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Mindblowing dissertations
We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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"Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People", 7 Years Later
In the post about GPT-4V, I mentioned the paper “Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People” (https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00289) by Brenden Lake, Tomer Ullman, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Samuel Gershman.
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Make your own pyramid salt crystals
This guide teaches you how to make pyramid salt crystals at home. Follow these simple steps to turn regular salt into premium artisan salt.
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Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.
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Passive Solar Water Desalination
I know we are supposed to be worried about the world supply of fresh water. I have been hearing that at least for the last 40 years, and the statistics are alarming. According to the Global Commission on the Economics of Water: "We are seeing the consequences not of freak events, nor of population growth
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Days of Awe: The clinical trial drug that might save my husband's life
"G’mar Chatimah Tovah” – May you be inscribed into the Book of Life
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The world needs computational social science
The world needs computational social science, and it is not only, or even primarily, about the AI revolution. The reasons follow below and I also cover what a computational social scientist should …
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Pharmacokinetics: Drug development's broken stair
There’s a blog post that floats around the Internet about the metaphor of the broken stair.
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Circles do not exist
Many logos, drawings and other graphical designs have the following shape in it. What is this shape? If you thought: "Ah-ha! I'm smart and r...
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A mathematical formalization of dimensional analysis (2012)
Mathematicians study a variety of different mathematical structures, but perhaps the structures that are most commonly associated with mathematics are the number systems, such as the integers $late…
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Can I take ducks home from the park?
16 queries and 6 language models
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Solar
I spent some time (in Fall 2023) reading about solar deployment. Some facts that struck me:
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What Is Dimensional Analysis?
Mathematics is famously concerned with numbers . However, most of the physical quantities that we encounter in everyday experience cannot be expressed as numbers alone.
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A CD Spectrometer (2006)
A simple spectrometer can be built from a CD and a box. Cut a slit on one side of the box. Place the CD on the other side with about 60 degree angle. Look down into the openning on the box. The slit should not be too wide, otherwise the spectrum lines will be blurred. It should not be too narrow either, otherwise the…
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The Relativity of Wrong (1989)
I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important.
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How large is that number in the Law of Large Numbers?
All large numbers are large, but some are larger than others
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What is an emotion? William James’s theory of how our bodies affect our feelings
“A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity.”
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Space travel via tether between asteroids
I wish I knew if my math was correct...
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Photogrammetry on commercial flights (2021)
Airplane window seats are great! Not only are they more comfy and easier to take a nap in, but they also have the most quaint form of in-flight entertainment: The outside world!
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I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
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How Correlated Are You?
This post is an offshoot from Chapter 1 of Probably Overthinking It, which is available for pre-order now! Suppose you measure the arm and leg lengths of 4082 people. You would expect those measurements to be correlated, and you would be right. In the ANSUR-II dataset, among male members of the armed forces, this…
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How far can you jump from a swing?
In this post I derive the physics of pumping a swing and the physics of jumping from a swing. Then, using both pieces I compute the optimal strategy of jumping from a swing to maximize the traveled distance. I propose this game as a new Olympic sport.
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Visualizing Neural Networks
A visual example-focused introduction to neural networks.
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Fusion Foolery
Great. The fusion hype is bad enough already. Now its resurgence is going to interrupt the series of posts I’m in the middle of publishing in order for this post to be “timely.”
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The 2002 Überlingen midair collision
The story of a tragedy which touched the hearts of the world and forced the industry to ask whether it had done enough to keep planes…