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Bicycle
Interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle.
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My $500M Mars rover mistake
Some mistakes feel worse than death.
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Why Not Mars
It's slow, expensive, the engineering is mostly port-a-potty chemistry, and the best-case outcome is that thirty years from now we’ll get to watch someone remotely operate a soil scoop from Mars instead of Pasadena
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Maps distort how we see the world
30 Maps to Rethink the World
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Why is desalination so difficult?
[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] This is the Carlsbad Desalination Plant outside of San Diego, California. It produces roughly ten percent of the area’s fresh water, around 50 million gallons or 23,000 cubic meters per day. Unlike most treatment plants that cle
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Poor sleep drove me insane, and my long path to recovery
I'm sharing my experience dealing with what might be the most underdiagnosed and under-treated health disorder today.
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Have attention spans been declining?
[This is one of the finalists in the SMTM Mysteries Contest, by a reader writing under the pseudonym Cennfaeladh. We’ll be posting about one of these a week until we have gotten through all th…
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The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation
Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?
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OpenAI’s policies hinder reproducible research on language models
LLMs have become privately-controlled research infrastructure
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Replace peer review with “peer replication” (2021)
As I’ve posted before and many others have noted , there is a serious problem with lack of adequate replication in many fields of science. The current peer review process is a dreadful combination of being both very fallible and also a huge hurdle to communicating important science.
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37, the median value for the second prime factor of an integer
Chris Grossack's math blog and professional website.
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Underwater ears everywhere
Programming note: the subscribe link was broken for a while because I am bad at computers (yet another case of "forgot to enable the systemd unit"). It's fixed now. The unsubscribe link was also broken and is now fixed but, you know, maybe that was a feature. Did wonders for reader retention.
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LED lighting badly suppresses human melatonin production at night
Yes, it’s a spicy title. Yes, I plan to back it with what I consider very reasonable evidence of the claims, in the form of a lot of research papers. I would simply ask that you read to the end before deciding I’ve lost it.
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Some insects I found inside dried Turkish figs from Trader Joe’s
During an online wasp identification course I participated in several weeks ago, there was a fun discussion about whether commercially-produced figs contained fig wasps (Agaonidae, in the Chalcidoidea). Opinions varied, plus some asserted, as do many internet pages, that even if wasps were once insi
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Cargo airships could be big
A capital-intensive, high-risk way to revolutionize global commerce
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I changed my mind about nuclear waste
I’ve feared it. I’ve protested it. Now I’m hugging it
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Why do prime numbers make these spirals? (2019)
A curious pattern in polar plots with prime numbers, together with discussion of Dirichlet's theorem
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Managing Kitchen Fruit Flies with a Little Shop of Horrors
I live in Seattle on a fairly wooded property. Every summer since we’ve moved here, we end up with swarms of fruit flies in the kitchen. They congregate around the compost bin and the fruit bowl (where there are always lots of bananas). We aren’t slobbish - I do the dishes and wipe down the counters every night, take…
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How to start a rocket engine
This article answeres the questions of how to start a rocket engine and takes you on a deep dive into spark plugs, torch ignitors and more.
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The story of titanium
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
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“Pigeon Neck” Illusion (2014)
An interactive demonstration of the “Pigeon Neck” Illusion
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GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question
OpenAI may have tested on the training data. Besides, human benchmarks are meaningless for bots.
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π in Other Universes
How the value of π depends on the definition of distance.
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Impacts of lack of sleep
Sleep is important. People vastly underestimate the extent to which not sleeping is harmful, viewing it as a valid trade off for productivity and overlooking all of the longterm negative effects.