Harmohit

This sounds really good! If the largest population and probably the largest manufacturer in the world goes green, that is going to be really good for climate change.

I hope India follows suit.

As another comment mentioned, this website does look like Time Cube at first sight.

However, the explanations of the second law of thermodynamics on the second page are quite decent and written in a humorous way. Of course it is not fully accurate because it does not use any math but I think it does a good enough job of explaining it to the lay person.

The explanations about human life at the third page are analogous at best. The situations that the author describes are similar to the workings of the second law but not a first principles outcome of it.

I am surprised I have not seen LabView mentioned in this thread. It is arguably one of the most popular visual programming languages after Excel and I absolutely hate it.

It has all the downsides of visual programming that the author mentions. The visual aspect of it makes it so hard to understand the flow of control. There is no clear left to right or top to bottom way of chronologically reading a program.

I didn't know there is such a thing as a metallurgical microscope. What makes them different from biological microscopes? And what is there primary purpose? I am assuming they don't make microscopes just for dissecting chips.

If we define a computer in very broad terms: a system used to emulate/simulate another system, could we call a wind tunnel a computer? It is a system that is used to infer what would happen high up in the atmosphere or on the race track. Taking it a step further, do animals used for drug testing count as computers? They are used to infer any potential adverse effects in a human body.

Although quite specialized, I think these things would still classify as a computer.

This is so cool! "Dissecting" a processor like this could be a fun educational activity to do in schools similar to dissecting a frog, but without the animal rights issues.

They have also tried to use nuclear power for space propulsion. Here is a fun one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...

I enjoy reading posts like this. Very thorough description. I am wondering if someone has insights into how the publishing model for more traditional publishers like Wiley and Elsevier work. Those guys are selling books for more than $200. Does the author get more money from their sales or is it all absorbed by the publisher?

This article does a great job at explaining interval arithmetic. However, the introduction says

Instead of treating each as exactly 7 feet, we can instead say that each is somewhere between a minimum of 6.9 feet and a maximum of 7.1. We can write this as an interval (6.9, 7.1).

Yes we can use an interval to express an uncertainty. However, uncertainties in physical measurements are a little bit more complicated.

When I measure something to be 7 plus minus 0.1 feet, what I am saying is that the value of the measured variable is not known for sure. It can be represented by a bell curve centred on 7 and 95% of the area under the curve (95% probability) that the true value lies between 6.9 and 7.1. The value of the measured variable is much more likely to be 7 than 6.9. There is also a small chance that the value lies outside of the 6.9 to 7.1 range.

In an interval, there is no probability distribution. It is more like an infinite list of numbers.

In practice, interval arithmetic is seldom used for uncertainty analysis for scientific experiments.

I wonder if open source software can play a role in this. Maybe we can have an open source algorithm for determining credit ratings and private companies only provide a secure database of ratings.

It will also offer the lay person insights into how the credit rating is exactly determined. They can know what is causing their rating to be less than desired and take appropriate action, instead of watching a random youtube video titled "5 ways to quickly improve your credit score".

Why is the debt ceiling defined as an absolute number? Wouldn't it make more sense to define it as a percent of the GDP or tax revenue

In my opinion, the way Subnautica motivates is players to play is through a natural sense of exploration - it wants you to think, "This is such a cool planet, I want to explore it" and not "What is the most efficient way of making these numbers/progress bars on the screen go up."

I totally understand what you mean though. I passed on Dark Souls on my first try due to the lack of a specific goal but it is my favourite game of all time now.

I am in Canada and I still get the German page

[Spoiler Alert] Subnautica is amazing! I remember the first time I discovered the huge turtle whales - it was such a surreal feeling. The world design of the game does such a good job of offering a guided exploration that feels completely natural. The contours of Subnautica's world guide you into specific areas and every area has something new to offer - it truly feels like exploring another planet.

Moreover, the sense of fear that I felt when I saw a dangerous looking creature was quite stronger than what I have felt playing several 'horror' games.

Unfortunately, I stopped playing when progressing became too dependent on farming and building - two things that I do not like. I would love to play an exploration only version of the game.

We strongly need a "prestigious" journal devoted to publishing reproductions of other studies. Moreover, we need to change our perception of a good scientist. Doing novel research is awesome and great but reproducing other people's work is also important - it is a fundamental pillar of science.

The problem is even more pronounced with more and more specialized and expensive equipment required for doing certain experiments.

I used to experience this had a kid! Not only did words and some names have shapes, but they were quite often coloured shapes. I have quite strong memories of some of the associations I made between names and shapes. However, I have completely lost the 'ability' as an adult. I do not feel it at all.

Hahaha, that is so true and so annoying. I am perpetually scared of sending the wrong thing in the wrong group. It gets even worse if the groups have similar names. If only there was a way to filter on excluded members...

The exploration of type theory in this blog post is quite interesting

Many cars like the cybertruck are limited by the production capacity of the company. If you order one now, you’ll probably get it in a few months or even a few years. A used cybertruck is available right now, so people are willing to pay more for it. It is a pretty common phenomenon in cars. Used Corvettes in canada frequently sell for more than new. Same for other products like a Rolex watch.

I completely agree. I do not believe that AI is a disruptive technology like computers and the internet was. It will at best be a + 25 % efficiency for business processes - which is awesome and I am all for it. But it is not a game changer that will fundamentally change how things are done.

The second answer does address this point.

I was doing some reading about the Mustang aircraft in WW2 and found about that they had V12 engines with 1000 to 2000 horsepower. But modern aerobatic aircraft only have around 300 to 500 horsepower. I was wondering if it would be possible to build a custom aircraft with 2 supercharged Corvette engines (around 700 to 800 horsepower each) and found this post on aviation stack exchange.

That is such an interesting idea! I wonder if someone has systematically studied hand shuffling biases and what consequences it has (or should have) for brick and mortar casinos

I would love to own something like this one day. Makes me wonder if something similar is possible for vintage sports cars.

This was a very interesting read! I will try finding an algebraic proof of the addition function in my time.

The author mentions that this is frequently used in optimizing compilers and program analysis but does not elaborate on this statement. Can someone provide more context?

I think it could also be related to diagnosing these issues. Nobody knew about depression in the 17th century, so nobody was diagnosed with it. As time goes on, more and more people in different parts of the world have access to the facilities required for getting diagnosed with a mental illness.

This was a great read! I generally find quanta magazine articles and podcasts to be of higher quality than a lot of other pop science journalism.

Can somebody point me towards a good review article or textbook to learn about the chemistry of the brain? Any exciting startups working in this field? Or any startups trying to come up with unconventional treatments for mental health problems?

Thanks for the great reply and for linking the research paper - I am going to check it out. Could you suggest a good review paper for someone new to get into modern HPC?

Thanks for the reply! Can you give some examples of these "hero runs"?

Serious question: my understanding of HPC is that there are many workloads running on a given supercomputer at any time. There is no singular workload that takes up the entire or most of the resources of a supercomputer.

Is my understanding correct? If yes, then why is it important to build supercomputers with more and more compute? Wouldn't it be better to build smaller systems that focus more on power/cost/space efficiency?