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What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?
Fossil fuels are the dirtiest and most dangerous energy sources, while nuclear and modern renewable energy sources are vastly safer and cleaner.
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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“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
Note: I link to a bunch of paywalled studies in this essay. Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. For the clearest example of deliberate data manipulation, see how Walker edits out the data that contradicts his argument from the graph…
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What can a technologist do about climate change?
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities , I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our…
4
Orbital Speed
What if a spacecraft slowed down on re-entry to just a few miles per hour using rocket boosters like the Mars-sky-crane? Would it negate the need for a heat shield?
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CO₂ emissions
How much CO₂ does the world emit? Which countries emit the most?
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Nicotine as a useful stimulant
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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Results of XKCD Color Survey
Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter int…
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Mechanical Watch
Interactive article explaining how a mechanical watch works.
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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings…
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Coronavirus (COVID-19) Vaccinations
Explore data on COVID-19 vaccinations across the world.
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Safe to swim in nuclear spent fuel pool?
What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
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The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
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On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
Chomsky's remarks were in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods. This essay is a response to Pinker and Chomsky, and will address these questions:
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Breakdown of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions by sector
How much do electricity, transport, and land use contribute to different greenhouse gas emissions?
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The control group is out of control (2014)
I. Allan Crossman calls parapsychology the control group for science. That is, in let’s say a drug testing experiment, you give some people the drug and they recover. That doesn’t tell …
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Quantum mechanics as a generalization of probability (2007)
There are two ways to teach quantum mechanics. The first way -- which for most physicists today is still the only way -- follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then you…
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Death rates from energy production per TWh
Death rates are measured based on deaths from accidents and air pollution per terawatt-hour of electricity.
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Poverty
In order to make progress against poverty in the future, we need to understand poverty around the world today and how it has changed.
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Reverse Engineering the Source Code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine
Translations: ελληνικά / عربى / 中文 (Weixin video, Youtube video) / 粵文 / bahasa Indonesia / český / Català / český / Deutsch / Español / 2فارسی / فارسی / Français / עִברִית / Hrvatski / Italiano / Magyar / Nederlands / 日本語 / 日本語 2 / नेपाली / Polskie / русский / Português / Română / Slovensky / Slovenščina / Srpski /…
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Scott and Scurvy: How the cure for scurvy was lost
Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:
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Deaths per TWH by energy source
I wrote this back in 2008 and with one new death that is somewhat nuclear energy related (a death at one of the japanese nuclear plants following the 8.9 earthquake) the statistics are not changed. Japan should have had sealed backup diesel generators or updated some of their designs. However, nuclear still compares…
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Energy Production and Consumption
Explore data on how energy production and use varies across the world.
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FedEx Bandwidth
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
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Nootropics
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
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Melatonin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know (2018)
[I am not a sleep specialist. Please consult with one before making any drastic changes or trying to treat anything serious.] Van Geiklswijk et al describe supplemental melatonin as “a chrono…
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Excess mortality from March to December of 2020
Explore data on COVID-19 excess mortality across the world.
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Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future
I knew the future would be shocking but this is a whole other level.
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Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
[Previously in series: Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know; SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, etc. This is all preliminary and you should not take it as a rea…
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You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local
“Eat local” is a common recommendation to reduce your diet's carbon footprint. How does the impact of what you eat compare to where it comes from?