Author: DOuG pRATt

Frozen in Place

There were a couple of spots on my leg the dermatologist wanted to biopsy. They appeared identical to me, but one of them was nothing and the other was pre-cancerous. The treatment was a blast of freezing liquid nitrogen.

The Liquid Nitrogen instructions:

  • A small blister may form on the areas treated. If the blister is large it may be ruptured with a sterilized needle. Sometimes the blister may be hemorrhagic (blood filled).
  • It may take anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks for the areas treated to form a scab and fall off.

Hmm. To rupture or not to rupture? I’ll contemplate what to do while awaiting the arrival of Snowzilla.

Two of My Favorite Things

At the NCS conference last August, Colleen Doran and I discussed how, generally, comic book people are more familiar with comic strips than comic strip people are familiar with comic books. Today’s Jumble has an exception to that generality.

Boomer boy that I am, Marvel Comics from the Sixties are one of my favorite things. Another is, of course, the Beatles.

LBJ was notorious for strong-arming legislators into voting his way. What if he had been a flat-out authoritarian president, like Trump? Could he have kept the Beatles out of America?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/could-president-deploy-wartime-law-203749200.html

AI AIEE!

White collar jobs are stuck in place. Labor growth is sluggish. How much of this is from the effect of AI-related productivity isn’t clear. Wall Street Week had a worthwhile discussion last month.

One casualty of AI is the tech site Stack Overflow.

https://boingboing.net/2026/01/14/stack-overflow-is-dead-and-its-toxic-community-helped-kill-it.html

The AI gold rush is literally tearing up acreage across the country.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/14/1131253/data-centers-are-amazing-everyone-hates-them/

Do all of the companies competing for AI supremacy really need to invest so much money in those data centers?

https://www.businessinsider.com/big-short-michael-burry-warren-buffett-ai-boom-nvidia-palantir-2026-1

The solid-state drives in those data centers have undeniable advantages over hard disk drives. Yet they can consume as much, or more, electricity than the old mechanical disks.

https://www.windowscentral.com/hardware/ssd-vs-hdd-we-know-about-speed-but-what-about-power-consumption