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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…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 76 posts.
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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…
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Time-Nuts -- Precise Time and Frequency for Amateurs
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.
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The Sad State of Diabetes Technology in 2012
I've been diabetic for almost two decades. It's tiring, let me tell you. Here's ...
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How we gave colors names and it messed with our brains (part II)
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…
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Urban trees reveal income inequality
Wealthy cities seem to have it all. Expansive, well-manicured parks. Fine dining. Renowned orchestras and theaters. More trees. Wait, trees? I’m afraid
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Why three prongs?
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.
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Feynman's Clock
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…
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Rosser’s Theorem via Turing machines
(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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New Particle Discovered at CERN
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Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything
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…