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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 160 posts.
April 10, 2023. The backlash was immediate after I spoke at the 2016 Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism , which bills itself as a “celebration of science and critical thinking.” Although the conference had allotted me 10 minutes for questions, the stage manager, Jamy
No, but they’re probably good for you.
I received a letter from a reader the other day. It was handwritten in crabbed penmanship so that it was very difficult to read. Nevertheless, I tried to make it out just in case it might prove to be important.
When we finished the Potato Diet Community Trial, we found ourselves in a pickle. The diet worked — people lost 10.6 lbs on average over only four weeks — and we had basically no idea why. No idea …
In his TED Talk, Stephen Wolfram covers the emergence of space by the application of computational rules to spacetime, gravity and quantum mechanics to AI and LLMs. Computational irreducibility and the ruliad.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer models (GPTs) are now all the rage and have inspired op-eds being written by everyone from Henry Kissinger (WSJ) to Noam Chomsky (NYTimes) in just the last month. That sure is some hype level.
The unreasonable persistence of an old standard
Falling down a rabbit hole
Follow Stephen Wolfram's evolution of research on the 2nd Law from early interest as a 12-year-old to his current findings in the Wolfram Physics Project. View a large collection of images of early and published works.
June 29, 2023. Some scientists seek to clarify reality, others to mystify it. Physicist David Bohm seemed driven by both impulses. He is renowned for promoting a sensible (according to experts like Einstein, John Bell and philosopher Tim Maudlin) interpretation of quantum mechanics. But Bohm also a
We synthesized the vast, contradictory scholarly literature on gender bias in academic science from 2000 to 2020. . . . Claims and counterclaims regarding the presence or absence of sexism span a range of evaluation contexts. Our approach relied on a combination of meta-analysis and analytic dissection. We evaluated…
What color is the night sky? Contrary to prevailing views, the moonless night sky is rarely, if ever, black or blue. It is actually much more colorful. In this article, I'll describe some of the colors and the physical reasons for those colors.
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh PA 15260. Homepage: www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton This page is available at www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/goodies
How the veneer of AI is used to legitimize awful ideas
Some anomalies/questions which are not necessarily important, but do puzzle me or where I find existing explanations to be unsatisfying.
Visualizing the weather anomalies in rainfall, sunshine and temperature in the Netherlands using data from the Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI).
There’s a blog post that floats around the Internet about the metaphor of the broken stair.
So we've landed on Mars, now we need somewhere to sit. It's pretty expensive to ship furniture from earth, so time to start building some chairs.
This post is an offshoot from Chapter 1 of Probably Overthinking It, which is available for pre-order now! Suppose you measure the arm and leg lengths of 4082 people. You would expect those measurements to be correlated, and you would be right. In the ANSUR-II dataset, among male members of the armed forces, this…
In the post about GPT-4V, I mentioned the paper “Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People” (https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.00289) by Brenden Lake, Tomer Ullman, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Samuel Gershman.
The world needs computational social science, and it is not only, or even primarily, about the AI revolution. The reasons follow below and I also cover what a computational social scientist should …
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
"G’mar Chatimah Tovah” – May you be inscribed into the Book of Life
Mathematics is famously concerned with numbers . However, most of the physical quantities that we encounter in everyday experience cannot be expressed as numbers alone.
mood, memory, education; five easy wins for behaviour change
I wish I knew if my math was correct...
