1
Nootropics
Notes on nootropics I tried, and my experiments
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 37 posts.
2
Life Expectancy
People are living longer across the world, but large differences remain. Explore global data on life expectancy and how it has changed over time.
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World Population Growth
Explore global and national data on population growth, demography, and how they are changing.
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Child and Infant Mortality
Child mortality remains one of the world’s largest problems and is a painful reminder of work yet to be done. With global data on where, when, and how child deaths occur, we can accelerate efforts to prevent them.
5
Economics of Nuclear Power
Nuclear power is cost competitive with other forms of electricity generation, except where there is direct access to low-cost fossil fuels. In assessing the economics of nuclear power, decommissioning and waste disposal costs are fully taken into account.
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Plans For New Reactors Worldwide
Nuclear power capacity worldwide is increasing steadily. Most reactors under construction are in the Asian region. Significant further capacity is being created by plant uprating.
7
Beware The Man Of One Study
Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease…
8
A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
9
Carcinogenicity of red and processed meat
Red meat refers to all mammalian muscle meat, including beef, veal, pork, lamb, mutton, horse and goat.
10
Economic Inequality
How is inequality measured, who produces key databases, and what does the data tell us?
11
Nuclear Power in China
China has become largely self-sufficient in reactor design and construction, as well as other aspects of the nuclear fuel cycle. The strong impetus for nuclear power in China is increasingly due to air pollution from coal-fired plants.
12
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…
13
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
14
Famines
In many parts of the world famines have been common in the past. What causes famines? How can famines be averted?
15
Human Height
The average height of a population can inform us about the nutrition and living conditions of populations in the past for which we have little other data.
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Hunger and Undernourishment
What are the consequences of undernourishment and how can we make progress against hunger and undernourishment?
17
Guns and suicide: A fatal link
In the United States, suicides outnumber homicides almost two to one. Perhaps the real tragedy behind suicide deaths—about 30,000 a year, one for every 45
18
The Relativistic Rocket
Thanks to Alan R. Wilson for correcting a two-word typo involving GPS satellites. Thanks to Aron Yoffe for suggesting the newtonian comparison. Thanks to Tom Fuchs for suggesting the analogy to the stone thrown upwards. Fuel numbers added by Don Koks, 2004. Updated by Phil Gibbs, 1998. Thanks to Bill Woods for…
19
The IQ Halo effect
On desirable correlates of intelligence
20
Shuffleboard at McMurdo
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
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Can computers become conscious?: My reply to Roger Penrose
A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. T…
23
How to assign partial credit on an exam of true-false questions?
Note: the following is a record of some whimsical mathematical thoughts and computations I had after doing some grading. It is likely that the sort of problems discussed here are in fact well studi…
24
HARC
We’re excited to announce YC Research’s newest project: the Human Advancement Research Community (HARC). This came out of a conversation that started between Alan Kay and me more than a year ago about how to invent future computing technologies; I’m delighted to finally be officially working with him and his group. He…
25
New finding may explain heat loss in fusion reactors
Solving a longstanding mystery, MIT experiments reveal two forms of turbulence interacting. The new finding may explain heat loss in nuclear fusion reactors.
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The Villain of CRISPR
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
27
Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work?
How Stephen Wolfram helped with the theory of interstellar travel, communication with aliens and questions from the actors in “Arrival”, the movie.
28
Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
Some people on the internet are getting very excited at the (unconfirmed) reports of an "Earth-like" exoplanet orbiting Proxima Centauri , a mere 4.25 light-years away from Earth. If correct, the planet is orbiting in the liquid water zone around our nearest stellar neighbour and is of the same order of mass as the…
29
What is the roundest country?
We can define roundness in many ways. For example, as you may know, the circle is the shape that given a fixed perimeter maximizes the area. This definition has many problems. One of the problems is that countries generally have chaotic perimeters (also known as borders), so they tend to be much longer than they seem…
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Elon Musk on How to Build the Future
How To Build The Future: Elon Musk discusses what high value ideas people should work on today and what's important for future of the humanity, including artificial intelligence and genetics.