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Everything is logarithms
Some connections between things, which I have not seen elsewhere. Maybe they mean something?
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Solar
I spent some time (in Fall 2023) reading about solar deployment. Some facts that struck me:
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Insects don't swarm at LED lights
Remember when you used to encounter swarms of insects around outdoor electric lights? Their well known attraction to outdoor lights is used by entomologists and moth lovers to conduct insect surveys. All you need is a light and a white sheet to see who’s flying at night.
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The Martians of Budapest
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a…
335
What is protein folding? A brief explanation
AlphaFold from Google DeepMind is said to solve the protein folding problem. What is that, and why is it hard?
336
On Chomsky and the Two Cultures of Statistical Learning
Chomsky's remarks were in response to Steven Pinker's question about the success of probabilistic models trained with statistical methods. This essay is a response to Pinker and Chomsky, and will address these questions:
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Tunnel Boring Machines (2018)
Meet the Most Interesting Tunnel Boring Machines
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How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle
Now that Discovery is safely delivered to the Smithsonian, I think I can tell the story of how we nearly lost her in July of 2005, and how well-intentioned, highly motivated, hard-working, smart p…
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“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
Note: I link to a bunch of paywalled studies in this essay. Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. For the clearest example of deliberate data manipulation, see how Walker edits out the data that contradicts his argument from the graph…
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Google, D-Wave, and the case of the factor-10^8 speedup
Update (Dec. 16): If you’re still following this, please check out an important comment by Alex Selby, the discoverer of Selby’s algorithm, which I discussed in the post. Selby querie…
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A review of correlations between big five personality types and life outcomes
People with the same big five personality types tend to be more happy, successful, intelligent, creative, and popular. Why aren’t there more tradeoffs?
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The LHC “nightmare scenario” has come true
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Starship is still not understood
Another entry into my blog series on countering misconceptions in space journalism. I discussed this post on The Space Show on November 5 2021. It has been exactly two years since my initial posts …
347
The unreasonable effectiveness of the Fourier transform
New : You can now watch a recording of my talk on my YouTube channel ! Or you can just click "play" below, I suppose.
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Turning scrap copper into beautiful crystals
To grow copper acetate crystals, first prepare a saturated solution by reacting 10 g of scrap copper with 400 mL of white vinegar.
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Running Speeds
Recently a shoe store in France ran a promotion called “Rob It to Get It”, which invited customers to try to steal something by grabbing it and running out of the store. But there was a catch — the “security guard” was a professional sprinter, Méba Mickael Zeze. As you would expect, he is fast, but you might not…
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The shadows lurking in the equations
If you've ever graphed equations, chances are you have only ever graphed equations in what I refer to as "Binary mode" - which draws a line where the equation is EXACTLY equal, and leaves white everywhere else.
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Using NASA’s SMAP satellite to detect L-band interference
It was launched to measure moisture. Now it’s ghost-trailing jammers across an electronic battlefield.
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Shor, I’ll do it (2007)
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
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How I Became a Knife Steel Metallurgist
Thanks to Jon Broida of Japanese Knife Imports and Anton Kudris for becoming Knife Steel Nerds Patreon supporters! When I was 16 I went with my father to the Las Vegas Custom Knife show. My interest in custom knives up to that point had been pretty limited. My father, Devin, has run a Damascus steel… Continue reading…
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Using an LCD’s poor viewing angle to your advantage
When viewing LCD monitors from an oblique angle, it is not uncommon to witness a dramatic color shift. Occasionally, this can appear as a total color inversion. This is primarily caused by a polarization asymmetry, where light rays passing through the pixel matrix at oblique angles are influenced by the relative…
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The Illustrated AlphaFold
A visual walkthrough of the AlphaFold3 architecture, with more details and diagrams than you were probably looking for.
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Understanding large language models: A cross-section of the relevant literature
A Cross-Section of the Most Relevant Literature To Get Up to Speed
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What's Earth's dominant species by mass?
You might have heard that all the ants in the world weigh as much combined as all the humans. That isn’t true. We outweigh ants 5 to 1.1 Termites might have us beat, though.2 Either way, it’s not r…
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Excitable cells
A demonstration of how reentry tachyarrhythmias can develop in a system of excitable cells.
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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…