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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Cat owners often claim that cats are too intelligent to do the sort of tricks that dogs do willingly. Others believe cats are unintelligent because it's harder to train them to do tricks. In this article (on 2 pages) I aim to explain some of these differences and explore feline intelligence and the limitations on…
In 2016, an EgyptAir A320 spiraled into the Mediterranean, killing 66 people. Was it an act of sabotage, or something even scarier?
Suppose I wanted to convince people that temperature in the USA wasn’t going up, it was going down. What would I show? Let’s try yearly average temperature in the conterminous U.S., als…
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
To keep below two degrees, we'll need to dramatically reduce current emissions and simultaneously remove 10-15 gigatons of CO2/yr from the atmosphere by 2050. Read on for what that means, why, and how we might do it.
The Wolfram Institute will pursue opportunities in scientific research based on a new multicomputational paradigm found during a project to develop a fundamental theory of physics.
In case you hadn’t heard, the universe is governed by four fundamental forces. But when it comes to understanding nature at almost any level larger than a nucleus and smaller than a planet, …
The long view of economic history says we're in the midst of a huge, unsustainable acceleration. What happens next?
That’s an easy go: energy is the amount of (on) my electricity bill, or maybe of (on) my natural gas bill. If I am very concentrated, I might add that it is also the money I spend at the gasoline pump, and if I am even more concentrated I will suggest that it might have something to do with the filling up of my…
A guide to the operating principles, techniques and technology in lidar systems for self driving cars.
Dissing Fourier, exploring the Hadamard-Walch transform, and making square-wave spectrograms.
AI and the ruliad in the Wolfram Physics Project provide a new way to consider how alien minds might perceive the world. Stephen Wolfram explains how this artificial neuroscience experiment works.
This article was originally written in 2014, but has had some minor improvements in December 2017 and January 2018 when I received some useful feedback after the article had unexpectedly been posted on Hacker News in December 2017.
Link to: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/16/5477568-are-airport-x-ray-scanners-harmful
a cheap and bloody experiment
I once heard a saying – “Don’t feel pity on plants because they can’t move. Feel pity on us, because we have to”. I really didn’t have an appreciation for what this meant until the COVID pandemic hit, which restricted my movement for a couple of years, and I decided to spend some of my new-found time at home learning…
You probably that planets go around the sun in elliptical orbits. But do you know why? In fact, they’re moving in circles in 4 dimensions. But when these circles are projected down to 3-dimen…
It turns out that launching, losing, finding, and recovering a balloon is way easier than getting the imagery ready. Let's find out why! (If you see an image in this post, click it. If you regret i...
“Every one of the stars in the sky uses fusion to generate enormous amounts of energy. Why shouldn’t we?”
Yesterday Ryan Mandelbaum, at Gizmodo, posted a decidedly tongue-in-cheek piece about whether or not the universe is a computer simulation. (The piece was filed under the category “LOL.…
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 6 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook. ]
In Michael Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation textbook, he has one Platonically perfect homework exercise, so perfect that I can reconstruct it from memory despite not having …
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Heights are normally distributed because height is determined by many factors. But why are other things with many inputs not normally distributed?
The Fall of Civilizations podcast put out a 6¾-hour episode on the history of the Mongol Empire, which I eagerly listened to. After finishing the episode I wondered about contemporary Mongolian society, I wanted to learn what the lands that the Mongol Empire exploded from are like in our current day. There are many…
Using high speed cameras, it’s possible to record the vibrations of everyday objects caused by nearby sounds and reverse engineer the sounds…essentially turning
I hope everyone in the States had a fantastic Thanksgiving (even if you’re a Dallas Cowboys football fan).
