Pseudo Random News and Comment

The downward spiral: Kids with ADHD must squirm to learn. Drug them so they no longer squirm and they no longer learn. Label them slow and another school career flushed down the drain. Brilliant way to create wards of the state.

If Virginia Elections Weren’t Hacked, It’s Only Because No One Tried. Even for the government, this is so jaw-droppingly lame it almost makes one think it’s intentional.

Only high exercise levels tied to better erectile, sexual function. “High” meaning roughly 2.5 hours of jogging per week from what I can tell. For a typical sedentary individual this is roughly equivalent to a buttload.

Chrome is really starting to suck.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

ISP pulls VPN service after geo-unblocking legal threats. I need to remember this principle: If you overpay for exclusive rights that you know going in are not enforceable due to commonly available technology, sue a third-party to recover your “loss.” It shouldn’t be too hard to extend this to the stock market, where decisions by other people always alter the value of your investment.

Apparently, it’s helpful to look at more than audited financial statements when selecting a spouse. Mortality and blood pressure directly linked to relationship quality.

An Atheist’s Prayer

Oh Merciful Lord,

Please guide THE Woman back to the path of righteousness,

and away from the Hell-sent temptation of Granny Panties,

They are as a plague upon your Divine Work.

Amen

Pseudo Random News and Comment

We know where you’ve been: Ars acquires 4.6M license plate scans from the cops. Hey Kids! Great science fair project: Take this data, find all higher level officials, police, etc., and search for locations frequently visited other than work, home, grocery stores, etc. Then you can publish which of these hypocrites is probably having an affair. Private access to the data will quickly be banned so in the end it won’t accomplish much, but will be great entertainment while it lasts.

 Mycophenolic Acid-Mediated Suppression of Human CD4⁺ T Cells: More Than Mere Guanine Nucleotide Deprivation. I need to go through this again, but I think it’s somewhat positive for my latest medical experiment. On the other hand it’s also further support for MMF screwing you up every way from Sunday, so any success in feeling better is likely to be either quite limited, or end up offsetting immunosuppression.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

Your Home by Mail: The Rise and Fall of Catalogue Housing. One of the house remodeling jobs I did in high school with my father was a Sears Roebuck and Co. house – which I discovered because it was printed on the rafters. What was really memorable was that the 2×4’s were actually 2″x4″, which I’d never seen or even imagined before. Since that time everything in the grocery store shrank too.

Athletes and AF: Connecting the Lifestyle Dots. May have to register to read this but if you’re an exercise addict you really should. Will it change my exercise habits? Probably not since I can’t do that much now anyway, but if I could I have to admit it probably wouldn’t (too much). Do as I say, not as I do.

Who Does the Autopsy? The security dangers of implantable devices have been covered many times, but this brings up the difficult forensics job of deciphering the mixed wet and hardware wreckage.

Human Genome’s Spirals, Loops and Globules Come into 4-D View. The more you know, the more you know you don’t know. Fascinating stuff.

It’s almost time for another, hopefully briefer, hiatus.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

I remember reading this when it came out but it seems far more relevant today. DNA Evidence Can Be Fabricated, Scientists Show. Though when you can be disappeared without trial or conviction who really needs to bother with creating evidence? Cut government waste and just skip that step.

Move over Mozart: Study shows cats prefer their own beat. Don’t bother playing your music for your pets. Like your parents, they just think it’s noise.

Landmark medical marijuana bill introduced in US Congress. Whether this goes anywhere or not, the outcome is already decided. Once Colorado raked in 10x as much from legalization as they projected the game was over. No state is going to let that windfall slip through their fingers very long.

Warning: the truth behind handshake-sniffing may bum you out. This continues to baffle me. Not because of the information that can be derived, but that anyone would actually do it. I guess I’m too concerned about infection control to ever put that shaken hand near my face, or maybe it’s that I’ve been too observant of the failings of male bathroom hygiene.

Men’s heart disease risk linked to high testosterone and low estrogen. My long time theory that a lifetime bathed in testosterone was an obvious candidate for lifespan differences gets a boost.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

It’s often not at all clear that our fellow humans are perceiving things the way we do, but here’s some proof a fish can see the same optical illusion. An Optical Illusion As Seen By a Fish.

