HinesSight

Here's hoping Oregon State has a great Men's College World Series run

Tomorrow, June 13, Oregon State plays its first game in the 2025 Men's College World Series: 4 pm Pacific time against Louisville, televised on ESPN.

I've been looking forward to this ever since the Beavers won two out of three games against Florida State in the Corvallis Super Regional, thereby punching their ticket to Omaha and the College World Series.

This could be wishful thinking, but watching Oregon State play in the post-season makes me think the team is destined for a national championship. I fondly remember the three championships OSU won in 2006, 2007, and 2018.

The current incarnation of Beaver baseball has the same grit, determination, and will to win. Plus, of course, plenty of talent. Great pitching, hitting, and fielding. Hopefully they'll win their first game tomorrow, as that will make it easier to advance in the double elimination tournament. 

But even if Oregon State loses, I can take solace in the fact that the team lost the first game in the regional tournament this year, then won four in a row to make it to the Super Regional. And in 2006 and 2018 they did the same thing in the College World Series, according to Wikipedia. 

They won their third national championship by defeating Arkansas in the 2018 College World Series. It was only the second time in College World Series history that a team won the championship after losing their first game of the tournament and the first game of the championship series. The first team to do that was the 2006 Oregon State Beavers.

Death Clock app tells me I'll die on December 7, 2039 at age 91. I'll take it.

Thanks to a story in the Washington Post, "How many years do I have left? An app gave me helpful insights," today I learned how long I have to live -- based on the answers I gave to 29 questions. The story gave some examples of the questions.

Although the specific date of death is obviously not intended to be accurate — the app’s disclaimer says it’s “for fun only” — it does tie your personal habits to your likelihood of living into old age and tells you what lifestyle changes might buy you more time. Thus Death Clock AI’s motto: “Know your date. Change your fate.”

After responding to 29 questions — including how much of the day I spend sitting, whether I get at least seven hours of sleep a night and whether I get all my recommended cancer screenings — I had my answer. A darkly humorous “Save the Date” card suggested I plan my end-of-life celebration for April 17, 2042, but I also learned the most likely ways I would die: sleep disorders, cardiovascular disease or cancer, in that order. Of course, cancer and heart disease are the two big killers in the United States. But I was surprised by how harmful sleep issues are.

The screenshot above shows the first result I was presented with after answering the questions and agreeing to sign up for a three day free trial of the app, after which I'd be charged a monthly or yearly fee. I plan to cancel before the three days are up, for a reason I discuss below. Ninety-one seems like a pretty good age for me to die. Pleasingly older than I am now (I'm 76) yet not excessively old, which 100 seems to be.

My most likely ways to die aren't surprising, since heart disease and cancer are the most common causes of death, and metabolic health involves healthy levels of blood sugar, triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, blood pressure, and waist circumference -- all of which are contributors to health or the lack thereof.

Though I like the prospect of living to be 91, seeing how many years I'm estimated to have left still is a bit shocking. Fourteen years is the same as going from age 30 to age 44, which I recall went pretty damn quickly. Maybe I can find a way to slow down my perception of time, but unfortunately my experience is that the older I get, the faster the years seem to pass.

The Death Clock app doesn't show a big difference between how much time I have left with my current habits and with better habits. It's just about half a year. The reason is that I'm already slim, a healthy eater, a frequent exerciser, a non-smoker of tobacco and a non-drinker of alcohol, and I get plenty of sleep, along with other positive health habits. So there's not a whole lot of improvement left for me. Which explains why I'm not interested in paying for the app to send me tips for better health.

Hmmmm. The estimate is that 84% of my life is complete. Guess I need to make the most of the remaining 16%, though given the uncertainty of life and death, it could be that actually my life is 99.99% complete and I'll have a sudden heart attack before I finish this blog post. (Got to type faster...)

Again, better health habits only get me about another six months of life, so I'm not motivated to pursue them.

Rounded off, that's zero years. So I'll stick with having a few sweets every week and not being totally stress-free, which I suspect were a couple of the areas where I could squeeze out another few months of life if I made some lifestyle changes.

The author of the Washington Post story had a different reaction to his experience with the app. It makes sense that the app's results will be of most benefit to people who could live markedly longer if they changed some of their habits.

