Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 431 posts.
Ernst Stuhlinger wrote this letter on May 6, 1970, to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration. A…
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
[Previously in sequence: Epistemic Learned Helplessness] I. “Culture is the secret of humanity’s success” sounds like the most vapid possible thesis. The Secret Of Our Success by …
Graham's number is so big, we need a whole new set of tools to even discuss it.
Fill this in yourself.
Presented in an experimental mnemonic medium that makes it almost effortless to remember what you read
Comic about a classic experiment into drug addiction science: Rat Park. Would rats take drugs if given a stimulating environment and company?
When an experimental study states "The group with treatment X had significantly less disease ( p = 1%)", many people interpret this statement as being equivalent to "there is a 99% chance that if I do treatment X it will prevent disease." This essay explains why these statements are not equivalent. For such an…
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?
Dendronization – Evolving into a tree-like morphology. (In the style of “carcinization”.) From ‘dendro’, the ancient Greek root for tree.
[ 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.]
This is the introduction to a four-part series of posts detailing evidence of fraud in four academic papers co-authored by Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino. In 2021, we and a team o…
Interactive article explaining how an internal combustion engine works.
There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.
This text is designed to accompany your study of introductory digital signal processing. 1 It’s an eccentric piece of not-so-rigorous literature with a preoccupation for explaining things using interactive visualizations, animations and sound. 2 My goal is to explain the Discrete Fourier Transform using a miniature…
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
SpaceX's new raptor engine is a methane fueled full flow staged combustion cycle engine and its so hard to develop, no engine like this has ever flown before!Now this topic can be really intimidating so in order to bring the Raptor engine into context, we’re going to do an overview of a few common types of rocket…
If you regularly read cognitive science or psychology blogs (or even just the lowly New York Times!), you’ve probably heard of something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger e…
There’s been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and no…
What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?
Self-experiment with sub-psychedelic doses of LSD; no benefit
This post is co-authored with a team of researchers who have chosen to remain anonymous. They uncovered most of the evidence reported in this post. These researchers are not connected in any way to…
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?
My book, Sous Vide for the Home Cook , came out in 2010. You can order the second edition directly from the US publisher. My book has over 200 delicious recipes for beef, pork, lamb, game, chicken, turkey, duck, fish, shellfish, vegetables, fruits, legumes, ice cream bases, sauces, and yogurt. I first cover the basics…
I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and perf…
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
