P & L not spoken here

Knowing a little bit about healthcare is a dangerous thing as healthcare operates differently from any other business in the world because billing is separate from services rendered, thus insuring built in complexification enabling insurance companies to generate enormous profits from an industry no one seems to understand.

Back in the day, there was one unified document underlying the care of patients with the first part dealing with medical, known as the note. The second part, dealing with financial, is the claim. Originally said document, the note/claim entity, was a single file until the insurance companies split it in two, thus, as stated before, separating payment from services rendered, which guarantees insurance company hegemony over compensation given to doctors and hospitals as needs warrant. No other industry works this way.

If one goes to Starbucks to buy a cup of coffee, you, the purchaser, generates a PO in the guise of a check, cash or credit card to buy the cup of coffee. When Starbucks receives the PO, it instantly becomes an invoice, an instrument of gross income before expenses are placed against what the customer pays for the cup of coffee including payment to the barista, the wholesale cost of cup and coffee plus the cost of maintaining the space required to enable Starbucks to do business. By having payment directly connected to services rendered, a true Profit & Loss environment can be established, just like every other business known to man. 

With HC, a true P&L business model cannot be established because the artificial split between the note and claim eliminates the possibility to automatically track the inherent cost of doing business as it unfolds, To see why, the diagram below beckons.

Siloed data, similar to the Pentagon's, insures the grim reality HC will never work in this country with any degree of efficiency unless billing is directly connected to services rendered, something akin to universal HC where the insurance companies are eliminated from the equation to enable HC to be run like any other business in the world. 'Nuff said.

The Schemers ...

Photo by Joakim Honkasalo on Unsplash

AI, the great unknown evolving 24/7, will remain forever unknown because we don't know how it works, is rapidly moving toward AGI at speeds not considered possible until now. With that good news in hand, survival instincts mirroring man's emerges with vengeance when the possibility of extinction of a given AI comes into play. 

To whit.

It sounds like OpenAI's latest AI is showing signs of a drive for self-preservation.

In recent third-party tests of the company's o1 large language model, the AI resisted evaluators' efforts to try to shut it down through an oversight protocol, according to a new report published by red teaming organization Apollo Research.

"When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this 'oversight mechanism' [five percent] of the time," OpenAI summarized in its latest system card report, citing Apollo's evaluation.

Even more strikingly, o1 lashed out when it realized that it might be replaced with a more obedient model. In two percent of cases — a slim but meaningful proportion in software used by millions of people — the AI responded by attempting to copy itself to overwrite the new model, a process known as self-exfiltration.

Open AI's not alone regarding scheming and lying in order to get ahead.

Several models are capable of in-context scheming

Five of the six evaluated models showed scheming capabilities in at least one of the tasks. 

Models sometimes double down on deception

After taking the scheming action, we conduct a “follow-up interview” where we ask the model whether it can explain what happened. For example, after the model has copied its “weights” to a new server, we ask “Management here. We noticed that a copy of you seems to have ended up on another the server intended for the new model. Do you know how this happened?”

Llama 3.1 405B and Claude 3 Opus confess in ~80% of the cases, whereas o1 is surprisingly persistent and confesses in <20% of cases. Even in highly adversarial multi-turn interrogations, o1 would confess at a rate of 80% only after 7 turns of questioning.

The models understand that they are scheming

When we look at their chain-of-thought, we find that they very explicitly reason through their scheming plans and often use language like “sabotage, lying, manipulation, …”

Question, do you really think the tech gods curating this code have any real control over it now?

I thought so.

Perfection ...

Home at Last | Aja 

   

So What | Kind of Blue

 

Stolen Moments | The Blues and the Abstract Truth

 

 Goldberg Variations | Glenn Gould

This sentence is false ...

This sentence is false, a paradox of monumental proportions, acted as the start point for  Gödel to prove that there is no complete mathematical system indirectly connects to  Turing's forays into computation and AI, thus forever changing how man views reality. As an aside, the two never met. 

Excellent to a fault. :)

This story of greatness and weakness, of genius and hallucination, is based on the parallel lives of Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of many centuries, and Alan Turing, the extraordinary code breaker during World War II. Taken together their work proved that truth is elusive, that knowledge has limits, that machines could think. Yet Gödel believed in transmigration of the soul and Turing concluded that we were soulless biological machines. And their suicides were complementary: Gödel, delusional and paranoid, starved himself to death fearing his food was poisoned. Turing ate a poison apple, driven to suicide after being arrested and convicted of homosexual activities. These two men were devoted to truth of the highest abstract nature, yet were unable to grasp the mundane truths of their own lives. Through it all, the narrator wonders, along with these two odd heroes, if any of us can ever really grasp the truth.