Breakthrough to take the pain out of catheters. Another breakthrough long after I needed it. The day started out well enough when that cute little urologist took my penis in her hand on my first time, but then when my entire body levitated off the table and broke into a full body sweat before landing, the thrill was most assuredly gone.

Penis déjà vu. Now with graphs and full text. Incidentally, the sight of an oncoming catheter will put most men squarely on the left side of the graph.

How Hillary Clinton Exposed Her Emails To Foreign Spies… In Order To Hide Them From The American Public. I told you they’re more afraid of the citizens than other governments. I just didn’t expect it to be proven so quickly after I published the post.

Women Hurt More Than Men, Due to Both Biology and Bias. The interaction between your perception of pain and others’ perception of your perception of pain.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

The one everyone has been waiting for: Penis size: Researchers provide the long and short of it. Sample size of 15,521, all using same measurement methodology, across multiple countries. Graph is behind a paywall but with roughly 2% outliers in both directions it’s probably better not to see the right side of the curve anyway.

Estimating the Life Course of Influenza A(H3N2) Antibody Responses from Cross-Sectional Data. Despite what it feels like, adults over the age of 30 only get flu about twice a decade. The rest of the fun is from other pathogens.

What strikes me about this graph is the trend line is an odd echo of interest rates over the same period. Free money for everyone makes Berkshire’s cheap 1.6x leverage available to all (who dare).

Pseudo Random News and Comment

Mitochondrial hormesis and diabetic complications. The prior theory may have been totally backward.

Venmo still hasn’t apologized for — let alone addressed — its security issues. Hey kids, I know many of you don’t reconcile any of your accounts ever, let alone monthly, and just assume the balance the bank, credit card, or whatever shows is correct. However, that leaves the door to fraud wide open, a particularly dangerous state of affairs with new payment technology, as this story illustrates.

Treadmill performance predicts mortality: New formula gauges 10-year risk of dying. A new way of looking at treadmill results. Basically if the person administering the test is tired of waiting before you crap out it’s a very good sign.

Killed the person you’re torturing before getting anything useful? Worry no more: Mind-readers: Scientists crack a piece of the neural code for learning and memory. I don’t know whether to be thrilled by the scientific advance or terrified that it will someday remove all need to keep detainees alive. Thank god only the guilty are ever detained.

Anxious people more apt to make bad decisions amid uncertainty. Naturally, at exactly the wrong time.

How hunting with wolves helped humans outsmart the Neanderthals. Hang around humans long enough and you’ll get your hands dirty with genocide. Dogs may have gotten that done early. If this theory is correct maybe I’ll have to change my mind about dogs always getting the better end of the deal – humans provide for their every need, pimp for them, and even follow them around picking up their shit. Still, that debt should have been paid off by now.

Everyone likes to say you’re not Warren Buffett. As time has gone on maybe he’s not either.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

Evolving a bigger brain with human DNA. First mice, then Mr. Peabody.

Brain makes decisions with same method used to break WW2 Enigma code. With so many decisions or parts of decisions done before conscious awareness it doesn’t leave much room for free will. Perhaps the conscious Turing plagiarized the unconscious Turing.

Skin patch shows promise in easing peanut allergy. There may be PBJ for all someday soon.

Could a dishwasher raise your child’s allergy, asthma risk? Though causality isn’t proven it sure looks like it.

How the NSA’s Firmware Hacking Works and Why It’s So Unsettling. Hard to think of a way around it. Ordinarily Tails would be the answer but when the firmware is compromised all bets are off.

Game Theory Calls Cooperation into Question. Not much of a surprise that cooperation can get destroyed in some conditions – it happens all too often in human societies. Yet, without digging into the details, I question whether payoff matrices where cheaters gain easily truly reflect the gains from division of labor, even among the less intelligent critters.

The Lie of Unbiased News

Any pretense of unbiased news is a lie. There can never be unbiased news (or history). For every event of any significance there are literally thousands of facts that could be reported, and the process of selecting which to include and exclude unavoidably reflects an opinion about what’s important, and what it means. Even in an ideal world “the facts” are never the unvarnished truth.

