What can a technologist do about climate change?
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities , I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our…
Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, Даже если его там нет. Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, За дверью большой секрет - Ундервуд. Буквально вчера, 02 июня 2015 года, исполнилось 60 лет колыбели мировой космонавтики и крупнейшей отечественной космической гавани - космодрому Байконур. За эти годы…
Raytracing a Black Hole
It's now clear I'm on a Black Hole binge (I can stop when I want, by the way). They're endlessly fascinating. My recent interest was in particular focused on simulating visualizations of the Schwarzschild geometry. I was preoccupied by the problem of generating a decent accurate representation of how the curvature of…
Photos of the An-225 Mriya – the world’s largest aircraft
An-225 Mriya (which is referred to Dream from Ukrainian) is the heaviest airlift cargo aircraft ever taken off in the sky. The maximum takeoff weight makes 640 tons. An-225 was designed, due to the necessity to create the air transport system for the Soviet reusable Space Shuttle Buran. This is the…
Spraying Magnetic Stripe Cards with Iron Filings
Posted by anaglyph under DIY , Gadgets , Hokum , Science , Skeptical Thinking , WooWoo [80] Comments
Google, D-Wave, and the case of the factor-10^8 speedup
Update (Dec. 16): If you’re still following this, please check out an important comment by Alex Selby, the discoverer of Selby’s algorithm, which I discussed in the post. Selby querie…
Show HN: Interactive Essay on Signals, Sampling and the Fourier Transform
This text is designed to accompany your study of introductory digital signal processing. 1 It’s an eccentric piece of not-so-rigorous literature with a preoccupation for explaining things using interactive visualizations, animations and sound. 2 My goal is to explain the Discrete Fourier Transform using a miniature…
Planets in the Fourth Dimension
You probably that planets go around the sun in elliptical orbits. But do you know why? In fact, they’re moving in circles in 4 dimensions. But when these circles are projected down to 3-dimen…
How Insects Breathe
Tại Việt Nam, sự gia tăng phổ biến của trò chơi điện tử đang định hình lại bối cảnh cá cược thể thao. Khi các game thủ trẻ đắm mình vào các cuộc thi ảo, niềm đam mê của họ sẽ
World map of the difference between solar and clock time
A better map of the difference between solar and standard time, and some trivia
Could dark matter not exist?
Is it possible that our problems indicate a flaw in the theory of gravity?
What Is Spacetime, Really?
On the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Stephen Wolfram discusses the nature of space and time, and fundamental theory of physics.
What's the third most common element?
The Universe was 99.999999% Hydrogen and Helium after the Big Bang. Billions of years later, there’s a new contender in town.
If 1+x is 1, how much is 1-x?
► Versión en Español (The title should be "if (= (+ 1 x) 1), how much is (- 1 x)?", but ...) Toy floating point Mathematically, if we...
What Is Aging? Most Scientists Still Get It Wrong
Most people misunderstand what aging is. It’s not just the public who have been deceived -- Most scientists and medical researchers who study aging are on the wrong track.
Listening to satellites for $30
I've ever dreamed of space & satellites, it turms out you can received pictures from them.
What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?
[Epistemic status: Speculative. I can’t make this post less condescending and elitist, so if you don’t like condescending elitist things, this might not be for you.] Developmental psych…
Gravity's Oldest Puzzles
Every now and then the orbital motion of a body doesn’t match our prediction. And that might lead to interesting discoveries.
Motion sensing using the doppler effect
Recently I stumbled upon an interesting paper for implementing motion sensing requiring no special hardware, only a speaker and mic ! Unfortunately the paper didn't include code to test it, so I decided to reproduce it here on the web!