Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 38 posts.
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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…
Virologists have created dozens of chimeric coronaviruses in the lab over the past 20 years.
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.
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…
I. Julian Jaynes’ The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind is a brilliant book, with only two minor flaws. First, that it purports to explains the origin of consciou…
Interactive article explaining how mechanical gears work.
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
Interactive article explaining how cameras and lenses work.
Some might find it ironic that an organization like NASA, who studies our atmosphere, is ok with rockets polluting it so much. Or isn’t it weird that Elon Musk, the same person who is pushing sustainable energy with Tesla also has a rocket company that runs on fossil fuels? So today we are going to do a deep dive into…
If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year. There are a number of ways someone could do this; one commonly suggested scheme was to buy put options that were expected to expire…
I recently learned that cells are extremely crowded and busy places. I knew there's a lot of activity in cells, but I didn't realize just h...
Visualizing the exponential growth of COVID-19 across the world.
What is electricity? This question is impossible to answer because the word " Electricity " has several contradictory meanings. These different meanings are incompatible, and the contradictions confuse everyone. If you don't understand electricity, you're not alone. Even teachers, engineers, and scientists have a hard…
Vitamin D is a big deal. Recent studies have shown that patients with low Vitamin D levels are more likely to die from Covid-19 than their Vitamin D-rich counterparts,(1) and deficiency in the…
NASA just announced the lunar landers for the Artemis program. To everyone’s surprise, SpaceX’s massive Starship is one of three landers NASA chose alongside Blue Origin and Dynetics. Understandably, this is bringing up a lot of questions. Some of which we will answer in my next video/article: “Should NASA just cancel…
This is part 1 of a series where I’ll look at the future costs of clean energy and mobility technologies.
an interactive guide
Replication, citations, power, incentives, and more.
In our previous installment of this podcast, we learned from independent researcher Alexey Guzey that famed sleep researcher Matthew Walker seems to have committed research misconduct in his bestselling book, Why We Sleep. Walker is a University of California professor, Google researcher, and Ted talk star, and his…
Notice. Since this seems to be such a common question I think I should describe my background. I have a PhD in molecular microbiology and I was once a tenured academic (professor). I now work in the biotech sector. I have published a number of peer reviewed papers in virology. If you really want to know more about me…
Color blindness is an inaccurate term. Most color-blind people can see color, they just don't see the same colors as everyone else. There ha...
by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman NOTE FROM IAN: The expert risk communication team of Lanard and Sandman has given me permission to post their very well-considered reply to my question of them just
[This is part one of a two-part series. The second part can be found here: Symmetries in Projective Geometric Algebra .]
