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Jean Bourgain
I have just learned that Jean Bourgain passed away last week in Belgium, aged 64, after a prolonged battle with cancer. He and Eli Stein were the two mathematicians who most influenced my early ca…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 105 posts.
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Can you use a magnifying glass and moonlight to light a fire? (2016)
A magnifying glass concentrates light on a small spot. As many mischevious kids can tell you, a magnifying glass as small as a square inch in size can collect enough light to start a fire. A little Googling will tell you that the Sun is 400,000 times brighter than the Moon, so all we need is a 400,000-square-inch…
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Gluten Free Antarctica
Far below the Antarctic circle, I watch a woman cry real tears because she can’t get gluten-free toast.
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Facts about smell (2014)
The home of typing by Alice Bartlett 👩🏻💻
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Why are amplitudes complex?
[By prior agreement, this post will be cross-posted on Microsoft’s Q# blog, even though it has nothing to do with the Q# programming language. It does, however, contain many examples th…
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Intro to Quantum Information Science
Someone recently wrote that my blog is “too high on nerd whining content and too low on actual compsci content to be worth checking too regularly.” While that’s surely one of the…
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Making Penicillin at Home
This article explains how to make antibiotics at home in the event of a collapse situation
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AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?
Update: An updated version of this blogpost was published as a (peer-reviewed) Letter to the Editor at Bioinformatics, sans the “sociology” commentary. I just came back from CASP13, the…
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Why is nuclear fusion so hard?
Why does water fall out of an inverted cup? Before considering nuclear fusion, let's consider something much more familiar. If you turn a...
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No funding for uncomfortable results
Latanya Sweeney blew the whistle on how easy supposedly de-identified data could be re-identified. Her results were not well received.
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No, negative masses have not revolutionized cosmology
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
A blog on landscape architecture and related fields
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The present phase of stagnation in the foundations of physics is not normal
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
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The Remarkable Brain Waves of High Level Meditators [video]
What’s going on in the brains of people who meditate? Anecdotal evidence suggests that meditation does something to people’s minds and bodies…quiets and calms t
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‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
Thanks, Hamilton1. The two reports look like excellent studies. At first scan, it looks like there are still things to examine though. For example, if ‘Oumuamua is considered representative of extra-solar objects in its debris trail, then the idea that extra solar meteorites showing up, say in Greenland, is in real…
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The Strangest Book on the Theory of Computation (2009)
Based on the description of the book in the World Scientific Press catalogue, I asked my university library to order a book entitled Automat...
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How I Became a Knife Steel Metallurgist
Thanks to Jon Broida of Japanese Knife Imports and Anton Kudris for becoming Knife Steel Nerds Patreon supporters! When I was 16 I went with my father to the Las Vegas Custom Knife show. My interest in custom knives up to that point had been pretty limited. My father, Devin, has run a Damascus steel… Continue reading…
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Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
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Mathematical Patterns That Eventually Fail
Sometimes patterns can lead you astray. For example, it’s known that $latex \displaystyle{ \mathrm{li}(x) = \int_0^x \frac{dt}{\ln t} }$ is a good approximation to $latex \pi(x),$ the number …
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I simulated California housing and learned about simulators
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...
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Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
Privacy, Power, & Protection In The Cyber Century2018148 points108 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.
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USA Temperature: can I sucker you?
Suppose I wanted to convince people that temperature in the USA wasn’t going up, it was going down. What would I show? Let’s try yearly average temperature in the conterminous U.S., als…
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