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World's shortest explanation of Gödel's theorem
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Topics /
Science & Space
The most popular blog posts about science & space on Hacker News. 57 posts.
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SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar
Avatar Review by Greg Egan
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Reversing Tooth Decay with Good Diet
In the last post, I discussed the research of Drs. Edward and May Mellanby on the nutritional factors affecting tooth formation. Dr. Mellan...
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Training Rats as Traders
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)
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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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Magenta Ain't A Color
All the colours in the light spectrum have complements that exist within the spectrum – except green. There seems to be some kind of imbalance. What is going on? Is green somehow being discriminated against? The light spectrum consists of a range of wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Red light has the longest…
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The New Science of Causation
It seems like each new day brings another one of those headlines: regular sleep “linked to” life expectancy, playing video games “associated with” surgical prowess, bullies “at risk” of becoming criminals, and “does breastfeeding reduce a baby’s blood pressure?” (the old rhetorical question gambit). Sometimes the…
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What You Learned About How Planes Fly Was Probably Wrong
So we all know how planes fly, right? The top of the wing is rounded and the bottom of the wing is more straight. Air takes longer to travel over the top of the
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James Randi: This Cruel Farce Has To Stop
James Randi Educational Foundation
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Clocks, Kids, and General Relativity on Mt Rainier
In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you've seen before.
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Calorie restrictive eating for longer life? The story we didn’t hear in the news
Junkfood Science - truth about food and health
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How to destroy the earth
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
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Why aeroplane wings aren't dimpled like golf balls
Before explaining the purpose of dimples, we first need to understand the aerodynamic properties of a sphere. Let us start by looking at a smooth sphere without any dimples, like a ping-pong ball. If we lived in an ideal world without any friction, the air flowing around a smooth sphere would behave like that shown in…
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At peak, Spain gets 53% of its energy from wind
Ok, not all the time, but last weekend at 5:50am on Sunday morning (8th Nov) Spain set a new record, hitting 53.7% of its energy requirements being supplied by wind energy. As you can see from the graph above, the amount of electricity being supplied by wind, the light green portion of the graph, doesn’t […]
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Python in the Scientific World
Yesterday I attended a biweekly meeting of an informal a UC Berkeley group devoted to Python in science (Py4Science), organized by Fernando ...