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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?
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 35 posts.
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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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FedEx Bandwidth
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
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Melatonin
Melatonin improves sleep, & sleep is valuable
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Good sleep, good learning, good life
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Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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U.S. could feed 800 million people with grain that livestock eat, Cornell ecologist advises animal scientists
From one ecologist's perspective, the American system of farming grain-fed livestock consumes resources far out of proportion to the yield, accelerates soil erosion, affects world food supply and will be changing in the future.
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Ten Signs a Claimed Mathematical Breakthrough is Wrong
Yesterday several people asked my opinion of a preprint claiming to solve the Graph Isomorphism problem in deterministic polynomial time. I responded: If I read all such papers, then I wouldn’t hav…
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D-Wave: Truth finally starts to emerge
Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige …
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Laser Pointer
If every person on Earth aimed a laser pointer at the Moon at the same time, would it change color?
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Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
A carousel is a rotating set of images. Use the previous and next buttons to change the displayed slide
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LSD microdosing: a randomized, blind self-experiment
Self-experiment with sub-psychedelic doses of LSD; no benefit
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A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking
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…
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Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 2 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook, also mirrors a 2022 article in Nature Physics . . ]
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An Intuitive (and Short) Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem
Bayes’ theorem was the subject of a detailed article. The essay is good, but over 15,000 words long — here’s the condensed version for Bayesian newcomers like…
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Impact of fluoride on neurological development in children
July 25, 2012 -- For years health experts have been unable to agree on whether fluoride in the drinking water may be toxic to the developing human brain.
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Dual N-Back Meta-analysis
Does DNB increase IQ? What factors affect the studies? Probably not: gains are driven by studies with weakest methodology like apathetic control groups.
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Hubble
If the Hubble telescope were aimed at the Earth, how detailed would the images be?
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How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
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English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited
Here's what we can do with today's computing power (using publicly available data and the processing power of my own personal computer; I'm not relying on access to corporate computing power):
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On Hyperloop
Dr. Drang (And now it's all this)2013167 points203 commentscited by 6Society, Policy & Culture details
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What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow? (2006)
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?
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Mercury Colonization
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…
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Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings
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…
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Cryptography is a science, not engineering
If we were still in the 1990s, I would agree with Thomas. 1990s cryptography was full of holes, and the best you could hope for was to know how your tools were broken so you could try to work around their deficiencies. This was a time when DES and RC4 were widely used, despite having well-known flaws. This was a time…
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The Existential Risk of Mathematical Error
Mathematical mistake/error-rates limit our understanding of rare risks and ability to defend against them.
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Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home
University of Washington researchers have shown it's possible to leverage Wi-Fi signals around us to detect specific movements without needing sensors on the hu