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Borges on Chaos Theory
About a weird, lovely short story
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 384 posts.
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An interactive guide to Fourier series (2022)
Drawing with the Fourier Series
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New study simulates gravitational waves from failing warp drive
Warp drives are staples of science fiction, and in principle could propel spaceships faster than the speed of light. However, there are many problems with constructing them in practice, such as the requirement for an exotic type of matter with negative energy. Nevertheless, physicists have been exploring the…
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Ancient Stars Made Extraordinarily Heavy Elements (2023)
How heavy can an element be? Ancient stars were capable of producing elements heavier than any element on the periodic table found naturally on Earth.
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The Rhisotope Project: Insertion of radioisotopes into live rhinoceros
The Rhisotope Project at Wits is entering a new testing phase with the insertion of radioisotopes into 20 live rhinoceros.
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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.
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Ten Noteworthy AI Research Papers of 2023
This year has felt distinctly different. I've been working in, on, and with machine learning and AI for over a decade, yet I can't recall a time when these fields were as popular and rapidly evolving as they have been this year. To conclude an eventful 2023 in machine learning and AI research, I'm excited to share 10…
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Deep sea mining could be worse for the climate than land ores
As decisions over the future viability of deep sea mining are under review, Planet Tracker’s latest report ‘The Climate Myth of Deep Sea Mining’ examines deep sea mining companies’ claim that mining polymetallic nodules could be a low carbon alternative to mining on land.
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Solving methane mysteries with satellite imagery
By combining two types of remote sensing data, we can see hidden leaks from ships
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Pilot study shows ketogenic diet improves mental illness
A small clinical trial led by Stanford Medicine found that the metabolic effects of a ketogenic diet may help stabilize the brain.
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Legendre transform, better explained (2017)
The way that most physicists teach and talk about partial differential equations is horrible, and has surprisingly big costs for the typical understanding of the foundations of the field even among professionals. The chief victims are students of thermodynamics and analytical mechanics, and I've me
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A vision for the alleviation of water scarcity in the US Southwest
[Edit May 2024: This concept was republished in Asterisk Magazine.] Just a couple of hours drive east of Los Angeles lies the Imperial Valley, home to Palm Springs, some of the most productive agri…
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Researchers trace a form of lupus back to a single mutation
Researchers were able to trace a form of the autoimmune disease lupus back to a single mutation
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Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
A wintertime climate change solution
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Scientists should use AI as a tool, not an oracle
How AI hype leads to flawed research that fuels more hype
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Scientists discover underlying cause of "brain fog" linked with Long Covid
Today, a team of scientists from Trinity College Dublin and investigators from FutureNeuro announced a major discovery that has profound importance for our understanding of brain fog and cognitive decline seen in some patients with Long COVID.
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Origami-Inspired Phased Arrays Are Reshaping the Future of Antennas
Folding antennas into different shapes to create near infinite radiation patterns.
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Bird brain from the age of dinosaurs reveals roots of avian intelligence
A ‘one of a kind’ fossil discovery could transform our understanding of how the unique brains and intelligence of modern birds evolved, one of the most enduring mysteries of vertebrate evolution.
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Do Penguins Have Knees? (2019)
What is the penguin’s skeleton truly made of? Do penguins actually have knees? Why do penguins walk that way. Find out here!
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Three of the oldest stars in the universe found circling the Milky Way
MIT astronomers discovered three of the oldest stars in the universe, and they live in our own galactic neighborhood. The stars are in the Milky Way’s “halo” — the cloud of stars that envelopes the entire main galactic disk — and they appear to have formed between 12 and 13 billion years ago, when the very first…
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Hacking physics from the back of a napkin (2020)
February 24, 2020. The computational power of a humble napkin is awesome. I discuss three napkin algorithms — dimensional analysis, Fermi estimates, and random walks — and use them to figure out why rain falls, the length of the E. coli genome, and the mass of a proton, among other things. These examples suggest a…
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Scratches in 2001: A Space Osyssey (2018)
A set of scratches in Stanley Kubrick’s '2001: A Space Odyssey' is visible at the same moments and locations within the frame in most copies of the movie.
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Bees have an internal sense of time (2022)
Did you know that bees can perceive time? Not even just simply tracking the Sun. Actual time measurements.
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Square roots and maxima
A brief numerical and graphical check on a 3Blue1Brown video.
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Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking?
Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking? Does running burn less calories per distance traveled than wa...
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The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)
A decade-long effort to build a machine to unlock the promise of nuclear fusion fell victim to budget constraints and competing science, and was shut down the day it was dedicated. It was never turned on.
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Not so fast, Mr. Fourier
A real explanation of discrete Fourier transform (DFT, FFT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), and their inverses.