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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 76 posts.
This blog post focusses on Chapter 4 about Implicit Priming in Kahneman's book "Thinking" Fast and Slow." A review of the book and other chapters can be found here: https://replicationindex.com/2020/12/30/a-meta-scientific-perspective-on-thinking-fast-and-slow/ Daniel Kahneman's response to this blog…
Intriguing title, no? These are the first eleven words of Neal Stephenson's novel Seveneves, which set up the remaining 600 pages as an extended treatise on the future of humanity as it copes with certain annihilation. I thoroughly recommend it, as long as you can deal with hundreds of pages of orbital mechanics. In…
New British train station design identified as cellular automata rule 30. Generating rule-based patterns. And a website that lets you try it yourself.
The X27 camera takes videos in darkness that looks like they were shot in the daytime. And they’re in color…none of this black and white, thermal, or infrared s
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was one of the giants of 20th-century mathematics. I’ve always found it amazing that the same man was responsible both for establishing the foundations of …
Snowflake macro photography: how to take closeup images of real snow crystals with simple optical add-on for compact camera? In this article, you'll find detailed description of shooting and photo processing techniques, scheme of optical add-on, snowflake pictures gallery, tips and tricks, useful links. Author: Alexey…
For those who just want the survey itself, not the backstory, it’s here. (Note: Partly because of the feedback I’ve gotten on this blog, it’s now expanded to 121 pages!) Upda…
Feynman (just off centre) at Wangerooge in 1987 I started my career as a theoretical physicist, and in the late-80s I co-organised a specialist workshop on a small island, Wangerooge, off the coast…
I’ve been talking a lot recently about how quantum algorithms don’t work. But last week JR Minkel, an editor at Scientific American, asked me to write a brief essay about how quantum al…
Patrick Winston is one of the greatest teachers at M.I.T., and for 27 years was Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (which later became part of CSAIL ).
This package provides an essential feature to LaTeX that has been missing for too long. It adds a coffee stain to your documents. A lot of time can be saved by printing stains directly on the page rather than adding it manually.
I was staring at a bonfire on a beach the other day and realized that I didn’t understand anything about fire and how it works. (For example: what determines its color?) So I looked up some s…
Light pollution is a rapidly growing problem. Most of the population in the United States cannot see the Milky Way. When I look up at the sky from Venice, California, I can see about 20 stars. The rest of the galaxy is hidden by an orange haze of light pollution. This guide talks about a method called ETTR or…
[Previously in series: Antidepressant Pharmacogenomics: Much More Than You Wanted To Know; SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, etc. This is all preliminary and you should not take it as a rea…
This article was originally written in 2014, but has had some minor improvements in December 2017 and January 2018 when I received some useful feedback after the article had unexpectedly been posted on Hacker News in December 2017.
Yesterday Ryan Mandelbaum, at Gizmodo, posted a decidedly tongue-in-cheek piece about whether or not the universe is a computer simulation. (The piece was filed under the category “LOL.…
Heights are normally distributed because height is determined by many factors. But why are other things with many inputs not normally distributed?
[Epistemic status: Total wild speculation] I. The predictive processing model offers compelling accounts of autism and schizophrenia. But Surfing Uncertainty and related sources I’ve read are…
How close are we to building the hosts?
A retirement project created and maintained by Tom O'Haver , Professor Emeritus , Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Dutch toilet cleaner ‘WC-EEND’ (literally: 'Toilet Duck') aired a famous commercial in 1989 that had the slogan ‘We from WC-EEND a...
You and your friend have watches which are synchronized to the second, and the proctors are used to him often finishing exams quickly and won't be suspicious if he leaves early. What is the largest value N such that you can guarantee that you answer at least N out of the 23 questions correctly?
Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research Oliver 2017
The molecule DMT (N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is a psychoactive chemical that causes intense visions and can induce its users to quickly enter a completely different "environment" that some have likened to an alien or parallel universe. The transition from our world to theirs occurs with no cessation of consciousness or…
