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Translating Akkadian clay tablets with ChatGPT?
Alles wat Jan bezighoudt, interesseert en irriteert... en ook een beetje onzin...
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I’m so sorry for psychology’s loss, whatever it is
The plane crashed and nobody checked the bodies
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Science is a strong-link problem
OR: How to eat fewer asparagus beetles
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Liu Cixin's Technologies of the Future
Highlight of cool technologies mentioned in "The Dark Forest".
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The Garden of Computational Delights
Beneath the utilitarian purpose of computation, computing is also a source of delight and wonder . Software is not just databases and mail merges or SaaS and spreadsheets; it's creative coding and simulated cities , code poetry and bulletin board systems . It's websites that dazzle and iPhone apps that make the heart…
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Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction
Large language models are valuable research assistants, especially when they refuse to follow instructions.
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Problem solving with dimensional analysis
A dimension is a physical quantity that can be measured, while a unit is a specific amount of a physical quantity. For example, time is a dimension, which can be measured in temporal units such as hours or seconds.
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We're wasting money by only supporting gzip for raw DNA files
Stylised graphics of money with DNA helix in the foreground.
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Lab Notebooks (2020)
What wet-lab chemistry can teach software engineers
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All the hominins made tools
A study of associations between stone tool evidence and fossil hominin remains shows that a wide range of species made stone artifacts.
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The Point of the Banach-Tarski Theorem
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
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Helplessness is not learned (2022)
Română On the sixth day of our science advent, we would like to talk about a debunked concept in neuroscience. The purpose of this prompt and of science debunking, in general, is not to make fun of how scientists in the past got things so wrong and how we’re so much smarter now. The point […]
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I think faster than light travel is possible [video]
Science News, Physics, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science
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Nicotine (2016)
On the benefits and lack of demerits of nicotine (research up to 2015)
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Could we stop Yellowstone from erupting with a geothermal power plant?
It’s become fairly common knowledge that Yellowstone National Park, in addition to being incredibly beautiful, is sitting on top of an enormous supervolcano that catastrophically erupts every few hundred thousand years.
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High Precision Mapping from Scratch
The fun of owning rural property is that knowing where your land actually starts and ends is a guess usually. Sure, you have a parcel description, and maybe even an online service with “official” GIS boundaries (for us here in New Brunswick, this is GeoNB ). However, since it’s in the middle of the forest, the odds of…
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Can I take ducks home from the park?
16 queries and 6 language models
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Nuclear Conversion for Starship
A blog dedicated to helping Science Fiction authors create and discuss worlds where a realistic setting can still serve the fiction.
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Effects on the lips of horn players seated too close to the timpani (2014)
Timpani-horn interactions:
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How We Knew Space Was a Vacuum (2021)
Question: At what point during the history of science did we discover outer space was a vacuum? I’m pretty sure it was before we actually went there, but when did we know for certain? — MC, Algoma, WI
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The False Promise of Chomskyism
Important Update (March 10): On deeper reflection, I probably don’t need to spend emotional energy refuting people like Chomsky, who believe that Large Language Models are just a laughable fa…
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Mindblowing dissertations
We don’t generally see PhD dissertations as an exciting genre to read, and that is wholly our loss. As the…
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Why Frames Tilt Forward (2015)
There is a ten-foot long alcove in our lower-level hallway — we call it the gallery . This is the one place in our house I can hang whatever I want (i.e., my own art) and switch it out whenever I want. To facilitate this, I installed a hanging system — basically a slotted rail mounted near the ceiling, with sliding…
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Dividing a Square into 7 Similar Rectangles
This is a continuation of my post Dividing a square into similar rectangles, in which I discussed this puzzle: if you partition a square into n similar rectangles, what proportions can these rectan…
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Infra-Red, in Situ (Iris) Inspection of Silicon
Cryptography tells us how to make a chain of trust rooted in special-purpose chips known as secure elements. But how do we come to trust our secure elements? I have been searching for solutions to this thorny supply chain problem . Ideally, one can directly inspect the construction of a chip, but any viable inspection…
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Death by vegetable oil: What the studies say (2020)
In a world without vegetable oil, we may be twenty pounds lighter, have half the amount of heart disease and cancer, live longer, think clearer, feel better, and be happier and less depressed.
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Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem (2020)
The mathematical field of information theory attempts to mathematically describe the concept of “information”. In the first two posts, we discussed the concepts of self-information and information entropy. In this post, we step through Shannon’s Source Coding Theorem to see how the information entropy of a probability…