In the imperfect world we inhabit the truth is far better served by a variety of blatantly biased sources than false claims of unbiased reporting. The internet has made a cornucopia of opinion more readily available than ever. That scares some people, but the real danger lies in only exposing yourself to the few with which you already agree.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

How do you increase US test scores? You let the kids play on playground equipment like this: Survival of the fittest should only take one or two generations to reach the Japanese level on standardized tests.

 A Pill That Mimics the Immune System. SillyCon Valley gets most of the headlines, but the real world-changing stuff is happening in biotech. Taken individually most of the discoveries won’t pan out, but collectively it will revolutionize medicine.

 Novel pathway for MMF. The next question is whether this effect alone would produce adequate immunosuppressive effect in transplantation. Combined with the current crop of immunosuppressants, probably not.

Glucosamine Update. Still no convincing evidence it works.

Gaming Medicare. A lukewarm defense of hospital reimbursement gamesmanship. There are so many regulations involved the games will never be stopped even if they wanted to. When I worked in a hospital years ago as a reimbursement analyst my favorite regulatory gem was DRG creep: To counter choosing more severe diagnosis codes to increase payment from Medicare, rather than audit charts, the Government in its infinite wisdom chose to decrease payment to all hospitals every year by the average amount of upward creep in coding the prior period. Therefore honesty was punished by constantly declining payments – in an industry with costs rising faster than overall inflation. A truly fiendish ethical dilemma, especially for a non-profit board.

Kitzhaber and the Greedy Greens. This is a rather unfair portrait of his record, which no doubt had a much more diversified portfolio of corruption than this implies. Two points in his favor: (1) He’s too stupid to avoid getting caught, and (2) He resigned. It’s a hurdle so low that even Nixon would clear it, but how many over the last 50 years have cleared it?

Obama to sign executive order on sharing cybersecurity threat information. Of an “advisory nature,” whatever that means in an unchallengeable edict. You show me yours, and I’ll….say mine’s classified. What a great deal!

Your Co-Workers Are Mean to You for a Reason. Fighting Mother Nature is supposed to be difficult but most organizations manage to easily defeat their employees’ inborn tendency toward civil cooperation. Where there’s a will there’s a way.

Does a Real Anti-Aging Pill Already Exist? Novartis trying to turn mTOR inhibition into the fountain of youth. Fasting one or two days a week is much safer.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

Will your partner stay or stray? Look at finger length. Reading between the lines the unfortunate ramification is that if they are less likely to stray and have sex with others, they’re also less likely to have sex with you. Pick your poison.

Choosing a cell phone, prescription drug plan or new car? Read this first. Improving results when faced with a large number of choices. Trouble is the most effective method was the one least preferred by those tested.

Caution concerning the possible health benefits of alcohol: Beneficial only for women over 65? And maybe not much for them either. Genetic testing should clarify things further since it’s likely only some are genetically equipped to better cope with the relatively recent invention of alcohol. It’s toxic at any level, so the question is whether for some groups the benefits objectively outweigh those costs. Subjective benefit is another story.

Make like a squid and transform: Squid can recode their genetic make-up on-the-fly to adjust to their surroundings. Cool ability. Maybe Spider Man should have been Squid Man instead.

Unwanted impact of antibiotics broader, more complex than previously known. It just keeps getting worse, without even considering resistance.

Brian Williams told a tale – but it could be how he really remembers what happened. That all his memories are self-serving doesn’t alter that either. Fact check your own and you may be surprised.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

Police Officers Can Sue Newspaper For Publishing Descriptive Info. I’ll save everyone the trouble: Fat, out of shape, ignorant of the law, with a bad attitude and anger management issues. Frequently seen with mustache and sunglasses, in blue uniform. Often uses siren for personal errands. Armed and dangerous. 5.5 times more likely than a civilian to shoot the wrong person. Avoid contact.

Five technologies that betrayed Silk Road’s anonymity. There are weaknesses in all those technologies but it’s really not fair to blame them for horrible security practices.

