1921
Lead Poisoning and Rome
"The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them."
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,038 posts.
1922
Calorie restrictive eating for longer life? The story we didn’t hear in the news
Junkfood Science - truth about food and health
1923
GPT-2 as step toward general intelligence (2019)
A machine learning researcher writes me in response to yesterday’s post, saying:I still think GPT-2 is a brute-force statistical pattern matcher which blends up the internet and gives you bac…
1924
Insanely deep fractal zoom
I was really into fractals in college (I know…) when I was making rave flyers (I know!) for a friend’s parties in Iowa (I know! I know! Shut up already!). Anywa
1925
1926
How to destroy the earth
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
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1932
Galactic-Scale Energy (2011)
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
1933
1934
The Science of Serif vs Sans Serif Type
Update March 2012 See my expanded critique of Colin Wheildon’s legibility research .
1935
1936
The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant (2005)
An allegory against complacency about aging and death.
1937
When (if ever) did the Sun set on the British Empire?
It hasn't. Yet. But only because of a few dozen people living in an area smaller than Disney World.
1938
1939
Python in the Scientific World
Yesterday I attended a biweekly meeting of an informal a UC Berkeley group devoted to Python in science (Py4Science), organized by Fernando ...
1940
A Non-Local Revolution
Paul Graham has recently argued for two points: first, that tech startups will continue to collect in Silicon Valley . Second, that startups may represent a new economic phase , replacing the corporate ladder of old . Now he’s suggesting that these two effects combined might lead to a very local economic revolution .
1941
500 Exabytes per Raindrop
People like to say this is the "information age". But just how much information are we talking about? I recently found a nice source of... umm... information about this question:
1942
Rutgers Graduate Student Finds New Prime-Generating Formula
Studying prime numbers is like playing the guitar. No, really, let me explain. The guitar is a simple instrument: six strings, some frets,...
1943
1944
Edward O. Wilson: Marx was right, he had the wrong species
Among many other things, Edward Wilson is a myrmecologist and two times Pulitzer-prize winner. There is a picture taken by him of an ant holding between its mandibles a banner with the words: 'Onward Sociobiolo�gy!'. Following the publication in 1975 of his book Sociobi�ology, the New Synthesis , he became both to…
1945
Dark Flash Photography - UV/IR Flash Instead of Visible Light
Dark Flash Photography To be presented at SIGGRAPH 2009, New Orleans. Download PDF Dilip Krishnan Rob Fergus Vision, Learning and Graphics Group Computer Science Department Courant Institute of Mat…
1946
Nuclear Reactor Wall Charts
Super Phénix: Creys-Malville Nuclear Power Station, River Rhone (Sur le Rhone) Creys-Malville, Isere, France, Centrale Nucleaire Europeen...
1947
If You Want to Catch a Liar, Make Him Draw
A man accused of a crime is brought into a police interrogation room and sits down at an empty table. There’s no polygraph equipment in sight, and the typical two-cop questioning team isn’t in the…
1948
1949
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?
1950