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Most Radioactive Spot in New York: A Street Corner in Queens
Many are going to ask, "What's so weird about this one corner?" and I'm here to answer. The end of Irving Avenue, where it meets Moffat Str...
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,457 posts.
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Sinusoidal Sunlight
The graph of daylight over the course of a year looks like a sine wave, but is it?
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Medication errors found in half of surgeries
The first study to measure the incidence of medication errors and adverse drug events during the perioperative period has found that some sort of mistake or adverse event occurred in every second operation and in 5 percent of observed drug administrations, according to information gathered from 275 operations at…
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Elite scientists are more likely to have a hobby in the arts and crafts
Highly-accomplished scientists are more likely to have an artsy hobby than the average scientist. And Nobel prize winners are even more likely.
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Physics in Metal Music
Metal bands aren't afraid to tackle serious topics in their lyrics. Here, we look at metal songs that deal with concepts in theoretical physics and cosmology.
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Satellites Spotting Depth
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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The Oh My God Particle
The Oh-My-God Particle
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Scale is a fantastic book on the hidden order of complex systems
A deep dive summary into on of the most interesting books I read this year.
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Visualizing Neural Networks
A visual example-focused introduction to neural networks.
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Physicists generate the first snapshots of fermion pairs
MIT physicists captured the first images that directly show the pairing of fermions. The snapshots of particles pairing up in a cloud of atoms can provide clues to how electrons pair up in a superconducting material.
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American Astronomical Society (AAS) journals transition to open access
The American Astronomical Society (AAS) is an international non-governmental organization with a mission to enhance and share humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe as a diverse and inclusive astronomical community.
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What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)
If you regularly read cognitive science or psychology blogs (or even just the lowly New York Times!), you’ve probably heard of something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger e…
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Dual N-Back Meta-analysis
Does DNB increase IQ? What factors affect the studies? Probably not: gains are driven by studies with weakest methodology like apathetic control groups.
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The Scaling Hypothesis (2021)
On GPT-3: meta-learning, scaling, implications, and deep theory. The scaling hypothesis: neural nets absorb data & compute, generalizing and becoming more Bayesian as problems get harder, manifesting new abilities even at trivial-by-global-standards-scale. The deep learning revolution has begun as foretold.
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Magenta Ain't A Color
All the colours in the light spectrum have complements that exist within the spectrum – except green. There seems to be some kind of imbalance. What is going on? Is green somehow being discriminated against? The light spectrum consists of a range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Red light has the longest…
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The New Science of Causation
It seems like each new day brings another one of those headlines: regular sleep “linked to” life expectancy, playing video games “associated with” surgical prowess, bullies “at risk” of becoming criminals, and “does breastfeeding reduce a baby’s blood pressure?” (the old rhetorical question gambit). Sometimes the…
4190
How the pantheon has lasted 2000 years without steel in its concrete
This famous building stands in the business district of Rome--much as it was built some 18 centuries ago. Amazingly, it has withstood the ravages of both the elements and war permitting a firsthand view of a unique product constructed by Roman hands. Now, it is exposed to acid rain and fumes from passing automobiles…
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2010 Physics Nobel Prize (Graphene)
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 was awarded jointly to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene"
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What You Learned About How Planes Fly Was Probably Wrong
So we all know how planes fly, right? The top of the wing is rounded and the bottom of the wing is more straight. Air takes longer to travel over the top of the
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S. Cook: “This appears to be a relatively serious claim to have solved P vs NP.”
An email I was recently forwarded (a couple of steps removed) from Vinay Deolalikar from HP Labs:
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The Science of Word Recognition
Reviews the history of why psychologists moved from a word shape model of word recognition to a letter recognition model.
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