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Passing planes and other whoosh sounds
A blog about signals, programming, music, and other stuff.
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 202 posts.
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Did the Particle Go Through the Two Slits, or Did the Wave Function?
In the quantum double-slit experiment, did the particle go through the slits or did the wave function? 1920's quantum physics has a simple answer: "NO".
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Wyvern's Open Satellite Feed
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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Study finds memory decline surge in young people
A Large US Study Finds Memory Decline Surge in Young People
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Gaussian integration is cool
Brief discussion on gaussian quadrature and chebyshev-gauss quadrature
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Is Ketamine Neurotoxic?
It is clear that ketamine at a sufficient dose & frequency can and does kill neurons through NMDA-driven excitotoxicity. However, what does a sufficient dose & frequency mean? There is a common myth that ketamine is “neurogenetic”. This is mostly false. While it does increase neurogenesis in the only two places in the…
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Synthetic aperture radar autofocus and calibration
3D trajectory position error estimation autofocus, antenna pattern normalization, and polarimetric calibration for drone mounted SAR radar.
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Google Co-Scientist AI fed previous paper with the answer in it
The hype cycle for Google’s fabulous new AI Co-Scientist tool, based on the Gemini LLM, includes a BBC headline about how José Penadés’ team at Imperial College asked the tool about a problem…
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The engineering behind the San Antonio River Walk
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] I am on location in downtown San Antonio, Texas, where crews have just finished setting up this massive 650-ton crane. The counterweights are on. The outriggers are down. And the jib, an extension for the crane's telescoping boo
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Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
Before we get nerd sniped by the shiny engineering details, ask the only question that matters. Why compute in orbit? Why should a watt or a flop 250 miles up be more valuable than one on the surface? What advantage justifies moving something as mundane as matrix multiplication into LEO?
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A deep dive into self-improving AI and the Darwin-Gödel Machine
How the Darwin-Gödel Machine rewrites its own code to improve, and whether we can trust it
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Why are smokestacks so tall?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] “The big black stacks of the Illium Works of the Federal Apparatus Corporation spewed acid fumes and soot over the hundreds of men and women who were lined up before the red-brick employment office.” That’s the first line of one
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It Awaits Your Experiments
You may have heard of Christian Bök. You may have read about him on this very blog if you’ve been hanging out here long enough. Perhaps you were even one of the very select few to witness the seminal talk I gave back in 2016 [1] —“ScArt: or, How to Tell When You’ve Finished Fucking”— which climaxed with a glowing…
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The Hidden Engineering of Niagara Falls
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] Niagara Falls is one of the most spectacular waterfalls in the world. With a vertical drop of more than 50 meters or 164 feet and a flow rate that often exceeds 2800 cubic meters per second or 100,000 cubic feet per second, it’s
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Magnesium Self-Experiments
3 magnesium self-experiments on magnesium ʟ-threonate and magnesium citrate.
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Very Wrong Math
The difference between misinformation and disinformation is the difference between ignorance and malice. Trolling is somewhat different, incorporating an element of provocation and narcissism. But what the hell is this?
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How hard do you have to hit a chicken to cook it? (2020)
Some questions are timeless, innocent yet penetrating in their simplicity. Why is the sky blue? Why do things fall? How hard must one hit a chicken to cook it? It is this last mystery of the universe that we discuss today.
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Why do people keep writing about the imaginary compound Cr2Gr2Te6?
I was reading the latest issue of the journal Science , and a paper mentioned the compound Cr 2 Gr 2 Te 6 . For a moment, I thought my knowl...
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The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe
How early, sustained, supermassive black hole jets carved out cosmic voids, shaped filaments, and generated magnetic fields
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How to build Intrinsic Motivation: a review of the science
I dig into the research on intrinsic motivation. Super interesting subject. Long but hopefully quite thorough.
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The Boring Part of Bell Labs
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
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Where is my von Braun wheel?
In 1962. There — that answers the clickbaity title right away.
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Why do some radio towers blink?
One day on my drive home, I saw three towers. One of them had a bunch of blinking white lights, another one had red lights that kind of faded in and out, and the third one, well, it wasn't doing anything. I'm lucky to have a radio engineer for a dad, so Dad: why do some towers blink?
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The Unknotting Number Is Not Additive
On June 30, 2025, Mark Brittenham and Susan Hermiller uploaded a preprint to the arXiv called “Unknotting number is not additive under connected sum” (and an updated version on Septembe…
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The most famous carbon dioxide absorber
The Apollo 13 astronauts were stranded in space. Their survival depended on if they could make a carbon dioxide absorber inside the spacecraft.
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Can a model trained on satellite data really find brambles on the ground?
Can a model trained on satellite data really find brambles on the ground? We put a new model to the test with a field trip around Cambridge. The results...
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