Week of April 21, 2025
Entropy, the thermodynamic measure of disorder, randomness, and uncertainty, has been on my mind over the last few weeks. I turned (and suddenly felt) 50 on April 5 (during nine days of travel). Shortly after getting home, an unexpected technology disruption consumed my schedule. In weeks marked by milestone birthdays, new (psychosomatic or age-related?) low back pain, news I find hard to watch, and rapid changes at work, it is easy to feel out of control. Fortunately, the AARP is now heavily recruiting me, offering multi-year membership deals with a gratis second membership for my wife and a branded, insulated trunk organizer. Perhaps AARP is sending me a signal to seek serenity by focusing on things I can definitively control, such as the "universe" of my car trunk.
P.S. - I prepared several of these articles for the never-published, tech-disrupted 4/14/25 newsletter. I have added more for this week, so you get the "double-stuffed Oreo" edition of my newsletter this week (with all the good and bad of such a cookie).
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Listen to a Google Notebook LM A.I.-generated podcast of the newsletter with two virtual "hosts."
This week, the speakers stuck to 8 minutes and no longer seem to believe they are writing the newsletter.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WUT4sxSUM1OihjSYxF9dais49Gg1-pzL/view?usp=sharing
About NotebookLM: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews/
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Science and Technology Trends
As I have previously discussed, no one medical article or data point is often compelling enough to drive how providers care for patients, but accumulating positive evidence can. I continue to see a steady stream of data and editorials about the benefits of GLP-1s (the family of medications including Ozempic). In this instance, the discussion focuses on the data associated with GLP-1 use and a decreased risk of dementia. As always, critically analyzing the studies is necessary. See the AI Summary for a good framework on the cited studies.
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/glp-1-drugs-might-cut-dementia-risk-half-2025a10008bs
and
https://claude.site/artifacts/891833a6-ece3-416b-90dd-aee44d66e4fa
As someone who travels by air a lot, this seems so obvious - why do I need to check in or have a boarding pass when it is evident who I am and I have a phone?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/11/boarding-passes-and-check-in-to-be-scrapped-in-air-travel-shake-up-plans
I can't recall thinking about the physiologic consequences of filibustering. The Huff Post shared, "Cory Cory Booker's Oura Ring Reveals What The 25-Hour Speech Did To His Body." I have not seen shared biometric data from a political event before this. Could biometric data offer insight into the quality or content of other political speeches?
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cory-booker-oura-ring-senate-speech_n_67effde9e4b0bb67eb7ad1d3
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_UkHRKiL1k
For now, a physician cannot be compelled (even by a court order) to perform a body cavity search (or any other invasive medical procedure) on an unwilling person. However, the issue is more complex than I realized.
https://www.empr.com/features/doctors-charged-after-refusing-to-perform-body-cavity-search/
I found this excellent AMA newsletter article about decision fatigue among physicians. None of the suggestions are novel, but applying decisions fatigue learnings to doctors is an under-addressed source of stress.
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/public-health/what-doctors-wish-patients-knew-about-decision-fatigue
Anti- Anti-Science Articles of Note
Headlines about vaccines (and the false notion that they are related to autism) were back in the news over the last two weeks. I found several blog posts and a JAMA editorial that helped contextualize the data. In particular, the blog post highlights key data:
- Scientific consensus confirms no link between vaccines and autism, supported by numerous large-scale studies, including a 2019 Danish study of over 600,000 children.
- There is no biological mechanism for vaccines to cause autism, as most autism-related brain development occurs in utero before any vaccine exposure.
- Autism diagnosis rates have increased significantly since the 1960s-70s, attributed mainly to expanded diagnostic criteria and increased awareness.
- Known factors associated with autism development include premature births, certain medications during pregnancy (such as valproic acid), infections or immune activation during pregnancy, folic acid deficiency, and some environmental factors.
https://healthscaping.substack.com/p/then-what-does-cause-autism
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2832728
Living with AI.
AI allows us to question assumptions I didn't even realize were assumptions. "Fingerprint biometrics are integral to digital authentication and forensic science. However, [this notion] is based on the unproven assumption that no two fingerprints, even from different fingers of the same person, are alike. Contrary to this prevailing assumption, we show above 99.99% confidence that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person share very strong similarities. Using deep twin neural networks to extract fingerprint representation vectors, we find that these similarities hold across all pairs of fingers within the same person, even when controlling for spurious factors like sensor modality."
https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.adi0329
and the TLDR summary:
https://claude.site/artifacts/8eb0550e-53de-415a-be63-f3d120be145c
If you do not routinely read Professor Ethan Mollick's One Useful Thing AI blog, you are missing out. His March 30, 2005, post about the updates to various AI image generation models details the importance and magnitude of recent updates across ChatGPT, Gemini, and others.
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/no-elephants-breakthroughs-in-image
Though the episode is (essentially) a commercial for the host's software, the AI Daily Brief from Saturday offered a great description of how layered agents work to replicate time-consuming activities: Building a Voice Agent [for interviewing a company's employees]—A Case Study.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/33pnNYLk0AMGq6fZH9sdRO?si=plOX6XH4QCGot2WtQ1c5Pg
Infographics
The Chemistry of Different Colors of Blood - why blood isn't always red.
https://i0.wp.com/www.compoundchem.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Chemistry-of-Blood-Colours-2015.png
from
https://www.compoundchem.com/2014/10/28/coloursofblood/
Things I learned this week
I was in Vegas for a nephrology meeting in early April, which necessitated walking through the casino. The unsettling scene of dopamine-fueled, trance-like blank stares of slot machine players is very reminiscent of seeing IV drug abusers in Baltimore. Sure enough, I found an interesting blog post about this phenomenon - "The most addicted players don't even play to win. Rather, Schüll explains that they play to be in a trance-like state called the "machine zone" where "daily worries, social demands, and even bodily awareness fade away."
https://www.readtrung.com/p/the-ludicrous-psychology-of-slot
This is not The Onion (as best I can tell): "LA's newest gambling event — live Sperm Racing. A fertility startup raised $1.5 million to stage the event at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles this month. Eric Zhu, the company's 17-year-old co-founder, said the inaugural event would pit samples taken from two healthy young university students against each other on a racetrack 20cm (8in) long and modeled on the female reproductive system." This event feels like a self-parody - combining South Park, science, and the worst elements of social media.
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/what-to-expect-from-worlds-first-competitive-sperm-race-c668fcdjf
Related:
"Sex Workers Already Predicted There's A Recession Coming — Here's How They Know."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/a-recession-is-coming-sex-workers_l_67eaa67fe4b008c5a2ecc0bc
AI art of the week.
(A visual mashup of topics from the newsletter, using ChatGPT to summarize the newsletter, suggest prompts, and make the images).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/14f_LLHrgbhE2bLO4p0LjJIeFZ1O5gDdJ/view
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Based on Wastewater, COVID rates are now down to 1 in 149 individuals in the U.S.
The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative (PMC) website uses wastewater levels to forecast 4-week predictions of COVID rates.
https://pmc19.com/data/
based upon https://biobot.io/data/
Wastewater Scan offers a multi-organism wastewater dashboard with an excellent visual display of individual treatment plant-level data.
https://data.wastewaterscan.org/
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Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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