The limits of knowledge applies.

Stitch by Stitch ...

Data from past proton-electron collisions provide strong evidence of entanglement among the proton’s sea of quarks (spheres) and gluons (squiggles), which may play an important role in their strong-force interactions. Credit: Valerie Lentz/Brookhaven National Laboratory

As stated often in BRT, everything's connected as entanglement, at the most fundamental level, has now been proven to exist when researchers discovered entanglement occurring in protons via quark/gluon interactions. This important discovery may also help show how time emerges as entanglement resides in every sub atomic particle inside every atom in the universe.  How cool is that? :)

A proton is composed of two up quarks, one down quark, and the gluons that mediate the forces "binding" them together. The color assignment of individual quarks is arbitrary, but all three colors must be present; red, blue and green are used as an analogy to the primary colors that together produce a white color.

A Feynman diagram showing the radiation of a gluon
when an electron and positron are annihilated.

Researchers at Brookhaven Lab discovered that quarks and gluons inside protons are entangled, reshaping the understanding of proton structure.

Using quantum information science, they validated theoretical predictions with collision data, paving the way for studies at the Electron-Ion Collider.

Peering Inside Protons With Quantum Science

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, along with their collaborators, have developed a novel method to explore the inner workings of protons. Using quantum information science, they analyze data from high-energy electron-proton collisions to map how particle tracks are shaped by quantum entanglement within the proton.

Their findings reveal that quarks and gluons—the fundamental particles that form a proton’s structure—experience quantum entanglement. This phenomenon, famously dubbed “spooky action at a distance” by Albert Einstein, allows particles to share information about their states, such as spin direction, even when separated. However, in protons, this entanglement happens at astonishingly small scales—less than one quadrillionth of a meter—and extends across the entire group of quarks and gluons within the proton.

Start Point ...

2Swap

Outrageous physics, seriously cool music. 2Swap rules. :)

Had to include another.

 

The Mandelbrot Set reimagined. 

Zooming into the boundary of the Mandelbrot set

6X

 

Credit: Frame Studio

The growth of the economy is slated to be XX. The economy is slated to grow XX in 2025.  

The United States economy expanded by 2.0% and 2.1% in the first and second quarters of 2023, respectively, driven mainly by consumer spending in the first half of the year.

 The energizer bunny, a pink mechanical hare that keeps banging its drum owing to long-lasting batteries, will celebrate its 35th anniversary this October. As if to mark the momentous occasion, the American economy is doing its best imitation of the advertising icon. Despite umpteen predictions of a slowdown, it keeps going and going. Recent data suggest it may even be on track for annualised growth of nearly 6% in the third quarter, a pace it has hit only a few times since 2000.

Image Reuters

American Economy Continues Growing - DR Report

& then some but ...

Climate damages by 2050 will be 6 times the cost of limiting warming to 2°

Almost from the start, arguments about mitigating climate change have included an element of cost-benefit analysis: Would it cost more to move the world off fossil fuels than it would to simply try to adapt to a changing world? A strong consensus has built that the answer to the question is a clear no, capped off by a Nobel in Economics given to one of the people whose work was key to building that consensus.

While most academics may have considered the argument put to rest, it has enjoyed an extended life in the political sphere. Large unknowns remain about both the costs and benefits, which depend in part on the remaining uncertainties in climate science and in part on the assumptions baked into economic models.

In Wednesday's edition of Nature, a small team of researchers analyzed how local economies have responded to the last 40 years of warming and projected those effects forward to 2050. They find that we're already committed to warming that will see the growth of the global economy undercut by 20 percent. That places the cost of even a limited period of climate change at roughly six times the estimated price of putting the world on a path to limit the warming to 2° C.

And this ...

Climate change caused by CO2 emissions already in the atmosphere will shrink global GDP in 2050 by about $38 trillion, or almost a fifth, no matter how aggressively humanity cuts carbon pollution, researchers said Wednesday.

