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If you watch closely enough, everything is a speaker
Using high speed cameras, it’s possible to record the vibrations of everyday objects caused by nearby sounds and reverse engineer the sounds…essentially turning
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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NASA’s IMAGE satellite, lost since 2005, is alive
Over the past week the station has been dedicated to an S-band scan looking for new targets and refreshing the frequency list, triggered by the recent launch of the mysterious ZUMA mission. This t…
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Reality has a surprising amount of detail (2017)
My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold. My dad’s preferred method of improving his lot was improving lots, and my brother and I were “voluntarily” recruited to help working on the buildings…
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How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The Plasma Magnet Drive: A Simple, Cheap Drive for the Solar System and Beyond
I guess we should also include a Planet Nine mission (once confirmed) among the possibilities opened up by this technology. In fact, since that planet seems to be near aphelion (otherwise we should have found it), it should also be beyond the gravitational focus of the Sun and thus any mission there could double as a…
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Birth Order Effects Exist and Are Strong
“Birth order” refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how t…
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Beginner's guide to longevity research
A beginner's guide to longevity research
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Adderall Risks: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
[Previously in series: Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know; SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, etc. This is all preliminary and you should not take it as a rea…
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A Pragmatic Introduction to Signal Processing
A retirement project created and maintained by Tom O'Haver , Professor Emeritus , Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
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The ABC conjecture has still not been proved
Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of the ABC conjecture. I have nothing further to add on the sociological aspects of mathematics discussed in that post, but I just wanted to…
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What are the complex numbers, really?
Where did complex numbers come from? You might think that people invented \(i\) just so that they had a solution to the quadratic equat...
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An Interactive Introduction to Quantum Computing
This article was originally written in 2014, but has had some minor improvements in December 2017 and January 2018 when I received some useful feedback after the article had unexpectedly been posted on Hacker News in December 2017.
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The impossibility of intelligence explosion
In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
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Photovoltaic growth: reality versus projections of the IEA
This is a guest blog by Auke Hoekstra, senior adviser electric mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology and developer of agent-based models for electric vehicles and renewable energy adop…
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The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? (2009)
Douglas G. Steigerwald joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara after completing an M.A. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on frontier econometric methods at the intersection of…
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Can a Human See a Single Photon? (1996)
The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
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The Scientific Case for P≠NP
Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of…
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A Theory of Sequence Memory in Neocortex
Why neurons have thousands of synapses, a theory of sequence memory in neocortex Hawkins & Ahmad, Front. Neural Circuits 2016 It all began with a fascinating lunchtime conversation with Martin …
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Why Cryonics Makes Sense (2016)
The more I read about cryonics—i.e. freezing yourself after death—the more I realized it's something we should all be talking about.
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Feynman’s Breakthrough: Disregard Others
Feynman (just off centre) at Wangerooge in 1987 I started my career as a theoretical physicist, and in the late-80s I co-organised a specialist workshop on a small island, Wangerooge, off the coast…
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The Neural Net Tank Urban Legend
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
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Wikipedia graph mining: dynamic structure of collective memory
Wikipedia graph dynamic pattern discovery. Dynamic graph analysis in GraphX. Collective memory research. Gephi graph visualization.