"Researchers in Brazil have found that a simple vitamin D supplement may help chemotherapy work better in women with breast cancer. The study suggests that low doses of the vitamin could improve treatment outcomes …

"The research, funded by FAPESP, included 80 women over the age of 45 who were preparing to begin treatment … Participants were split into two equal groups. One group received a daily dose of 2,000 IU (international units) of vitamin D, while the other group was given placebo tablets.

"All of the women underwent neoadjuvant chemotherapy, a treatment given before surgery to shrink tumors and make them easier to remove.

"After six months, the difference between the two groups was notable. Among those taking vitamin D, 43% experienced complete disappearance of their cancer following chemotherapy. In comparison, only 24% of those in the placebo group saw the same result."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/04/260428004119.htm

"Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto documents how aviation-style checklists, which treat error as a predictable product of complex systems rather than individual failure, were resisted for decades by physicians who experienced them as an affront to professional judgment. The evidence that checklists reduced deaths in surgical settings was not in dispute. The resistance was to the implication that a physician’s individual competence and experience were insufficient, and that standardized protocols designed by committees should constrain clinical practice.

The legal profession’s relationship with access to justice follows a similar pattern. Legal ethics in the United States has historically focused on conflicts of interest, attorney-client confidentiality, and competence, but not on cost. The profession’s code of conduct treats affordability as a matter of individual attorney discretion rather than a structural obligation."
https://third-bit.com/2026/04/25/software-taboos/

"Through her research, she uncovered four key features that, when combined together, help hold people on the gambling devices. These features trigger a trancelike or dissociative state, known as a "machine zone" or "dark flow," in which people lose track of their sense of time and place.

"To Schüll's surprise, around the early 2010s, the same features began to appear on phone and tablet apps, including social media, games and video-streaming platforms. "These are not normal products for kids like a pair of shoes or a toy," she says. "They create a relationship with kids."

"Here are four features that create that superglue…"

#addiction #gambling #SocialMedia #screens
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/21/nx-s1-5776665/surprising-origin-features-superglue-kids-adults-to-screens

This grayish tabby short-hair male cat with blue eyes, called "smoky" , is lost in the Beaverton/Aloha area. If seen, message me and I’ll relay a report to the owner.

"those solar panels had to go somewhere. Mostly, they ended up in Pakistan, dumped there at such a massive discount that the country solarized virtually overnight. Pakistani solar installers learned their trade from Tiktok videos set to Tamil film soundtracks, and unwired the country so thoroughly that today, the national power company is in danger of going bust because no one buys their electricity from the grid anymore. Pakistani bridal dowries now routinely include four panels, an inverter and a battery:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/a-tale-of-two-countries

"This is an inversion of the normal order of things, in which rich countries get all the good stuff first, and poor countries like Pakistan get scraps after we've gorged ourselves."
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/20/praxis/

"–Andrew Solender: “By my count, there are now over 50 House Democrats, along with two Senate Democrats, who have called for Trump to be impeached or removed via the 25th Amendment for his post on Iran.”"

The cabinet members wearing the (clown)shoes #Trump bought for them are NOT going to do a 25th Amendment process.
https://azsf.net/cwdaily/2026/04/08/everyone-breathes-a-sigh-of-relief-for-the-moment/

"Think of a worker at a chip fab who finds themself with a load of microprocessors that have failed QA because they become unreliable when they're run above a certain clockspeed. If that worker knows enough about the downstream customers' processes, they can contact one of those customers and offer the chips for use in a lower-end product, which can save the fab millions and make millions more for the customer.

"This just happened to Apple, who seized upon a lot of "binned" microprocessors that were headed to the landfill and designed the Macbook Neo (a new, cheap, low-end laptop) around them, salvaging the defective chips by running them at lower speeds. The result? Apple's most successful laptop in years, which has now sold so well that Apple has exhausted the supply of defective chips and is scrambling to fill orders:"
https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/08/process-knowledge-vs-bosses/

"Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug:

Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot"
https://sixcolors.com/link/2026/04/macs-crash-after-49-days-of-uptime/

"What Trump understands intuitively, from decades of practice, is that his base does not track contradictions. They track emotional states. The profanity, the exclamation points, the theatrical deadlines — these are stimulants, engineered to produce a feeling of vicarious toughness in people who are frightened and angry. The cycle is familiar to anyone who has lived inside a narcissistic system: manufacture urgency, perform dominance, declare victory, repeat. The audience never notices the goalposts moved because each new threat erases the memory of the last one.

"[…] There is no endgame. There is only the need — raw, insatiable, and utterly indifferent to the consequences for the people of Iran, for global oil markets, or for the American service members already dying in this war — to be seen as powerful."
https://alisav.substack.com/p/trumps-batshit-iran-threats-are-not

it has become glaringly obvious that my Mac laptop is too old -- it's slower than my relatively-new iPad. I'll have to update the hardware soon. No recommendations needed.