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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,457 posts.
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Bayes’ Theorem – What is it and what is it good for?
Bayes’ Theorem tells us how to rationally assess the probability of a certain statement of interest being true, given some evidence. Insofar as science consists in creating hypotheses, collecting e…
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Top mathematical achievements of the last 5ish years, maybe
I have recently been going through my book Maths 1001 making updates for a forthcoming foreign edition (of which more in future). So I have been looking over mathematical developments since approxi…
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Clifford Algebra: A visual introduction (2014)
Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of wh…
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Diet that mimics fasting appears to slow aging
Want to lose abdominal fat, get smarter and live longer? New research led by USC’s Valter Longo shows that periodically adopting a diet that mimics the effects of fasting may yield a wide range of health benefits.
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Computer scientists prove that a 40-year-old algorithm is optimal
Computer scientists from MIT find that a 40-year-old algorithm for determining the “edit distance” between symbols cannot be optimized any further.
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What's the third most common element?
The Universe was 99.999999% Hydrogen and Helium after the Big Bang. Billions of years later, there’s a new contender in town.
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LightSail Test Mission Declared Success; First Image Complete
The Planetary Society’s LightSail test mission successfully completed its primary objective of deploying a solar sail in low-Earth orbit.
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What Did Bohr Do at Los Alamos?
Along with almost getting hit by a car, he made important contributions to the atomic bomb's design.
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California, Water You Doing?
[Epistemic status: Low confidence. I have found numbers and stared at them until they made sense to me, but I have no education in this area. Tell me if I’m wrong.] I. There has recently been…
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Stanford engineers' breakthrough heralds super-efficient light-based computers
Light can transmit more data while consuming far less power than electricity, and an engineering feat brings optical data transport closer to replacing wires.
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Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science
Attention conservation notice : Once, I was one of the authors of a paper on cellular automata . Lawyers for Wolfram Research Inc. threatened to sue me, my co-authors and our employer, because one of our citations referred to a certain mathematical proof, and they claimed the existence of this proof was a trade secret…
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After 100 Years, Ramanujan Gap Filled (2013)
History of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan’s lost notebooks and an exploration of solutions to those equations using Mathematica.
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Retire This Idea: Scientific Knowledge Structured as “Literature”
In my view, what's most outmoded within science, most badly in need of retirement, is the way we structure and organize scientific knowledge itself. Academic literature, even as it moves online, is a relic of the era of typesetting, modeled on static, irrevocable, toothpaste-out-of-the-tube publication. Just as the…
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Energy Is Not Conserved (2010)
I’ve been meaning to link to this post at the arXiv blog , which is a great source of quirky and interesting new papers. In this case they are pointing to a speculative but interesting paper by Martin Perl and Holger Mueller, which suggests an experimental search for gradients in dark energy by way of atom…
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GitWikXiv: Toward a successor to the academic paper
[Other posts in this series: 2,3,4.] I had the chance to have dinner tonight with Paul Ginsparg of arXiv fame, and he graciously gave me some feedback on a very speculative idea that I’ve been kicking around: augmenting — or even replacing — the current academic article model with collaborative d
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If 1+x is 1, how much is 1-x?
► Versión en Español (The title should be "if (= (+ 1 x) 1), how much is (- 1 x)?", but ...) Toy floating point Mathematically, if we...
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Why the sun is a poor dumping ground for nuclear waste (2010)
A physicist explains why the sun is a poor dumping ground for nuclear waste.
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Ebola whole virus vaccine shown effective, safe in primates
An Ebola whole virus vaccine, constructed using a novel experimental platform, has been shown to effectively protect monkeys exposed to the often fatal virus.
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Start Using Landsat on AWS
My colleague Jed Sundwall wrote the guest post below to show you how one of the newest AWS Public Data Sets is being put to use. — Jeff; You can now access over 85,000 Landsat 8 scenes through our newest Public Data Set: Landsat on AWS. The scenes are all available in the landsat-pds bucket […]
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Planets in the Fourth Dimension
You probably that planets go around the sun in elliptical orbits. But do you know why? In fact, they’re moving in circles in 4 dimensions. But when these circles are projected down to 3-dimen…
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Study: Teen Cannabis Users Have Poor Long-Term Memory in Adulthood
A new study shows that teenagers who had previously been heavy users of marijuana performed worse on long-term memory tests than those who never used cannabis, and they had abnormally shaped hippocampuses.
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Motion sensing using the doppler effect
Recently I stumbled upon an interesting paper for implementing motion sensing requiring no special hardware, only a speaker and mic ! Unfortunately the paper didn't include code to test it, so I decided to reproduce it here on the web!