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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 152 posts.
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Bioluminescent trees as an alternative to electric lighting
When people think of Registered Apprenticeship, they may picture careers in construction, manufacturing, or the skilled trades. But apprenticeship is also creating exciting career pathways in industries that keep our communities beautiful, safe, and thriving — including turfgrass management and groundskeeping. New…
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France signs a five-year national deal with Elsevier
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Correlation is usually not causation. But why not?
Correlations are oft interpreted as evidence for causation; this is oft falsified; do causal graphs explain why this is so common, because the number of possible indirect paths greatly exceeds the direct paths necessary for useful manipulation?
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An Example of Forensic Science at Its Worst: US v. Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sinclair
In early 2014, I provided material support in what would end up turning around what was, in their own words, the US Army’s biggest case in a generation, and much to the dismay of the prosecution team that brought me in to assist them. In the process, it seems I also prevented what the evidence pointed to as an…
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95% of climate models agree: the observations must be wrong
I’m seeing a lot of wrangling over the recent (15+ year) pause in global average warming…when did it start, is it a full pause, shouldn’t we be taking the longer view, etc.
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A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
Our knowledge of the composition and structure of the Earth’s interior through direct observation and sampling is limited to the top few ki...
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Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain
The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain.
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Terry Tao on how to compute non-converging infinite sums (2010)
The Riemann zeta function $latex {\zeta(s)}&fg=000000$ is defined in the region $latex {\hbox{Re}(s)>1}&fg=000000$ by the absolutely convergent series $latex \displaystyle \zeta(s) = \su…
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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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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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UNSW researchers set record in solar energy efficiency
Solar engineers from UNSW's Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics have set a new world-record in solar energy efficiency, achieving an electricity conversion rate of over 40%.
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Selection bias and bombers (2008)
During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald told the RAF to add armor where it didn't seem planes needed it. But he was right.
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Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)
It might be thought that special relativity provides a short negative answer to this question. In actual fact, there are many trivial ways in which things can be going faster than light (FTL) in a sense, and there may be other more genuine possibilities. On the other hand, there are also good reasons to believe that…
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“The Great Plate Count Anomaly” that is no more
by Gemma Reguera — For over a century, microbiologists have been using growth media solidified with agar to culture microbes from environmental samples. Individual cells are easily separated on th…
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Richard Dawkins' response to “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?"
Essentialism—what I’ve called "the tyranny of the discontinuous mind"—stems from Plato, with his characteristically Greek geometer’s view of things. For Plato, a circle, or a right triangle, were ideal forms, definable mathematically but never realised in practice. A circle drawn in the sand was an imperfect…
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Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)
Happy birthday to me! Recently, lots of people have been asking me what I think about IIT—no, not the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Integrated Information Theory, a widely-discussed &#…
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Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:”There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought …
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How reliable are climate models?
<p>While there are uncertainties with climate models, they successfully reproduce the past and have made predictions that have been subsequently confirmed by observations.</p>
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SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
The claim that “SSRIs don’t work” or “SSRIs are mostly just placebo” is most commonly associated with Irving Kirsch, a man with the awesome job title of “Associa…
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Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
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Lethal Neutrinos
How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?