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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,457 posts.
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Societies with Little Coercion Have Little Mental Illness (2013)
Throughout history, societies have existed with far less coercion than ours, and while these societies have had far less consumer goods and what modernity calls “efficiency,” they also have had far…
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Putin’s nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto
There was some wanking among the US foreign policy wonkosphere about the nuclear torpedo “accidentally” mentioned in a Russian news video. The device described in the leak is a megat…
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How MTV's “16 and Pregnant” May Have Reduced Teen Pregnancy
Apparently MTV broadcasts a show called "16 and Pregnant," in which each show tracks a pregnant teen-ager through the final months of pregna...
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Lab explosions and accidents
If you're working on serious projects there are often serious risks. A lot of these can be mitigated by preventative measures and safety ge...
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Scott Aaronson on Google’s new quantum-computing paper
MIT professor Scott Aaronson discusses new Google experiments that suggest the D-Wave computer exploits quantum phenomena.
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Regression to the mean is the main reason ineffective treatments appear to work
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
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Research links creativity and inability to filter irrelevant sensory information
Research links creativity with inability to filter irrelevant sensory information
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Why I decided not to enter the $100k global warming time-series challenge
Interesting applied project for your students , or as a warning for decisions under uncertainty / statistical significance. Real money on the line so the length of time and number of entries required to get a winner may be an interesting dataset after this is all done.
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The first plasma: the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device is now in operation
Start of operation and first plasma in the Wendelstein 7-X fusion research device at IPP Greifswald
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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
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Google, D-Wave, and the case of the factor-10^8 speedup
Update (Dec. 16): If you’re still following this, please check out an important comment by Alex Selby, the discoverer of Selby’s algorithm, which I discussed in the post. Selby querie…
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Chemical flavorings found in e-cigarettes linked to lung disease
A Harvard study links chemicals used in flavored electronic cigarettes to cases of severe respiratory disease.
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What Is Spacetime, Really?
On the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Stephen Wolfram discusses the nature of space and time, and fundamental theory of physics.
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The Mysterious Aging of Astronauts
When I took Physics courses in college, I learned about how astronauts should age a tiny bit slower than us. Of course, they would be exposed to a lot more radiation so they might develop more cancers. But all in all, I would have been excited about the prospect of living in space. Then the … Continue reading The…
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Listening to satellites for $30
I've ever dreamed of space & satellites, it turms out you can received pictures from them.
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Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
I. It takes a special sort of person to be a cardiologist. This is not always a good thing. You may have read about one or another of the “cardiologist caught falsifying test results and perf…
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What can a technologist do about climate change?
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities , I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our…
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Where to hate daylight saving time and where to love it
Update: a newer version of this little project helps you make your complaints about daylight saving time—whether they’re for or against it—with clearer messages about whether keeping DST, abolishing it, or making it permanent would be best for your daylight preferences. Give it a whirl over at Observable.
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Homeschooled with MIT courses at 5, accepted to MIT at 15
After acquiring his entire elementary and secondary education from OpenCourseWare and <i>MITx,</i> Ahaan Rungta joined the MIT Class of 2019 at age 15.
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Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave
Over their lifetime, battery electric vehicles produce far less global warming pollution than their gasoline counterparts—and they’re getting cleaner.
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The Discovery of Statistical Regression
We explore the hotly contested history of the crowning jewel of statistics.
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Julia Computing Granted $600k by Moore Foundation
As data-driven research becomes more mainstream, the need for efficient and powerful scientific computing tools increases. To help meet this need, the Gordon an…