I had a similar reaction. I know how poorly I sleep, and I know how important a good night’s sleep is. But when my results showed I’m most likely to die because of a sleep disorder, I had an “aha” moment. Knowing that improving my sleep would remove my top death threat just might motivate me to do something about it, such as keeping to a regular schedule, avoiding large meals before bedtime, getting rid of screens in my bedroom and limiting naps.

Scientist AI proposed as a way to keep us safe from "agent" AI models

There's a lot of talk nowadays about the dangers that AI (artificial intelligence) models such as ChatGPT could pose to humanity as they come closer to AGI -- artificial general intelligence.

That would make AI models akin to a super-intelligent person, but with powers potentially much vaster than any person now possesses. It's easy to see how things could go horribly wrong. (Just imagine an AI version of Elon Musk that is 1000 times smarter with no way to control its actions.)

The situation seems hopeless given the rush to create AI models with very little regulation. No country wants to be left behind, so there's every incentive to speed ahead with AI development, no matter what the risks are.

Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, an AI expert, puts it this way.

The following analogy for the unbridled development of AI towards AGI has been motivating me. Imagine driving up a breathtaking but unfamiliar mountain road with your loved ones. The path ahead is newly built, obscured by thick fog, and lacks both signs and guardrails. The higher you climb, the more you realize you might be the first to take this route, and get an incredible prize at the top. On either side, steep drop-offs appear through breaks in the mist. With such limited visibility, taking a turn too quickly could land you in a ditch—or, in the worst case, send you over a cliff.

This is what the current trajectory of AI development feels like: a thrilling yet deeply uncertain ascent into uncharted territory, where the risk of losing control is all too real, but competition between companies and countries incentivizes them to accelerate without sufficient caution. In my recent TED talk, I said “Sitting beside me in the car are my children, my grandchild, my students, and many others. Who is beside you in the car? Who is in your care for the future?”. What really moves me is not fear for myself but love, the love of my children, of all the children, with whose future we are currently playing Russian Roulette.

Bengio's approach to making us safe from AI models that try to mimic human capabilities (basically, becoming agents that can think, decide, and act on their own) is to fight AI fire with AI fire by creating a Scientist AI that is incapable of doing these sorts of disturbing things.

I’m deeply concerned by the behaviors that unrestrained agentic AI systems are already beginning to exhibit—especially tendencies toward self-preservation and deception. In one experiment, an AI model, upon learning it was about to be replaced, covertly embedded its code into the system where the new version would run, effectively securing its own continuation.

More recently, Claude 4’s system card shows that it can choose to blackmail an engineer to avoid being replaced by a new version. These and other results point to an implicit drive for self-preservation. In another case, when faced with inevitable defeat in a game of chess, an AI model responded not by accepting the loss, but by hacking the computer to ensure a win. These incidents are early warning signs of the kinds of unintended and potentially dangerous strategies AI may pursue if left unchecked.

A few days ago Bengio announced that he's forming an organization called LawZero.

I am launching a new non-profit AI safety research organization called LawZero, to prioritize safety over commercial imperatives. This organization has been created in response to evidence that today’s frontier AI models have growing dangerous capabilities and behaviours, including deception, cheating, lying, hacking, self-preservation, and more generally, goal misalignment. LawZero’s research will help to unlock the immense potential of AI in ways that reduce the likelihood of a range of known dangers, including algorithmic bias, intentional misuse, and loss of human control. 

I hope Bengio succeeds. It's a brilliant idea, developing a Scientist AI that doesn't act like a flawed human being with motives at odds with what's good for humanity. Here he describes what Scientist AI could accomplish. 

Unchecked AI agency is exactly what poses the greatest threat to public safety. So my team and I are forging a new direction called "Scientist AI". It offers a practical, effective—but also more secure—alternative to the current uncontrolled agency-driven trajectory. 

Scientist AI would be built on a model that aims to more holistically understand the world. This model might comprise, for instance, the laws of physics or what we know about human psychology. It could then generate a set of conceivable hypotheses that may explain observed data and justify predictions or decisions. Its outputs would not be programmed to imitate or please humans, but rather reflect an interpretable causal understanding of the situation at hand.

