The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,457 posts.
Time-Nuts ™ is a mailing list for amateurs who are interested in precise Time & Frequency. Topics include stability of quartz oscillators, measurements of rubidium and cesium atomic clocks, using WWVB, Loran-C, and GPS for long-term comparisons.
I've been diabetic for almost two decades. It's tiring, let me tell you. Here's ...
Update: This post was an Editor’s pick by Cristy Gelling at Science Seeker, and was included in Bora Zivkovic’s top 10 science blog posts of the week. Lately, I’ve got colors on t…
Wealthy cities seem to have it all. Expansive, well-manicured parks. Fine dining. Renowned orchestras and theaters. More trees. Wait, trees? I’m afraid
Why do AC cords need three prongs? If there is no positive or negative in AC systems, why do we have HOT and NEUTRAL? I attempt to shed light on some of these mysteries.
You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. – Richard Feynman, to his wife, Arlene Richard Feynman is famous for his ceaseless questioning of life and the universe, to a degree unexpected even for being a Nobel Prize quantum physicist. His dogged investigation of the Challenger explosion is the most…
(Thanks to Amit Sahai for spurring me to write this post!) The Background We all remember Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem from kindergarten. This is the thing that, given a formal syste…
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So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance…
Technology Academy Finland (TAF) awards the global one-million-euro Millennium Technology Prize and runs associated events and initiatives.
Water is complicated and fascinating stuff! There are at least sixteen known crystal phases of ice, many shown in this diagram based on the work of Martin Chaplin: (Click for a larger version.) For…
I’m eager to summarize the (largely excellent) discussion of last week’s nightmares and to talk about what it all means. I’ll surely get to that in the next few days. But meanwhil…
So you've decided to leave academia, or are perhaps just thinking about doing so. Welcome to the dark side. I made the transition a few years ago, and since then I've gotten a number of questions about how to do it. Hence, this article. First of all, I'm going to …
This theorem is one of the most important proven in the twentieth century. Here are a few brief selections that will help you start to understand it. Gödel’s original paper “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” is available in a modernized translation . It’s also in print from Dover in a nice, inexpensive edition …
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
So Maciej Cegłowski has updated his blog for the first time in four months. Upon encountering the novel task of "actually generating HTML", his gimcrack blogging software sprayed a couple random posts across his RSS feed, one of which was the venerable 2010 essay on scurvy in Antarctic exploration. Which, combined…
Suppose you go around taking extremely close-up black-and-white pictures of randomly chosen natural and unnatural objects (rocks, trees, streams, buildings, etc.). What do they look like? Well, eac…
Last week I was in Vancouver, to give talks at the University of British Columbia and at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. As part of that visit, on Friday af…
This is the first post of probably several in my concern about textmining. You do NOT have to be a scientist to understand the point with total clarity. This topic is one of the most important I have written about this year. We are at a critical point where unless we take action our scholarly rights will be further…
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This s…
New Scientist – Musk declared recently that he could put a human on Mars in 10 to 20 years’ time. It is a remarkable claim, yet even more astonishingly Musk tells me that he could do it for $5 billion, and possibly as little as $2 billion – a snip when you consider that the International Space Station (ISS) has cost…
By using optical equipment in a totally unexpected way, MIT researchers have created an imaging system that makes light look slow.
