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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 76 posts.
Fifty years ago, the first molecular dynamics papers allowed scientists to exhaustively simulate systems with a few dozen atoms for picoseconds. Today, due to tremendous gains in computational capability from Moore’s law, and due to significant gains in algorithmic sophisticiation from fifty years of research, modern…
For a while now, Microsoft have provided a free Jupyter Notebook service on Microsoft Azure. At the moment they provide compute kernels for Python, R and F# providing up to 4Gb of memory per sessio…
When discussing the validity of the Axiom of Choice, the most common argument for not taking it as gospel is the Banach-Tarski paradox. Yet, this never particularly bothered me. The argument …
Why neurons have thousands of synapses, a theory of sequence memory in neocortex Hawkins & Ahmad, Front. Neural Circuits 2016 It all began with a fascinating lunchtime conversation with Martin …
Wikipedia graph dynamic pattern discovery. Dynamic graph analysis in GraphX. Collective memory research. Gephi graph visualization.
As the anniversary of Sir David MacKay’s untimely death approaches, I think we should honour his memory by trying to update Sustainable Energy as a crowd-sourced project. I have made an initial attempt to suggest how we might develop the section on photovoltaics but others will want to suggest other
It turns out that Earth is not a planet. Asteroid 2016 H03, first spotted on April 27, 2016, by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope…
The more I read about cryonics—i.e. freezing yourself after death—the more I realized it's something we should all be talking about.
[Content note: food, dieting, obesity] I. The Hungry Brain gives off a bit of a Malcolm Gladwell vibe, with its cutesy name and pop-neuroscience style. But don’t be fooled. Stephan Guyenet is…
Since Death Valley is below sea level could we dig a hole to the ocean and fill it up with water?
[This post has mostly been replaced/supplanted with a more thorough analysis in Contra Grant On Exaggerated Differences] I. One idea that kept coming up in the comments to the thread on signal-boos…
I. A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, a…
[Related to: It’s Bayes All The Way Up, Why Are Transgender People Immune To Optical Illusions?, Can We Link Perception And Cognition?] I. Sometimes I have the fantasy of being able to glut m…
