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The two cultures of mathematics and biology
I’m a (50%) professor of mathematics and (50%) professor of molecular & cell biology at UC Berkeley. There have been plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with biologists and…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 75 posts.
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The Fermi Paradox
The Fermi Paradox: There should be 100,000 intelligent alien civilizations in our galaxy — so why haven't we found any of them?
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The Future of Space Launch Is Near
Until recently, the future of space launch looked pretty much like its past. For over 50 years, humanity has blasted thousands of spacecraft and satellites into space. Every launch vehicle that carried them aloft has ended up littering the planet with the broken, twisted remains of expended rocket stages. The scenario…
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What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Stronger
Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. -- Friedrich Nietzsche
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6 GHz frequency modulated radar
Making a cheap and simple radar with a range of about 100 meters.
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Publish and Perish at Imperial College London: The Death of Stefan Grimm
Jump to follow-up This week’s Times Higher Education carried a report of the death, at age 51, of Professor Stefan Grimm: Imperial College London to ‘review procedures’ after death of academi…
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Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain
The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain.
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How speakers make sound
Check out Animagraffs on youtube > .
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Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)
It might be thought that special relativity provides a short negative answer to this question. In actual fact, there are many trivial ways in which things can be going faster than light (FTL) in a sense, and there may be other more genuine possibilities. On the other hand, there are also good reasons to believe that…
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Designing Stereographic Lampshades
I saw an article on the Guardian website here on the 3D-printing of shapes which project interesting patterns of light. Ignoring the strangely forced Halloween reference, I thought this would be an interesting project to attempt for an arbitrary pattern, perhaps as a personalised lampshade. Buoyed by the continuing…
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Lost Civilizations of the Andes
Fig. 5.1 Wall in in Hatunrumiyoc street, Cuzco. Polygonal stones usually have pillowed (convex) faces and bevelled, sunken joints.
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Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
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Calories in, calories out
This article was discussed on Hacker News. Introduction How do we lose (or gain) weight? Is it really as simple as “calories in, calories out” (i.e., eat less than you burn), or i…
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Lab Notebook: Single Pixel Camera
Please forgive me for the lack of new content over the last five or so months. After my most recent post about neural networks and quadcopte...
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Building the Largest Ship in the World
The Maersk Triple E is the largest ship on the planet, the pride and joy of the largest shipping company in the world. The ship was a huge hit with the public last year when it docked ...
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Coanda Effect: Understanding Why Wings Work
"In aerodynamics, theory is what makes the invisible plain. Trying to fly an airplane without theory is like getting into a fistfight with a poltergeist." --David Thornburg [1992].
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Losing 58.3 Lbs for Science
This morning was my final data collection for a randomized diet experiment I have been participating in for the last year. Here is a graph of my near-daily weigh-ins on Withings: ...
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Rolling Shutters
I remember seeing once the following photo from Flickr, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong: The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector 'read out', i.e. there was some motion during the exposure of the camera. This is an interesting thing to think about…
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What makes for a stable marriage?
Randy Olson reviews a research paper that outlines what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S.
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Quantum mechanics as a generalization of probability (2007)
There are two ways to teach quantum mechanics. The first way -- which for most physicists today is still the only way -- follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then you…
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A scientist stole my root beer
I’m not ashamed to say that I like root beer. There’s something about the herbal and woodsy flavors that I enjoy. It’s refreshing, but also a time machine. A sip of root beer brin…
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1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-long progress f...
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Melting aluminum
Today another in my ongoing, seldom-updated series of posts about building my own backyard foundry. Today I’ll describe how the final step works: actually melting and pouring the metal. First…
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Correlation is usually not causation. But why not?
Correlations are oft interpreted as evidence for causation; this is oft falsified; do causal graphs explain why this is so common, because the number of possible indirect paths greatly exceeds the direct paths necessary for useful manipulation?