1501
Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future
I knew the future would be shocking but this is a whole other level.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
1502
Patrick Winston Explains Deep Learning
Patrick Winston is one of the greatest teachers at M.I.T., and for 27 years was Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (which later became part of CSAIL ).
1503
Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality than journal articles
The Dutch toilet cleaner ‘WC-EEND’ (literally: 'Toilet Duck') aired a famous commercial in 1989 that had the slogan ‘We from WC-EEND a...
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1505
Color Night Vision (2016) [video]
The X27 camera takes videos in darkness that looks like they were shot in the daytime. And they’re in color…none of this black and white, thermal, or infrared s
1506
Earth is a ‘dwarf planet’ because it has not cleared its orbit
It turns out that Earth is not a planet. Asteroid 2016 H03, first spotted on April 27, 2016, by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope…
1507
Keeping David MacKay's 'Sustainable Energy – without the hot air' up-to-date
As the anniversary of Sir David MacKay’s untimely death approaches, I think we should honour his memory by trying to update Sustainable Energy as a crowd-sourced project. I have made an initial attempt to suggest how we might develop the section on photovoltaics but others will want to suggest other
1508
1509
A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers
There are a bunch of things about this story that just don’t make a lot of sense to me.
1510
Pi and the Golden Ratio
Two of my favorite numbers are pi: $latex \pi = 3.14159… $ and the golden ratio: $latex \displaystyle{ \Phi = \frac{\sqrt{5} + 1}{2} } = 1.6180339… $ They’re related: $latex \pi =…
1511
Your yearly dose of is-the-universe-a-simulation
Yesterday Ryan Mandelbaum, at Gizmodo, posted a decidedly tongue-in-cheek piece about whether or not the universe is a computer simulation. (The piece was filed under the category “LOL.…
1512
High quality graphics for Latex documents: The Matlab route
You use L a T e X instead of a WYSIWYG word processing program because they can’t cope with the high quality required for publication. But your nice professional looking documents can be ruined because you insert the wrong type of figures. Bitmap figures are easily pixelated because the actual size is not always known…
1513
Insert D-Wave Post Here
In the two months since I last blogged, the US has continued its descent into madness. Yet even while so many certainties have proven ephemeral as the morning dew—the US’…
1514
1515
Cheating on a string theory exam
You and your friend have watches which are synchronized to the second, and the proctors are used to him often finishing exams quickly and won't be suspicious if he leaves early. What is the largest value N such that you can guarantee that you answer at least N out of the 23 questions correctly?
1516
1517
Why Do DMT Users See Insects from a Parallel Universe?
The molecule DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is a psychoactive chemical that causes intense visions and can induce its users to quickly enter a completely different "environment" that some have likened to an alien or parallel universe. The transition from our world to theirs occurs with no cessation of consciousness or…
1518
Analysis of Soviet smoke detector plutonium
Technical nuclear forensics-themed discussion of the age, activity, and grade of plutonium found in a KI-1 Soviet smoke detector.
1519
The Axiom of Choice Is Wrong (2007)
When discussing the validity of the Axiom of Choice, the most common argument for not taking it as gospel is the Banach-Tarski paradox. Yet, this never particularly bothered me. The argument …
1520
Influenza A (H1N1) – How many bits does it take to kill a human? (2009)
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
1521
Fake Physics
2016 so far wins my lifetime award for most depressing and disturbing year ever (on the front of the larger world one reads about in the newspaper and elsewhere, personally things are fine, thanks)…
1522
1523
What’s a fire, and why does it burn?
I was staring at a bonfire on a beach the other day and realized that I didn’t understand anything about fire and how it works. (For example: what determines its color?) So I looked up some s…
1524
LaTeX Coffee Stains (2009)
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
1525
1526
The science of Westworld
How close are we to building the hosts?
1527
P vs. NP
For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…
1528
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1530
My New Year’s Resolution – read a research paper every weekday
… and post a write-up on this blog. That sounds crazy of course – who has the time to read a paper every weekday? Let alone write it up! I’ve done it for each of the last two calendar y…