A Crypto Trick That Makes Software Nearly Impossible to Reverse-Engineer. I’m pretty sure it’s not “nearly impossible” but even if it is, once fully implemented on both sides of the battle, the balance of power won’t be much different than now.

High-intensity interval training benefits chronic stroke patients. Glad I was trying to run up stairs soon after I was out of the ICU.

Reality is distorted in brain’s maps. Steve Jobs wasn’t the only one with a reality distortion field. Very utilitarian reasons for it.

R2d2 beats Mendel: Scientists find selfish gene that breaks long-held law of inheritance. 50-50 split from mom and dad not always the case. The Selfish Gene looks better all the time.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

Jeb Bush dumps emails including social security numbers of Florida residents online. Q: Can he really be that stupid? A: Not only that, everyone around him is too.

Box hands cloud encryption keys over to its customers. Maybe Dropbox will follow suit. Doesn’t stop man in the middle but it’s a start.

Should I Trust The Government? Ummm, if you’re middle-aged and trust your government even 1% you’ve somehow missed every major news story over your entire life. Still it’s an amusing survey. India gets the award for most gullible population. China is a bit puzzling unless it reflects a very political definition of trust.

Facing Decline and Death. A good review of Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal. I highly recommend watching the Frontline episode, Being Mortal. Far too many of us will be in similar circumstances some day. In an hour filled with the dreary end game of the terminally ill, oddly enough I felt the most sorry for Dr. Nayak, who seemed poised for a flaming burnout at any moment.

How long would you play a game you can’t win? Your whole life.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

‘Smart’ insulin may ease burden of type 1 diabetes patients, research suggests. Since some studies show long acting insulin may cause cancer I wouldn’t be surprised if this does too, but it’s a far simpler, more fault tolerant, and just plain more elegant solution than the closed loop pump/artificial pancreas.

Tolerant Kidney Transplant Patients Produce B Cells with Regulatory Properties. T cells aren’t  everything.

Robot Scientist Discovers Potential Malaria Drug. Amusing Luddite quote from one scientist near the end. While the incentives for the approach used by Eve are understandable, the focus on expediency is bound to miss some promising candidates. Just like humans.

Human Traffickers Caught on Hidden Internet. It’s great that at least some of the scumbags are in jail, but this story is a load of ******* straight from the *******. The case was made by the *******, not *******. It makes a convenient justification for expanding *******, while the blind spot over some ******* allies being the biggest ******* of ******* remains intact.

[I had to censor myself, so any thought crimes are yours, not mine.]

Pseudo Random News and Comment

Obama’s 10 new taxes. In the search for loot a surprising number may make it through Congress, but the interesting thing to me was this: ” It would bar contributions to tax-preferred accounts once balances reach about $3.4 million, which the administration says is enough to provide $210,000 in annual income.” Yup, over 6% annual income. I can only assume they include discounted future lobbying income to get that number because even basket case governments are paying under 2% and dividend yields are similarly atrophied.

Obama’s MyRA Savings Plan: Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing? It might sound like it couldn’t happen in the US of A, but it’s already been done in other countries. Never forget, you owe them for doing you a favor in allowing you to avoid taxes, and sooner or later that favor will come due. The Roth IRA was created to bring tax revenue from the future to the present. Well, it’s now the future and they’re a bit short, so those favors are going to start getting called in soon.

Teaching Children with Autism to Read for Meaning: Challenges and Possibilities. Some usable information on the subject for once. Hopefully beneficial for more general deficits in inductive reasoning too.

Crony Capitalism and the Oracle of Omaha. Another one loses their religion. Unfortunately, once you reach a certain size in the modern managed market, you’re either a crony or you’re a casualty (Silicon Valley hasn’t funneled millions into lobbying because they wanted to). Fortunately for his shareholders, Buffett slid into the crony role as smooth as silk and used it to great advantage. Isn’t that why you invest in Berkshire instead of a socially conscious fund?

Who Said: “If Rates Go Negative The Treasury Will Print A Lot More Currency” Some tips for dealing with negative interest rates. Once in a blue moon ZH still has something I’ll save for future reference.

