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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
For those of you who haven’t seen, there were actually two “bombshell” QC announcements this week. One, from Caltech, including friend-of-the-blog John Preskill, showed how to do quantum faul…
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
Air traffic control has been in the news lately, on account of my country's declining ability to do it. Well, that's a long-term trend, resulting from decades of under-investment, severe capture by our increasingly incompetent defense-industrial complex, no small degree of management incompetence in the FAA, and…
(This is an adapted version of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , November 2021.)
Over the last few months, Baker and I have been digging in deep on Heat Pumps . I'm putting my explorations here on pause but wanted to write up everything we've learned over the last few months.
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] On January 28, 2022, about an hour before dawn, the four-lane Fern Hollow Bridge in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, collapsed without warning. Five vehicles, including an articulating bus, fell with the bridge, and another car drove o
What is the most rectangular country?
Uncovering a century-old misinformation
Cliff-edged fitness functions and the evolution of schizophrenia
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
My son (5y) asked me today: If there were a kind of a fireman's pole from the Moon down to the Earth, how long would it take to slide all the way from the Moon to the Earth?
Frequency modulation (FM) is more robust to noise than amplitude modulation (AM) because static itself is primarily a form of amplitude modulation.
The biggest energy story of the last fifteen years is the rise of solar photovoltaics, also known as solar PV or simply solar panels.
I shared a controversial take the other day at an event and I decided to write it down in a longer format: I’m afraid AI won't give us a compressed 21st century.
Ian Harris explains that more than half of commonly performed surgical operations may be placebos. Adequate studies using a blinded control group are essential. Ian Harris, a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, wrote a book titled Surgery, The Ultimate Placebo. I…
Making a cheap and simple radar with a range of about 100 meters.
People often ask me "What good is Relativity?" It is a commonplace to think of Relativity as an abstract and highly arcane mathematical theory that has no consequences for everyday life. This is in fact far from the truth.
Soviet rocket engines - this article is about their history, their development, their use and their rockets.
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
“Birth order” refers to whether a child is the oldest, second-oldest, youngest, etc. in their family. For a while, pop psychologists created a whole industry around telling people how t…
The story of a tragedy which touched the hearts of the world and forced the industry to ask whether it had done enough to keep planes…
Five and a half years after our proposal of the existence of Planet Nine, we have finally accomplished what is perhaps the most important t...
It’s hot these days, it’s unusually hot, even dangerously hot, in a lot of places a lot of the time. While America has been hit hard this summer, it seems that Europe has been hit even …
I. “Pseudoaddiction” is one of the standard beats every article on the opioid crisis has to hit. Pharma companies (the story goes) invented a concept called “pseudoaddiction”…
And they hint at a future with vastly better products
