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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,457 posts.
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The Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity: a Critical Examination
Introduction I'd like to begin by emphasizing that carbohydrate restriction has helped many people lose body fat and improve their metabol...
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Deaths per TWH by energy source
I wrote this back in 2008 and with one new death that is somewhat nuclear energy related (a death at one of the japanese nuclear plants following the 8.9 earthquake) the statistics are not changed. Japan should have had sealed backup diesel generators or updated some of their designs. However, nuclear still compares…
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How automatic transmission almost made sperm whales extinct
It was the familiar story of human cruelty and greed: the sperm whales were hunted to the oblivion. Then, in the 1970s, the better part of humanity led by good people - ecological activists - saw the error of their ways and stopped the murder. Good triumphed over evil. Amen. The problem with such…
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A shuffled deck of cards is unique in all human history
Every time you shuffle a deck of playing cards, it's probably a unique order, never before seen in human history.
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The Demon Machine
Over the weekend I was reunited with the first two computers I spent extensive time programming. The Sharp MZ-80K (released in 1979) and t...
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Using an LCD’s poor viewing angle to your advantage
When viewing LCD monitors from an oblique angle, it is not uncommon to witness a dramatic color shift. Occasionally, this can appear as a total color inversion. This is primarily caused by a polarization asymmetry, where light rays passing through the pixel matrix at oblique angles are influenced by the relative…
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Closed access means people die
Jenny Molloy and I have been representing the Open Knowledge Foundation at the Open Science Summit and we presented the Open Research Reports (ORR) project. The slides we used are at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6280676/orr.pptx . I expect that at some stage we’ll be on the video record (last year’s was very useful and…
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Fibonacci Flim-Flam.
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
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MIT’s ‘Artificial leaf’ makes fuel from sunlight
Solar cell bonded to recently developed catalyst can harness the sun, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.
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Neutrinos Faster Than Light, or FPGA artifacts?
I spent my week-end reading comments from theoretical physicists,geodesists, and other scientists, speculating on the news of the OPERA experiment that appe...
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Feynman On The Importance Of Playing
I'm reading " Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman " (very good read). What he says about burnout, playing and doing the things you love is pr...
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Latitude doesn’t exactly mean what I thought
There are two kinds of latitude: geocentric and astronomical. On a perfect sphere, they're the same, but on an oblate spheroid like Earth they're different.
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People are biased against creative ideas, studies find
While people say they welcome creative ideas, they are in fact frightened by them and favor the tried and true, according to a new ILR School study. (Aug. 25, 2011)
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Do trees communicate? Networks, networks
I was unfamiliar with how mycorrhizal networks connect the roots of trees, facilitating the sharing of resources. Dr. Suzanne Simard writes: Graduate student Kevin Beiler has uncovered the extent a…
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