The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
We can define roundness in many ways. For example, as you may know, the circle is the shape that given a fixed perimeter maximizes the area. This definition has many problems. One of the problems is that countries generally have chaotic perimeters (also known as borders), so they tend to be much longer than they seem…
When listening to music, however, we are not just listening to a series of disconnected instants. Instead, the way things sound depends on the notes we have heard. In other words, we integrate over time . One of the most important functions of a musical scale is to limit the overall pitch content of what we're hearing…
Think I’m pranking you, right? You can see the paper right here (“Synthetic recombinase-based state machines in living cells,” by Nathaniel Roquet, Ava P. Soleimany, Alyssa C. Fer…
The other day I was amused to find a quote from Einstein , in 1936, about how hard it would be to quantize gravity: “like an attempt to breathe in empty space.” Eight decades later, I think we can still agree that it’s hard.
What is the most rectangular country?
Abstract It has been a common practice in social psychology to publish only significant results. As a result, success rates in the published literature do not provide empirical evidence for the existence of a phenomenon. A recent meta-analysis suggested that ego-depletion is a much weaker effect than the published…
Edit: Part 2 of this post can be found here , and part 3 here . Most of the code used in these posts is available here .
I write about Startups, coding and Physics
Anyone who has talked to me in the last year would have heard me complain about my 8-times-failure-to-replicate which nobody wants to publis...
Physicist: Actual pictures of atoms aren’t actually pictures at all. There are a few good rules of thumb in physics. Among the best is: light acts like you’d expect on scales well abov…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Some time ago I gave a talk in which I showed that something unexpected happened with a deck of playing cards. I had some volunteers try it, and while they did so I talked about just how many orderings there are for 52 cards. I computed (an approximation to) $52!$ (52 factorial) by hand. It's not so hard - you just…
A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. T…
Note: the following is a record of some whimsical mathematical thoughts and computations I had after doing some grading. It is likely that the sort of problems discussed here are in fact well studi…
Last week saw various reports about a rare stolen copy of a Columbus letter that had turned up in the Library of Congress and has now been restored to its Italian owners; a comparatively happy end …
This month, a bunch of ‘logic hackers’ have been seeking to determine the precise boundary between the knowable and the unknowable. The challenge has been around for a long time. But on…
However, many others have contributed in one form or another (newsgroup postings, email, laser parts, etc.). They are cited in the Acknowledgments and/or in the individual sections which contain their material. And, by the way, the name: "Sam's Laser FAQ" was more or less created by those who have read and commented…
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
What happens when you ignore the math
Thanks to Alan R. Wilson for correcting a two-word typo involving GPS satellites. Thanks to Aron Yoffe for suggesting the newtonian comparison. Thanks to Tom Fuchs for suggesting the analogy to the stone thrown upwards. Fuel numbers added by Don Koks, 2004. Updated by Phil Gibbs, 1998. Thanks to Bill Woods for…
A Go board has 19 × 19 points, each of which can be empty or occupied by black or white, so there are 3 (19 × 19) ≅ 10 172 possible board positions, but "only" about 10 170 of those positions are legal. Here are some of them:
I like to think there are some solid foundations to my life. I will be able to do the Monday New York Times crossword and I will not be able to do the Thursday version. My dental hygienist will not be satisfied with the amount of flossing I do. I will get my favorite spaghetti meal served on my birthday.
Update (4/19): Inspired by Trudeau’s performance (which they clocked at 35 seconds), Maclean’s magazine asked seven quantum computing researchers—me, Krysta Svore, Aephraim Steinb…
