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A 189 Year Old Limitation on Inductor Size Has Been Broken (2018)
One of the three basic circuit elements just got a lot smaller for the very first time, in what promises to be a trillion-dollar…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
1112
Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches
I was personally useless for most of the Spring of 2020. There was a period of time, though, after the peak in coronavirus cases here in NYC and before the onslaught of police violence here in NYC that I managed to scrounge up the motivation to do something other than drink and maniacally refresh my Twitter feed. I…
1113
Vitamin D, part 2: Shannon's story
How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a…
1114
Open Problems in Robotics
Robotics is one of those things the business funny papers regularly wonder about; it seems like consumer robotics is a revolutionary trillion dollar market which is perpetually 20-years away -more…
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Reversing Mental Age with Psychedelics
INTRODUCTION There are some overlaps in the effects of serotonergic psychedelic drugs such as LSD, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms and also the state of mind that newborn infants and young children ar…
1117
Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)
An explorable blog post about entropy, with sheep.
1118
Vitamin D, part 1: back to basics
Vitamin D is a big deal. Recent studies have shown that patients with low Vitamin D levels are more likely to die from Covid-19 than their Vitamin D-rich counterparts,(1) and deficiency in the…
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The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia
The event that would eventually lead to Isaac Newton writing and publishing his magnum opus, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), too…
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How Pulse Oximeters Work (2015)
Principles of how pulse oximetry works explained without using complicated physics.
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What if the Trinity test had failed?
If the first nuclear weapons test had been a flop, would the world be better or worse off?
1125
Who is the greatest knife steel metallurgist of all time?
There have been many metallurgists over the decades who have developed steels used in knives. Who has made the greatest contribution?
1126
Do We Need a Theory of Everything?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1127
An aerospace engineer explains fireworks
A quick look at the ballistics and stability of aerial fireworks.
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Why Can't I Reproduce Their Results?
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
1129
Sphere Eversion
Topology is the study of the properties of geometric objects which aren’t changed by continuous deformation. A standard low-grade math joke is that toplogists consider a coffee mug and a doughnut equivalent because they’re both torii—(pauses for laughter)—one can be continuously deformed into the other, called a…
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Lights and Shadows
Interactive article explaining how lights and shadows behave.
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All about Modelica: An equation-based language for modeling physical systems
Marco Bonvini’s personal website.
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How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
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Weighing a Car with Tire Pressures
The first thing I wanted to do with my Saab 96 was to establish a baseline weight.
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Neurons that fire together, wire together, but how?
Neurons that fire together, wire together... Ok, but how? One of my little pet projects is a neurology book for psychologists, coaches and the like. What most people in these fields imagine about the brain is somewhere between perplexing, preposterous and potentially poisonous. (Seriously, I could tell you stories...)…
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Crows’ ability to discriminate between languages
That crows can recognize humans faces (and other physical attributes) has been a staple of our experiences with them for thousands of years. It’s part of what has allowed them to take s…
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Solar storm risk and EMP attacks
A Q&A style dialogue to separate fact from fiction.
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Covid-19: The T Cell Story
When COVID-19 burst on to the scene, tests quickly showed that the everyone was susceptible - no pre-existing antibodies were found that bound to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This led to dire predictions that over 80% of the population might eventually fall ill. Now more than six months in, this has not happened, and it does…
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Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions
Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a…
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The Sun seen through the Earth in “neutrino light” (2007)
Physics blog quantum computation