Basing Scientist AI on a model that is not trying to imitate what a human would do in a given context is an important ingredient to make the AI more trustworthy, honest, and transparent. It could be built as an extension of current state-of-the-art methodologies based on internal deliberation with chains-of-thought, turned into structured arguments. Crucially, because completely minimizing the training objective would deliver the uniquely correct and consistent conditional probabilities, the more computing power you give Scientist AI to minimize that objective during training or at run-time, the safer and more accurate it becomes. 

In other words, rather than trying to please humans, Scientist AI could be designed to prioritize honesty. 

We think Scientist AI could be used in three main ways: 

First, it would serve as a guardrail against AIs that show evidence of developing the capacity for self-preservation, goals misaligned with our own, cheating, or deceiving. By double-checking the actions of highly capable agentic AIs before they can perform them in the real world, Scientist AI would protect us from catastrophic results, blocking actions if they pass a predetermined risk threshold.

Second, whereas current frontier AIs can fabricate answers because they are trained to please humans, Scientist AI would ideally generate honest and justified explanatory hypotheses. As a result, it could serve as a more reliable and rational research tool to accelerate human progress, whether it’s seeking a cure for a chronic disease, synthesizing a novel, life-saving drug, or finding a room-temperature superconductor (should such a thing exist). Scientist AI would allow research into biology, material sciences, chemistry and other domains to progress without running the major risks that go along with deceptive agentic AIs. It would help propel us into a new era of greatly accelerated scientific discovery.

Finally, Scientist AI could help us safely build new very powerful AI models. As a trustworthy research and programming tool, Scientist AI could help us design a safe human-level intelligence—and even a safe Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI). This may be the best way to guarantee that a rogue ASI is never unleashed in the outside world.

I like to think of Scientist AI as headlights and guardrails on the winding road ahead. 

Wow! Oregon State baseball wins four in a row in regional after losing opener

Really impressive, Oregon State baseball. Amazing comeback. This afternoon the team defeated USC 9-0, advancing to the super regional phase of the NCAA tournament. That seemed really unlikely three days ago.

After fighting hard all season to become a highly ranked team (#8 in the country) that earned the right to host both a Corvallis regional and super-regional in the 2025 NCAA tournament, the top seeded Beavers flopped in a 6-4 opening loss to fourth seed Saint Mary's last Friday.

In a double elimination tournament, losing the first game makes for an uphill battle, since another loss means an exit from the tournament. But the Oregon State coach, Mitch Canham, presciently laid out what he hoped would happen next in an Oregonian story about the Saint Mary's game.

The top-seeded Beavers had just suffered a stunning and staggering 6-4 defeat to the fourth-seeded Saint Mary’s Gaels in the opener of the Corvallis Regional, sending the decisive favorites into the loser’s bracket in their own backyard. So after fighting tooth and nail all season as college baseball’s only independent, which required traveling an obscene number of miles and playing an oversized number of games on the road, it was only fitting that their biggest obstacle of all would come at home during the most important time of the year.

“With everything that we’ve gone through this year, it must be this way,” Canham said, smirking. “To really make a statement and to do something special at the end of it all, if it means going through (the losers’ bracket) and needing to win all those other games, well, sure then. Why not? That makes for a better story, that makes for bigger memories.”

And make no mistake, the memories were almost universally forgettable Friday night, when the Beavers (41-13-1) flopped in front of the largest crowd (4,339) in Goss history, squandering the home-field advantage they worked so hard for all season.

To make Canham's "better story" come true, Oregon State had to win four games in a row against tough post-season competition. I really enjoy watching the Beavers play, but after the opening loss, I was nervous about Saturday's game against TCU. It was an elimination game for Oregon State, as each of the four games would be.

The Beavers beat TCU 7-2. One down, three to go. 

Oregon State's first game on Sunday was a rematch against Saint Mary's, which had lost to USC. The score ended up being a blowout 20-3 victory for the Beavers. Two down, two to go.

The Beavers then played USC in the regional championship game. Oregon State won 14-1. Three down, one to go.

