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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,038 posts.
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The inspection paradox is everywhere (2015)
I have updated this article with new data, better code, and friendlier data visualization. You can read the new version here . Th...
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Dark Alley Mathematics
Base changing and other calculations
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A Meta-Scientific Perspective on Thinking: Fast and Slow (2020)
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
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So You Think You Have a Power Law (2007)
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
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Creating a Pluto flyby using unaligned New Horizons images
Last month, a few days before NASA’s New Horizons probe made its historic flyby of Pluto, I posted a GIF of it doing so to Reddit .
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My God, It’s Full of Dots
Please click or tap in the gray square below. It will fill with a jolly tableau of colored disks—first big blue ones, then somewhat smaller purple ones, and eventually lots of tiny red dots.
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Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies
If delivered today, the last of Huxley’s 7-part lecture series at MIT would probably be categorised under motivational talks or self-help strategies. It surv...
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The Latest Study on Red Meat and Heart Disease: A Red Herring
Procter & Gamble has driven research on TMAO and heart disease since 2015
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Epistemic Collapse at the WSJ
For a long time now fundamental theoretical physics has been suffering not just from a slowdown in progress, but from a sort of intellectual collapse (I wrote about this here a while back in the co…
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Dr John C. Clark, a scientist who disarmed atomic bombs twice
One scientist did it twice
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Irish teen invents magnetic liquid trap to remove microplastics in water (2019)
Read about the Irish teenager who won the Google Science award for the magnetic liquid trap that could clean an ocean of microplastics.
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When zebra mussels colonized Lake Erie, it began to recover
There are many ways we can talk about the deeper roots of the crisis of our time, setting out from many different vantage points; as Charles Fort pointed out, one measures a circle, beginning anywh…
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Why we think giant pterosaurs could fly (2018)
Giant azhdarchid pterosaur in flight. Images like this virtually always trigger discussions about the validity of giant pterosaur flight h...
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Dividing a Square into 7 Similar Rectangles
This is a continuation of my post Dividing a square into similar rectangles, in which I discussed this puzzle: if you partition a square into n similar rectangles, what proportions can these rectan…
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Homemade synthetic aperture radar
Second version of the 6 GHz FMCW radar now with SAR images
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The Gaslighting of Science
Final Installment of the Misinformation Trifecta
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Two conspiracy theories about cola
Does cola contain a drug to prevent you from throwing up from the sugar? And is Mexican Coke somehow better than American Coke?
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Algernon's Law
Why most supplements fail: IQ improvement skepticism, Yudkowsky & Bostrom’s heuristics, nootropics
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The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? (2009)
Douglas G. Steigerwald joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara after completing an M.A. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on frontier econometric methods at the intersection of…
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“American Scientist” Understands Nothing about the Traveling Salesman Problem
I like to think there are some solid foundations to my life. I will be able to do the Monday New York Times crossword and I will not be able to do the Thursday version. My dental hygienist will not be satisfied with the amount of flossing I do. I will get my favorite spaghetti meal served on my birthday.
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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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Does the LHC collide protons at twice the speed of light?
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Those correction notices, in full
In light of our recent discussion of the unwillingness of authors of published papers to acknowledge their mistakes, I thought I’d post the four correction notices that I’ve felt the need to issue.