31
A Chemical Hunger: Mysteries
The study of obesity is the study of mysteries.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 431 posts.
32
Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…
33
Lethal Neutrinos
How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?
34
Deaths per TWh for all energy sources: Rooftop solar power relatively dangerous
Update: I have written a fairly comprehensive article about steps to lower deaths per terawatt hour . Primary focus on pollution mitigation. Air pollution causes 3.1 million deaths per year
35
GPS and Relativity
People often ask me "What good is Relativity?" It is a commonplace to think of Relativity as an abstract and highly arcane mathematical theory that has no consequences for everyday life. This is in fact far from the truth.
36
Concerns with that Stanford antibody study of coronavirus prevalence
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
37
Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:”There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought …
38
Lab-made? CoV2 genealogy through the lens of gain-of-function research
Virologists have created dozens of chimeric coronaviruses in the lab over the past 20 years.
39
How is efficacy vs. severe disease strong if 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?
A surge involving the rapidly-transmitting Delta variant in heavily vaccinated countries has led to much hand-wringing that the vaccines are not effective against Delta, or vaccine effectivenss wanes after 4-6 months. This has fueled anti-vaccine sentiment suggesting the vaccines are not working, and causing much…
40
Are You Living In a Computer Simulation? (2003)
The original paper that introduced the simulation argument
41
Medical researcher discovers integration, gets 75 citations
(Note: this post is `just for fun;’ no premeds, doctors, researchers, or nobel laureates were meant to be offended in the writing of this post.) The bane of many American physics grad student…
42
SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
The claim that “SSRIs don’t work” or “SSRIs are mostly just placebo” is most commonly associated with Irving Kirsch, a man with the awesome job title of “Associa…
43
The Fermi Paradox
The Fermi Paradox: There should be 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them?
44
Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong
Yesterday several people asked my opinion of a preprint claiming to solve the Graph Isomorphism problem in deterministic polynomial time. I responded: If I read all such papers, then I wouldn’t hav…
45
Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)
Happy birthday to me! Recently, lots of people have been asking me what I think about IIT—no, not the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Integrated Information Theory, a widely-discussed &#…
46
Beware The Man Of One Study
Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease…
47
The Wolfram Physics Project
How does our universe work? Scientist Stephen Wolfram opens up his ongoing Wolfram Physics Project to a global effort. His team will livestream work in progress, post working materials, release software tools and hold educational programs.
48
Galactic-Scale Energy (2011)
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
49
What happens when a basebal goes at nearly the speed of light (what-if.XKCD)
What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
50
D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge
Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige …
51
Feynman's wobbling plate: how to recover from burnout
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance…
52
The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important.
53
Laser Pointer
If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
54
PHYS771 Quantum Computing Since Democritus
University of Waterloo, Fall 2006 Tuesdays and Thursdays, 1:00-2:30pm BFG Building, 2nd floor seminar room (BFG2125)
55
Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
A carousel is a rotating set of images. Use the previous and next buttons to change the displayed slide
56
Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
57
A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
58
Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
59
The bitter truth about fructose alarmism.
Dr. Robert Lustig, professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco, is the star of the video above. While he presents some material that’s scientifically sound, he also makes enough errors to warrant a healthy dose of criticism. There’s a ton of material he goes over, so instead of writing a…
60