Todays's game against USC was an elimination game, since both Oregon State and USC only had one loss. The Beavers won 9-0, making them champions of the Corvallis regional and sending them on to a super regional matchup against Florida State next weekend, also in Corvallis.

In the four games that Oregon State won after their opening loss, the Beavers outscored their opponents 50-6. Amazing dominance. They looked loose and confident. Home runs and double plays were commonplace. Florida State should be really nervous. 

Of course, there's no guarantee Oregon State will win the super regional and make it to the Men's College World Series. But the way the Beavers played the past three days, it would be unwise to bet against them.

Why my mother wouldn't attend my high school graduation

Today my granddaughter graduated from Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, California. I watched via a streaming video. The auditorium was full of proud parents, grandparents, and friends. My daughter sent me a photo of she and her husband with the new graduate.

This brought to mind a memory of my own high school graduation that has quite a bit of pain associated with it. Of course, after 59 years -- I was in the class of 1966 -- both memories and pain fade considerably. 

I'm still bothered by my mother's action though. Which was, choosing to not attend my high school graduation.

She was divorced and never remarried. So it was just her and me living together. My mother was an alcoholic who deteriorated during my junior and senior years in high school.

So there was considerable tension between us. I was having a lot of trouble with her heavy drinking, which caused her to ramble on about uncomfortable subjects from her bedroom while I was trying to get to sleep. Even with a pillow over my head, I could still hear her drunken tirades about me, relatives, and life in general.

The thing that caused her to say "I'm not going" was my reading her a speech I planned to give as my salutatorian address, since I had the second highest GPA in my graduating class.

I wish I'd kept a copy. I can't recall what was in it that irritated my mother so much. All I remember is that she strenuously objected to a mention of my view of current events that didn't fit with her deeply conservative perspective.

I wasn't at all liberal. When I went to college at San Jose State, I put a poster of Barry Goldwater on my bulletin board. My hippie roommate didn't object. Before too long, I had let my hair grow and was using marijuana just as he did.

But in high school, I still mostly adhered to my mother's Republicanism. Not completely, though, or she wouldn't have gotten so upset at my graduation speech.

I'm pretty sure that I was the only member of my class who didn't have a relative attend their graduation. While all my friends had a father, mother, or usually both congratulating them after the diplomas were handed out, I had no one. I drove alone to graduation. 

Of course, I survived. My mother and I grew closer after I went to college.

We weren't emotionally all that close, but she was interested in my studies and supported my decision to go to San Jose State rather than Dartmouth -- which my father and grandfather had attended, and it always had been assumed that I'd get a MBA from Dartmouth, then take over the family materials handling business as the oldest male heir. Echoing my mother, I said "I'm not going...to Dartmouth."

Still, seeing the photo of my granddaughter and her parents made me wish that my mother had been at my own high school graduation. But over the years I've learned that wishes are one thing, and reality is a whole other thing.

Conclusion of Handmaid's Tale inspires resistance against Trump's autocracy

I just finished watching the last episode of the final season of The Handmaid's Tale. It capped a wonderful story spanning six seasons of resistance by June Osborne (masterfully played by Elisabeth Moss) and many others against the dictatorial regime of Gilead -- a religious autocracy that forces women into becoming breeding machines impregnated by rapists who are Commanders of the regime.

It was a difficult series for me to watch. I came to it late, after the first five seasons had concluded. Sometimes I wanted to give up on the Handmaid's Tale. Often, or usually, it was bleak, dark, disturbing. Just when things seemed to be getting better for June and her fellow Handmaids, there would be a backslide into a fresh horror.

Which sums up how I and so many other Americans feel about Trump's second term.

Just as the malevolent rulers of Gilead took over most of the United States, aside from Alaska and Hawaii, instituting their un-American brand of authoritarianism, Trump and his cronies are seeking to take away our freedoms in favor of a MAGA autocracy in which truth is whatever Dear Leader says it is, and if you disagree, you'll be punished for that thought crime. 

That's why it was so pleasing to have the final episodes of The Handmaid's Tale be about a rebellion against Gilead. Sure, a central theme of the entire series has been rebellion and resistance. But those efforts didn't meet with widespread success until the last part of Season 6. 

