Link. That is an extraordinary claim.
Author Archives: jgordon
IRS identity theft: “backlog of 500,000 unresolved fraud cases”
Link. Two year backlog, low income filers who are due refunds.
RNA Vaccines For Cancer: An industry review.
Link. A very hard slog but there is new energy.
“Historians say Mr. Ben-Gurion believed that in modern Israel, ultra-Orthodoxy would diminish or eventually disappear. Instead the Haredim have become the fastest-growing part of Israel’s population…”
Link. Religious zealots are bad everywhere.
Scientists Inject Radioactive Material Into Live Rhino Horns to kill the Chinese demand for rhino horns. 🆓
Link. This is brilliant. Material will set off alarms at airports. Only a test for now.
“They’d heard of private citizens filling maybe 200 VHS tapes with news, but not 140,000.”
Link. Her unhealthy and costly obsession is a great gift to history. Internet active scanning. Linkfest.
The 2007 apex of the internet: RSS and Yahoo Pipes
Link. This was as good as the web got. The pieces were all in place. Two years later the web began to die.
“They are ancient and slow, reproducing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years”
Link. Microbes of the Mole Man.
“AI energy estimates are only a small fraction of the 620 to 1,050 TWh that data centers as a whole are projected to use by 2026”
Link. I think Ars got this right.
“Debating” Trump: “He starts with nonsense and then digresses into blather. This has gotten only worse in the years since we debated.”
Link. HRC.
“If you’re at high risk for Covid-19, it may be time to wear a mask on the West Coast, especially in Hawaii.”
Link. Maybe Denver too?
RNAi: more amyloid disease therapies on the way.
Link. My father’s brother died of amyloid cardiomyopathy. Go pharma.
“it is now possible to believe that South Africa is getting a second chance” 🆓
Link. Voters bring hope to South Africa and promise of a better future to India. Democracy has a pulse.
Putin’s pawns: “We Have Provoked This War”.
Link. Dyer dismembers the Putin talking points regurgitated by Trump et al.
Recalling WinFS: “weird amalgam of the Windows shell, SQL Server Server, and just a sprinkle of actual file system”
Link. The outside view was that it was really wonderful. I wonder if some aspects of it lived on in SharePoint (aka the worst software ever made)
“Boeing will pay a total criminal monetary amount of over $2.5 billion, composed of a criminal monetary penalty of $243.6 million, compensation payments to Boeing’s 737 MAX airline customers of $1.77 billion, and the establishment of a $500 million cr
Link. We need the responsible CEOs in prison.
“Boeing’s failure to timely and voluntarily self‑disclose the offense conduct to the department; and Boeing’s prior history, including a civil FAA settlement agreement from 2015 related to safety and quality issues”
“Chinese institutions and authorities are indeed becoming worried about the increasing flood of low- (or zero-) quality papers that come from all sorts of Chinese sources”
Link. Chinese biomedical publications are, at the moment, nearly worthless.
“national discussion on the viability of the small towns that have long been a pillar of American culture”
Link. FINALLY.
I believe this is a significant contributor to Trumpism. America’s election system gives small town rural voters power and their communities have been dying since the 80s.
Young people leave for college and never return.
“participation in an oncology trial does not seem to extend a survival benefit”
Link. But it doesn’t hurt.
“When it was first observed, the Great Red Spot extended over 24,200 miles …. it has been shrinking ever since. Today, the storm stretches to 8,700 miles”
Link. There have been two, ours is bigger.
Sweetenders: Xylitol and erythritol – platelet activation is not good
Link. “reason enough to avoid both of these compounds as sweeteners, and I would extend the caution to the other sugar alcohols as well (maltitol, mannitol, sorbitol, etc.)” OTOH aspartame seems good.
“36 volunteers age 18-29 were inoculated with a wild-type SARS-CoV2 virus strain isolated from an infected patient in the UK”
Link. Immense details on immune studies of these 2021 healthy young volunteers. About 1/5 NEVER were PCR positive despite being infected; the innate immune system worked fast. (Most people who say they never got COVID are presumed to be like this. They got COVID (virus), killed it, never noticed).
“authors were also able to find a blood marker that could distinguish the sustained-infection group from those where the virus didn’t get a chance to establish itself … HLA-DQA2, whose function is not really clear yet.”
Noah techno-optimism: “Soviet America … energy revolution; Trump’s tax cuts; the Build-Nothing Country; macro data mysteries”
Link. I mostly agree. The broadband fail is my team (Dem) being stupid. America needs a GOP that is not insane.
Housing 2024: signs of market rebalancing.
Link. Lots of apartment construction and new home — in context of record prices. Signs of rebalancing.
Current COVID employee retention benefit claims largely fraud: “The unexpectedly high cost of the program has contributed to the nation’s larger-than-expected annual budget deficits”
Link. Crime on a staggering scale.
Mexico’s female Jewish scientist president lived the grad student life in California.
Link. I just wanted to write “Mexico’s female Jewish scientist president” because it blows my mind.
