Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 689 posts.
Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today. None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true. What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.
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…
Aviation accounts for 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions. But it has contributed around 4% to global warming to date.
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…
This page contains a photomicrograph of the surface of a Digital VAX microprocessor containing a phrase written in Russian.
Fossil fuels were key to industrialization and rising prosperity, but their impact on health and the climate means that we should transition away from them.
Understand the risks of taking high doses of this vitamin in supplement form.
Cancers are one of the leading causes of death globally. Are we making progress against them?
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
Why the air you breathe matters, and what to do about it.
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
A magnifying glass concentrates light on a small spot. As many mischevious kids can tell you, a magnifying glass as small as a square inch in size can collect enough light to start a fire. A little Googling will tell you that the Sun is 400,000 times brighter than the Moon, so all we need is a 400,000-square-inch…
All modern language models sometimes act like they have emotions. What’s behind these behaviors? Our interpretability team investigates.
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
The world loses 5 million hectares of forest each year. What activities are driving this?
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
Our impact on climate change is not just about emissions that occur today. How much we emitted in the past also matters.
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…
Globally, we emit around 50 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases yearly. Where do these emissions come from? We take a look, sector-by-sector.
Nuclear is expensive, but it should be cheap
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
Which 20 countries emit the most carbon dioxide? You may be surprised.
TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-long progress f...
A cost-benefit analysis of the marginal cost of IVF-based embryo selection for intelligence and other traits with 2016–2017 state-of-the-art.
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
