America uses less energy per capita than we did in World War II, and even World War I. Thanks to natural gas, we provide energy in most states at an affordable cost.(1) With the help of a new data set that shows where air conditioning is used, it will be even easier to know where things can be improved.

In France, you have to get permission from both the government and your neighbors to put in air conditioning. You will also want to be wealthy because it is more profitable to sell it to the rest of Europe than domestically.(2) America has far more equity, about 90% of people have air conditioning but the new AC Map shows that not all of it is optimal. Portable units in a humid area are not very effective, for example.

Today is November 1st, the day dedicated to the dead, and I am in northern Sweden where daylight is scarce this time of the year. The two things conjure to arise thoughts of a darkish nature. 


[Above, a lousy picture taken this evening in a cemetery in Gammelstad, close to Lulea, in Norrbotten, Sweden. Sorry for the bad quality... Yet the landscape with all those small lights was really inspiring.]

A commenter contested my statement that gang murders are a much greater menace to public safety than homelessness – at least, here in Albuquerque. So let’s unpack.

Preliminaries

When I wrote Halloween Science 2.0, I wanted to get it down to a brisk 150 pages, which means taking a chainsaw to a lot of the material I had.(1)

Like the woman who left her corporeal significant other to become a ghost groupie. Amethyst Realm, that is not her Dungeons&Dragons name, she calls herself that for real, cheated on her totally organic fiancé with a ghost but she suggested it was kind of his fault. He moved them into a haunted house.

There is legitimate concern about increased social authoritarianism in governments worldwide. The state has gained more financial control everywhere. Even in the U.S nearly 60% of wealth is controlled by politicians, and it is the most "capitalist" country.

It led to a culture where the American federal government forced employees to get a COVID-19 vaccine or be fired. Yet 20,000,000 government employees were not given that same ultimatum.
The same mentality has led to countries where companies in the organ transplant business want you to be an organ donor by law. It would create another schism in U.S. culture, where body autonomy remains an issue. There can be no body autonomy if the government can force you to donate your organs.

The older you get, the more frail you become. The more frail you become, the greater the risk of falling, hospitalization, and shorter life expectancy.

Doctors talk about physical activity to reduce frailty but less attention is paid to biology. A new paper suggests that the hypothalamic–pituitary–gonadal (HPG) axis, the body’s system of regulating production of the hormone testosterone, can impact frailty.

"Suggests" means this is only EXPLORATORY, not human science, but a relationship between 

In early 2018, colleagues and I released The Next Plague and How Science Will Stop It and coronavirus was in there, because there had already been two coronavirus pandemics, SARS and MERS, this century.

No one anticipated that SARS-CoV-2 would erupt in Wuhan, China, and be the worst pandemic since the 1950s but one thing I had long been concerned about was how unprepared the CDC was. Thanks to government becoming more overlords and less public servants - sorry, George Soros and friends, 'no kings' was a problem decades before President Trump was elected - and government employees spent their days grasping for more money rather than helping anyone.(1)

A National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences paper(1) is sounding the alarm about detectable per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in blood samples of Delaware residents.

It sounds scary, but scientifically there are two things to keep in mind:

1. We can detect anything in anything in 2025.
2. Presence is not pathology.

Having interacted for a few months with ChatGPT 5 now, both for work-related problems and for private / self-learning tasks, I feel I might share some thoughts here on what these large models can tell us about our own thought processes. 

The sentence above is basically giving away my bottomline from square one, but I suppose I can elaborate a bit more on the concept. LLMs have revolutionized a wide range of information-processing tasks in just three or four years. Looking back, the only comparable breakthrough I can recall is the advent of internet search engines in the early 1990s. But as exciting and awesome this breakthrough is, it inspires me still more to ponder on how this is even possible. Let me unpack this.

A survey asked 185 practicing transplant hepatologists across the U.S. who are among the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases members across the U.S. about "unhealthy" alcohol use - alcohol is a class 1 carcinogen, so unless you eat healthy amounts of plutonium or smoke healthy amount of cigarettes 'unhealthy' is a strange qualifier only alcohol gets - and found 26.3 percent screened positive for way too much alcohol use.

Which is higher than the general United States population but ironic since hepatologists are gastroenterologists who focus on liver diseases and alcohol is the leading cause of liver disease. So common that they had to create a non-alcohol version for the rarer cases of fatty liver disease that don't involve drinking.