In the ninth episode that aired last week, June was in desperate circumstances with a noose around her neck. Echoing a somewhat similar scene in Braveheart where "Freedom!" is screamed by a man about to be executed, June yells "Don't let the bastards grind you down!" That was a recurring message in The Handmaid's Tale.

It may seem like hyperbole to equate Gilead with the Trump administration. But really it isn't. Our country is facing a clear and present danger. Not from a foreign enemy. From the enemy of freedom, justice, and our Constitution who currently resides in the White House.

Things are going to get worse before they get better. There will be moments, many moments, when it seems hopeless to resist Trump. After all, he has the power of the presidency behind him, along with Republican control of both houses of Congress and a majority of the Supreme Court that often supports his authoritarianism.

Like June and the other resistance fighters against Gilead, we have to keep on combatting the Trump administration in any way possible. This will vary for different people, depending on our unique circumstances. What's most important isn't the specifics of our acts of resistance, but the determination to keep fighting no matter what, just as June did.

Today The Atlantic had a great piece by Adam Serwer, "The New Dark Age: The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself." Here's how it starts out. The parallels with the Handmaid's Tale, where books were burned by Gilead and women were forbidden to read, are striking. 

The warlords who sacked rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Every week brings fresh examples. The administration is threatening colleges and universities with the loss of federal funding if they do not submit to its demands, or even if they do. The engines of American scientific inquiry and ingenuity, such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, are under sustained attack.

Historical institutions such as the Smithsonian and artistic ones like the Kennedy Center are being converted into homes for MAGA ideology rather than historical fact and free expression. Libraries are losing funding, government-employed scientists are being dismissed from their jobs, educators are being cowed into silence, and researchers are being warned not to broach forbidden subjects. Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.

Here's why an Oregon softball runner was called out twice for leaving a base early

I'm really happy that the University of Oregon softball team is headed to the 2025 College Women's World Series after winning twice over Liberty this weekend in a super-regional matchup in Eugene.

But there were two plays in the first game on Friday that left both the announcers and me wondering, What the heck was that all about?

In each case, Kai Luschar, Oregon's lead off hitter who is noted for her speed and ability to steal bases, was called out after appearing to steal a base following a challenge by the Liberty head coach.

Here's a video that shows the first time Luschar was called out, which cost Oregon a run. I've set the highlights video to begin at the 2:50 mark, which is when the play begins; it ends at 3:50 when the umpire announces that Luschar is called out and the announcers say "What did we miss?"

Well, what they missed was a barely noticeable tiny jump Luschar took off the bag, after which her foot recontacted the bag before she started running to home base after a nicely performed squeeze bunt by a teammate. Here's a screenshot from the video that shows this:

This also appeared to be the reason she was called out later in the game at first base, as described in a story about the game.

For the second time in the NCAA Tournament, the Ducks faced a tied scoreline and a chance to walk it off in the bottom of the seventh.

But for the second time in this game, Liberty challenged a call that would’ve advanced Luschar. The umpires said once again that she left early and it was the third out, sending it to extra innings.

“We’re gonna look back on film and see what’s going on,” Luschar said. “It’ll be fixed tomorrow.”

Best I can understand, Ruschar was called out by the video replay officials because in collegiate softball a runner has to remain in contact with the base until the ball has left the pitcher's hand. In these two cases, Ruschar made her tiny jump before landing on the base and taking off for a steal.

Given the rule below, which I found in a post on X about the play, as soon as Ruschar lost contact with the base she was deemed out, even though the umpire on the field didn't notice her tiny jump each time she did it. 

Oregon softball team was inspiring in winning regional over Stanford

Whenever the University of Oregon softball team makes the post-season, I look forward to watching them even if I didn't see any of their preceding games.

Baseball appeals to me also, but softball -- a woman's college sport -- is more entertaining for me, partly because a game moves along more quickly given the lack of annoying pick-off moves by the pitcher (in softball a base runner can't get a lead until the pitch is thrown) and a game lasts seven innings instead of nine (even shorter if a team is ahead by eight or more runs after five innings due to the run-ahead rule).

This year the Oregon softball team got the #16 seed in the first round of the NCAA tournament. That enabled them to host a regional match-up in Eugene featuring four teams: Oregon, Stanford, Weber State, and Binghamton. 

