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Droppings
If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,457 posts.
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Building a supercomputer from 64 Raspberry Pis and Lego
Discover the latest news from the University, including news about our research, enterprise and teaching activities.
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Everybody Jump
What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?
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Pascal's Apology, or why computer science is complicated
Blaise Pascal once famously ended a letter with an apology : I'm sorry that this was such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write you a short one. Computer science has pretty much the same problem. It's a young field, and young fields are, by their nature, messy. As we race to generate new knowledge, we also…
4207
Look at yourself objectively
In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places. Mothers who went in to give birth often didn’t make it out. For example, at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at the Second Clinic, the number was just…
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Parrondo's Paradox: How two ugly parents can make a beautiful baby
"How two ugly parents (mathematically) can make a beautiful baby"
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Bill Thurston has died
Bill Thurston, who made fundamental contributions to our understanding of low-dimensional manifolds and related structures, died on Tuesday, aged 65. Perhaps Thurston’s best known achievement…
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How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle
Now that Discovery is safely delivered to the Smithsonian, I think I can tell the story of how we nearly lost her in July of 2005, and how well-intentioned, highly motivated, hard-working, smart p…
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New study finds 45,000 deaths annually linked to lack of health coverage
Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a new study published online today by the American Journal of Public Health. That figure is about…
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The Science of Serif vs Sans Serif Type
Update March 2012 See my expanded critique of Colin Wheildon’s legibility research .
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A Mole of Moles
What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?
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Why Explore Space? A 1970 Letter to a Nun in Africa.
Ernst Stuhlinger wrote this letter on May 6, 1970, to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun who worked among the starving children of Kabwe, Zambia, in Africa, who questioned the value of space exploration. A…
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Income inequality, as seen from space
Last week, I wrote about how urban trees—or the lack thereof—can reveal income inequality. After writing that article, I was curious, could I actually see
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Elsevier charges authors to make items "Open Access", then charges to read them.
[This is a long post – in summary Elsevier breach licences and charge readers for Open Access. I also ask the world to verify and amplify my conclusions].
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10-year-old problem in theoretical computer science falls
Interactive proofs — mathematical games that underlie much modern cryptography — work even if players try to use quantum information to cheat.
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The Latest On Intelligence
You may remember The Bell Curve. The book was published in 1994 by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, and it argued that IQ is largely determined by genetics and little by the environment. It...
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What happens when a basebal goes at nearly the speed of light (what-if.XKCD)
What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
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Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics
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Pump Up the Storage
If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or…