The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
Is Earth Potentially an Evaporated Gas Giant?
How does our universe work? Scientist Stephen Wolfram opens up his ongoing Wolfram Physics Project to a global effort. His team will livestream work in progress, post working materials, release software tools and hold educational programs.
I was greatly saddened to learn that John Conway died yesterday from COVID-19, aged 82. My own mathematical areas of expertise are somewhat far from Conway’s; I have played for instance with …
In our previous installment of this podcast, we learned from independent researcher Alexey Guzey that famed sleep researcher Matthew Walker seems to have committed research misconduct in his bestselling book, Why We Sleep. Walker is a University of California professor, Google researcher, and Ted talk star, and his…
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be explained, if we’re willing to dig deep enough into the stack of abstractions our software is built atop. Some of the ensuing discussion on Twitter and elsewhere lead me to write this followup, in which I want to run…
Notice. Since this seems to be such a common question I think I should describe my background. I have a PhD in molecular microbiology and I was once a tenured academic (professor). I now work in the biotech sector. I have published a number of peer reviewed papers in virology. If you really want to know more about me…
I heard this morning about the death yesterday of Philip Anderson, at the age of 96. It’s not hard to make the case that Anderson was the most important condensed matter theorist of the twent…
Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out—that is, for life, health, and the economy to return roughly to normal. Either we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the...
Visualizing the exponential growth of COVID-19 across the world.
There’s been recent controversy about the use of face masks for protection against coronavirus. Mainstream sources, including the CDC and most of the media say masks are likely useless and no…
Space Shuttle thermal tiles conduct heat so poorly that after being in a 2200 °F oven for hours, you can pick them up with your bare hands only seconds after th
Some might find it ironic that an organization like NASA, who studies our atmosphere, is ok with rockets polluting it so much. Or isn’t it weird that Elon Musk, the same person who is pushing sustainable energy with Tesla also has a rocket company that runs on fossil fuels? So today we are going to do a deep dive into…
In the last article we covered some of the historical pandemics that rocked the world - smallpox, typhoid, and the bubonic plague. We ended on a hopeful note - many of the pandemics that plagued the world in the past have faded, and that modern pandemics have been far less fatal than historical o
A playable disease simulation
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras.
Your body requires viruses, but viruses don’t always require a body
To celebrate being alive for a billion seconds, Daniel Bruin built a machine with 100 gears with a 10-to-1 gear ratio…meaning that the overall gear ratio is a g
I got my first telescope in 2017, in time for the Great American Eclipse. I started paying attention to the concept of light pollution, including finding detailed maps of what places had high or lo…
How to answer this question—and how not to
To keep below two degrees, we'll need to dramatically reduce current emissions and simultaneously remove 10-15 gigatons of CO2/yr from the atmosphere by 2050. Read on for what that means, why, and how we might do it.
by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman NOTE FROM IAN: The expert risk communication team of Lanard and Sandman has given me permission to post their very well-considered reply to my question of them just
If you read any personal finance forums late last year, there's a decent chance you ran across a question from someone who was desperately trying to lose money before the end of the year. There are a number of ways someone could do this; one commonly suggested scheme was to buy put options that were expected to expire…
Part of my series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. The SpaceX Starship is a game changer for space exploration. It is intended to be far bigger, cheaper, versatile, and available t…
