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Origami-Inspired Phased Arrays Are Reshaping the Future of Antennas
Folding antennas into different shapes to create near infinite radiation patterns.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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The Engineering of Landfills
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Puente Hills Landfill outside of Los Angeles, California. The first truckload of trash was dumped here in 1957, and the trucks just kept coming. For more than five decades, if you threw something away in LA County, t
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Strange Attractors (2018)
Interactive Mathematical Applets and Animations
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Can solar costs keep shrinking?
The costs of some parts of solar farms will drop to near zero. But some obstacles remain to make this energy cheaply available everywhere. As a result, the entire energy industry will change. What are those obstacles? How will the industry change?
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Your Immune System Is Not a Muscle
AI, science, education, & ethics
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Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
EDIT: Be warned that this post is angry. If you’re easily offended when someone goes on a rant, then leave now because I’m very unforgiving in several places below. The tone of my writing is unusually harsh, but the people whose work I’m talking about deserve it, and here’s why. Even though I had been working with…
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Why are Texas interchanges so tall?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Dallas High Five, one of the tallest highway interchanges in the world. It gets its name from the fact that there are five different levels of roadways crossing each other in this one spot. In some ways, it’s kind of
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Seven basic rules for causal inference
Personal website of Dr. Peder M. Isager
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Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking?
Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking? Does running burn less calories per distance traveled than wa...
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The Third Atomic Bomb
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Army Air Force had plans to drop a third bomb on August 19, 1945—with more to come if necessary. Fat Man bomb casing at the USAF Museum
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How French Drains Work
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] In February of 2017, one of the largest spillways in the world, the one at Oroville Dam in northern California, was severely damaged during releases from heavy rain. You might remember this. I made a video about it, and then ano
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A primer on the current state of longevity research
4k words, 19 minutes reading time
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Quark Stars
Wow — evidence that very massive neutron stars may have cores made of deconfined quark matter! The idea of a ‘quark star’ is not new, but I didn’t know it was a serio…
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How I got my laser eye injury
It has been brought to my attention that I have never actually written this story down before, merely told it in person to many students for valuable lessons and also for laughs over cocktails. It is a litany of bad ideas from several people that all came together at once to reach out and zap … Continue reading "How I…
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Tritone Substitutions
A ‘tritone substitution’ is a popular trick for making your music sound more sophisticated. I’ll show you a couple of videos with lots of examples. But since I’m mathematici…
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STS-93: We don’t need any more of those (2014)
It was about a quarter past midnight on July 23, 1999 when the Ralph Roe, the Shuttle Launch Director, told Eileen’s crew that they were go for launch and wished them good luck. The launch, which h…
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Humans 1, Chimps 0: Correcting the Record
Behavioural economics, data science and artificial intelligence.
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Turing's topological proof that every written alphabet is finite (2010)
Recently one of my colleagues was reading Alan Turing’s groundbreaking 1936 article “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” This is the article in…
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What Is Entropy?
I wrote a little book about entropy; here’s the current draft: • What is Entropy? If you see typos and other mistakes, or have trouble understanding things, please let me know! An altern…
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The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)
Web site content explains the modern view of entropy change and the dispersal of energy in a process (at a specific temperature). It has been selected for instructors in general and physical chemistry by Dr. Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus (Chemistry) of Occidental College, Los Angeles.
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The Illustrated AlphaFold
A visual walkthrough of the AlphaFold3 architecture, with more details and diagrams than you were probably looking for.
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The Seal Failure in the SRB That Doomed Challenger (2021)
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...
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The zombie misconception of theoretical computer science
In Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having …
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Guide to attending a space launch in person
Learn what it's like to attend a launch, which launches you can attend, how much it costs and other launch questions