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The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Critical Thinking
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 689 posts.
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Gravitational Lensing to Observe Ancient Earth
I was at SFMOMA with Erika a few weekends ago and we saw an exhibit showing the work of Lebbeus Woods – a futuristic architect and illustrator.
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The Dipole Drive: A New Concept for Space Propulsion
It’s a fascinating concept but I’d like to see a comparison toDr. Young Bae’s laser thruster concept for solar system travel.
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The False Promise of Chomskyism
Important Update (March 10): On deeper reflection, I probably don’t need to spend emotional energy refuting people like Chomsky, who believe that Large Language Models are just a laughable fa…
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When Kitty Litter Caused a Nuclear Catastrophe
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Late in the night of Valentine’s Day 2014, air monitors at an underground nuclear waste repository outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, detected the release of radioactive elements, including americium and plutonium, into the environme
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Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
1. Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion.
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Space Emerging from Quantum Mechanics
The other day I was amused to find a quote from Einstein , in 1936, about how hard it would be to quantize gravity: “like an attempt to breathe in empty space.” Eight decades later, I think we can still agree that it’s hard.
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The inspection paradox is everywhere (2015)
I have updated this article with new data, better code, and friendlier data visualization. You can read the new version here . Th...
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Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score
I. The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder. The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief fora…
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Homemade synthetic aperture radar
Second version of the 6 GHz FMCW radar now with SAR images
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Infra-Red, in Situ (Iris) Inspection of Silicon
Cryptography tells us how to make a chain of trust rooted in special-purpose chips known as secure elements. But how do we come to trust our secure elements? I have been searching for solutions to this thorny supply chain problem . Ideally, one can directly inspect the construction of a chip, but any viable inspection…
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Death by vegetable oil: What the studies say (2020)
In a world without vegetable oil, we may be twenty pounds lighter, have half the amount of heart disease and cancer, live longer, think clearer, feel better, and be happier and less depressed.
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Weird pupils let octopuses see their colorful gardens
Scientists propose unique way in which ‘colorblind’ cephalopods can detect color
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This is what the year actually looks like (2018)
A few weeks back, I asked the Norwegian public what the year looks like inside their heads. It led to a deluge of responses. Here's a summary of more than 75 000 month placements, and nearly 40 000 questionnaire responses.
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The Newton hypothesis: Is science done by a small elite?
In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following …
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Why it takes so long to get data back from New Horizons
As I write this post, New Horizons is nearing the end of a weeklong optical navigation campaign. The last optical navigation images in the weeklong series…
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Unusual Locomotives
The Douglas Self Site, steam locomotive, Shay, Climax, Mallet, Garratt, Turbomotive, Reid-Ramsey
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Adult Neurogenesis – A Pointed Review
[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article. A recent study came out contradicting some of the claims mentioned here. See here for study, this comment for som…
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Reversing Tooth Decay with Good Diet
In the last post, I discussed the research of Drs. Edward and May Mellanby on the nutritional factors affecting tooth formation. Dr. Mellan...
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Richard Dawkins' response to “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?"
Essentialism—what I’ve called "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind"—stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle, or a right triangle, were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect…
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The calculus of caffeine consumption
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
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