Week of May 5, 2025
Last Friday, several patients arrived more than 15 minutes late for their appointments. Deciding if I rebook or see a late patient triggers a complex heuristic: how sick are they? How difficult is it for them to (physically or logistically) get to appointments? Why are they late? What time limits do I have on my day? For me, squeezing in patients creates anxiety; adding time pressure to appointments is a setup for missed details and amplifies cognitive bias (such as not ensuring new lab data fits with prior diagnostic assumptions). I like being liked, and when possible, I am okay inconveniencing myself in the spirit of "customer service." However, my job is (in part) to ensure good customer service does not impede good care.
While the resources below don't speak to time pressure, the links are great discussions of common logical fallacies healthcare providers make.
https://www.deltapsychology.com/articles-for-doctors/clinical-decision-cognitive-biases
and
https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/4-widespread-cognitive-biases-and-how-doctors-can-overcome-them
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Listen to a Google Notebook LM A.I.-generated podcast of the newsletter with two virtual "hosts."
We are back to the AI hosts evoking the "royal we" - speaking as they wrote the newsletter, they have a son in college and they read the book I mentioned in the infographic.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RrBdEtpp1FvGlfHJDEUJOH0F1PFPNa22/view
About NotebookLM: https://blog.google/technology/ai/notebooklm-audio-overviews/
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Science and Technology Trends
I found recent articles discussing new, novel research on male contraception. The study highlights a compound targeting vitamin A signaling pathways essential for sperm production rather than manipulating hormones, like testosterone, a fundamentally different approach than previous male contraceptive efforts.
https://twin-cities.umn.edu/news-events/first-hormone-free-male-birth-control-pill-clears-another-milestone
and
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-025-00752-7
and
AI Summary of the research: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/undefined
Related follow-up: Here is video footage from the live sperm racing I highlighted a few weeks back. I imagine the burgeoning sperm racing industry will be very much against this medication.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJAVZwCp-S6/?igsh=MWd4ZWx6anN3bnN3OQ==
See What I Learned at:
http://www.whatadamisreading.com/2025/04/what-adam-is-reading-week-of-4-21-25.html
Remembering that our little planet is a blip in an incomprehensibly large universe is humbling. It is even more humbling to realize that this universe will (at some point) end. Previously, scientists thought the universe would end with a "big freeze" in which stars die and heat dissipates (go entropy!). However, new data suggests our universe may end by collapsing on itself in a big crunch. While I prefer the latter's drama, "crunch" and "freeze" seem equally unappealing (as far as one can experience a universe death, though they sound good when describing a packaged frozen dessert).
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/dark-energy-desi-universe-future-end
and
https://smry.ai/https:/www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/dark-energy-desi-universe-future-end
and
TLDR (or I would rather not spend that much time reading about the demise of existence):
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/undefined
Anti- Anti-Science Articles of Note
This week's collection of anti-science offers a winning lineup for those playing logical fallacy bingo. Check your bingo cards for purposeful ambiguity, appeals to emotion, mixing causation with association, and cherry-picking data.
Minnesota legislators introduced HF 3219, the "mRNA Bioweapons Prohibition Act," referencing" mRNA injections and products designated as weapons of mass destruction."
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/minnesota-bill-against-vaccines-promotes-disinformation-2025a1000a5l
Here is the bill:
https://www.revisor.mn.gov/bills/bill.php?b=house&f=HF3219&ssn=0&y=2025.
I recommend exploring the qualifications of the bill's authors (including lead author Representative Shane Mekeland - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Mekeland.)
Dr. Noc, a PhD immunologist, does a nice job quickly explaining the latest misinformation about MMR vaccines on Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DJI1m8IA_F0/?igsh=Z29iZ3pzNXMxaGdr
Related: Our younger son is now writing for the Brown University humor paper, The Noser. His first article offers a perspective from RFK Jr's brain worm.
http://thenoser.com/article/RFK-Jrs-Brain-Worm-Breaks-Barriers-As-First-Parasi
Living with AI
Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, eloquently writes about how AI tools are fundamentally not yet entirely understandable. He argues we are building powerful tools that are more "grown" than "written." His description of the neurobiological equivalent of LLMs is quite interesting.
