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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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UFOs shows government competence as either surprisingly high or low
Sometimes I pride myself on my taking an intellectual strategy of tackling neglected important questions.
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How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?
Over the last number of years, our planet has become encircled by Starlink, OneWeb, and other “megaconstellation” satellites.
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The Point of the Banach Tarski Theorem (2015)
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
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How far behind a plane is its noise?
If you’re ever near a relatively low flying airplane, you may have noticed that it sounds like it’s in a different spot in the sky than where it actually is. You can hear the loud engines, and your ears tell you it should be in one place, but your eyes tell you it’s clearly well ahead of its noise. It’s a funny visual…
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The Future of Space Launch Is Near
Until recently, the future of space launch looked pretty much like its past. For over 50 years, humanity has blasted thousands of spacecraft and satellites into space. Every launch vehicle that carried them aloft has ended up littering the planet with the broken, twisted remains of expended rocket stages. The scenario…
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How Correlated Are You?
This post is an offshoot from Chapter 1 of Probably Overthinking It, which is available for pre-order now! Suppose you measure the arm and leg lengths of 4082 people. You would expect those measurements to be correlated, and you would be right. In the ANSUR-II dataset, among male members of the armed forces, this…
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All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune
Can We Terraform the Earth Using Life Itself?
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Endemic Pathogens Are Making You Crazy and Then Killing You
In February 2022, Jim Keller organized a scientific anarchism event in Woodside, California. Scientific anarchism, a term borrowed from the controversial philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend, concerns the way science is performed in the laboratory and the way that ideas are generated, refuted, and incorporated into…
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CRISPR Gene Editing
CRISPR is a recently discovered genomic tool that could potentially revolutionize genetic modification and editing, including gene silencing, editing, activating, and other crucial functions. It has made a big splash in the synthetic biology community, and mentions of CRISPR have started cropping up elsewhere in the…
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Analyzing my DNA
I recently bought 23andme [http://23andme.com], a service which requires you to send off a DNA sample, and in return performs a series of interesting tests concerning your health and ancestry. I bought the test as a birthday present to myself, somewhat because I was interested in the results,
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I wrote a short story about von Neumann probes
"They would have eaten our whole house and probably the whole cul-de-sac if we didn't find those jelly beans."
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Introduction to Digital Filters (2024)
INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL FILTERS WITH AUDIO APPLICATIONS
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Illustration Beyond Proof
[This is a guest post by Kate Stange and Edmund Harriss. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] In January a group of mathematicians, hi…
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What does it mean for light to be stopped or stored?
Physicist: We’ve gotten a handful of questions since this was published and led to articles like this, this, and, this. In a nutshell, some dudes in Germany (Georg Heinze, Christian Hubrich,…
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The Colors of Chemistry
This notebook documents my exploration of color theory and its applications to photochemistry. It also shows off the functionality of several Julia packages: Color.jl for color theory and colorimetry, SIUnits.jl for unitful computations, and Gadfly.jl for graph plotting.
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On Two Views of Computation in Computer Science
Abstract: Machine and language models of computation differ so greatly in the computational complexity properties of their representation that they form two distinct classes that cannot be directly…
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Double Slit Experiment No Mystery
How can you be in two places at once When you’re not anywhere at all — Firesign Theater [Note: this is NOT original research. I just read the right book] The famous double slit experime…
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For the first time in four decades, the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is dry
For the first time in ~40 years (? – see below) New Mexico’s Rio Grande has “broken” – is no longer flowing – in what we call “the Albuquerque reach”…
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Maps Of Matter
Status: Rough working notes – me thinking aloud. Speculative, and likely contains errors, misconceptions, and omissions; thoughtful, informed comments are welcome. Intended for a general scientifically curious audience, not requiring much detailed specialist background.
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Spherical Harmonics
3D visualization tool of spherical harmonics. Visualize and compare real, imaginary, and complex components by adjusting the degree l and order m parameters.
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Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apollo 11
This is how a completely abstract argument about alien germs was taken seriously and mitigated at great effort and expense during the 1969 Apollo landing.
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Quantum transitions take time – the news is its experimental demonstration
A number of people have asked me to weigh in on this story in Quanta Magazine (based on this paper [ PDF version ] and also reported in t...
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Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation (2007)
When an experimental study states "The group with treatment X had significantly less disease ( p = 1%)", many people interpret this statement as being equivalent to "there is a 99% chance that if I do treatment X it will prevent disease." This essay explains why these statements are not equivalent. For such an…
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