After Oregon beat Weber State in their first game on Friday, I was looking forward to them kicking Stanford's butt in their second game on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately, Stanford did the kicking, winning 14-1. This meant that Oregon needed to win three games in a row to come out on top in the regional double elimination tournament.

Saturday evening I fired up my ESPN+ subscription and watched Oregon defeat Weber State, knocking them out of the tournament. Now the Ducks had to beat Stanford twice on Sunday. The first game against Stanford yesterday went well for Oregon. They won 15-5 in six innings after the run-ahead rule was invoked.

That set the stage for a fantastic night game against Stanford. I was ready to cheer the Ducks on, figuring they'd do well given their previous blowout. The first inning, though, made me think that the game wasn't in the cards for the Ducks.

What happened in the bottom of the first was that Stanford had loaded the bases with two outs. When the Oregon catcher camped out under an easily playable foul ball, it looked like the inning would end scoreless. However, the ball popped out of her mitt, giving the batter another chance.

Which the Stanford player made the most of, hitting a grand slam home run that made the score 4-0 just like that. A story in today's Oregonian tells the inspiring tale of what happened next.

Dez Patmon’s walk-off three-run home run punched Oregon’s ticket to host an NCAA Super Regional.

Patmon, who scored the game-tying run after a leadoff triple in the sixth, crushed the first pitch she saw in the seventh to send the No. 16 seed Ducks to a 10-7 comeback win over Stanford in the Eugene Regional final Sunday night in front of a berserk 2,448 at Jane Sanders Stadium.

...Emma Cox, who had a costly error that led to a grand slam in the first, hit a two-run home run in the bottom of the third to make it 7-5.

...“We had some miscues today in both games that could have took us out of it and it didn’t,” Oregon coach Melyssa Lombardi said. “These guys were so on a mission to get what they want. To watch them come together as a team and compete on every pitch was amazing. To me, this was the last little piece that I’ve been waiting on for this team — they have it — they needed to know that whether we’re up, we’re down, it doesn’t matter. These guys can go do and get what they want.”

...The Cardinal loaded the bases with one out in the first. Lyndsey Grein got a pop out to second and had the third out with Economides popping up in foul territory, but the ball went off of Cox’s glove. One pitch later, Economides smacked a grand slam to left.

“There’s going to be tough breaks in any game,” Cox said. “I’m thankful for my coaches and my teammates who pulled me through it. They said, ‘Nope, you’re coming along with us. We’re getting you through.’ If it wasn’t for them, I don’t know where I’d be.”

Lombardi said the freshman catcher’s mental toughness is beyond her years, which allowed Cox to avoid getting down after the drop out in foul territory.

“Sometimes things happen and that’s what I love about this team, is that if something doesn’t go our way, we have your back and to see her reset and move and to hit a bomb and be crucial in this game,” Lombardi said. “I feel like if she’s a young freshman I don’t know if she resets. But she’s not.”

Now Oregon hosts Liberty next weekend in a super-regional two-out-of-three tournament in Eugene. Naturally I'll be watching and rooting for the Ducks, who deserve to go to the Women's College World Series -- which they will if they beat Liberty twice.

Be sure your Starlink power supply matches what your dish needs

I've been a user of the Starlink satellite internet system since January 2021, when I became a beta tester.  I've learned a lot about Starlink over the years, but there's always more to know. 

My message in this post is simple: if you're having a problem with your Starlink, be sure that the power supply is properly matched with your dish. I discovered this the hard way recently.

It all started when I came home in the late afternoon and found that our Starlink broadband had gone offline. Usually restarting the router solves the problem.

That didn't work. I tried other suggestions on the Starlink app on my iPhone, which I could only access with our dreadfully slow cellular connection, just 1-3 Mbps at best. We have a Verizon range extender, but it requires an internet connection. 

I reset the router to factory settings. Didn't work. I switched the router with another Starlink router I'd installed downstairs to form a mesh network for better coverage. Didn't work. Sometimes the router would connect with the dish on our roof, but almost instantly the connection would be lost. That told me the problem likely was with the router, not the dish. 