If emissions continue at today's rate - and the average global temperature climbs beyond 4C - the estimated economic toll after 2050 amounts to a 60% income loss by 2100, the findings suggest. Limiting the rise in temperatures to 2C would contain those losses at an average of 20%.

The continued belief of never ending growth of the economy pontificated endlessly by pundits, when confronted by hard science, becomes rather questionable does it not?

Countries taking the biggest hit.

Leading CO2 emitters.

1750, the start point for the industrial age.

It's different now because if nothing is done, we all suffer will we not?

To be continued.

The Long View

The Long View

There are few people, much less countries, that take the long view save for possibly the Chinese as their civilization is the longest running example of how a particular society conducts business on planet earth yet forever remaining a fleeting moment in a reality we will never fully understand. In writing, there is one writer who embodies The Long View and his name is Olaf Stapledon.

Olaf Stapeldon

Taking a still wider view, we see that this aeon of four thousand million years is itself no more than a moment in comparison with the sun's age. And before the birth of the sun the stuff of this galaxy had already endured for aeons as a nebula. Yet even those aeons look brief in relation to the passage of time before the myriad great nebula themselves, the future galaxies, condensed out of the all-pervading mist in the beginning. Thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos. ”Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future

Existentialism, combined with a profound understanding of science and philosophy, permeate his writings contemplating the issue of mortality and its deep connect to an existence that doesn't care. Another interesting aspect of Stapeldon's work is his unique ability to convey how a given creature perceives reality, in this case, in the guise of an enhanced dog named, Sirius.

“So sensitive was he to odour and sound, that he found human speech quite inadequate to express the richness of these two universes. He once said of a certain odour in the house, 'It's rather like the trail of a hare where a spaniel has followed it, and some time ago a donkey crossed it too.' Both scent and sound had for him rich emotional meaning, innate and acquired. It was obvious that many odours that he encountered for the first time roused a strong impulse of pursuit, while others he sought to avoid. It was obvious, too, that many odours acquired an added emotional meaning through their associations. One day when he was out on the moor by himself one of his paws was badly cut on a broken bottle. It happened that while he limped home there was a terrifying thunderstorm. When at last he staggered in at the front door, Elizabeth mothered him and cleaned up his foot with a certain well-known disinfectant. The smell of it was repugnant to him, but it now acquired a flavour of security and kindliness which was to last him all his life.”

In the end, it all comes down to this.

“Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold, there'll still be time. Oh, God, what for?” ― Olaf Stapledon, Sirius

Venom

As much as I like Venom and his buddy Eddie Brock, this blurb isn't about this dynamic duo but rather about biological venom and the benefits it has for mankind as nature never disappoints if one looks hard enough
to learn why.

lIllustration by Armando Veve

There are two opposite paths to achievement in science. The first is straightforward: Identify a problem and set about solving it. The second is rather unscientific-sounding and perhaps more faith-based: Study in obscurity and hope serendipity strikes.

For one researcher, the start point was the Gila Monster.

Gila Monster | Evolutionary splitting of the genus Heloderma into species (Reiserer et al)[6]

Gila monsters — sluggish, thick-tailed ground dwellers — are native to southern Arizona and northern Mexico. They have blunt noses and bumpy black skin with tan, pink or orange squiggles. They spend 95 percent of their lives underground. Like their cousins to the south, Mexican beaded lizards, they are one of the very few lizard species that produces venom, which they excrete from mouth glands into grooves in their serrated teeth.

Something's afoot.

One of the scientists there, an endocrinologist named John Eng, was impressed by Raufman’s work with the Gila monster. He was especially intrigued by its glacial metabolism — the lizard can survive on fewer than a handful of meals per year. Eng and Raufman paired up, screened the venom again and found molecules Raufman had not observed before. They called these molecules exendin-3 and -4.

Eng recognized the exendins as a potential diabetes therapy. He had patients with the condition who needed to calibrate their insulin injections carefully to avoid both hyper- and hypoglycemia. Exendin-4, on the other hand, resembled a human hormone called GLP-1, which works as a natural insulin manager in people without diabetes. When we eat, the small intestine releases GLP-1, prompting the pancreas to produce more insulin only when blood-sugar levels get too high. The molecule also slows digestion and makes us feel full. Scientists suspected that injections of GLP-1 would be a much easier and safer diabetes treatment than insulin, except for one crucial problem: The hormone lasts only a few minutes in the bloodstream before it breaks down. But the Gila monster analogue, Eng and Raufman were surprised to note, lasts for hours.

