Topics /
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
[Other posts in this series: 2,3,4.] I had the chance to have dinner tonight with Paul Ginsparg of arXiv fame, and he graciously gave me some feedback on a very speculative idea that I’ve been kicking around: augmenting — or even replacing — the current academic article model with collaborative d
This month, a bunch of ‘logic hackers’ have been seeking to determine the precise boundary between the knowable and the unknowable. The challenge has been around for a long time. But on…
Fifty years ago, the first molecular dynamics papers allowed scientists to exhaustively simulate systems with a few dozen atoms for picoseconds. Today, due to tremendous gains in computational capability from Moore’s law, and due to significant gains in algorithmic sophisticiation from fifty years of research, modern…
Blaise Pascal once famously ended a letter with an apology : I'm sorry that this was such a long letter, but I didn't have time to write you a short one. Computer science has pretty much the same problem. It's a young field, and young fields are, by their nature, messy. As we race to generate new knowledge, we also…
Ebola is one of the nastiest, most frightening viruses known to man. Its victims suffer fevers, muscle weakness, and other symptoms that pr...
For a while now, Microsoft have provided a free Jupyter Notebook service on Microsoft Azure. At the moment they provide compute kernels for Python, R and F# providing up to 4Gb of memory per sessio…
See also other posts tagged Single Rotation . In the previous post I have presented the Reversible Cellular Automata simulator , along ...
I’m seeing a lot of wrangling over the recent (15+ year) pause in global average warming…when did it start, is it a full pause, shouldn’t we be taking the longer view, etc.
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
I recently returned from the 2025 Annual Meeting of the “Localization of Waves” collaboration (supported by the Simons Foundation, with additional related support from the NSF), where I…
In the last post, I discussed the research of Drs. Edward and May Mellanby on the nutritional factors affecting tooth formation. Dr. Mellan...
Our knowledge of the composition and structure of the Earth’s interior through direct observation and sampling is limited to the top few ki...
This theorem is one of the most important proven in the twentieth century. Here are a few brief selections that will help you start to understand it. Gödel’s original paper “On Formally Undecidable Propositions” is available in a modernized translation . It’s also in print from Dover in a nice, inexpensive edition …
Stephen Wolfram investigates the discovery of structures since the Game of Life was invented--searching possibilities versus invention by explicit effort. A thorough look at oscillators, modularity, glider guns.
The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain.
Students of military history know that acoustic refraction and unusual audibility have often played significant roles in the outcome of battles. Before electrical and wireless communications became common on the tactical level, the sound of battle was often the quickest and most efficient method by which a commander…
I crafted this skinner box exclusively for the rattraders' training; it is equipped with airconditioning and a music device. The picture above shows the special light signal that indicates the start of trading. (image by Nora Friedel)
Resonance occurs when two sources of excitation fall completely in sync, and reinforce one another endlessly. In this state, the sources convey an unbounded amount of energy over time.
$\newcommand\of{\subseteq}\newcommand\N{\mathbb{N}}\newcommand\R{\mathbb{R}}\def\<#1>{\left\langle#1\right\rangle}\newcommand\Z{\mathbb{Z}}\newcommand\Q{\mathbb{Q}}\newcommand\ltomega{{{<}…
There are two kinds of latitude: geocentric and astronomical. On a perfect sphere, they're the same, but on an oblate spheroid like Earth they're different.
The graph on the left shows a third example, taken from analytical chemistry: a straight-line calibration data set where X = concentration and Y = instrument reading (Y = a + b X). Click to download that data . The blue dots are the data points. They don't all fall in a perfect straight line because of random noise…
When discussing the validity of the Axiom of Choice, the most common argument for not taking it as gospel is the Banach-Tarski paradox. Yet, this never particularly bothered me. The argument …
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…
People are starting to take geoengineering seriously.
Update: a version of this post appeared on Slate.com. I seem to have touched a nerve with my rant about the conventional teaching of music theory and how poorly it serves practicing musicians. I th…
There’s a blog post that floats around the Internet about the metaphor of the broken stair.
