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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 152 posts.
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Yale researchers reconstruct facial images locked in a viewer’s mind
Using only data from an fMRI scan, researchers led by a Yale University undergraduate have accurately reconstructed images of human faces as viewed by other people.
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Press Conference in Brazil to Announce Discovery in Outer Solar System
Media Advisory: Press Conference in Brazil to Announce Discovery in Outer Solar System
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Why are roller coaster loops not circular?
Why are the loops on roller coasters never circular?
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How a Light Saber Works
[ Metanote: This explanation arose out of a lunch-time discussion with a colleague who claimed a light saber could not exist since the light beam it emits could not just stop in mid-air after 75 cm. I thank this colleague for the challenge. ]
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Machines are better referees than humans but we’ll be sued if we use them
Andy Howlett and Mark Williamson in our group have been developing fantastic software. It can read the whole scientific literature and analyse it in minute detail. One of the things we are starting with is chemistry. ChemVisitor (part of AMI2) can read chemical structure diagrams and chemical names and work out what…
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Nootropics Survey Results And Analysis
In case you are just joining us: nootropics are substances which purportedly improve mental functioning with relatively few side effects when used responsibility. Caffeine is a good example. It imp…
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How reliable are climate models?
<p>While there are uncertainties with climate models, they successfully reproduce the past and have made predictions that have been subsequently confirmed by observations.</p>
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95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong
I’m seeing a lot of wrangling over the recent (15+ year) pause in global average warming…when did it start, is it a full pause, shouldn’t we be taking the longer view, etc.
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The Weight of Rain
My talk at Visualized.
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ICE/ISEE-3 to return to an Earth no longer capable of speaking to it
It's with great sadness that I report that the Goddard Space Flight Center team has determined that we will not be able to regain control of the venerable…
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown 2. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: Down for the Count 3. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: The Great Gali...
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Lethal Neutrinos
How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?
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Terry Tao on how to compute non-converging infinite sums (2010)
The Riemann zeta function $latex {\zeta(s)}&fg=000000$ is defined in the region $latex {\hbox{Re}(s)>1}&fg=000000$ by the absolutely convergent series $latex \displaystyle \zeta(s) = \su…
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The sum of all the positive integers is not -1/12
I haven't been blogging recently because my new startup is taking up all my time, but someone needs to stand up and say the emperor has no c...
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Introducing our smart contact lens project (for diabetics)
You’ve probably heard that diabetes is a huge and growing problem—affecting one in every 19 people on the planet. But you may not be familiar with the daily struggle tha…
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Nassim Taleb: We should retire the notion of standard deviation
The notion of standard deviation has confused hordes of scientists; it is time to retire it from common use and replace it with the more effective one of mean deviation. Standard deviation, STD, should be left to mathematicians, physicists and mathematical statisticians deriving limit theorems. There is no scientific…
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