The human eye is very sensitive; but can we see a single photon? The answer is yes: sensors in the retina can respond to a single photon. But neural filters only allow a signal to pass to the brain to trigger a conscious response when at least about five to nine arrive within less than 100 ms. If we could consciously…
Eva Silverstein has a new preprint out, entitled The Dangerous Irrelevance of String Theory. The title is I guess intended to be playful, not referring to its accurate description of the current st…
There is a grand tradition of scientifically minded science fiction authors creating not just the characters in their novels but also the brass tacks scientific details of the planets they reside on. This is the art and science of Worldbuilding .
Two of my favorite numbers are pi: $latex \pi = 3.14159… $ and the golden ratio: $latex \displaystyle{ \Phi = \frac{\sqrt{5} + 1}{2} } = 1.6180339… $ They’re related: $latex \pi =…
Where did complex numbers come from? You might think that people invented \(i\) just so that they had a solution to the quadratic equat...
Technical nuclear forensics-themed discussion of the age, activity, and grade of plutonium found in a KI-1 Soviet smoke detector.
AI folklore tells a story about a neural network trained to detect tanks which instead learned to detect time of day; investigating, this probably never happened.
Mapping nearest locations.
Many times a scientist is choosing a programming language or a software for a specific purpose. For the field of scientific computing, the methods for solving differential equations are one of the important areas. What I would like to do is take the time to compare and contrast between the most popular offerings. This…
Five years ago, Cathy O’Neil laid out a perfectly cogent case for why the (at that point recent) claims by Shinichi Mochizuki should not (yet) be regarded as constituting a proof of the ABC conjecture. I have nothing further to add on the sociological aspects of mathematics discussed in that post, but I just wanted to…
I read a fantastic article in Nature magazine (vol 459, pp931-939 (18 June 2009)) that summarizes not only the current state of novel H1N1 (aka Swine Flu) understanding, but also a compares H1N1 against other flu strains. In particular, it discusses in-depth how the pathogenic components — i.e., the stuff that kills…
This is a guest blog by Auke Hoekstra, senior adviser electric mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology and developer of agent-based models for electric vehicles and renewable energy adop…
Edited 8/16 to correct attributions to Alon and Boppana and to Tardos, thanks to an anonymous commenter for the correction Yesterday, Norbert Blum posted a preprint with a claimed proof that $latex…
physics, history of science, pseudoscience, hoaxes, writing, education, skepticisism, humor, quotes, illusions, 3d stereo photography.
I knew the future would be shocking but this is a whole other level.
Douglas G. Steigerwald joined the faculty of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara after completing an M.A. in Statistics and a Ph.D. in Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research and teaching focus on frontier econometric methods at the intersection of…
There are a bunch of things about this story that just don’t make a lot of sense to me.
2016 so far wins my lifetime award for most depressing and disturbing year ever (on the front of the larger world one reads about in the newspaper and elsewhere, personally things are fine, thanks)…
Out there in the wider world—OK, OK, among Luboš Motl, and a few others who comment on this blog—there appears to be a widespread opinion that P≠NP is just “a fashionable dogma of…
In the two months since I last blogged, the US has continued its descent into madness. Yet even while so many certainties have proven ephemeral as the morning dew—the US’…
As you might remember, the FDA stomped on 23andMe for using too many irresponsible genetic tests that purported to tell you things about yourself and your health with limited support. They eventual…
Or, for fucks sake, DL people, leave language alone and stop saying you solve it.
You use L a T e X instead of a WYSIWYG word processing program because they can’t cope with the high quality required for publication. But your nice professional looking documents can be ruined because you insert the wrong type of figures. Bitmap figures are easily pixelated because the actual size is not always known…
In 1965, I. J. Good described for the first time the notion of “intelligence explosion”, as it relates to artificial intelligence (AI):
