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Lost Civilizations of the Andes
Fig. 5.1 Wall in in Hatunrumiyoc street, Cuzco. Polygonal stones usually have pillowed (convex) faces and bevelled, sunken joints.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 152 posts.
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Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
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Calories in, calories out
This article was discussed on Hacker News. Introduction How do we lose (or gain) weight? Is it really as simple as “calories in, calories out” (i.e., eat less than you burn), or i…
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Lab Notebook: Single Pixel Camera
Please forgive me for the lack of new content over the last five or so months. After my most recent post about neural networks and quadcopte...
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Building the Largest Ship in the World
The Maersk Triple E is the largest ship on the planet, the pride and joy of the largest shipping company in the world. The ship was a huge hit with the public last year when it docked ...
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Coanda Effect: Understanding Why Wings Work
"In aerodynamics, theory is what makes the invisible plain. Trying to fly an airplane without theory is like getting into a fistfight with a poltergeist." --David Thornburg [1992].
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Losing 58.3 Lbs for Science
This morning was my final data collection for a randomized diet experiment I have been participating in for the last year. Here is a graph of my near-daily weigh-ins on Withings: ...
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Rolling Shutters
I remember seeing once the following photo from Flickr, and having my brain melt slightly from trying to figure out what went wrong: The issue was the propeller was rotating as the camera detector 'read out', i.e. there was some motion during the exposure of the camera. This is an interesting thing to think about…
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Giant leap against Diabetes
Harvard stem cell researchers announced a giant leap forward in the quest to find a truly effective treatment for type 1 diabetes, a disease that affects an estimated 3 million Americans.
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What makes for a stable marriage?
Randy Olson reviews a research paper that outlines what makes for a stable marriage in the U.S.
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The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources"
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The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2014 was divided, one half awarded to John O'Keefe, the other half jointly to May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain"
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Accidental release of 45L of polio virus solution into the environment – Belgium
See the latest news and media contact details
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Why the Facebook Experiment Is Lousy Social Science
Facebook is grappling with its impact on our social and emotional lives — and that’s a good thing. But it has to get the research right. Why Facebook did the experiment, and how to make it better.
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Quantum mechanics as a generalization of probability (2007)
There are two ways to teach quantum mechanics. The first way -- which for most physicists today is still the only way -- follows the historical order in which the ideas were discovered. So, you start with classical mechanics and electrodynamics, solving lots of grueling differential equations at every step. Then you…
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Rethinking the origins of the universe
Laura Mersini-Houghton has mathematically proven that quantum effects are strong enough to stop the formation of black holes, work that opens up a new round of discussions and debates about the origins of the universe.
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A scientist stole my root beer
I’m not ashamed to say that I like root beer. There’s something about the herbal and woodsy flavors that I enjoy. It’s refreshing, but also a time machine. A sip of root beer brin…
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1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-long progress f...
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Melting aluminum
Today another in my ongoing, seldom-updated series of posts about building my own backyard foundry. Today I’ll describe how the final step works: actually melting and pouring the metal. First…
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Correlation is usually not causation. But why not?
Correlations are oft interpreted as evidence for causation; this is oft falsified; do causal graphs explain why this is so common, because the number of possible indirect paths greatly exceeds the direct paths necessary for useful manipulation?
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Isolating Football Player Movement by Eliminating Camera Motion
Note: This post departs from the general format used on this blog. That's because the post is not about a specific analysis I've done bu...
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Richard Dawkins' response to “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?"
Essentialism—what I’ve called "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind"—stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle, or a right triangle, were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect…
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