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Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”
How to answer this question—and how not to
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 164 posts.
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Color blindness
Color blindness is an inaccurate term. Most color-blind people can see color, they just don't see the same colors as everyone else. There ha...
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Optimal Peanut Butter and Banana Sandwiches
I was personally useless for most of the Spring of 2020. There was a period of time, though, after the peak in coronavirus cases here in NYC and before the onslaught of police violence here in NYC that I managed to scrounge up the motivation to do something other than drink and maniacally refresh my Twitter feed. I…
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The human genome is full of viruses
Your body requires viruses, but viruses don’t always require a body
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What is protein folding? A brief explanation
AlphaFold from Google DeepMind is said to solve the protein folding problem. What is that, and why is it hard?
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Smoke has caused temperature forecasts to go crazy
This blog provides updated forecasts and comments on current weather or other topics
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Vitamin D, part 3 – The Evidence
Vitamin D deficiency is linked to cancer, heart disease, respiratory infection, stroke, diabetes, and death. It might seem reasonable that we should all be taking this supplement.
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How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
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Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)
I recently learned that cells are extremely crowded and busy places. I knew there's a lot of activity in cells, but I didn't realize just h...
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Experiments on a $50 DIY air purifier that takes 30s to assemble
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.
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Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now
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
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What Happens Next? Covid-19 Futures, Explained with Playable Simulations
an interactive guide
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Log-log plot of new vs. total Covid-19 cases by country
Visualizing the exponential growth of COVID-19 across the world.
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Systems that defy detailed understanding
Last week, I wrote about the mindset that computer systems can be understood, and behaviors can be explained, if we’re willing to dig deep enough into the stack of abstractions our software is built atop. Some of the ensuing discussion on Twitter and elsewhere lead me to write this followup, in which I want to run…
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A googol-to-one gear ratio [video]
To celebrate being alive for a billion seconds, Daniel Bruin built a machine with 100 gears with a 10-to-1 gear ratio…meaning that the overall gear ratio is a g
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Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo
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…
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We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech
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.
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The Sun seen through the Earth in “neutrino light” (2007)
Physics blog quantum computation
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Picking up glowing hot space shuttle tiles with bare hands (2011) [video]
Space Shuttle thermal tiles conduct heat so poorly that after being in a 2200 °F oven for hours, you can pick them up with your bare hands only seconds after th
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The Recursive Universe
A few years ago I came across this video, showing a complex machine built entirely in Conway’s Game of Life:
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SLS vs. Starship
NASA just announced the lunar landers for the Artemis program. To everyone’s surprise, SpaceX’s massive Starship is one of three landers NASA chose alongside Blue Origin and Dynetics. Understandably, this is bringing up a lot of questions. Some of which we will answer in my next video/article: “Should NASA just cancel…
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Concerns with that Stanford antibody study of coronavirus prevalence
I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the population has been infected…
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Quantum supremacy, now with BosonSampling
Update (12/5): The Google team, along with Gil Kalai, have raised questions about whether the results of the new BosonSampling experiment might be easier to spoof classically than the USTC team tho…
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Is Probability Real?
Today, I want to address an issue with statements involving chance. To demonstrate, let’s first consider a statement that doesn’t involve chance:
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Entropy explained, with sheep (2016)
An explorable blog post about entropy, with sheep.