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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
Every once in a while the internet gets talking about Geometric Algebra (henceforth GA) and how it’s a new theory of math that fixes everything that’s wrong with linear algebra and multivariable calculus. When I come across this stance I am compelled to respond with something like: “wait wait, it’s not true! GA is…
Why did the Asian flush evolve? What does this say about alcoholism? What does this have to do with Odysseus?
This article is about a new kind of simple computational rule ("LACE rules" running on LACE, the Link Automata Computing Engine platform) which, when applied locally on a grid of cells, demonstrates fascinating emergent "artificial life" behavior.
Jump to follow-up “Statistical regression to the mean predicts that patients selected for abnormalcy will, on the average, tend to improve. We argue that most improvements attributed to the p…
Wonderful news! We just received full funding for the Galileo Project expedition to scoop the fragments of the first interstellar meteor…
You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. – Richard Feynman, to his wife, Arlene Richard Feynman is famous for his ceaseless questioning of life and the universe, to a degree unexpected even for being a Nobel Prize quantum physicist. His dogged investigation of the Challenger explosion is the most…
Contribution by Philip Ham: attractor.basic and Python implementation by Johan Bichel Lindegaard.
Some intuition about this topic can be developed without summoning the ghost of Pierre-Simon Laplace.
[This is part one of a two-part series. The second part can be found here: Symmetries in Projective Geometric Algebra .]
A map of over 18,000 asteroids in the Solar System.
examines claims that the big five personality traits is more scientifically valid than the myers briggs personality indicator
In early spring 2020, I reported an article for The New York Times on which I put the tentative headline: “New Coronavirus Is ‘Clearly Not…
W. Jherek Swanger writes in his introduction to Camillo 7 Agrippa's "A Treatise on the Science of Arms, with a philosophical Dialogue (1553)" that:
I've decided not to work with Aubrey de Grey or SENS in any capacity moving forward. I had one bad experience with him when I was 17 - he told me in writing that he had an ‘adventurous love life’...
Clifford Algebra, a.k.a. Geometric Algebra, is a most extraordinary synergistic confluence of a diverse range of specialized mathematical fields, each with its own methods and formalisms, all of wh…
Why launch costs aren't the reason it costs a fortune to do things in space
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh https://sites.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/jdnorton.html
The trick that makes GHC’s ApplicativeDo optimization faster is structurally identical to how biologists predict RNA folding.
Many electric cars will still have more than 80% of their initial capacity after 200,000 miles.
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
An In-Depth Overview of Key Technical Factors
Weight limits, speed limits, fuel consumption at scale, and why trucks do the things that annoy you on the motorway.
Yesterday, I had a coronectomy: the top halves of my bottom wisdom teeth were surgically removed. It was my first time being sedated, and I didn’t know what to expect. While I was unconscious…
A statistical test of whether the Sumerian King List's antediluvian reigns line up with paleoclimate events better than chance.
One attempt at rationalizing astrology is to say that the gravitational effects of celestial bodies impact our bodies. To get an idea how hard the stars and planets pull on us, let's compare their gravitational attraction to that of cows at various distances. Newton's law of gravity says that the gravitational…
The lottery ticket hypothesis explains why massive neural networks succeed despite centuries of theory predicting they should fail
Wow — evidence that very massive neutron stars may have cores made of deconfined quark matter! The idea of a ‘quark star’ is not new, but I didn’t know it was a serio…
