The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
A work crane at the Clock site in western Texas. There is a Clock ringing deep inside a mountain. It is a huge Clock, hundreds of feet tall, designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every once in a while the … Continue reading →
Fill this in yourself.
Weekly essays on biology, philosophy and other topics.
Chomsky's remarks were in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods. This essay is a response to Pinker and Chomsky, and will address these questions:
Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, has assembled a team of nine top European scientists for the research effort to build a computer model of a human brain. The Human Brain Project is in discussion with the EU for a £1billion (US$1.61 billion) grant.
[This is an excerpt from the Dance of the Possible: the mostly honest, completely irreverent guide to creativity] When you are known as a writer about creativity, people send you interesting things…
By Mark W. Danielson Why are all these airliners in the desert? In a word, they’re being preserved. Aircraft bone yards are a testament to t...
Publishing is central to Academia, but its publishing system is outclassed by what Open Source software developers have in GitHub
I have been doing business in Japan for 20 years, consulting for big and small companies, speaking at conferences, writing for Japanese publications, and helping both American and Japanese companies do business with each other. For years I flew to Tokyo once a month, generally in my role as giver of bad news, which I
Update: I have written a fairly comprehensive article about steps to lower deaths per terawatt hour . Primary focus on pollution mitigation. Air pollution causes 3.1 million deaths per year
So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance…
Artists say all colors are a mixture of red, yellow, and blue. But physics and TV screens and printers disagree. How does color really work?
The answer is basically "not a chance". No Earthbound telescope can see the flag on the Moon. Why not? For openers, the Earth's atmosphere is never steady enough to allow resolution below about one arc second for most locations. Beyond that, the telescope required to "see" the flag would need to be absolutely huge!…
Science historian James Burke’s entire iconic Connections series, tracing the origin of innovation, is now available for free online.
(Note: this post is `just for fun;’ no premeds, doctors, researchers, or nobel laureates were meant to be offended in the writing of this post.) The bane of many American physics grad student…
Link to: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-airport-x-ray-scanners-harmful
To demonstrate the problem, I did a simulation where I generated 480 random numbers per subject, representing the 480 time slices in the experiment. I repeated this generation of random numbers 20 times. I compared the send and no-send intervals of random numbers using a T-test; none of the 20 trials found a…
Disclaimer: This blog post covers only a fraction of what’s sketchy with “The China Study.” In the years since I wrote it, I’ve added a number of additional articles expandi…
