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The Man Who Knew Infinity
Last night I went to see a showing at the Tribeca Film Festival of the new movie about Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity. It was extremely good, infinitely better than the most recent high profi…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
1592
How old were the inventors of major inventions?
I came across this fun column the other day listing a number of Famous Inventions , like the airplane, the camera, electricity, the car, e...
1593
How a Car Engine Works
Check out Animagraffs on youtube > .
1594
The IQ Halo effect
On desirable correlates of intelligence
1595
The Importance of Acoustics in Food Storage
Deep in the archives of San Francisco-based Aquarius Records, buried between several days’ worth of “laptop glitchery” and “brutal industro-crunch,” lies this gem: Insect Noise in Stored Foodstuffs , (INRA, 2000, CD, 19:98).
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Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience
Stevan Harnad’s “Subversive Proposal” came of age last year. I’m now teaching students younger than Stevan’s proposal, and yet, very little has actually changed in these 21 years. On the contrary, one may even make the case that while efforts […] <a class="more-link"…
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Black Hole Tech?
In celebration of the detection of gravitational waves, Stephen Wolfram looks forward and discusses what technology black holes could make possible.
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Beware The Man Of One Study
Aquinas famously said: beware the man of one book. I would add: beware the man of one study. For example, take medical research. Suppose a certain drug is weakly effective against a certain disease…
1601
A Peek into Einstein's Zurich Notebook
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies
1602
Most Radioactive Spot in New York: A Street Corner in Queens
Many are going to ask, "What's so weird about this one corner?" and I'm here to answer. The end of Irving Avenue, where it meets Moffat Str...
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A small 2009 car demolishes a 1959 Chevy in a crash test [video]
In 2009, The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted a crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu. The video plainly shows how
1605
The Villain of CRISPR
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)
Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far…
1609
Putin’s nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto
There was some wanking among the US foreign policy wonkosphere about the nuclear torpedo “accidentally” mentioned in a Russian news video. The device described in the leak is a megat…
1610
How MTV's “16 and Pregnant” May Have Reduced Teen Pregnancy
Apparently MTV broadcasts a show called "16 and Pregnant," in which each show tracks a pregnant teen-ager through the final months of pregna...
1611
Regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
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Why I decided not to enter the $100k global warming time-series challenge
Interesting applied project for your students , or as a warning for decisions under uncertainty / statistical significance. Real money on the line so the length of time and number of entries required to get a winner may be an interesting dataset after this is all done.
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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
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Google, D-Wave, and the case of the factor-10^8 speedup
Update (Dec. 16): If you’re still following this, please check out an important comment by Alex Selby, the discoverer of Selby’s algorithm, which I discussed in the post. Selby querie…
1617
What Is Spacetime, Really?
On the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Stephen Wolfram discusses the nature of space and time, and fundamental theory of physics.
1618
The Mysterious Aging of Astronauts
When I took Physics courses in college, I learned about how astronauts should age a tiny bit slower than us. Of course, they would be exposed to a lot more radiation so they might develop more cancers. But all in all, I would have been excited about the prospect of living in space. Then the … Continue reading The…
1619
Listening to satellites for $30
I've ever dreamed of space & satellites, it turms out you can received pictures from them.
1620
Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and perf…