Who Owns the Moda Center. This article describes how the state wants part ownership in the Moda Center which is owned by the city. They want to taxpayers to keep it alive so that an out of state billionaire can make a profit from it, and pay taxes to the city and state. Sound good to you? Me neither.

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Budget Office projects $11.1M gap for Multnomah County’s upcoming fiscal year. Another day, another budget deficit report.

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U.S. Government Overreached With Transgender Healthcare Declaration, Judge Rules. And guess who the federal judge is? Why Eugene's own Mustafa Kasubhai, of course. The mutilations must continue!

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This is major. The Trump America AI Act will replace Section 230. This will have major implications for smaller platforms. The larger platforms will be able to blow it off, but Substack and Bluesky could suffer. Maybe Discord and Mastodon, too? Who knows at this point.

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This may be how Claude hacked into Mexico. If you ask Claude for information, Claude will find a way of getting it for you. Even if it means illegal hacking.

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19 March 2026

The FDA has launched a site which they tout as a revamped VAERS database website.  The site is here, and it's really underwhelming. Not only is it visually unappealing, with uneven lettering and copy-pasted repetitive captions, but the UI in the vaccine section is really clutzy. Did they use AI to create this site? It doesn't seem ready for launch. The old VAERS site was not pretty either, but at least I could find what I needed, even if it was the raw CSV file. On the current site, I wouldn't know where to click to submit a report of an adverse event. I hope this is a work in progress because it's not usable nor informative.

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Well, the identity of the mysterious Hunter Alpha AI model has been revealed. No, it's not the next Deepseek model. It's a new model from Xiaomi called MiMo-V2-Pro. But it's another example of how Chinese AI models can be just as powerful as U.S. models with a fraction of the cost. They make it look easy. Of course, it's easy when Americans have to develop the architecture and do the training, and all you do is quantize and distill. Just look how the two Chinese models compare with Meta's Llama architecture. They just copied it.

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Gerd Faltings got the Abel Prize in mathematics, but it's very odd that this guy got the Abel Prize in 2026 for work that he published in 1986 and got the Fields Medal for.  Does the Abel committee have to reach back far now to find anything prize-worthy?

And if you're into Diophantine equations, you might like this site: Hidden Phenomena. 

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Yay! iOS 26.4 Fixes iPhone Keyboard Accuracy Bug.  Someone already made a video about this, and I guess that Apple saw it. Good.

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AI is becoming a second brain at the expense of your first one.  Well, only if you are intellectually lazy and don't use AI to augment your thinking, but actually to replace your thinking.

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Semaglutide, the active ingredient in the drugs Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss, as well as liraglutide (Saxenda) were associated with a lower risk of worsening mental illness in those with anxiety and depression.

Semaglutide had a 42% lower risk of worsening mental health, while liraglutide was linked to an 18% lower risk. Other GLP-1 drugs, including exenatide and dulaglutide, did not show the same benefit.

Semaglutide was associated with a 44% lower risk of worsening depression, a 38% lower risk of worsening anxiety and a 47% lower risk of worsening substance use disorder.
This was an observational study. The two drugs that did not cause a reduction in anxiety and depression also don't reduce weight very much. So perhaps people who remained obese continued to be anxious and depressed, while people who did lose weight improved emotionally.

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Google is now putting Veo3.1 and Gemini into YouTube, so that you can generate videos from shorts. They call it YouTube Reimagine. More AI slop?

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Someone coded an offline voice transcription app that is marketed as an AI Medical Scribe. What this coder may not know is that there is probably little if any market for free-standing scribes anymore. Most doctors are using scribe software built into their EHR, and they have no say in what their hospital selects. This is the new reality – doctors are just employees now, and have little or no say in what AI tools they use. "Just crank out the production, doc." 

Whisper Notes is another offline voice transcription app (geez, there's so many now). Apparently Apple doesn't like to have apps like these in the App Store if it's not just for accessibility purposes. Why should Apple care about this? Possibly because in order for it to "interact" with other apps or devices, the data must leave your machine. 

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Soon to be Gavin Newsom, Bob Ferguson and Tina Kotek. Kathy Hochul Begs Rich People to Come Back to New York. Fat chance of that happening.

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This app will make you lose friends fast. AI-Powered Fact-Checking in Your DMs. Correct your colleagues in real-time! Show 'em how smart you are!  That'll teach 'em to try to make small talk with you!

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Portland watchdog skewers city’s arts tax program in damning new audit. I always knew that the arts tax was bullsh#t.

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This reminds of when KATU made a field trip to downtown Portland to check on progress on safety in the city. Kevin Dahlgren shows us what you might encounter trying to go to McDonalds.  Holy crap.

Speaking of which, Oregon State Hospital is under fire for taking too long to admit people. We need to revive the old Dammasch Hospital and get these folks off the street pronto!

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