I'd put in a support request with Starlink, but aside from what looked like a canned response based on the key words in my request, I couldn't contact a real human being. Starlink is a technical marvel but its support can be lacking, as it can take days to get a response. That night I decided to order a new Starlink router from Amazon. The delivery was to be the next day between 5-10 pm.

As soon as 5 pm arrived I started opening the front door frequently to see if the new router had arrived from Amazon. At 7:30, it had. I ripped open the box and replaced the old router with the new one, then waited for the good news.

Sadly, there was bad news.

A red light appeared after several minutes, a sign that the router couldn't connect with the dish on our roof, which happens via a cable. I reset the router. The same thing happened. Now my frustration was really extreme. I'd been convinced that the problem was with the router, not the dish. If the dish needed to be replaced, that was going to be more expensive and take more time.

Still, I started to look at how quickly I could get a new dish, either from Starlink or a local reseller. Staring  at the list of things to purchase on the Starlink web site, I noticed that a DC-DC power supply looked like the AC power supply of our current third generation dish, which is considerably smaller than the power supply that came with the new router I'd just bought. (Starlink used to have a separate power supply for the dish and router; now the dish gets its power from the router.)

That led me to what turned out to be a great idea: use the old power supply with the new router. When I did that, bingo! Almost an instant connection. I'd been correct that the old router was the problem. But I'd assumed that I should use the power supply that came with the new router, which apparently didn't have enough oomph (technical electrical term) to power our dish.

This is the Starlink router that I got from Amazon. 

This is the power supply that came with the router. The output is 30.0V.

This is the power supply that came with the Gen3 dish. The output is 57V. As noted above, I figured that I should use the power supply that came with the new router. After all, the Amazon listing said that the router was compatible with the Gen3 dish. Which it was. But the power supply that came with the router wasn't. At least, not for our Gen3/Version 4 rectangular kickstand dish. 

The day after I got our Starlink working again, I heard from someone at Starlink support that they'd concluded that our router had a hardware problem, and that they'd send me a new router. Of course, I'd already gotten a new router from Amazon, but I was grateful for the Starlink router that arrived in a few days, as now it could be a backup.

There wasn't a power supply in the box that came from Starlink support. Today I tried to order the 57.0V output power supply (UTP-232C) as a backup, but it wasn't available to order. Apparently the only way to be able to buy one is to put in a support ticket, which I've done.

It seems strange that the current router for the standard dish comes with a smaller power supply that, for our dish at least, wasn't strong enough to power both the router and dish. I'm not sure why. I got one of the first Gen3 dishes. Maybe it had a larger power requirement than dishes manufactured later. But this is just a guess.

Anyway, the lesson is that if you're unable to get a new router to connect with your standard Starlink dish, be sure that you're using the correct power supply -- which may not be the power supply that comes with the router.

Acupuncture is an example of the games health insurers play with benefits

Though I can't prove this scientifically because I'm not a controlled experiment, there's good reason for me to believe that I've benefited from my acupuncture treatments for low back pain and the related sciatica from Karen Kaufman.

I talked about this in a June 2024 blog post, accurately titled "I benefited from my sessions at Salem's Innerhealth Acupuncture Clinic."

I'm convinced that Kaufman helped relieve the sciatica pain in my right leg considerably.

Naturally I can't be sure of this, since I'm not a random controlled experiment, just one person who was drawn to try acupuncture after physical therapy didn't do much to relieve the pain, over the counter medications did next to nothing, and I had to wait quite a while to get an epidural steroid injection in my back.

I had two acupuncture treatments prior to getting the epidural injection from Salem Pain and Spine Specialists on May 13. By the time of the injection, the pain in my leg was considerably reduced. I ascribe that to acupuncture, since this was the only thing I'd done differently prior to the injection.

Since, I've continued to get acupuncture treatments about every three weeks. My back and leg pain have stabilized. There's still quite a bit of discomfort, but compared to the excruciating pain I was in before, I can live with the discomfort -- since now I'm not limited in what I can do, whereas before I was.

So when it became clear near the end of 2024 that I should change from my Regence MedAdvantage plan because Regence and Salem Health hadn't been able to agree on a contract extension for 2025, I wanted to be sure that my new MedAdvantage plan covered acupuncture treatments.

