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What an unprocessed photo looks like
The image isn't even black-and-white , it's gray-and-gray: While the sensor's ADC can theoretically output values from 0 to 16382, the data doesn't cover that whole range.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 202 posts.
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NIST was 5 μs off UTC after last week's power cut
If you were 5 microseconds late today, blame it on NIST. Their facility in Boulder Colorado just had its power cut for multiple days. After a backup generator failed, their main ensemble clock lost track of UTC, or Universal Time Coordinated. But even if you used the NTP timing servers they run, they were never off by…
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More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”
These days, the most common question I get goes something like this: A decade ago, you told people that scalable quantum computing wasn’t imminent. Now, though, you claim it plausibly is immi…
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Erdős Problem #1026
Problem 1026 on the Erdős problem web site recently got solved through an interesting combination of existing literature, online collaboration, and AI tools. The purpose of this blog post is to try…
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Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
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If a Meta AI model can read a brain-wide signal, why wouldn't the brain?
In 2023, Meta researchers were able to decode images in thoughts from the brain's magnetic fields. What if that's how the brain coordinates it's own global state?
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The tiniest yet real telescope I've built
76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere
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$5 whale listening hydrophone making workshop
Whale songs were first noticed by accident, when analysts tracking Russian submarines at the height of the cold war heard cetacean interference instead. An engineer sent some recordings to Roger Payne, a biologist friend of his, who did something that proved pivotal: he played the hours-long recordings on his hi-fi at…
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Beautiful Abelian Sandpiles
I can't remember where I first saw them, but ever since, I have been unable to forget them: abelian sandpiles. I'm far from the only one . They're remarkably simple, yet produce lovely symmetric patterns. I loved them so much that I adorned the title banner of this blog with an animation of an abelian sandpile. But…
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Autism's confusing cousins
A differential diagnosis for the weird and the awkward
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Tides are weirder than you think
Our world relies on the sea more than ever: 80% of goods traded worldwide move by ship. Today’s mariners take it for granted that they can get an accurate chart of the tides for any location on Ear…
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Datacenters in space aren't going to work
There is a rush for AI companies to team up with space launch/satellite companies to build datacenters in space. TL;DR: It's not going to work.
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The 101 of analog signal filtering (2024)
Some intuition about this topic can be developed without summoning the ghost of Pierre-Simon Laplace.
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It's hard to build an oscillator
Especially if you want it to work.
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The Boring Part of Bell Labs
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
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Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies
If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surv...
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How Tube Amplifiers Work
How Tube Guitar Amplifiers Work
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A new Google model is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition
A mysterious new model currently in testing on Google’s AI Studio is nearly perfect on automated handwriting recognition but it is also showing signs of spontaneous, abstract, symbolic reasoning.
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Metabolic and cellular differences between sedentary and active individuals
We're discussing a paper that demands attention...
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Study finds memory decline surge in young people
A Large US Study Finds Memory Decline Surge in Young People
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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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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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