1351
Why are amplitudes complex?
[By prior agreement, this post will be cross-posted on Microsoft’s Q# blog, even though it has nothing to do with the Q# programming language. It does, however, contain many examples th…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
1352
Intro to Quantum Information Science
Someone recently wrote that my blog is “too high on nerd whining content and too low on actual compsci content to be worth checking too regularly.” While that’s surely one of the…
1353
Making Penicillin at Home
This article explains how to make antibiotics at home in the event of a collapse situation
1354
AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?
Update: An updated version of this blogpost was published as a (peer-reviewed) Letter to the Editor at Bioinformatics, sans the “sociology” commentary. I just came back from CASP13, the…
1355
Why is nuclear fusion so hard?
Why does water fall out of an inverted cup? Before considering nuclear fusion, let's consider something much more familiar. If you turn a...
1356
No funding for uncomfortable results
Latanya Sweeney blew the whistle on how easy supposedly de-identified data could be re-identified. Her results were not well received.
1357
No, negative masses have not revolutionized cosmology
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1358
1359
Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
A blog on landscape architecture and related fields
1360
The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
1361
The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
1362
The Remarkable Brain Waves of High Level Meditators [video]
What’s going on in the brains of people who meditate? Anecdotal evidence suggests that meditation does something to people’s minds and bodies…quiets and calms t
1363
‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
Thanks, Hamilton1. The two reports look like excellent studies. At first scan, it looks like there are still things to examine though. For example, if ‘Oumuamua is considered representative of extra-solar objects in its debris trail, then the idea that extra solar meteorites showing up, say in Greenland, is in real…
1364
The Strangest Book on the Theory of Computation (2009)
Based on the description of the book in the World Scientific Press catalogue, I asked my university library to order a book entitled Automat...
1365
How I Became a Knife Steel Metallurgist
Thanks to Jon Broida of Japanese Knife Imports and Anton Kudris for becoming Knife Steel Nerds Patreon supporters! When I was 16 I went with my father to the Las Vegas Custom Knife show. My interest in custom knives up to that point had been pretty limited. My father, Devin, has run a Damascus steel… Continue reading…
1366
1367
1368
1369
Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
1370
Mathematical Patterns That Eventually Fail
Sometimes patterns can lead you astray. For example, it’s known that $latex \displaystyle{ \mathrm{li}(x) = \int_0^x \frac{dt}{\ln t} }$ is a good approximation to $latex \pi(x),$ the number …
1371
I simulated California housing and learned about simulators
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...
1372
Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
Privacy, Power, & Protection In The Cyber Century2018148 points108 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.
1373
1374
USA Temperature: can I sucker you?
Suppose I wanted to convince people that temperature in the USA wasn’t going up, it was going down. What would I show? Let’s try yearly average temperature in the conterminous U.S., als…
1375
1376
1377
Gamifying propositional logic: QED, an interactive textbook
About six years ago on this blog, I started thinking about trying to make a web-based game based around high-school algebra, and ended up using Scratch to write a short but playable puzzle game in …
1378
Getting Started with Quantum Computing in Python
Quantum computers might sound a bit exotic and far into the future, but in reality, they are now accessible in the cloud or through emulators for everyone to write quantum code. In this tutorial, we’ll go through how you can program a simple quantum computer to generate random numbers.
1379
Autopsy of a deep learning paper
Introduction I read a lot of deep learning papers, typically a few/week. I've read probably several thousands of papers. My general problem with papers in machine learning or deep learning is that often they sit
1380
Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…