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How much usage can a Lego piece take before it loses its 'clutch power'?
Have you ever asked yourself this question: "How many times can I assemble LEGO bricks before they wear out?" Well... probably never but I...
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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A Pragmatic Introduction to Signal Processing
A retirement project created and maintained by Tom O'Haver , Professor Emeritus , Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
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Blue light filters don't work – controlling total luminance is a better bet
Why controlling total luminance is a better bet
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The Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem introduces an impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of …
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How far can you jump from a swing?
In this post I derive the physics of pumping a swing and the physics of jumping from a swing. Then, using both pieces I compute the optimal strategy of jumping from a swing to maximize the traveled distance. I propose this game as a new Olympic sport.
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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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Photogrammetry on commercial flights (2021)
Airplane window seats are great! Not only are they more comfy and easier to take a nap in, but they also have the most quaint form of in-flight entertainment: The outside world!
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Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?
A battery technology that’s getting a lot of attention is solid-state batteries, lithium-ion batteries that replace the liquid electrolyte with a solid material.
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Does that use a lot of energy?
This tool was designed to get a sense of the differences in energy consumption between different products. It's often difficult to understand whether activities matter a lot or very little for our overall energy consumption.
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Why you can't color calibrate deep space photos
Color is the most disputed part of astrophotography: Every image looks different and the internet is full of arguments over what colors are correct or natural.
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Reasons blog posts can be of higher scientific quality than journal articles
The Dutch toilet cleaner ‘WC-EEND’ (literally: 'Toilet Duck') aired a famous commercial in 1989 that had the slogan ‘We from WC-EEND a...
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Satellites Spotting Aircraft
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Physics for Mathematicians – Introduction
A blog about math by Nic Ford
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Mercury Colonization
There is a good reason for colonizing another planet, which is to avoid extinction if the Earth is hit by a 10km or larger asteroid, as has happened many times in the Earth's history. Colonization of Mercury appears to be a very real and practical possibility, whereas colonization of Mars or the other planets, moons…
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Does X cause Y? An in-depth evidence review (2021)
This summarizes the frustratingly ambiguous state of the evidence for pretty much any "Does X cause Y?" question you might have.
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CubeSats are fascinating learning tools for space
These are CubeSats. Satellites that are going to space—or at least, the ones I have here are prototypes. But these have one thing in common: they're all powered by either a Raspberry Pi, or a microcontroller. There are already Pis in space, like on Mark Rober's SatGus, on GASPACS, and the Astro Pis on the Space…
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Ice
Water is complicated and fascinating stuff! There are at least sixteen known crystal phases of ice, many shown in this diagram based on the work of Martin Chaplin: (Click for a larger version.) For…
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Some people who take psychedelics continue hallucinating indefinitely
[Related to: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, HPPD And The Specter Of Permanent Side Effects] I. Hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder is a condition where people wh…
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The Year 2512
Usually when I speculate about the future, I stick to two areas; either the really near future (within the next couple of decades), or the really far future (so far out that signs of continental drift should be glaringly obvious). But what about the medium term?
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There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)
1 post published by Georgia Ray on May 2, 2021
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Poor Foundations in Geometric Algebra
EDIT: Be warned that this post is angry. If you’re easily offended when someone goes on a rant, then leave now because I’m very unforgiving in several places below. The tone of my writing is unusually harsh, but the people whose work I’m talking about deserve it, and here’s why. Even though I had been working with…
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Robot Learns to See in 30 Minutes (2022)
TL;DR: Learning to walk from pixels in the real world by using proprioception as supervision.
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Cargo Cult Quantum Factoring
Just days after we celebrated my wife’s 40th birthday, she came down with COVID, meaning she’s been isolating and I’ve been spending almost all my time dealing with our kids. But …
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“Gravity is worth asking about”
A blog about software craft and quality