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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 169 posts.
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’...
If you've been reading popular science websites or magazines lately, then you may have heard the news: we don't understand how airplanes work. For example:…
Greenland shark swimming under an ice flow in the Canadian arctic WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2011 was an important year in the history of psychology, especially social psychology. First, it became apparent that one social psychologist had faked results for dozens of publications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel). Second, a highly respected journal published an article with the incredible claim…
Read about the Irish teenager who won the Google Science award for the magnetic liquid trap that could clean an ocean of microplastics.
Final Installment of the Misinformation Trifecta
Does cola contain a drug to prevent you from throwing up from the sugar? And is Mexican Coke somehow better than American Coke?
Most of the visual cortex studies I’ve read have been about mammalian vision. But mammals are not the only organisms with cortex, or at least tissue resembling cortex. This paper explores turtle visual cortex, in an area known as dCx. This dorsal region plays the role of the turtle primary vision center — as close as…
A couple of months ago a new paper was released that examined the lead-crime hypothesis. Its conclusion is that there's little evidence for an association, and if there is one it's pretty small. I haven't commented on it, but not because of its negative conclusion. It's because the paper is a meta-analysis. I'm fairly…
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Ensemble averages and time averages
This is the fourth…and LAST…entry in my series of blog posts analyzing the accuracy of Ray Kurzweil’s predictions about what things would be like in 2019. These predictions come from hi…
In previous posts I said that the extent to which "Fund people" works will depend on the distribution of scientific talent. Think about the following …
Mathematician: That depends on what you mean by “universe.” Here’s a framing: A circle of radius R centered at a point P is the set of all points in the plane with distance R fro…
Critics of AI risk suggest diminishing returns to computing (formalized asymptotically) means AI will be weak; this argument relies on a large number of questionable premises and ignoring additional resources, constant factors, and nonlinear returns to small intelligence advantages, and is highly unlikely.
Lagrange multipliers are used in multivariable calculus to find maxima and minima of a function subject to constraints (like "find the highest elevation along the given path" or "minimize the cost of materials for a box enclosing a given volume"). It's a useful technique, but all too often it is poorly taught and…
An examination of the software that powers modern Climate simulations.
[Content Warning: Trying to understand the contents of this essay may be mind-warping. Proceed with caution. Featured image credit: Paul Nylander] Friends, right here and now, one quantum away, the…
As recently as February 2016 an article in a prestigious science journal (Nature) raises the question if a nuclear blast will have a...
The Douglas Self Site, steam locomotive, Shay, Climax, Mallet, Garratt, Turbomotive, Reid-Ramsey
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
There’s a very good new book about Stephen Hawking that just came out, Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking. Some detailed reviews can be found at Prospect Magazine (Philip Ball) and the New…
Homepage of Florian Echtler
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
Few upwardly mobile people in the modern rat-race society can live without an alarm clock. With a shot of strong coffee and round-the-clock stress, most people learn to live and survive with an alarm clock. Half of the population wakes up with an alarm, 9% are woken by a partner, 4% by pets, 3% by children, etc. That…
