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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Several Egyptian gods are depicted with animal heads. Horus has a falcon head, Anubis has a jackal head, Thoth has an ibis head (except when he’s a baboon), and Set has…uhh, what is that, exactly? …
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
Common misconceptions about the complexity in robotics vs AI
Chang’e 5 is a Chinese lunar sample return mission. It was launched a few days ago on 2020-11-23 from Wenchang and is estimated to perform lunar orbit injection on Saturday. Since then, a number of Amateurs such as USA Satcom , Paul Marsh M0EYT , Scott Tilley VE7TIL , Fer IW1DTU and others have been receiving the…
I can't remember where I first saw them, but ever since, I have been unable to forget them: abelian sandpiles. I'm far from the only one . They're remarkably simple, yet produce lovely symmetric patterns. I loved them so much that I adorned the title banner of this blog with an animation of an abelian sandpile. But…
What do you do when you’re stuck at home with a 16-year-old son during a pandemic lockdown? Well, the first answer is that you build a gaming PC. That was a good project with a lot of incentives to complete, but that also meant it was soon over. So, what next? I spotted a post about an outreach project from CERN to…
Presented in an experimental mnemonic medium that makes it almost effortless to remember what you read
I like to start all my scientific inquiries off with really dumb questions. It makes life more fun. Here’s my latest: why can’t we just give steroids to people with muscular dystrophy?
By Michael Nielsen, November 23, 2019
The three brains in our body
Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.
A dimension is a physical quantity that can be measured, while a unit is a specific amount of a physical quantity. For example, time is a dimension, which can be measured in temporal units such as hours or seconds.
I came across this fun column the other day listing a number of Famous Inventions , like the airplane, the camera, electricity, the car, e...
Cartoon Law I Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over.
Here is what might possibly be my single favorite song in the world:
Hiking with Wallace, my 6" f/2.8 corrected dobsonian.
The annual Pinewood Derby in my Cub Scout troop was always an exciting time for my friends and me growing up. Just look how happy I am in this amazing digital photo composition that my dad put together using Microsoft PictureIt! 99:
The other day someone pointed me to this article by James Kaufman and Vlad Glǎveanu in a psychology journal which begins:
Can high school students really learn algebraic geometry? And what could it teach us about mathematics education?
“If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” — Adolf Hilter
This is part 1 of a series where I’ll look at the future costs of clean energy and mobility technologies.
“From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go…
Could we halve aviation's climate impact at a fraction of the cost of sustainable aviation fuels?
"If you have the aspiration of kicking ass when you're 85, you can't afford to be average when you're 50." —Peter Attia
A few weeks ago, I attended the Seven Pines Symposium on Fundamental Problems in Physics outside Minneapolis, where I had the honor of participating in a panel discussion with Sir Roger Penrose. T…
How much Vitamin D should I take? This is still the looming question, and it’s time to address it. First, though, imagine that someone in a public forum online asked me, “How much metoprolol (a…
