211
Rosser’s Theorem via Turing machines
(Thanks to Amit Sahai for spurring me to write this post!) The Background We all remember Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem from kindergarten. This is the thing that, given a formal syste…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 689 posts.
212
Schizophrenia: No Smoking Gun
[Note: despite how some people are spinning this, tobacco is still really really bad and you should not smoke it] I. Schizophrenics smoke. A lot. Depending on the study, about 60-80% of schizophren…
213
What is nuclear waste? Challenges and solutions
Nuclear waste is primarily composed of the atoms that are left over after larger atoms are split in a fission chain reaction. This page explains what it is in detail, what the hazards are, how we store it today, what the long-term plans are, and how much waste we make.
214
Pump Up the Storage
If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or…
215
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Testing
Explore data on COVID-19 testing across the world.
216
China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal
China is adding more coal capacity, but its plants are running less often.
217
Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave
Over their lifetime, battery electric vehicles produce far less global warming pollution than their gasoline counterparts—and they’re getting cleaner.
218
Gerard ’t Hooft, Theoretical Physics as a Challenge
How to become a good theoretical physicist
219
In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
A guest post by David Schneider-Joseph
220
Renewable Energy
Renewable energy sources are growing quickly and will play a vital role in tackling climate change.
221
Seriously bright light vs. winter blahs
Most SAD light therapy lamps are not bright enough. How to get brighter light than any you can buy!
222
Gears
Interactive article explaining how mechanical gears work.
223
Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier
The Wirecutter’s review of the IKEA air purifier is a mishmash of scientific errors, shoddy testing, and self-contradictory logic.
224
AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology
Proteins are essential to life, supporting practically all its functions. They are large complex molecules, made up of chains of amino acids, and what a protein does largely depends on its unique 3D structure. Figuring out what shapes proteins fold into is known as the “protein-folding problem”, and has stood as a…
225
I should have loved biology
In biology class, biology wasn't presented as a quest for the secrets of life. The textbooks wrung out the questing.
226
So You Want to Learn Physics
Over the past few years, ever since writing “If Susan Can Learn Physics So Can You,” I've been contacted by people from all backgrounds who are inspired and want to learn physics, but don't know where to start, what to learn, what to read, and how to structure their studies...this post is a condense
227
Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
Craig Gidney's computer science blog
228
How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
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…
229
The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
230
Why is life expectancy in the US lower than in other rich countries?
Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries despite paying much more for healthcare. What factors may explain this?
231
How death rates from Covid-19 differ between vaccinated and unvaccinated
To understand how the pandemic is evolving, it’s crucial to know how death rates from COVID-19 are affected by vaccination status.
232
Income Inequality (2016)
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
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234
The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
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.
235
The Scaling Hypothesis (2021)
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.
236
Lead Poisoning and Rome
"The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them."
237
GPT-2 as step toward general intelligence (2019)
A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you bac…
238
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
239
Link between health spending and life expectancy: US is an outlier (2017)
Americans have a lower life expectancy than people in other rich countries despite paying much more for healthcare. What factors may explain this?
240
When (if ever) did the Sun set on the British Empire?
It hasn't. Yet. But only because of a few dozen people living in an area smaller than Disney World.