391
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
392
Sinusoidal Sunlight
The graph of daylight over the course of a year looks like a sine wave, but is it?
393
Yes, we did discover the Higgs
Ben Recht got my attention with a tweet about his blog post "The Higgs discovery did not take place.” I’m generally a fan of Ben’s writing, but I think he’s off base on a number of issues, and I’ll explain why. [Updated Oct 23rd, 2024] Ben's …
394
Can SpaceX land a rocket with 1/2 cm accuracy?
No. But they don’t need to. In preparation for the 5th test flight of Starship, SpaceX announced that they would try to catch the booster using “Mechazilla’s chopsticks.” Later du…
395
Using Euro coins as weights (2004)
Here is a cheap way to obtain a set of standard weights, for measuring weights up to about 100 gram, to an accuracy of about 0.5 gram : Use the coins of the currency of your country. Thus one can make use of the fact that these coins are fabricated in mass production, and because of that have not only a constant shape…
396
Scratches in 2001: A Space Osyssey (2018)
A set of scratches in Stanley Kubrick’s '2001: A Space Odyssey' is visible at the same moments and locations within the frame in most copies of the movie.
397
Cargo Airships Are Happening
I got something wrong; introducing Airship Industries
398
Why does FM sound better than AM?
Frequency modulation (FM) is more robust to noise than amplitude modulation (AM) because static itself is primarily a form of amplitude modulation.
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On the Nature of Time
Stephen Wolfram takes a computational view of time, defining it abstractly, and the implications from computational irreducibility.
401
Research in psychology: are we learning anything?
OR: The mystery of the televised salad
402
Why Is Light So Fast?
The speed of light is much faster, and the energy in ordinary objects far greater, than what daily life accustoms us to. Why? Step 1: new perspectives
403
The real data wall is billions of years of evolution
Careful with those human analogies
404
What P vs. NP is about
We recently made a Polylog video about a nonstandard way of understanding the P vs NP problem. As usual, our goal was to present an underrated idea in a broadly understandable way, while being slig…
405
Is the world really running out of sand?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] If you have to know the answer right away, it’s no; or at least, my goal with this video is to convince you that the world is not running out of sand. But if it were that simple, I wouldn’t be here (right?) and you probably woul
406
Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
A wintertime climate change solution
407
A pilot project in universal algebra to explore new ways to collaborate
Traditionally, mathematics research projects are conducted by a small number (typically one to five) of expert mathematicians, each of which are familiar enough with all aspects of the project that…
408
Italian music through the lens of complex networks
Last year I was talking with a non-Italian, trying to convey to them how nearly the entirety of contemporary Italian music rests on the shoulders of Gianni Maroccolo — and the parts that don’t, should. In an attempt to find a way out of that conversation, they casually asked “wouldn’t it be cool to map out who…
409
Global EV Charging Points with Open Charge Map
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
410
The Gravo-Thermal Catastrophe
In 1962, V. A. Antonov did some remarkable simulations showing that in Newtonian mechanics, gravitating systems can violate the usual rules of thermodynamics. Instead of reaching equilibrium they c…
411
Diatom Arrangements
An odd post. Diatoms are single-celled algae with glass shells, and people arrange them into patterns under a microscope.
412
If I could dissect a sauropod
Luke Horton asked in a comment on a recent post: Given the chance to examine a titanosaur cadaver with your hypothetical army of anatomists, what would you look for first? *FACEPALM* How we’v…
413
We're not going to run out of new anatomy anytime soon
[This post received first place in the 2024 Blog Extravaganza at Adam Mastroianni’s Experimental History. Many thanks, Adam!] I first had this thought in 2019, and I started this draft in ear…
414
The magic of DC-DC voltage conversion (2023)
Resistor-based dividers, linear regulators, buck converters, and other ways to adjust voltages.
415
The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
A substantial philosophical literature explores the " unity of consciousness ": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experiencing the taste of beer and separately…
416
Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
(with thanks to René Zandbergen, Ray Clemens, Roger Easton, Claire Bowern, Bill Endres, and the curatorial and conservation staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) I have some exc…
417
Satellites Spotting Aircraft
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
418
A new rare high-rank elliptic curve, and an orchard of Diophantine equations
I got an email the other day from mathematician Bogdan Grechuk, whose book Polynomial Diophantine Equations: A Systematic Approach ( was recently released. This is to my mind a rather remarkable bo…
419
Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does,...
420
What happens when you touch a pickle to an AM radio tower
A few months ago, our AM radio hot dog experiment went mildly viral. That was a result of me asking my Dad 'what would happen if you ground a hot dog to one of your AM radio towers?' He didn't know, so one night on the way to my son's volleyball practice, we tested it. And it was awesome. There's a video and some…