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All clocks are 30 seconds late
OK, this is going to sound crazy: I believe all clocks are 30 seconds late. Let's get a few things out of the way: this is neither about time zones, nor l...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804
In 2016, an EgyptAir A320 spiraled into the Mediterranean, killing 66 people. Was it an act of sabotage, or something even scarier?
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Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
How Machine-Readable Clinical Guidelines Can Help Standardize Cancer Care
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Spherical Harmonics
3D visualization tool of spherical harmonics. Visualize and compare real, imaginary, and complex components by adjusting the degree l and order m parameters.
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Music and Geometry: Intervals and Scales
An article about music and geometry, in particular about musical intervals and scales and their geometric equivalent ...
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Moon
Interactive article about the Moon
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Our muscles will atrophy as we climb the Kardashev Scale
If you like this, you might also like my Instagram channel Nerd on Bars @nerdonbars where I calculate the power output of various athletes and myself.
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The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio
A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.
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Hacking physics from the back of a napkin (2020)
February 24, 2020. The computational power of a humble napkin is awesome. I discuss three napkin algorithms — dimensional analysis, Fermi estimates, and random walks — and use them to figure out why rain falls, the length of the E. coli genome, and the mass of a proton, among other things. These examples suggest a…
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The case against Google's claims of "quantum supremacy"
The 2019 paper “Quantum supremacy using a programmable superconducting processor” asserted that Google’s Sycamore quantum computer, with 53 qubits and a depth of 20, performed a specific computat…
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The marvelous disappearing capacitor
The performance of photodiode amplifiers can be improved in a clever way.
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Can life emerge around a white dwarf?
Yes the tidal forces would be a problem with the Roche limit and Hill Sphere. The planet might break apart in the life belt around a white dwarf star or crash into the white dwarf. The planet has to be too close to the white dwarf to be in the life belt.
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A pro-science, pro-progress, techno-optimistic health textbook from 1929
"Science and The Way to Health" by Andress and Brown
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Derivative at a Discontinuity
Alok Singh's Blog
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Square roots and maxima
A brief numerical and graphical check on a 3Blue1Brown video.
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Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
It was not easy or quick, and there were so many qualifiers that, for over a decade, I didn’t really think I “deserved” the label. But as I got older, those qualifiers started dropping off one by one, and today I’m convinced that I have perfect pitch. I describe my musical journey and thoughts on what perfect pitch…
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A Short Introduction to Automotive Lidar Technology
A guide to the operating principles, techniques and technology in lidar systems for self driving cars.
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Why I have resigned from the Royal Society
The Royal Society is a venerable institution founded in 1660, whose original members included such eminent men as Christopher Wren, Robert H...
379
Those correction notices, in full
In light of our recent discussion of the unwillingness of authors of published papers to acknowledge their mistakes, I thought I’d post the four correction notices that I’ve felt the need to issue.
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Phased Array Microphone (2023)
A 192-channel phased array microphone, with FPGA data acquisition and beamforming/visualization on the GPU. Phased arrays allow for applications not possible with traditional directional microphones, as the directionality can be changed instantly, after the recording is made, or even be focused at hundreds of…
381
Which power plant does my electricity come from?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In June of 2000, the power shut off across much of the San Francisco Bay area. There simply wasn’t enough electricity to meet demands, so more than a million customers were disconnected in California's largest load shed event si
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Visualizing World War II
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …
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Powering the Mars Base
This post is part of the series on space topics. This post is not the last word on this topic. The usual caveats apply. I’m curious if you have strong opinions on different fuel mixes. A grow…
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Adventures in Probability
I hope everyone had a good weekend. I went on a hike. It was great. Statistics One of my great school regrets, next to “taking three years of business...
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131M American Buildings
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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The unnecessary decline of U.S. numerical weather prediction
This blog provides updated forecasts and comments on current weather or other topics
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Deep dive: the instability of op-amps
A closer look at op-amp feedback loops and the stability criteria for circuits that use them.
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We Can Terraform the American West
Why is there almost nothing on the left hand side of the USA? Water scarcity! We’re missing 300 million Americans. We’re missing 30 global cities west of 100 degrees longitude. We shoul…