Attenuated Monocyte Apoptosis, a New Mechanism for Osteoporosis Suggested by a Transcriptome-Wide Expression Study of Monocytes. Rather than simply being a janitorial crew circulating in a building, the immune system is looking more and more integral in all aspects of maintenance and repair. Makes me curious about the role of innate immunity in fetal development…

Pseudo Random News and Comment

DNA clock helps to get measure of people’s lifespans. I don’t think I want to know what time it is on my DNA clock. At my current age, no matter what the answer is it will be far too soon.

New mechanism of inheritance could advance study of evolution, disease treatment. Epigenetics isn’t new but this demonstrates the effect can last 25 generations in worms. I doubt selection pressures would extend out that long in humans, but without knowing more details of the genetic changes accompanying the agricultural revolution for example, that’s just speculation since epigenetics could have provided significant stop-gap measures until the rest of the hardware caught up.

Even cockroaches have different personalities – and therefore more personality than your ex.

Study ties immune cells to delayed onset of post-stroke dementia. I’m not happy reading this since I’m almost 5 years post stroke now and noticing an increasing  number of mental errors (hopefully just biased observations). MMF should be helpful against B cells so maybe there’s an upside to feeling like total crap all the time on it.

Malocclusion and dental crowding arose 12,000 years ago with earliest farmers. Finally a good explanation for the wisdom tooth problem.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

Simple Pictures That State-of-the-Art AI Still Can’t Recognize. A case of anthropocentric bias. All algorithms have problems in some situations whether they are running between your ears or on a chip. Though AI is making more fine-grained errors in most of the examples, humans frequently see patterns where none exist (whether deities on a piece of toast or you name it in a stock chart), and misidentify things with appalling regularity and equally appalling certainty….but we still think we failed the test more smarter than they done.

 Power psychs people up about… themselves. I’ve always thought that psychopaths self-selected for politics, but this could imply a reinforcing process where politicians are increasingly lost in their own world and the lives of others rapidly dwindle to zero value. Most likely it’s both. All the more reason to avoid them to the greatest extent possible.

Your college major is a pretty good indication of how smart you are. This could easily be nothing but survivorship bias, though the results are hardly a surprise. At any rate, I think the easiest way to fix the low education ranking is to eliminate classes like “Math for Elementary School Teachers” and make them pass actual math and science classes. As long as it remains the easiest major it will attract the dumbest students. While we’re at it, Government/Public Administration should be made the easiest major by a wide margin. Evil morons are far easier to deal with than evil geniuses.

Pseudo Random News and Comment

Dendritic cells and innate immunity in kidney transplantation. Research is ignoring them no more. Once the latest data is in I’ll have a post on telmisartan, monocytes, and mTOR inhibitors, grounded in the grand tradition of medical self-experimentation.

Engineered Commensal Bacteria Reprogram Intestinal Cells Into Glucose-Responsive Insulin-Secreting Cells for the Treatment of Diabetes. Only partially effective but still an interesting approach.

Two for the young adults in the crowd, plagued by hormone deranged risk assessment circuitry and the illusion of immortality:

Drinking alcohol several times a week increases risk of stroke mortality.

Heavy drinking in middle-age may increase stroke risk more than traditional factors

Two for us old farts:

Older adults: Double your protein to build more muscle. Not sure how this can be balanced with low protein renal diets.

Pacemakers with Internet connection, a not-so-distant goal. Um, they can say they’ve solved the security problems all they want but it’s simply not possible to be totally secure. If you get a connected medical device you better make sure you’re not on any government list because this opens up a whole new enforcement mechanism.

 

Confabulation and Identity

When I first learned what confabulation meant it commonly referred to memory disturbances in alcoholics. Reading the definition again recently, it struck me how similar it is to the modern understanding of how memory actually works in all of us. Research in the intervening years has shown that, far from being a cinematic record, events are inaccurately perceived and sketchily retained, revised every time they’re recalled, rely on only a basic framework to represent an event then filling in details based on more recent experience, and all colored by the current emotional state. In other words, confabulated.