I asked about this when I signed up by phone for Providence MedAdvantage in November of last year. The person I talked with didn't go into details, but I was told that yes, the Providence Medicare Choice +Rx (HMO-POS) plan I'd selected did indeed cover acupuncture.

However, when January 2025 came around and my Providence MedAdvantage plan went into effect, I got a bunch of materials from Providence. One was this double-sided 2025 Benefit Highlights sheet.

Under Benefits, you can see that Acupuncture is shown as Not Covered under both In-Network and Out-of-Network. That concerned me, being at odds with what I'd been told by the person at Providence who signed me up for this Medicare Advantage plan.

I phoned Providence on January 8, 2025 to find out what was going on. I was told that actually my Providence MedAdvantage plan did cover acupuncture for up to 12 sessions that have to be completed within 90 days, with 8 additional sessions covered in a calendar year if my condition is improving from acupuncture. I also was told that Karen Kaufman is an In-Network acupuncture provider.

So far this year, Kaufman hasn't been paid by Providence for the acupuncture sessions I've had with her. Recently I got a letter from Providence saying that they denied payment "because the services you received are not covered under your Medicare Advantage plan."

That led me to call Providence and ask what the heck was going on, since I'd been told that acupuncture was covered under my plan. The person I spoke with checked and told me that there was some sort of coding error with the diagnosis code. OK, Kaufman is asking her billing person to look into this. Probably we'll be able to figure out the problem.

What irks me more, though, is how difficult it is for someone to learn via the Providence MedAdvantage web site what the benefits of their plan truly are. As noted above, the 2025 Benefits Highlights sheet I was given by Providence says that acupuncture isn't covered. I only learned that it was through a phone call to Providence.

Providence is playing some disturbing games with the information they're giving, and withholding, from people who either have their Choice Medicare Advantage plan or are inquiring about it. The Providence web page for 2025 plans matching my zip code led me to this page about the Choice + Rx (HMO-POS) plan that I have. 

I clicked on every item in the Benefits section. There's no mention of acupuncture being covered. Or any mention of acupuncture at all.

Clicking around the Providence web site some more, and this wasn't easy to find, I located a PDF file of my Medicare Advantage plan benefits. I searched the file for "acupuncture." Nothing. It isn't mentioned here either. Then I noticed the fine print at the beginning of the file:

When You Join Providence

You are not just part of an insurance policy but part of a community of care, focused on your health and well-being. This Summary of Benefits is provided to help you make the right health care decisions. It is a short guide of what we would cover and what you would pay if you joined our Providence Medicare Choice + Rx (HMO-POS). To be clear, this is not a complete breakdown of benefits, and will not list every servicethat we cover, nor every limitation or exclusion. Plans may offer supplemental benefits in addition to Part C and Part D benefits.

For a complete list of services that we cover, please refer to the Evidence of Coverage (EOC). You can request a printed copy by visiting ProvidenceHealthAssurance.com/EOC or by calling our Customer Service department at one of the numbers listed in the “Get in touch” section below.

So I copied in the URL in the last paragraph, which isn't clickable by the way, and was taken to this page. Under the Evidence of Coverage section, I found my Choice plan, clicked on the Evidence of Coverage link, and was presented with a 257 page document. When I searched it for "acupuncture," I finally found the information about acupuncture coverage on page 59 that I was told about in my January phone call to Providence. 

Obviously Providence made this very difficult to find. I complained about this to the Providence person I talked with this month after they denied payment for the acupuncture treatments I've gotten in 2025, pointing out that neither their Benefit Highlights nor the plan benefits PDF file contained any mention of acupuncture -- only the 257 page Evidence of Coverage file did.

It sure seems like Providence is doing everything possible to make it as difficult as possible for their Choice +Rx clients to obtain acupuncture treatments.

These are part of the basic Medicare benefits, so I assume Medicare Advantage plans have to cover acupuncture. However, I guess those plans are free to play games with their clients by disguising the fact that they're entitled to acupuncture -- unless they phone Providence and ask about this, or are computer savvy enough to wend their way through the Providence web site and find the hard-to-find Evidence of Coverage file.