“Leather straps hang from the wire and brush the brakeman to get his attention about a bridge or a tunnel”

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https://streets.mn/2025/05/23/minneapolis-twenty-ninth-street-railroad-depression-part-one/

Fun history, especially for bike riders of the now Minneapolis Greenway. Before Boston’s big dig there was the Milwaukee Road trench of WW I, with several SCOTUS rulings.

Straps similar to the height chain at garage entrance.

“Mice lacking the enzyme cystathionine γ-lyase — which breaks down other molecules into cysteine — lost 30% of their weight in one week when their diet also lacked food containing cysteine.”

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01597-9

Creatine supplements used in strength training increase cysteine levels …

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4754151/

Implications for cachexia in malignancy and other disorders?

“[pro tier] ChatGPT effectively maintains a detailed summary of your previous conversations, updating it frequently with new details. The summary then gets injected into the context every time you start a new chat.”

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https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/chatgpt-new-memory/

I very much prefer the Perplexity Spaces approach. This needs to be under user control: it would stop me using CGPT. But for most users it is probably an improvement.

“Has there ever been a consumer product that’s this capable of building up a human-readable profile of its users?”

KrebsOnSecurity 6.3 Tbps DDoS: “… Project Shield, a free DDoS defense service that Google provides to websites offering news, human rights, and election-related content”

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https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/05/krebsonsecurity-hit-with-near-record-6-3-tbps-ddos/

How long will Google do this?

“Aisuru botnet comprises a globally-dispersed collection of hacked IoT devices, including routers, digital video recorders and other systems”

Absurdly cheap: “botnet was rented out in subscription tiers ranging from $150 per day to $600 per week”

Scott Adams, at the end of his life, learns compassion the very hard way

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/us/scott-adams-dilbert-prostate-cancer-biden.html

Adams became an enthusiastic MAGA extremist. But now he’s dying of metastatic cancer of the prostate. He may be reevaluating his beliefs.

“Part of Mr. Adams’ sympathy for Mr. Biden seemed to come from his own lived experience with the disease, which he called “intolerable” … “I don’t have good days,” he said. “Every day is a nightmare. And evening is even worse.”

Autoimmune Disease: B-cell reset – “B cell plasmablasts that were the constant source of the “autoantibodies” directed against the patients’ own tissues”

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https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/autoimmune-disease-transformed

Suddenly a lot of chronic diseases may be cured. Not AFAIK applicable to Rheumatoid Arthritis but Lupus and many less common disorders. Trial results expected over next 1-2 years.

NYT does not terrible job of explaining why experts don’t like early PSA screening.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/20/health/joe-biden-prostate-cancer-diagnosis-screening.html

Basically it’s a lousy test. High false positive, high false negative, and in 80+ the goal isn’t 20y survival.

“… about half of men have some cancer in their prostate by their 70s or 80s, although most have no symptoms.”

If you find a PSA you have to pay attention to it – even if you don’t want to.

Fascinating story of all the odd places Denisovan fossils have been found it

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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01549-3

“… a man bought a lower jawbone from an antique shop in Tainan City in Taiwan. It had been dredged from the Penghu Channel, 20 kilometres offshore. The man donated it to a museum after researchers realized, on the basis of photographs, that it was a hominin bone. When they finally described it in 2015, the researchers noted that its second molar looked distinctly Denisovan”

Paywalled but the free part is still good.

“In 1993, IBM fired 60,000 people, setting the all-time record for largest layoff. Since Trump took office, the government has pushed at least 130,000 people out of jobs”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2025/05/20/federal-workers-trump-mental-health/

“In 2011, economists examined a decade of data and found that mass layoffs resulted in an additional suicide for every 4,200 men and for every 7,100 women losing their jobs. Mass layoffs can devastate entire communities, they noted, fracturing social networks and creating pools of applicants fighting over limited jobs.”

1/3 are veterans, often more vulnerable than non-veteran cohorts.

“A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently.”

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https://www.wired.com/story/intelligence-evolved-at-least-twice-in-vertebrate-animals/

Stephen Baxter’s SF novel “Evolution” does a very good job of portraying a velociraptor like dinosaur with hunter-gather tech and intelligence — doomed by inability to domesticate animals or cooperate. It was a small part of the novel but a fascinating bit of prescience.

“Rather than neat layers, birds have “unspecified balls of neurons without landmarks or distinctions” but the neural networks resemble ours. And resemble LLMs.

“By training AIs to fight and defeat other AIs we can perhaps preserve a healthy balance in the new ecosystem … building AIs whose sole purpose was to predate upon existing AI models”

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https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/remarks-on-ai-from-nz

The mammals scurry about while T-Rex fights Triceratops. I like that Stephenson remembers McLuhan. His “optimistic take” is, inevitably, pretty dark. If AGI works there are no good futures left …

“preserving and advancing our own intelligence by holding at arms length seductive augmentations in order to avoid suffering the amputations that are their price”

Uh-no. Not happening.

WaPo confusing reporting on FDA vs CDC “approval” of COVID vaccine for low risk

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/05/20/covid-vaccine-elderly-high-risk-fda/

The reporting is confusing because it doesn’t describe what is meant by “approval”. I suspect it’s about whether “insurance companies are required to cover the cost of the shots with no out-of-pocket charges to consumers.”

There is limited benefit to current COVID vaccines for lower-risk people so this would be a cost consideration even if the CDC/FDA were not being run by lunatics.

Schedule F and making the civil service serve Trump: “If judges will consistently accept facially absurd factual claims or facially absurd interpretations of statutes then there is no law”

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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/a-novel-concept-will-judges-start-enforcing-the-law-with-doge

Roe v Wade never made legal sense to me. The judicial interpretation of the 2nd amendment is absurd.

Now it’s going to new extremes. The GOP SCOTUS corruption has old roots.

“boys have always lagged girls in certain areas, yet there has been little focus on their issues, perhaps because men have dominated in so many spheres.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/13/upshot/boys-falling-behind-data.html

Girls are better at school work and better at modern employment settings. And women do not “marry down” (might change).

We will need boy-oriented school options (open to all), which implies charter schools.