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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 105 posts.
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Lost in Math
Sabine Hossenfelder’s new book Lost in Math should be starting to appear in bookstores around now. It’s very good and you should get a copy. I hope that the book will receive a lot of a…
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Getting Started with Quantum Computing in Python
Quantum computers might sound a bit exotic and far into the future, but in reality, they are now accessible in the cloud or through emulators for everyone to write quantum code. In this tutorial, we’ll go through how you can program a simple quantum computer to generate random numbers.
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How people die vs. media coverage of death
Data collection and analysis by Hasan Al-Jamaly, Maximillian Siemers, Owen Shen, and Nicole Stone.
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How to build a brain – An introduction to neurophysiology for engineers
How does the brain work? While neuroscience provides insights on small-scale processes and overall behavior, we don’t know much for sure about the learning and processing algorithms in between. In this blog post, I will give an introduction to what we know. Let’s take an engineering perspective and play evolution: How…
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Death of the sampling theorem?
tl;dr: A team from Columbia University led by Ken Shepard and Rafa Yuste claims to beat the 100 year old Sampling Theorem [1,2]. Apparently anti-aliasing filters are superfluous now because one can…
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I simulated California housing and learned about simulators
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...
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Bret Victor Redesigns Classic Strogatz Paper (2011)
This page presents a scientific paper that has been redesigned as a sequence of illustrations with captions. This comic-like format, with tightly-coupled pictures and prose, allows the author to depict and describe simultaneously — show and tell.
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Planets evenly spaced on log scale
The distances to the planets are fairly evenly distributed on a logarithmic scale, not only in our solar system but in extrasolar systems as well.
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Gödel and the unreality of time
In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein , Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relati...
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J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
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Mathematical Patterns That Eventually Fail
Sometimes patterns can lead you astray. For example, it’s known that $latex \displaystyle{ \mathrm{li}(x) = \int_0^x \frac{dt}{\ln t} }$ is a good approximation to $latex \pi(x),$ the number …
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The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory (2016)
I’ve supervised a lot of great student projects in my nine years at MIT, but my inner nerdy teenager has never been as personally delighted by a project as it is right now. To…
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Dissolving the Fermi Paradox
I’m late to posting this, but it’s important enough to be worth sharing anyway: Sandberg, Drexler, and Ord on Dissolving the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox asks: given the immense num…
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City street orientations around the world
This post is adapted from this research paper that you can read/cite for more info. It analyzes and visualizes 100 cities around the world.
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AlphaFold at CASP13: What just happened?
Update: An updated version of this blogpost was published as a (peer-reviewed) Letter to the Editor at Bioinformatics, sans the “sociology” commentary. I just came back from CASP13, the…
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Gamifying propositional logic: QED, an interactive textbook
About six years ago on this blog, I started thinking about trying to make a web-based game based around high-school algebra, and ended up using Scratch to write a short but playable puzzle game in …
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The Plasma Magnet Drive: A Simple, Cheap Drive for the Solar System and Beyond
I guess we should also include a Planet Nine mission (once confirmed) among the possibilities opened up by this technology. In fact, since that planet seems to be near aphelion (otherwise we should have found it), it should also be beyond the gravitational focus of the Sun and thus any mission there could double as a…
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Executing gradient descent on the earth
A common analogy for explaining gradient descent goes like the following: a person is stuck in the mountains during heavy fog, and must navigate their way down. The natural way they will approac......
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Making Penicillin at Home
This article explains how to make antibiotics at home in the event of a collapse situation
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No funding for uncomfortable results
Latanya Sweeney blew the whistle on how easy supposedly de-identified data could be re-identified. Her results were not well received.
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‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
Thanks, Hamilton1. The two reports look like excellent studies. At first scan, it looks like there are still things to examine though. For example, if ‘Oumuamua is considered representative of extra-solar objects in its debris trail, then the idea that extra solar meteorites showing up, say in Greenland, is in real…
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High-quality schools can increase academic achievement among the poor (2010)
Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an ambitious social experiment, combines community programs with charter schools. We provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of HCZ charters on educational outcomes. Both lottery and instrumental variable identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an HCZ…
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How do plutonium-powered pacemakers work?
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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