1291
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
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Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
1292
Packing the world for longest lines of sight
I have a side project to find the longest line of sight on the planet 1 using a novel Total Viewshed algorithm . At a resolution of 3 arc-seconds (~92m x 92m), the planet contains around 4.5 billion elevation samples 2 . Now obviously we don’t need to calculate the visibility between literally every single one of…
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1294
High Precision Mapping from Scratch
The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB ). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of…
1295
The Baloney Detection Kit: Carl Sagan’s Rules for Critical Thinking
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.
1296
Facts about smell (2014)
The home of typing by Alice Bartlett 👩🏻💻
1297
Dolosse – a South African invention used over the world
All along the South African coast you find dolosse wherever coastal management is necessary to prevent tides and rough seas from eroding breakwaters, harbour walls, coastal construction. In Port El…
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1299
Publish and Perish at Imperial College London: The Death of Stefan Grimm
Jump to follow-up This week’s Times Higher Education carried a report of the death, at age 51, of Professor Stefan Grimm: Imperial College London to ‘review procedures’ after death of academi…
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Elsevier charges authors to make items "Open Access", then charges to read them.
[This is a long post – in summary Elsevier breach licences and charge readers for Open Access. I also ask the world to verify and amplify my conclusions].
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The future of electricity is local
I frequently read about proposals for new solar power developments where the resulting power is moved great distances to less sunny places, such as northern Europe from the Sahara, the US North Eas…
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Gravitational Lensing to Observe Ancient Earth
I was at SFMOMA with Erika a few weekends ago and we saw an exhibit showing the work of Lebbeus Woods – a futuristic architect and illustrator.
1306
Can I take ducks home from the park?
16 queries and 6 language models
1307
The Seal Failure in the SRB That Doomed Challenger (2021)
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...
1308
How a Handgun Works: 1911 .45
Check out Animagraffs on youtube > .
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The sum of all the positive integers is not -1/12
I haven't been blogging recently because my new startup is taking up all my time, but someone needs to stand up and say the emperor has no c...
1311
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.
1312
Holography without Lasers: Hand-drawn Holograms (1999)
I've stumbled across a technique for drawing holograms directly upon a plastic plate by hand. It sounds impossible, but I've been sitting on the livingroom sofa making holographic images of floating polyhedra, words, 3D starfields, opaque objects, etc. No laser, no isolation table, no darkroom, no expensive film…
1313
Can guitar frets perform multiplication?
I’m sure that some pictures are worth a thousand words, but others trigger a whole lot of puzzlement. Such was the case with the cover of a book I recently bought entitled Calculating with Tones: The Logarithmic Logic of Music:
1314
Black Hole Tech?
In celebration of the detection of gravitational waves, Stephen Wolfram looks forward and discusses what technology black holes could make possible.
1315
When Einstein Met Tagore
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality.
1316
When will the eclipse happen? A multimillennium tale of computation
Wolfram tech and its dedicated website now easily predict eclipses. A look at advances in understanding and science from ancient eclipse data thousands of years old through current eclipse calculations.
1317
An equation that takes Pythagoras to a new level
Unbelievably enough, it all comes back to Pythagoras.
1318
How has mathematics gotten so abstract?
What's the meaning of "numbers" and "arithmetic operations"? We consult Georg Cantor's turtles and look at Giuseppe Peano's code.
1319
There is no nanotech, stop talking about it and start laughing at it
I used to work next to the center for nanotechnology. The first indication I had that there was something wrong with the discipline of “nanotechnology” is I noticed that the people who …
1320
Can SpaceX land a rocket with 1/2 cm accuracy?
No. But they don’t need to. In preparation for the 5th test flight of Starship, SpaceX announced that they would try to catch the booster using “Mechazilla’s chopsticks.” Later du…