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The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 76 posts.
Suppose you go around taking extremely close-up black-and-white pictures of randomly chosen natural and unnatural objects (rocks, trees, streams, buildings, etc.). What do they look like? Well, eac…
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…
“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter in…
Update March 2012 See my expanded critique of Colin Wheildon’s legibility research .
What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?
If you went outside and lay down on your back with your mouth open, how long would you have to wait until a bird pooped in it?
What would happen if everyone on earth stood as close to each other as they could and jumped, everyone landing on the ground at the same instant?
Time-Nuts ™ is a mailing list for amateurs who are interested in precise Time & Frequency. Topics include stability of quartz oscillators, measurements of rubidium and cesium atomic clocks, using WWVB, Loran-C, and GPS for long-term comparisons.
What would happen if you were to gather a mole (unit of measurement) of moles (the small furry critter) in one place?
(Thanks to Amit Sahai for spurring me to write this post!) The Background We all remember Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem from kindergarten. This is the thing that, given a formal syste…
If we adopt solar and wind as major components of our energy infrastructure as we are weaned from fossil fuels, we have to solve the energy storage problem in a big way. An earlier post demonstrated that we do not likely possess enough materials in the world to simply build giant lead-acid (or nickel-based or…
[ An updated treatment of this material appears in Chapter 1 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook , and also appears as part of an article in Nature Physics in 2022.]
Last week I was in Vancouver, to give talks at the University of British Columbia and at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting. As part of that visit, on Friday af…
Nearly 45,000 annual deaths are associated with lack of health insurance, according to a new study published online today by the American Journal of Public Health. That figure is about…
