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What P vs. NP is about
We recently made a Polylog video about a nonstandard way of understanding the P vs NP problem. As usual, our goal was to present an underrated idea in a broadly understandable way, while being slig…
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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 179 posts.
92
Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
It was not easy or quick, and there were so many qualifiers that, for over a decade, I didn’t really think I “deserved” the label. But as I got older, those qualifiers started dropping off one by one, and today I’m convinced that I have perfect pitch. I describe my musical journey and thoughts on what perfect pitch…
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131M American Buildings
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
94
Earth rotation limits in-body image stabilization to 6.3 stops (2020)
In 2016, Olympus Camera made some buzz in the photo world when they claimed that their new camera was capable of an impressive 6.5 stops of stabilization and that the limiting factor was in fact th…
95
The physics of airplane flight
A common misconception about wings is that they need to have the classic airfoil shape to work. In reality, just about any surface can create lift and function as a wing.
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Adventures in Probability
I hope everyone had a good weekend. I went on a hike. It was great. Statistics One of my great school regrets, next to “taking three years of business...
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Constructing a Four-Point Egg
For reasons beyond the scope of this entry, I have been investigating elliptical and ovoid shapes. The Wikipedia article for Moss’s egg has a link to a tutorial on Euclidean Eggs by Freyja Hreinsdóttir which (amongst other things) describes how to construct the “four point egg”. I think it is a nicer shape than Moss’s…
99
Simulating a minimal cell in the browser
Simulating an entire cell using kinetic parameters of reactions in a well-stirred environment
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How far could the sun possibly be?
The Greeks found the minimum possible distance to the Sun is a few million miles. Today we'll see how the speed of light can provide a maximum distance.
101
The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio
A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.
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The disunity of consciousness in everyday experience
A substantial philosophical literature explores the " unity of consciousness ": If I experience A, B, and C at the same time, A, B, and C will normally in some sense (exactly what sense is disputed) be experientially conjoined. Sipping beer at a concert isn't a matter of experiencing the taste of beer and separately…
104
The regenerative urban garden I: No-till gardening
I am an advocate of regenerative farming . But I’m not a farmer myself. The piece of land I steward is 1/3 acre — still sizable for an urban lot, but laughably minuscule compared to what Real Farmers are working with.
105
Why your brain is 3 milion more times efficient than GPT-4
Wild ramblings, raport from the field about choosing Vector Database for a particular project and a little bit of a rant about the current state of AI and how it's perceived, why human brains are a wonder of nature, and why it's far from 'thinking' and 'consciousness'.
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The real data wall is billions of years of evolution
Careful with those human analogies
108
The purge of German science in 1933
“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
109
Story of Vitamin D Toxicity (2022)
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…
110
"AI will cure cancer" misunderstands both AI and medicine
AI, science, education, & ethics
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A look at the Mojo language for bioinformatics
A look at a Mojo benchmark for bioinformatics, and Mojo in general.
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Why Is Light So Fast?
The speed of light is much faster, and the energy in ordinary objects far greater, than what daily life accustoms us to. Why? Step 1: new perspectives
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Can life emerge around a white dwarf?
Yes the tidal forces would be a problem with the Roche limit and Hill Sphere. The planet might break apart in the life belt around a white dwarf star or crash into the white dwarf. The planet has to be too close to the white dwarf to be in the life belt.
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Peer review is an honor-based system (2008)
It would take too long to expose all of the flaws of peer review, here are some: some work is just flat wrong because the reviewers cannot analyze all of the mathematical results, and because they cannot redo the experiments; numerous researchers cheat, sometimes in small ways ("2 out of 3 experiments agree with by ……
116
Global EV Charging Points with Open Charge Map
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Want to build a sequencer? 454.bio opens up their plans
Just as the AGBT hype cycle was firing up (with me contributing multiple sparks), serial entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg's latest sequencing ...
118
The Second Law of Thermodynamics (2011)
Web site content explains the modern view of entropy change and the dispersal of energy in a process (at a specific temperature). It has been selected for instructors in general and physical chemistry by Dr. Frank L. Lambert, Professor Emeritus (Chemistry) of Occidental College, Los Angeles.
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The biggest losers: Metabolic damage or constrained energy?
Did the Biggest Loser contestants really damage their metabolism or was something else going on?
120
How the Great Green Wall is holding back the Sahara desert
The Great Green Wall being built in Africa to halt the southern progress of the Sahara Desert is a favorite public works project of mine — it’s massive, ambitio