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Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale
Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gómez-Serrano, Adam Zsolt Wagner, and I have uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale”. This is a longer report on…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Fourier Transforms
Fourier Transform
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The shadows lurking in the equations
If you've ever graphed equations, chances are you have only ever graphed equations in what I refer to as "Binary mode" - which draws a line where the equation is EXACTLY equal, and leaves white everywhere else.
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Things you can do with diodes
Paying homage to the component we usually don't think about.
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How the cochlea computes (2024)
Sensory coding 2: electric boogaloo
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Why do some radio towers blink?
One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink?
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Mapping the off-target effects of every FDA-approved drug in existence
6.2k words, 29 minutes reading time
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Cancer survival rates are misleading
UPDATE: I submitted a more formal version of this article to the UMAP Journal (Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications), which publishes articles that use mathematical modeling for real-world problems, often with a pedagogical or expository angle. A preprint is available on arXiv at…
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Interstellar Mission to a Black Hole
If DM could form a BH at the center of a planet, wouldn’t that then collapse the planet into that BH, consuming it? Wouldn’t the same apply to stars, extinguishing them?
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The Hidden Engineering of Niagara Falls
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Niagara Falls is one of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world. With a vertical drop of more than 50 meters or 164 feet and a flow rate that often exceeds 2800 cubic meters per second or 100,000 cubic feet per second, it’s
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How to sequence your DNA for <$2k
a cheap and bloody experiment
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Live Stream from the Namib Desert
https://www.looduskalender.ee/n/en - check these as well (not so exotic, but still a lot of fun)
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Lace: A New Kind of Cellular Automata Where Links Matter
This article is about a new kind of simple computational rule ("LACE rules" running on LACE, the Link Automata Computing Engine platform) which, when applied locally on a grid of cells, demonstrates fascinating emergent "artificial life" behavior.
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No science, no startups: The innovation engine we're switching off
Tons of words have been written about the Trump Administrations war on Science in Universities. But few people have asked what, exactly, is science? How does it work? Who are the scientists? What d…
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American solar farms
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)
Some questions are timeless, innocent yet penetrating in their simplicity. Why is the sky blue? Why do things fall? How hard must one hit a chicken to cook it? It is this last mystery of the universe that we discuss today.
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All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune
Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?
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The Unknotting Number Is Not Additive
On June 30, 2025, Mark Brittenham and Susan Hermiller uploaded a preprint to the arXiv called “Unknotting number is not additive under connected sum” (and an updated version on Septembe…
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Synthetic aperture radar autofocus and calibration
3D trajectory position error estimation autofocus, antenna pattern normalization, and polarimetric calibration for drone mounted SAR radar.
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Eliminating contrails from flying could be cheap
Could we halve aviation's climate impact at a fraction of the cost of sustainable aviation fuels?
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The World's 2.75B Buildings
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Packing the world for longest lines of sight
I have a side project to find the longest line of sight on the planet 1 using a novel Total Viewshed algorithm . At a resolution of 3 arc-seconds (~92m x 92m), the planet contains around 4.5 billion elevation samples 2 . Now obviously we don’t need to calculate the visibility between literally every single one of…
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Random Attractors – Found using Lyapunov Exponents (2001)
Contribution by Philip Ham: attractor.basic and Python implementation by Johan Bichel Lindegaard.
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How has mathematics gotten so abstract?
What's the meaning of "numbers" and "arithmetic operations"? We consult Georg Cantor's turtles and look at Giuseppe Peano's code.
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Don't Become a Scientist (1999)
Don't Become a Scientist!
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Solar panels + cold = A potential problem
You purchased a new Delta Pro and looked up the specifications - Delta Pro can take up to 1600w/150v/15a of solar input. Then you buy four EcoFlow 400w Rigid solar panels to plug them in series.
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Why today's humanoids won't learn dexterity
In this post I explain why today’s humanoid robots will not learn how to be dexterous despite the hundreds of millions, or perhaps many billions of dollars, being donated by VCs and major tech companies to pay for their training.
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Can a model trained on satellite data really find brambles on the ground?
Can a model trained on satellite data really find brambles on the ground? We put a new model to the test with a field trip around Cambridge. The results...
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DSM Disorders Disappear in Statistical Clustering of Psychiatric Symptoms (2024)
Whither Major Depression?