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Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate
A quick reference
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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CubeSats are fascinating learning tools for space
These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller. There are already Pis in space, like on Mark Rober's SatGus, on GASPACS, and the Astro Pis on the Space…
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Folks, we have the best π
And some novel ideas for bicycle wheel design.
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Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the co…
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An engineering history of the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped…
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Knowledge and memory
The what is connected to the when.
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How many dimensions is this?
A degree in mathematics might not save you from stacking boxes for a living.
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A Random Walk in 10 Dimensions (2021)
The geometry of random walks in high dimensions provides the power behind deep learning and may be the secret to intelligence.
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John Coltrane's Tone Circle
An article about the John Coltrane Tone Circle, a 5-octave Circle of Fifths and a double-ring Hexatonic Circle as well. Interpretation, explanation ...
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Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
Craig Gidney's computer science blog
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God created the real numbers
W. Jherek Swanger writes in his introduction to Camillo 7 Agrippa's "A Treatise on the Science of Arms, with a philosophical Dialogue (1553)" that:
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CDC officials’ resignation emails
The end of an era.
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Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?
I was reading the latest issue of the journal Science , and a paper mentioned the compound Cr 2 Gr 2 Te 6 . For a moment, I thought my knowl...
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In Search of AI Psychosis
Folie a deux ex machina
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Line scan camera image processing for train photography
I use my line scan camera to take cool pictures of trains and other stuff.
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Everything is correlated (2014–23)
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
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In Defense Of The Amyloid Hypothesis
A guest post by David Schneider-Joseph
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The contrarian physics podcast subculture
This is the story of how a circle of popular science communicators, who built their brands on championing free inquiry, worked to suppress scientific critique. Of how Eric Weinstein, the man who co…
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How does the US use water?
Water infrastructure often gets less attention and focus than other types of infrastructure.
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Why you can’t grow cool-climate plants in hot climates
Since moving to Deep South Texas 4 years ago I've come to realize that many plants I used to love growing in the cool mild maritime climate of the SF bay area are impossible to grow where I live. This is not just because of the high daytime heat. It's not as simple as that. Specifically, it is the h
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How much do electric car batteries degrade?
Many electric cars will still have more than 80% of their initial capacity after 200,000 miles.
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The lottery ticket hypothesis: why neural networks work
The lottery ticket hypothesis explains why massive neural networks succeed despite centuries of theory predicting they should fail
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The Block Stacking Problem
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/jdnorton.html
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Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock
Todays candles have been optimized for millenia not to flicker. But it turns out when we bundle three of them together, we can undo all of these optimizations and the resulting triplet will start t…
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Simulating and Visualising the Central Limit Theorem
Update: this post was discussed on Hacker News I completed a Computer Science degree at uni, and bundled a lot of maths subjects in as electives: partial differential equations, vector calculus, discrete maths, linear algebra.
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LLMs aren't world models
I believe that language models aren’t world models. It’s a weak claim — I’m not saying they’re useless, or that we’re done milking them. It’s also a fuzzy-sounding claim — with its trillion weights, who can prove that there’s something an LLM isn't a model of? But I hope to make my claim clear and persuasive enough…
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Two Birds with One Tone: I/Q Signals and Fourier Transform
An intuitive and ground-up introduction to I/Q signals. Learn the foundational concepts through clear geometric analogy perfect for beginners
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Learning Is Slower Than You Think
What AI-optimized schools misunderstand about learning