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Toward a Predictive Theory of Depression
[Epistemic status: Total wild speculation] I. The predictive processing model offers compelling accounts of autism and schizophrenia. But Surfing Uncertainty and related sources I’ve read are…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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How to Study Physics (1949)
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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A Comparison of Differential Equation Solver Suites
Many times a scientist is choosing a programming language or a software for a specific purpose. For the field of scientific computing, the methods for solving differential equations are one of the important areas. What I would like to do is take the time to compare and contrast between the most popular offerings. This…
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Book Review: Surfing Uncertainty
[Related to: It’s Bayes All The Way Up, Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?, Can We Link Perception And Cognition?] I. Sometimes I have the fantasy of being able to glut m…
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“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason”
Intriguing title, no? These are the first eleven words of Neal Stephenson's novel Seveneves, which set up the remaining 600 pages as an extended treatise on the future of humanity as it copes with certain annihilation. I thoroughly recommend it, as long as you can deal with hundreds of pages of orbital mechanics. In…
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Snowflake macro photography (2013)
Snowflake macro photography: how to take closeup images of real snow crystals with simple optical add-on for compact camera? In this article, you'll find detailed description of shooting and photo processing techniques, scheme of optical add-on, snowflake pictures gallery, tips and tricks, useful links. Author: Alexey…
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Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research
Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research Oliver 2017
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Daniel Kahneman “I placed too much faith in underpowered studies”
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
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A method for improving Milky Way exposures in light pollution
Light pollution is a rapidly growing problem. Most of the population in the United States cannot see the Milky Way. When I look up at the sky from Venice, California, I can see about 20 stars. The rest of the galaxy is hidden by an orange haze of light pollution. This guide talks about a method called ETTR or…
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On Norbert Blum’s claimed proof that P does not equal NP
Edited 8/16 to correct attributions to Alon and Boppana and to Tardos, thanks to an anonymous commenter for the correction Yesterday, Norbert Blum posted a preprint with a claimed proof that $latex…
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Worldbuilding
There is a grand tradition of scientifically minded science fiction authors creating not just the characters in their novels but also the brass tacks scientific details of the planets they reside on. This is the art and science of Worldbuilding .
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The Kolmogorov option
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …
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Gender Imbalances Are Mostly Not Due To Offensive Attitudes
[This post has mostly been replaced/supplanted with a more thorough analysis in Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences] I. One idea that kept coming up in the comments to the thread on signal-boos…
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How Shor's Algorithm works (2007)
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
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Why isn't everything normally distributed?
Heights are normally distributed because height is determined by many factors. But why are other things with many inputs not normally distributed?
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An Adversarial Review of “Adversarial Generation of Natural Language”
Or, for fucks sake, DL people, leave language alone and stop saying you solve it.
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The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory
Eva Silverstein has a new preprint out, entitled The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory. The title is I guess intended to be playful, not referring to its accurate description of the current st…
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Oh My Gosh, It’s Covered in Rule 30s
New British train station design identified as cellular automata rule 30. Generating rule-based patterns. And a website that lets you try it yourself.
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Voronoi Tessellations
Mapping nearest locations.
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The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
I. A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, a…
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How Powerful Are Microsoft Azure’s Free Jupyter Notebooks?
For a while now, Microsoft have provided a free Jupyter Notebook service on Microsoft Azure. At the moment they provide compute kernels for Python, R and F# providing up to 4Gb of memory per sessio…
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Flood Death Valley
Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water?
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Book Review: The Hungry Brain
[Content note: food, dieting, obesity] I. The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don’t be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is…
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How To Use 23andMe Irresponsibly (2014)
As you might remember, the FDA stomped on 23andMe for using too many irresponsible genetic tests that purported to tell you things about yourself and your health with limited support. They eventual…
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The Ferocious Complexity of the Cell
Fifty years ago, the first molecular dynamics papers allowed scientists to exhaustively simulate systems with a few dozen atoms for picoseconds. Today, due to tremendous gains in computational capability from Moore’s law, and due to significant gains in algorithmic sophisticiation from fifty years of research, modern…