A number of consciousness researchers have pointed out that what you think of as “you” is almost entirely the result of autobiographical memory. That reliance on memory leads to something interesting: Since those memories are all confabulated to some degree, what does that say about your self conception? Though the way we remember things makes it seem otherwise, your traits and character change over time, with the quirks of memory allowing the illusion of an unchanging self which binds it all together.

The past is said to define you, but the past as you remember it is also largely a bunch of confabulated BS. Don’t let that BS limit you. We are all living lies of our own creation, modified with each recollection, and our autobiographical memory like a film we’ve stitched together from details both real and invented. If you don’t like how things are going, it’s time to change the script.

The Truth About Investing

According to Buffett’s Alpha, one of the main reasons for Buffett’s success is, “he managed to stick to his principles and continue operating at high risk even after experiencing some ups and downs that have caused many other investors to rethink and retreat from their original strategies.”

Investors have an uncanny knack for underperforming whatever strategy they claim to be using. The reason is, regardless what method is used, the most critical variable in its success or failure is you. All investment strategies have discretionary and active elements which depend on the actions of a frail and faulty human being, and that human element contains the potential destruction for every investing strategy.

The truth about investing is this: If I gave 100 people the mythical Holy Grail of trading systems, one which could never have a losing year, very few of them would still be using it 10 years later. You’re far too smart for that to happen to you, but what if:

• The first 11 months of use resulted in significant losses.
• A friend of a friend made three times as much last year.
• Any idiot would have known the last 5 losing trades weren’t going to work.
• The average annual return for the previous five years was a mere 1.3%.
• You know the system is wrong about a trade, and the last 3 times you felt that way the system was indeed wrong.

Suddenly it’s not so easy. A nearly infinite number of things can result in the loss of confidence, second-guessing, and eventually abandoning a plan. Perhaps to avoid taking responsibility, investors often spend the bulk of their time on the external: The unending search for some better, smarter strategy, asset allocation, or risk management tool. Beyond pandering to the fruitless desire for certainty amid chaos, that outward focus pushes you to become a kid in the strategy candy store, lured by every new analytical temptation you see. Spend enough time in that situation and even the most resolute will suffer from willpower fatigue.

Instead, the focus should be on the internal: Understanding the feelings and emotions that drive your investment decisions. Remaining consistent over many years despite doubts and conflicting feelings, rather than any particular investing style, is what determine success or failure in the markets. The best returns with any investing style typically occur after prolonged bad patches, decade-long bad patches in some cases, and those higher returns go to those who have stuck it out rather than wandered off trying something new. Good investing should be a pretty boring affair. If that bothers you, find an exciting hobby to stay occupied.

This doesn’t mean you should never change your investing style. You may very well be more successful trying something else. It won’t be because the historical returns are marginally better (and definitely not because the backtested returns are a work of heavenly beauty), but because it’s one you’ll still be using long after it has fallen out of favor.

Finding Value

When you’re trying to find the best values in any market, you’re looking for a diamond hidden in a huge pile of manure. To find those rare diamonds you have to expect to spend virtually 100% of your time looking through shit. That’s what keeps other people from finding it first. If you want to spend all of your time looking at diamonds, go to the jewelry store and pay their 1000% markup.

That was my explanation of the need for patience when three real estate deals in a row fell apart a few years ago. Finding value isn’t for the impatient. Most of your time and research come to nothing and that can become very frustrating. The longer it takes, the easier it is to convince yourself that you have to pay up to get something worth buying. But you don’t. An individual – not handcuffed by a prospectus or investor pressures – can always keep their criteria unchanged and wait for something better. That’s a big advantage.

Regarding Copyright

The reason I started this blog was to propagate ideas, and what better way to do that than by allowing other people to do the work for me. Therefore, I, for myself, my personal representatives, assigns, heirs, and next of kin, claim no copyright on anything I have written for this site. Do with it what you will. I’d like attribution purely for ego reasons, but failure to do so risks nothing more than a small chance of public ridicule if someone other than me were to point it out.

Seems simple enough, but nothing makes much sense in copyright and patent law: Why We Still Can’t Really Put Anything In The Public Domain.