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Mammalian Aggression
Introduction
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 2,038 posts.
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Genuinely, my all-time favourite image: Mamenchisaurus hochuanensis
Get ready to scroll. In 2017, Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire hosted an exhibition, Dinosaurs Of China: Ground Shakers To Feathered Flyers. Wollaton Hall Curator Adam Smith arranged for the SVPCA …
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Designing a low-cost high-performance 10 MHz – 15 GHz vector network analyzer
Designing a cheap two-port vector network analyzer with good measurement accuracy.
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How transistors really work (1995)
Most technician textbooks do a very poor job of explaining the details of transistors' internal workings. First they assume that the Base current is somehow controlling the Collector current, then they try to explain how one current can affect another. These explanations invariably fail because Bipolar transistors…
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An intutive counterexample to the axiom of choice
Time for some hard-core geeking-out. This comment on HN by /u/jiggawatts struck me as a brilliant idea: it's an intuitive counter-example t...
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Nuclear power is too safe
If you don't pursue safety in a way that is cost effective, you are killing people.[David Okrent]
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Interstellar Flight: Perspectives and Patience
Transit time of 6,600 years; that long ago, around 4,600 BCE, the state of human civilization was devoid of technology. Hard to imagine what would happen back home on Earth during a journey of that length.
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Confronting the Credibility Gap for Crewed Exploration of Mars
Confronting the Credibility Gap for Crewed Exploration of Mars (Notes from talk on September 22, 2016, at the Mars Society Conference. ...
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Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon
Most of us go about our lives comforted by the thought “I would never drop a nuclear weapon on the moon.” The truth is that given a lot of power, a nuclear weapon, and a lot of extremely specific c…
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The examples in the textbooks are not representative of real world problems
Bill Harris points to this cartoon from Randall Munroe. I think he (Munroe) is really on to something here. Not about Bayes’s theorem but about the sorts of examples that are in textbooks.
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Knowledge and memory
The what is connected to the when.
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Generating true random numbers from bananas
It was a dreary afternoon in Milan last year when, procrastinating on studying, I was struck by a flash of genius. “What would happen if I made a banana-powered random number generator?“. I immediately went to tell my roommate, who was also an electronic engineer.He looked me in the face and burst out laughing. At ……
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MAGA Is Winning Its War Against U.S. Science
When a political movement believes that ignorance is strength
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If you put your hand in the Large Hadron Collider...
Several physicists weigh in on what would happen if you were to place your hand in the proton stream of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. There’s not a definit
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An un-edited view of Saturn
Something that is kind of annoying about NASA photos is that they end up so touched up, and so many liberties taken with them that they become creatures of their own.
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A Primer on Long-Duration Life Support
Life support is the hardest technical obstacle to the human exploration of Mars.
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How thick is the atmosphere? A derivation of the Boltzmann distribution
Let’s talk about a small question as a way of introducing a big question. How thick is the atmosphere? How far does Earth’s atmosphere extend into space? In other words, how high can y…
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The Demon Machine
Over the weekend I was reunited with the first two computers I spent extensive time programming. The Sharp MZ-80K (released in 1979) and t...
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Out of Africa's midlife crisis
on bottlenecks, crashes and what diversity really looks like
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Supertasks
Background Reading: Earman and Norton, Infinite Pains: The Trouble with Supertasks and Comments on Laraudogoita's Supertask
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Most Radioactive Spot in New York: A Street Corner in Queens
Many are going to ask, "What's so weird about this one corner?" and I'm here to answer. The end of Irving Avenue, where it meets Moffat Str...
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Sinusoidal Sunlight
The graph of daylight over the course of a year looks like a sine wave, but is it?
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Physics in Metal Music
Metal bands aren't afraid to tackle serious topics in their lyrics. Here, we look at metal songs that deal with concepts in theoretical physics and cosmology.
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Satellites Spotting Depth
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
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