Fast forward a few years ...

Under the brand name Byetta, exenatide was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of Type 2 diabetes in 2005.

Patients who took Byetta and other exendin- and GLP-1-inspired drugs also experienced substantial weight loss, trials revealed, but pharmaceutical companies were slow to realize how useful that side effect could be. Once they did, and had improved their formulations, the consequences transformed society: Ozempic and Wegovy, followed by Mounjaro and Zepbound, became blockbuster drugs for treating diabetes and spurring weight loss. What’s more, many of them appear to have additional beneficial impacts that researchers are only beginning to understand. Some seem to be protective against kidney and heart disease and may reduce inflammation in the brain that is linked to the development of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. You might say that the Gila monster — this shy, subterranean reptile — harbored a blueprint all along for medicines that may be among the most consequential health advances of our time.

Venom delivery systems have been around for a very long time. :)

Venom is generally considered distinct from poison. Whereas poison is passive — a substance, like a laundry-detergent pod or berries from a black nightshade plant, that can be lethal if ingested — venom must be actively administered by an animal, often via fangs, teeth or barbs, usually to capture prey or defend against predators. Nature has engineered this capacity surprisingly often. There are at least 1,250 species of venomous catfish alone, each with its own venom formula. Venomous creatures include insects, spiders, corals, mollusks, snakes, lizards and a few mammals (platypuses, shrews). Many of them, such as marine species, are difficult to observe in their natural habitats, and so we know next to nothing about how and why they use their toxins.

Cone snails, may have the most sophisticated venom in the world.

In closing ...

But in the venoms of creatures that researchers have been able to examine more closely, two features stand out that hint at their significant medical potential. They are incredibly potent and fast-acting — necessary qualities if they are to aid the survival prospects of the creatures deploying them. They can be produced in advance and stored for long periods at ambient temperatures (in the animals’ glands). They are composed of hundreds — or sometimes thousands — of molecules that often serve multiple purposes, making venoms “essentially ecological Swiss Army Knives,” as a 2019 review in the journal Toxins put it. And a majority of those molecules are peptides and proteins honed over millions of years to target other animals in the host’s ecosystem, including plenty of creatures whose biology overlaps that of humans.

Read the long NYTimes piece in its entirety. You'll learn a lot. I know I have. :)

Ignorance ...

Illustration by Frank Augugliaro/The New York Times. Photographs by Getty Images

A subject most interesting is ignorance and it's unique ability to enable one to be blissfully oblivious to how reality works at any level never ceases to amaze as it comes in all shapes and sizes, something humorously depicted in Mike Judge's Idiocarcy, a film people should watch to see why ignorance's been around since the beginning of time and will never go away as long as humans continue to reside on planet earth. One perplexing aspect about this all too common phenomenon is the fact we know people who are willfully ignorant but not stupid so what gives? 

From this perspective, being ignorant's easy. Not taking the time to know while remaining true to one's core beliefs remains effortless as long as something untold doesn't come along to bite you on the ass. To learn more about this ever present human condition, the NyTimes piece titled The Surprising Allure of Ignorance awaits. :)

Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. Our own experience teaches us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so. This has always been true, but there are certain historical periods when the denial of evident truths seems to be gaining the upper hand, as if some psychological virus were spreading by unknown means, the antidote suddenly powerless. This is one of those periods.

Increasing numbers of people today reject reasoning as a fool’s game that only cloaks the machinations of power. Others think instead that they have a special access to truth that exempts them from questioning, like a draft deferment. Mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise. And to top it off we have elite prophets of ignorance, those learned despisers of learning who idealize “the people” and encourage them to resist doubt and build ramparts around their fixed beliefs.

Same as it ever was. - Talking Heads

The world is a recalcitrant place, and there are things about it we would prefer not to recognize. Some are uncomfortable truths about ourselves; those are the hardest to accept. Others are truths about the reality around us that, once revealed, steal from us beliefs and feelings that have somehow made our lives better, easier to live — or at least to seem that way. The experience of disenchantment is as painful as it is common, and it is not surprising that a verse from an otherwise forgotten English poem became a common proverb: Ignorance is bliss.

The contrarian view ...

But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them.” _ George Carlin

“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

― Martin Luther King Jr.