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A Nuclear Probe to Explore Earth’s Interior
Our knowledge of the composition and structure of the Earth’s interior through direct observation and sampling is limited to the top few ki...
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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 75 posts.
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Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain
The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain.
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Terry Tao on how to compute non-converging infinite sums (2010)
The Riemann zeta function $latex {\zeta(s)}&fg=000000$ is defined in the region $latex {\hbox{Re}(s)>1}&fg=000000$ by the absolutely convergent series $latex \displaystyle \zeta(s) = \su…
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The Future of Space Launch Is Near
Until recently, the future of space launch looked pretty much like its past. For over 50 years, humanity has blasted thousands of spacecraft and satellites into space. Every launch vehicle that carried them aloft has ended up littering the planet with the broken, twisted remains of expended rocket stages. The scenario…
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The Colors of Chemistry
This notebook documents my exploration of color theory and its applications to photochemistry. It also shows off the functionality of several Julia packages: Color.jl for color theory and colorimetry, SIUnits.jl for unitful computations, and Gadfly.jl for graph plotting.
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Selection bias and bombers (2008)
During WWII, statistician Abraham Wald told the RAF to add armor where it didn't seem planes needed it. But he was right.
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Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible? (1997)
It might be thought that special relativity provides a short negative answer to this question. In actual fact, there are many trivial ways in which things can be going faster than light (FTL) in a sense, and there may be other more genuine possibilities. On the other hand, there are also good reasons to believe that…
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Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)
Happy birthday to me! Recently, lots of people have been asking me what I think about IIT—no, not the Indian Institutes of Technology, but Integrated Information Theory, a widely-discussed &#…
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Beware Isolated Demands For Rigor
I. From Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self by John Perry:”There is something about practical things that knocks us off our philosophical high horses. Perhaps Heraclitus really thought …
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SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
The claim that “SSRIs don’t work” or “SSRIs are mostly just placebo” is most commonly associated with Irving Kirsch, a man with the awesome job title of “Associa…
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Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable
Today during an otherwise terrible lecture on ADHD I realized something important we get sort of backwards. There’s this stereotype that the Left believes that human characteristics are socia…
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Lethal Neutrinos
How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?
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1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-long progress f...
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The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown 2. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: Down for the Count 3. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: The Great Gali...