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Scratches in 2001: A Space Osyssey (2018)
A set of scratches in Stanley Kubrick’s '2001: A Space Odyssey' is visible at the same moments and locations within the frame in most copies of the movie.
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Square roots and maxima
A brief numerical and graphical check on a 3Blue1Brown video.
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Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking?
Is running a more efficient way to travel than walking? Does running burn less calories per distance traveled than wa...
154
The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)
A decade-long effort to build a machine to unlock the promise of nuclear fusion fell victim to budget constraints and competing science, and was shut down the day it was dedicated. It was never turned on.
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Not so fast, Mr. Fourier
A real explanation of discrete Fourier transform (DFT, FFT), discrete cosine transform (DCT), and their inverses.
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Strange Attractors (2018)
Interactive Mathematical Applets and Animations
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Debugging the Doctor Brain: Who's teaching doctors how to think?
Who's teaching doctors how to think?
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Romeo and Julia, Where Romeo Is Basic Statistics
Hello there. This is an open access book entitled: “Romeo and Julia, where Romeo is Basic Statistics”. So I guess it’s gonna be about a programming language named Julia and its usage for basic statistics.
159
Deep dive: the instability of op-amps
A closer look at op-amp feedback loops and the stability criteria for circuits that use them.
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Twitter and the spread of academic knowledge
Serendipity without physical proximity? Maybe, maybe not.
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mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less
Quick, inexpensive, made-to-order treatments
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The likelihood of unilateral solar geoengineering
People are starting to take geoengineering seriously.
165
How bad are satellite megaconstellations for astronomy?
Over the last number of years, our planet has become encircled by Starlink, OneWeb, and other “megaconstellation” satellites.
166
The Point of the Banach Tarski Theorem (2015)
One of my favourite Limited Audience Jokes (although technically it's actually a riddle) goes:
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Spherical Harmonics
3D visualization tool of spherical harmonics. Visualize and compare real, imaginary, and complex components by adjusting the degree l and order m parameters.
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Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apollo 11
This is how a completely abstract argument about alien germs was taken seriously and mitigated at great effort and expense during the 1969 Apollo landing.
169
Italian music through the lens of complex networks
Last year I was talking with a non-Italian, trying to convey to them how nearly the entirety of contemporary Italian music rests on the shoulders of Gianni Maroccolo — and the parts that don’t, should. In an attempt to find a way out of that conversation, they casually asked “wouldn’t it be cool to map out who…
170
Powering the Mars Base
This post is part of the series on space topics. This post is not the last word on this topic. The usual caveats apply. I’m curious if you have strong opinions on different fuel mixes. A grow…
171
The Gravo-Thermal Catastrophe
In 1962, V. A. Antonov did some remarkable simulations showing that in Newtonian mechanics, gravitating systems can violate the usual rules of thermodynamics. Instead of reaching equilibrium they c…
172
The rise and impending fall of the dental cavity
Another of history's great killers is on the chopping block
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Rotation curves: still flat after a million light-years
That rotation curves become flat at large radii is one of the most famous results in extragalactic astronomy. This had been established by Vera Rubin and her collaborators by the late 1970s. There …
174
The marvelous disappearing capacitor
The performance of photodiode amplifiers can be improved in a clever way.
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Does anybody know this fractal? (2012)
Experimenting with the "divisibility" of complex numbers, I stumbled across this thingy. It looks like a fractal. Although the formula does not do any iterations. It reminds me of something. But I dont know what. Doing a Google image search brings up a couple of galaxies :) This image shows the region from (-1/-1) to…
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Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon
Most of us go about our lives comforted by the thought “I would never drop a nuclear weapon on the moon.” The truth is that given a lot of power, a nuclear weapon, and a lot of extremely specific c…
177
Sinusoidal Sunlight
The graph of daylight over the course of a year looks like a sine wave, but is it?
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When (if ever) did the Sun set on the British Empire?
It hasn't. Yet. But only because of a few dozen people living in an area smaller than Disney World.
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China is building more coal plants but might burn less coal
China is adding more coal capacity, but its plants are running less often.