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Comparing City Street Orientations
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.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 105 posts.
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Flyover video of Jupiter’s Europa
NASA engineer Kevin Gill stitched together images from two 1998 observations of Europa by the Galileo spacecraft to create this super smooth flyover video of th
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How Isaac Asimov shaped robotics and space exploration and predicted the Internet
Some futurists try to foresee the future. Others attempt to shape it. Yet prolific science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov did both. Asimov not
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Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration
Darwin: a genomics co-processor provides up to 15,000x acceleration on long read assembly Turakhia et al., ASPLOS’18 With the slow demise of Moore’s law, hardware accelerators are needed to m…
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Yann LeCun vs. Christopher Manning on Need for Priors in Deep Learning
Earlier this month, I had the exciting opportunity to moderate a discussion between Professors Yann LeCun and Christopher Manning, ti...
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Three Meanings of E=mc²
It’s so much more than mass-energy equivalence; it’s the key to unlocking the quantum Universe.
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Why is nuclear fusion so hard?
Why does water fall out of an inverted cup? Before considering nuclear fusion, let's consider something much more familiar. If you turn a...
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Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
1400 words, 5 minutes. The Tay Bridge disaster occurred during a violent storm on 28th December 1879 when the first Tay Rail Bridge collapsed while a train was passing over it from Wormit to Dundee, killing all 70 people aboard.
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You need 16 times the sample size to estimate an interaction than a main effect
In causal inference, it is often important to study varying treatment effects: for example, a treatment could be more effective for men than for women, or for healthy than for unhealthy patients. Suppose a study is designed to have 80% power to detect a main effect at a 95% confidence level. Further suppose that…
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Facts about smell (2014)
The home of typing by Alice Bartlett 👩🏻💻
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The Dipole Drive: A New Concept for Space Propulsion
It’s a fascinating concept but I’d like to see a comparison toDr. Young Bae’s laser thruster concept for solar system travel.
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The Strangest Book on the Theory of Computation (2009)
Based on the description of the book in the World Scientific Press catalogue, I asked my university library to order a book entitled Automat...
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Gravitational attraction of stars and cows
One attempt at rationalizing astrology is to say that the gravitational effects of celestial bodies impact our bodies. To get an idea how hard the stars and planets pull on us, let's compare their gravitational attraction to that of cows at various distances. Newton's law of gravity says that the gravitational…
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So You Think You Have a Power Law (2007)
Regular readers who care about such things — I think there are about three of you — will recall that I have long had a thing about just how unsound many of the claims for the presence of power law distributions in real data are, especially those made by theoretical physicists, who, with some honorable exceptions…
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The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
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Progress on longstanding open problems
For those who haven’t seen it: Aubrey de Grey, better known to the world as a radical life extension researcher, on Sunday posted a preprint on the arXiv claiming to prove that the chromatic …
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Random Points on a Sphere
John D. Cook, Greg Egan, Dan Piponi and I had a fun mathematical adventure on Twitter. It started when John Cook wrote a program to compute the probability distribution of distances $latex |xy R…
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Genetics and Eugenics in Frank Herbert's DUNE
Observations on Frank Herbert’s 𝐷𝑢𝑛𝑒 series—the notes are probably overstated, the Butlerian Jihad was 𝑛𝑜𝑡 a robot uprising seeking to exterminate humanity, and precognition/prescience in the Dune universe appears to work backwards allowing for retro-causality and stable time-loops as exemplified by Leto II’s Golden…
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No, negative masses have not revolutionized cosmology
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Adult Neurogenesis – A Pointed Review
[I am not a neuroscientist and apologize in advance for any errors in this article. A recent study came out contradicting some of the claims mentioned here. See here for study, this comment for som…
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Interactive computational neuroscience – part 1, spiking neurons
An interactive introduction to spiking neuron models -- all in the browser. Learn about modeling neurons as dynamical systems and the computational properties of neurons.
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Intro to Quantum Information Science
Someone recently wrote that my blog is “too high on nerd whining content and too low on actual compsci content to be worth checking too regularly.” While that’s surely one of the…