Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 689 posts.
Very few think the world is making progress. In this article, we look at the history of global living conditions and show that the world has made immense progress in important aspects.
A few weeks ago, Hensen et al., of the Delft University of Technology and Barcelona, Spain, put out a paper reporting the first experiment that violates the Bell inequality in a way that closes off…
INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL FILTERS WITH AUDIO APPLICATIONS
The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.
arXiv’s goal is equitable access to scientific research for all – and to achieve this, we have been working to make research papers more accessible for arXiv…
Interactive article explaining how ships float and maintain their stability.
Can optical illusions take you outside the human color gamut?
Peter Denton, Stephen Parke, Xining Zhang, and I have just uploaded to the arXiv the short unpublished note “Eigenvectors from eigenvalues”. This note gives two proofs of a general eige…
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Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. SpaceX has been working on some variant of the Big Falcon Rocket for almost a decade, with a publicly an…
MIT engineers have flown the first silent, fuel-free “ion plane.” The light aircraft is the first plane to fly with no propellers, turbine blades, or other moving parts.
More Updates (Oct. 12): Jeffrey Ketchersid has used Claude Code agents to show that BusyBeaver(10) exceeds Graham’s number, beating the previous best result that BB(13) does so. In response t…
You can make a DIY air purifier in 30s. To test if it works, I generated smoke, and measured how well it removes tiny particles.
The notorious Jacobian conjecture can be formulated concretely over the complex numbers as follows. Conjecture 1 (Jacobian Conjecture) Let $latex {F:{\bf C}^n \rightarrow {\bf C}^n}&fg=000000$ …
Solving a longstanding mystery, MIT experiments reveal two forms of turbulence interacting. The new finding may explain heat loss in nuclear fusion reactors.
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
There is a good reason for colonizing another planet, which is to avoid extinction if the Earth is hit by a 10km or larger asteroid, as has happened many times in the Earth's history. Colonization of Mercury appears to be a very real and practical possibility, whereas colonization of Mars or the other planets, moons…
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
On the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Stephen Wolfram discusses the nature of space and time, and fundamental theory of physics.
About 80 people pointed me to this post by Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, and Leif Nelson about a 2012 article, “Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end.” Apparently some of the data in that paper were faked; see for example here:
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
This blog is a direct follow up of Starship Is Still Not Understood, and is part of the series on popular misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. I think it is relatively s…
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
