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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
This text is designed to accompany your study of introductory digital signal processing. 1 It’s an eccentric piece of not-so-rigorous literature with a preoccupation for explaining things using interactive visualizations, animations and sound. 2 My goal is to explain the Discrete Fourier Transform using a miniature…
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…
You can make a DIY air purifier in 30s. To test if it works, I generated smoke, and measured how well it removes tiny particles.
Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a textbook in real analysis called “Analysis I”. It was intended to complement the many good available analysis textbooks out there by focusing more on foun…
Patrick Winston is one of the greatest teachers at M.I.T., and for 27 years was Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (which later became part of CSAIL ).
With all the July runs in, dynamical models give a ~90% chance of a record-setting event
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…
by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman NOTE FROM IAN: The expert risk communication team of Lanard and Sandman has given me permission to post their very well-considered reply to my question of them just
When I was in college, I applied for an internship at the Huffington Post, that venerable bastion of journalism. Before my interview, I was given a spreadsheet of articles and associated view counts. I was asked to formulate and present a hypothesis about which types of articles generate the most views.
One of my favorite pastimes is exploring old bookstores.
People say many things about entropy: entropy increases with time, entropy is disorder, entropy increases with energy, entropy determines the arrow of time, etc.. But I have no idea what entropy is, and from what I find, neither do most other people. This is the introduction I wish I had when first told about entropy…
My neighbour has 50 hives, the road has 30 more. That's 4 million honeybees, and not one of them is the bee that actually needs saving.
How simple circuits can create complex behaviors
How hungover can you get? Kids blocks and Calculus!
AI, science, education, & ethics
A Two Part Post on the Immense Promise and Ecological Tragedy of Natural Herbertsmithite Crystals
Bidding farewell to classic experiments.
The James Webb Space Telescope probably needs no introduction, since it is perhaps the most important and well-known mission of the last years. It was launched on Christmas day from Kourou, French Guiana , into a direct transfer orbit to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point . JWST uses S-band at 2270.5 MHz to transmit…
an interactive guide
This article is an adaptation of a Lightning Talk I gave at CppCon2021. Link here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtqTGSOdmBo
"REAL stories. REAL history."
Reflections on the Summer of Math Exposition
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] At around 7PM on the balmy evening of Saturday, December 3, 2022 , nearly every electric customer in Moore County, North Carolina was simultaneously plunged into darkness. Amid the confusion, the power utility was quick to di
I've just read " The Low Quality of Scientific Code ", which claims that code written by scientists comes out worse than it would if "software engineers" were involved.
