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Civilizational Collapse, Part 4
This is part 4 of an intermittent yet always enjoyable series: • Part 1: the rise of the ancient Puebloan civilization in the American Southwest from 10,000 BC to 750 AD. • Part 2: the rise and col…
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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 131 posts.
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ET Don't Phone Home
I recently became aware of this article where a Google exec says - he’s serious - that ‘Nest owners should probably warn their guests that their conversations are being recorded’. That’s assuming the owners themselves are even aware of what these devices are doing, and the likely truth is that they do not. Like needy…
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Our Dazzling Night Sky When the Milky Way Collides with Andromeda in 4B Years
This is what our night sky is going to look like in 3.9 billion years: Wow! So what’s going on here? Using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers at
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The crisis in physics is not only about physics
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Everything You Should Know About Sound (2016)
We all know what sound is. Except actually, no we don't. Let's fix that.
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Misunderstanding Dunning-Kruger
There is, apparently, an increase recently in interest in the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Washington Post writes about this recently, making the obvious political observation (having to do with the current occupant of the White House). It's great that there is public interest in an important psychological phenomenon…
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Everything Is Correlated
Anthology of sociology, statistical, or psychological papers discussing the observation that all real-world variables have non-zero correlations and the implications for statistical theory such as ‘null hypothesis testing’.
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Music Generates Feelings That Are Only Weakly Bound to the Music
Here I use the word "bound" in the same sense as "bind" in the "binding problem".
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The Paris Compressed-Air Power Network (2018)
Douglas Self, clockwork, tram, Leveaux,
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What is ergodicity? (2016)
Why are election polls often inaccurate? Why is racism wrong? Why are your assumptions often mistaken? The answers to all these questions and to many others have a lot to do with the non-ergodicity…
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Quantum Computing for the Curious
Presented in an experimental mnemonic medium that makes it almost effortless to remember what you read
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Why does F = ma?
By Michael Nielsen, November 23, 2019
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Let’s Publish Everything
The other day someone pointed me to this article by James Kaufman and Vlad Glǎveanu in a psychology journal which begins:
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The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
By Michael Nielsen, November 21, 2019
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If the universe is 13.8B years old, how can we see 46B light years away? (2018)
Distances in the expanding Universe don’t work like you’d expect. Unless, that is, you learn to think like a cosmologist.
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How the quantum search algorithm works
An explanation of how the quantum search algorithm works, & introduction to the design of quantum algorithms
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Investigating the Galileo Satellite Navigation System Outage with a LimeSDR
You may have already heard that the Galileo EU satellite navigation constellation is out of service since last Thursday July 11th. Currently the Galileo constellation status page shows that the status of most Galileo satellites is not usable because of a service outage. The satellites not affected by this outage are…
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Superdeterminism: The path we didn’t take
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Trying to improve buffet lines using simulations
I have suspected for years that the classic buffet line system is a deeply flawed method, so I decide to simulate different methods to find out better ways
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Gödel's Theorem
A much-abused result in mathematical logic , supposed by many authors who don't understand it to support their own favored brand of rubbish, and even subjected to surprisingly rough handling by some who really should know better.
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The Paris Pneumatic Clock Network (2018)
Douglas Self, clock, Pneumatic
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Getting a scientific prize for open-source software
Note An important acknowledgement for a different view of doing science: open, collaborative, and more than a proof of concept. A few days ago, Loïc Estève, Alexandre Gramfort, Olivier Grisel,...
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A Molecular Near Miss
I’m thrilled to report that I’m a co-author of the article “ An ultra-stable gold-coordinated protein cage displaying reversible assembly “, which was recently published in Nature . This work is the result of an exciting collaboration between biochemists, physicists, structural biologists, mathematicians, and others…
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Glyphosate in Organic Hydroponic Food Production
The National Organic Program (NOP) is now allowing the cancer-causing herbicide, glyphosate, in “organic” hydroponic production.
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An Orbit Map of the Solar System
A map of over 18,000 asteroids in the Solar System.