uolmir

He managed to create the ultimate version of form over function. All hail Lorem Epsom.

So elves in dwarf fortress.

Seriously. I remember distinctly playing with this in 2004-5.

This is a great write up. It's also weirdly similar to a video I happened upon yesterday playing around with raw Hubble imagery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gBXSQCWdSI

He take a few minutes to get to the punch line. Feel free to skip ahead to around 5:30.

I know what you mean by your comment, but you might want to give catch 22 another try sometime. I'd say that the start with the Texan is far from the best the book gets. Reading it, I think you'll find Yossarian more and more understandable and the situations more and more bleakly comic as you go.

Or don't. There's no end of great novels out there.

Several of the candidate variable objects are characterized in the results section of the paper. The model is also tested for effectiveness against synthetic data. It appears to be a useful method and the paper describes a plausible path for it to aid future discovery.

Everywhere? This is a crazy thing to claim. I was also recently in Japan and I never took a car anywhere. I'm sure there are particular routes that are badly served but come on.

> In fact up until a recent funding method change from the Trump Administration, most grant money was subject to "overhead"--a nebulous nonsensical accounting trick that allowed the university administration to get upwards of 60% of the dollars that are earmarked for grants.

We're better than this here. Don't spread misinformation. First of all overhead is listed as a percentage, such as 55% or 60% or whatever but the university doesn't get that fraction of the total grant. You work up the so called direct costs, ie the line item salaries of the researchers, the reagents, etc. and then the overhead is 60% of that figure. So it would work out to be 38% of the total dollars granted.

It's also not a trick. It's a negotiated amount that is supposed to avoid each grant requesting some amortized fraction of the cost of office space and other necessary but shared expenses.

I and most people agree that's it's possibly too high, but it's ignorant to treat it like a scam.

Although that land would have already been under water.

Important context to be found in the reporting on this saga, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/science/arseniclife-retra....

In short, the authors and NASA strongly disagree with the decision to retract and argue that this is clearly outside of the typical norms for what retraction is supposed to represent. A paper being wrong isn't and shouldn't be the standard for retraction, particularly in this case when the original paper was published with multiple technical responses and rejoinders.

One of the best! If memory serves there was a This American Life segment excerpted from it too (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/195/transcript).

From the article this seems much less bad than the headline might imply. This idea predates trump and it does not eliminate scientific review of proposals. That said, whether the cost savings itself is worth what might be a diminishment in review quality is hard to say. I can only comment from the NSF side of things to say that peer review of proposals is a mixed bag and will unavoidably run into human error and individual predispositions regarding scientific importance so maybe this isn't a bad approach to try.

There have been several of these deep dives into manipulated speed runs and they seldom disappoint. Since we are on HN, I'll mention another mathy one that was summarized by Matt Parker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ko3TdPy0TU

Reflections on science in the internet age and a debate on the meaning and appropriate use of retraction.

That's good advice in that context and speaks to the difference in standards of evidence between normal expository or persuasive writing in school and scientific writing. In a scientific paper if you assert something it's important to flag to the reader what kind of claim this is, eg something demonstrated by other research, something that directly follows from your evidence, or something that could possibly be true given prior knowledge and your evidence.

Very true (I imagine) and similar to the popularity of "roadside geology" books.

This is good stuff but I'll say that it isn't as comprehensive as all that. These studies and findings are almost entirely focused on simple recall knowledge (isolated facts, vocabulary). That's an important part of learning certainly and it informs research on learning higher order concepts but it's not the full story.

Just to name one example, folks might look into research on conceptual change theory (eg Chi or Posner). This theory helps explain why a concept like electricity is so challenging to learn. The reason, in brief, being that naive conceptions make a category error and think of electricity as a thing rather than a process. And this theory then informs instructional practice. Specifically, teachers should be aware of difficult concepts and should design activities that force students to confront the contradictions between their naive models and more accurate/complete ones.

Mickie Chi also has fascinations research on active learning (ICAP) and related work on the effectiveness of peer learning.

This is gonna be me if or when my quite functional dumb LG from 2012 ever gives up the ghost. I just don't see the appeal of smart TVs when that functionality can be outsourced to a cheaper modular device.

I think the author probably exaggerates her point a bit (fair enough; she's an opinion writer), but I do find it appealing to imagine that OpenStreetMap would have broad buy-in and would lead to more innovation and diversity in the digital maps marketplace.

Yeah. I think if I read Dream Machine first I would have enjoyed Wizards less. But some of the history was new to me which meant that I enjoyed Wizards for those aspects and then Dream Machine for the detailed look into why it happened.

It is one of my favorites. I actually came to it via "where wizards stay up late", which I would also recommend although it doesn't have the depth and insight of dream machine.

I don't know your circumstances but often you retain the right to distribute a "post print", ie the final text as published but absent journal formatting. A dissertation should fit that definition.

For example,

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/03/car-tyre...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/07/0...

This result reminds me of a paper I read last week via Andrew Gelman's blog [1]. It's a very thorough review of the, so called, bat and ball problem and is an up to date summary of something brought to many people's attention via Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow. As other commenters have suggested, the most reasonable explanation for the mathematicians to get this problem wrong is something more like carelessness than a lack of logical reasoning ability.

[1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/04/21/now-heres-...

You may enjoy this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality

As an English speaker myself it's astonishing the number and range of features that other languages have built in, so to speak. Years ago I took Latin and the idea of declension just blew my mind. And that's basic in the grand scheme.

Great article. As someone with a geology background working in an Earth and space science department, I've greatly appreciated everything I've learned from the planetary scientists and meteorite researchers. There's just so much that we now understand about how our solar system formed and arrived at its current state. The explosion of exoplanet research on top of that and how those two fields inform each other has also been exciting to follow.

Ah yes, the famously objective field of economics.

I think this can be seen as a change to acknowledge the need for context in order to make a robust (and hopefully correct) argument for possible evidence of life (fossil, trace, or otherwise). In all likelihood you're not going to find this uncontestable smoking gun and so you're going to need your robot geologist to collect much more than one sample in one place in order to rule out alternative interpretations. The Viking approach doesn't get you that.

Low content reply I know but it's great to see ICAP having the mindshare to appear in this discussion on HN. It's such a great paper and concept. I also think it has a lot to offer practitioners by making "active learning" a defined and delineated idea.

I hadn't seen that, but I was going to recommend this recent paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15291006211051...

At a glance of the medium article, they seem to have the same perspective on these issues, so the one should complement the other.