"AI systems' opacity also means that they are not used in many applications, such as high-stakes financial or safety-critical settings, because we can't fully set limits on their behavior, and a small number of mistakes could be very harmful. Better interpretability could significantly improve our ability to limit the range of possible errors. In fact, for some applications, the fact that we can't see inside the models is a legal blocker to their adoption—for example, in mortgage assessments where decisions are legally required to be explainable."
https://www.darioamodei.com/post/the-urgency-of-interpretability
On top of the lack of interpretability (see article above), we now have to decide if we still want to say "please" and "thank you" to our LLMs.
Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) discusses the cost and energy impact (think 10s of millions of dollars) for ChatGPT to interpret and understand users' innate tendency to use pleasantries with the LLM. (Who amongst us doesn't tacitly believe our soon-to-be AI overlords will look more kindly upon those of us who are more polite?)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/technology/chatgpt-alexa-please-thank-you.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EU8.Fvmd.S5-C6lLCp68X&smid=url-share
Infographics
At age 50, I've begun re-exploring the midlife crisis literature. Most recently, I finished a John Tropper book (The Book of Joe) that resonated a little too much (a guy who grew up in the 1980s and is wondering if his life has meaning.). With ChatGPT's help, I made an infographic heatmap of mid-life crisis authors and their common themes.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HAfjimWBjPo79L24A_2MRH-4mEtpPub_/view
from this data:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t9iuMsEAFc0oGLrTPP9xvGE4JvDYfOyG/view
Things I learned this week
My favorite headline of last week:
United Airlines flight forced into emergency landing after 'rabbit' sucked into engine. (Why is the word rabbit in single quotes? Was it a pseudo-rabbit, or is this just bad journalism?)
https://ground.news/article/passengers-witnesses-recall-flight-in-flames-that-made-emergency-landing-in-denver
and, in case you are wondering:
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/commonly-confused-words/single-vs-double-quotes/
“Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania's Penn Dental Medicine have been working on this novel drug delivery model, focusing on attacking viruses that like to hide out in our throats and nose. The team looked at neutralizing herpes simplex viruses (HSV-1 and HSV-2) and influenza A strains (H1N1 and H3N2) through clinical chewing gum made with lablab beans (Lablab purpureus). This bean – also known as the hyacinth, Egyptian kidney, and Indian bean – is a legume that contains a protein that can "trap" and neutralize certain viruses, essentially giving it antiviral properties. This protein, FRIL, is also inherently stable when the legume is converted into a powder and turned into chewing gum." There is so much to learn here - viral trapping in gum, the lablab bean, and if you read the article, you will see a reference to the ART-5 mastication simulator, a tool I did not know existed.
Article
https://newatlas.com/infectious-diseases/chewing-gum-protection-flu-herpes/
Paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1525001624008086
Video of the ART-5 mastication simulator. (My initial thought on this video is that I hope they don't attach to the Boston Robotics dog. Being another living creature's meal is not appealing, but being eaten by an AI robot dog with an attached mastication module feels just that much worse, right?)
https://youtu.be/7BZP7t-PTVc?si=Ld5kAXyTjka0inkJ
"An innovative art installation titled "Revivification" at the Art Gallery of Western Australia features the posthumous musical creation of experimental composer Alvin Lucier, who died in 2021 at age 90. The installation consists of cerebral organoids (artificial mini-brains) grown from Lucier's white blood cells, which he donated before his death. These "in-vitro brain" organoids rest on an electrode mesh connected to twenty large brass plates placed around the exhibition room, creating music through their neural activity."
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/09/alvin-lucier-dead-composer-making-music-ai-artificial-intelligence-brain
and the AI summarized version:
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/a37aff8c-cc49-47de-b424-13a76ef3b937
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/17ZyyULVho2DWIEhR-UiSVHmtyGM76FMw/view
The sun melts into a smiling spiral of clocks in a vibrant surrealist dreamscape while candy-colored nebulae swirl playfully above. A cheerful lablab bean superhero, wearing a bright red cape and joyful grin, rides a gleaming, brass-legged robot grasshopper across golden dunes. The bean aims a sparkling bubble-gum cannon that captures giggling virus creatures midair in glistening orbs. Nearby, a translucent humanoid AI child doodles "Please and Thank You" in crayon on an oversized scroll, watched fondly by a floating musical brain organoid that beams with rainbow neural tendrils. In the distance, the cosmos debates its fate over scoops of galaxy-swirled ice cream labeled "Crunch" and "Freeze," while stars twinkle with curiosity rather than doom.
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There were no updates from the PMC website last week due to the author traveling.
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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