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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
This class is a general introduction to computer vision. It covers standard techniques in image processing like filtering, edge detection, stereo, flow, etc. (old-school vision), as well as newer, machine-learning based computer vision. It was originally offered in the spring of 2018 at the University of Washington .
Bogdan Georgiev, Javier Gómez-Serrano, Adam Zsolt Wagner, and I have uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Mathematical exploration and discovery at scale”. This is a longer report on…
In computer programming, it’s common to split your program into multiple different threads that run simultaneously, as this often simplifies application design. Imagine, for example, ... Read more
Physicist: Actual pictures of atoms aren’t actually pictures at all. There are a few good rules of thumb in physics. Among the best is: light acts like you’d expect on scales well abov…
For overdetermined reasons, I’ve lately found the world an increasingly terrifying and depressing place. It’s gotten harder and harder to concentrate on research, or even popular scienc…
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] It seems like homemade tunnels are kind of having a moment. Just about everywhere I look, it feels like someone is carving new spaces from the ground and documenting the process online. Colin Furze might be the quintessential ex
76/300 Pocket Dobson: a tiny yet real telescope that comes with you everywhere
Every time you shuffle a deck of playing cards, it's probably a unique order, never before seen in human history.
I recently made a physical object that defies all intuition. It’s a square of acrylic, smooth on both sides, totally transparent. A tiny window.
I should state from the very beginning that the title of this post is a bit of a tease. I don’t know why nothing can go faster than the speed of light. No one does. It is a fundamental pos…
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.]
Today we’re going to look at the history of aerospike engines, go over how nozzles work including things like overexpansion, underexpansion and even expansion ratios, we’ll look at the pros and cons of the aerospike, the physical limitations and problems, then we’ll compare the aerospike to some other traditional…
[Previously in series: Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know; SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, etc. This is all preliminary and you should not take it as a rea…
I posted a video earlier today of a Super Cub airplane landing on the side of a mountain. Super Cubs are ideal for that undertaking because of their low stall s
If you overheard the phrase "1 in a million chance" in someone else's casual conversation, what might they be talking about?
If you are a scientist, you confront ignorance as soon as you open your eyes. For example -- I am typing this post on a laptop computer that is powered by a lithium battery. No one has the slightest idea how and why it works. Metallic lithium can intercalate between the graphene sheets in graphite…
It was the familiar story of human cruelty and greed: the sperm whales were hunted to the oblivion. Then, in the 1970s, the better part of humanity led by good people - ecological activists - saw the error of their ways and stopped the murder. Good triumphed over evil. Amen. The problem with such…
William Shatner's profound words about his experience in space after returning on Blue Origin NS-18:
Wrap-Up (June 5): This will be my final update on this post (really!!), since the discussion seems to have reached a point where not much progress is being made, and since I’d like to oblige …
Exploring the relationship between Kalman filtering and optimal frequency domain filtering.
What do you think are the odds that you will die during the next year? Try to put a number to it — 1 in 100? 1 in 10,000? Whatever it is, it will be twice as large 8 years from now. This s…
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Army Air Force had plans to drop a third bomb on August 19, 1945—with more to come if necessary. Fat Man bomb casing at the USAF Museum
There’s been a lot of buzz lately in the science blogosphere about a recent experiment where physicists created a gas of quantum particles with a negative temperature – negative as in, …
