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Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Italian music through the lens of complex networks
Last year I was talking with a non-Italian, trying to convey to them how nearly the entirety of contemporary Italian music rests on the shoulders of Gianni Maroccolo — and the parts that don’t, should. In an attempt to find a way out of that conversation, they casually asked “wouldn’t it be cool to map out who…
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The Joy of Condensed Matter
I published a slightly different version of this article in Nautilus on February 24, 2021. Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, SmolinR…
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A Ring of Controversy Around a Black Hole Photo
[Note Added: Thanks to some great comments I’ve received, I’m continuing to add clarifying remarks to this post. You’ll find them in green.] It’s been a couple of months si…
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The mountain that weighed the Earth
Suppose you want to find out how much you weigh. It’s easy enough – get a scale, stand on it, and read the number. Now suppose you want to know how much the Earth weighs. You get out a scale and…hm…
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Wikipedia graph mining: dynamic structure of collective memory
Wikipedia graph dynamic pattern discovery. Dynamic graph analysis in GraphX. Collective memory research. Gephi graph visualization.
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Science is political, and that's a bad thing
People who say “science is political” usually aren’t just stating facts - they’re trying to push something on you. Don’t let them
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Powering the Mars Base
This post is part of the series on space topics. This post is not the last word on this topic. The usual caveats apply. I’m curious if you have strong opinions on different fuel mixes. A grow…
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Cancer survival rates are misleading
UPDATE: I submitted a more formal version of this article to the UMAP Journal (Undergraduate Mathematics and Its Applications), which publishes articles that use mathematical modeling for real-world problems, often with a pedagogical or expository angle. A preprint is available on arXiv at…
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What comes next: π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, π/2, ...?
I’m eager to summarize the (largely excellent) discussion of last week’s nightmares and to talk about what it all means. I’ll surely get to that in the next few days. But meanwhil…
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"Building Machines That Learn and Think Like People", 7 Years Later
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.
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Keeping David MacKay's 'Sustainable Energy – without the hot air' up-to-date
As the anniversary of Sir David MacKay’s untimely death approaches, I think we should honour his memory by trying to update Sustainable Energy as a crowd-sourced project. I have made an initial attempt to suggest how we might develop the section on photovoltaics but others will want to suggest other
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Gravity assist maneuvers in space
Ingenious maneuvers by missions to go over the Sun, chase a comet and sail using the Sun.
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The Philosophy of Linear Algebra (2021)
Whenever a student wonders why linear algebra, matrices, and vectors are important, the response from teachers usually sounds like this:
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Confirmed: The Last Great Prediction Of The Big Bang
A leftover glow unlike any other — of neutrinos — has finally been seen.
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A Visual Introduction to Morse Theory
In a previous article , I already introduced manifolds and their, ahem, manifold ways. Among the many interesting comments I received about this article, some were dealing with a basic question, namely how to measure the properties of a manifold. In this article, I want to present a few concepts from Morse theory …
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The Existential Risk of Mathematical Error
Mathematical mistake/error-rates limit our understanding of rare risks and ability to defend against them.
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A review of probability theory
In preparation for my upcoming course on random matrices, I am briefly reviewing some relevant foundational aspects of probability theory, as well as setting up basic probabilistic notation that we…
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Steve Blank: Gravity Will be Turned Off
Part of marketing is the ability to communicate a message to thousands of people and convince them to believe your version of reality. When I was 19 I accidentally had a test run of my ability to d…
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Ozempic-style drugs now in trials for heart failure, addiction and even aging
Ozempic-style drugs are being tested far beyond diabetes, for heart failure, addiction, Alzheimer's and aging. The share of such trials has roughly tripled in fifteen years.
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The world needs computational social science
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 …
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Physical Intuition, Not Mathematics (2011)
“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”