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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 131 posts.
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The cognitive costs of air pollution
Air pollution is a very big deal. Its adverse effects on numerous health outcomes and general mortality are widely documented . However, our understanding of its cognitive costs is more recent and those costs are almost certainly still significantly under-emphasized. For example, cognitive effects are not mentioned in…
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Going Critical
Learn how things spread with playable simulations
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I found two identical packs of Skittles among 468 packs
This article was discussed on Hacker News, and was cited in The Mathematical Gazette. Introduction This is a follow-up to a post from earlier this year discussing the likelihood of encountering two…
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1060-hour image of the Large Magellanic Cloud captured by amateur astronomers
This extraordinary view of the LMC might be the world's longest exposure image in amateur astronomy. 1060 hours were needed to capture this highly-resolved image (204 Megapixels) of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
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Adults learn language to fluency nearly as well as children: study
Scott Chacon is CEO of the online language learning company Chatterbug.
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Earth and Sun
Interactive article about Earth and Sun.
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Scott’s Supreme Quantum Supremacy FAQ
You’ve seen the stories—in the Financial Times, Technology Review, CNET, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, or elsewhere—saying that a group at Google has now achieved quantum computation…
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On whether changes in bedroom CO2 levels affect sleep quality
Self-experiment on whether changes in bedroom CO₂ levels affect sleep quality
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Eigenvectors from eigenvalues
Peter Denton, Stephen Parke, Xining Zhang, and I have just uploaded to the arXiv the short unpublished note “Eigenvectors from eigenvalues”. This note gives two proofs of a general eige…
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Sci-Hub and Alexandra Basic Information
I decided to make a quick summary of facts about Sci-Hub and myself, because in our times you cannot fully trust articles published in media, Wikipedia pages. Well, they do present facts about Sci-…
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The SpaceX Starship is a big deal
Part of my series on common misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. SpaceX has been working on some variant of the Big Falcon Rocket for almost a decade, with a publicly an…
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Practical Facts about the Human Brain
I don’t think it’d have been possible for me to connect with the topic of emotional resilience without a really solid amount of scientific evidence and brain facts supporting it. As a self-identified left-brained male, I need a lot of safety signals from the world of science to really allow myself to go deeper into […]
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Why was it so hard to take a picture of a black hole?
Physicist: Black holes and space are both black, so there’s that. But while black holes tend to be very small, space is bonkers big and filled with just enough stuff to give astronomers thin…
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How pharmaceutical industry financial modelers think about rare diseases
How does industry decide whether curing your disease would be profitable, and how can you convince them it will be?
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German solar and wind are triple the cost of French nuclear, last half as long
France’s nuclear energy spending was 60% of what Germany spent on renewables. France gets about 400 Terawatt hour per year from nuclear but Germany gets 226 Terawatt-hours each year. 45 Terawatt-hours of Germany’s renewable power comes from burning biomass which generates air pollution.
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A Look at Overnight Stays at US National Parks
Explore overnight stays at US National Parks and uncover surprising patterns.
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Tunnel Boring Machines (2018)
Meet the Most Interesting Tunnel Boring Machines
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IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle
Background : “IQ” is a stale test meant to measure mental capacity but in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning…
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Queueing theory: The science of waiting in line
The math behind how people wait in line
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What Is a Manifold?
In machine learning, the term manifold is thrown around a lot—in fact, there’s even a branch of machine learning dealing with learning the structure of manifolds. Said branch is aptly named manifold learning . Inspired by fantastic visualizations of shapelet mining algorithms , this post aims to give a visual…
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It’s Time for Some Queueing Theory
Queueing theory is the scientific study of waiting in line. It can apply to familiar lines like those at the grocery store or bank but also to things like web s
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Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off
Links:Google paper in NatureNew York Times articleIBM paper and blog post responding to Google’s announcementBoaz Barak’s new post: “Boaz’s inferior classical inferiority FA…
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Our Brains Are Not Multi-Threaded
In computer programming, it’s common to split your program into multiple different threads that run simultaneously, as this often simplifies application design. Imagine, for example, ... Read more