Biden admin fights price-fixing by United Health Group and others by promoting competition.
Link. “the use of A.I. or algorithmic-based technologies should concern us more because it’s much easier to price-fix when you’re outsourcing it to an algorithm versus when you’re sharing manila envelopes in a smoke-filled room.”
Fighting monopolies is a major responsibility of good government.
AI data centers keep coal plants online
Link. Clean energy offsets are in part an accounting trick. Microsoft fusion timeline is absurd.
These kinds of externalities are usually managed through forms of taxation.
“Swiss RE, the insurance-industry giant, said … accumulating hazards of climate change could further drive the growing market for insurance against strikes and riots”
Link. Opportunity identified.
Iran’s presidential election: a curious need to seem legitimate.
Link. Controlled by clerics yet dressed up like a democracy. It’s sort-of a joke and sort-of real.
macOS keychains – classic, iCloud and post-Sequoia
Link. A useful reference review. No big Sequoia changes found so far; just continuation of iCloud Keychain functionality.
“Kaspersky Labs … on the Entity List for their cooperation with Russian military and intelligence authorities …”
Link. As expected.
Pirate Ship: cheaper, better shipping. Free to use.
Link. “Pirate Ship has negotiated corporate-level discounted shipping rates of up to 89% off retail and passes most of those savings on to customers.”
Their profits come from the retained savings.
Tour De Gall | Vanity Fair: “The liver crumbles under the knife like plumber’s putty and tastes faintly of gut-scented butter or pressed liposuction” 2011
Link. Reputedly a famously cruel review. Link via Threads
Language and reasoning: an update.
Link. “large studies have suggested that languages have been optimized to transfer information clearly and efficiently.”
But we can do a lot of reasoning without using our unique and stable individual language network.
Metabolic syndrome: treat obesity with a glutide and the blood pressure and glucose improve.
Link. “…Patients often keep taking the obesity drugs, while many who are taking drugs they need to be healthy, like statins, abandon them …”
Physicians will increasingly start with the glutide. Speculative uses for inflammatory conditions or Parkinson’s need clinical trials.
Visual Studio Code extension security risks explained.
Link. Wouldn’t WordPress plugins have similar issues?
American torture: more details emerge in trial. 🆓
Link. A story of both American brutality and some compassion on the side. (Note CIA illegally destroyed their torture videos.)
The Cheney/Bush torture program was quite popular with Americans after 9/11.
Review of SMS spam filtering solutions: “I stopped when I found Nomorobo, which was the cheapest and most effective of the commercial apps. AT&T Active Armor is free but ineffective.”
Link. $20 per year. I’ve been using Junkman which does pretty well.
The best discussion I’ve seen to date. Mostly dealing with political spam — I think carriers are forbidden to block some of it.
Cosmic Dawn: discover of merging quasars supports current model of universe development
Link. “the universe has evolved via frequent mergers of galaxies, which would naturally result in many merging quasar pairs observed throughout the universe.”
Substack and the perils of principal: “I’m inches away from going back. Almost every other creator stayed”
Link. Substack. Twitter. Reddit. Most people just shrug and continue. Sometimes the bad guys win.
Africa rising: in remote regions increasingly educated women get access to discrete contraception.
Link. Nothing bad or dramatic, just continued progress. Gates foundation and UNFPA working away.
“Apple needs more technical authors and fewer engineers if anyone, including its own staff, is to get the best from macOS and its sister operating systems.”
Link. “macOS Sequoia brings radical changes that somehow escaped presentation at WWDC … lack of documentation fills me with deep and growing despair”
The Tim Cook era.
Next-Generation Apple CarPlay analysis.
Link. Smells like another product failure.
NYT investigation of Rafah strike: “Israel had failed to take adequate care to safeguard civilians.“
Link. Relevant to ICC investigations. The conclusion is deeply buried in the article.
The love of Gazans for Hamas may be overestimated by American students. 🆓 (gift link)
Link. “group and its leaders have remained broadly unpopular in the enclave. More Gazans have even been willing to speak out against Hamas, risking retribution.”
There was one election then Hamas ended elections.
India: “voters received calls from their local representatives to discuss local issues—except the leader on the other end of the phone was an AI impersonation”
Link. Lots of interesting lessons.
Facebook study: “flagged misinformation reduced intention to vaccinate by 0.05% per user, while unflagged vaccine-skeptical content reduced it by 2.3%”
Link. Flagged misinformation is not main problem now. Fox not mentioned specifically but Murdoch is a famed serial killer.
“Make headlines better” is key recommendation. Most Americans never get past the headline.
“The new Photos interface reminds me of the TV and Music stores, which are among my least favorite Apple designs”
Link. Horizontal scrolling. Damn kids.
Still more secret Harlan trips for Thomas: “revelation underlined the extent to which Justice Thomas has relied on the generosity of his friends over the years and the consistency with which he declined to report those ties.”
Link. Consistency counts for something.