Science
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How a Kalman Filter Works, in Pictures
A friendly illustrated walk-through of the Kalman filter, using colorful Gaussian blobs to show how a robot fuses noisy…
How Bayesian Inference Works
A friendly illustrated explainer of Bayesian inference that walks through priors, likelihoods and posteriors with simple…
How Big is YouTube?
Researchers describe two years of work to estimate how many videos YouTube really holds, using random sampling of video…
How Complex Systems Fail
Richard Cook's short, much-cited treatise of 18 points on why failures in complex systems from hospitals to power grids…
How Distortion Works in Music
An explainer on guitar distortion with animated waveform plots and playable audio clips, showing how clipping a clean si…
How Do Calculators Compute Sine?
A clear walk through how pocket calculators calculate sine without a lookup table, from Taylor series to the CORDIC algo…
How Do MRI Headphones Work?
A curious patient wonders how audio can reach your ears inside an MRI scanner full of huge magnets, and works out the cl…
How Does Shazam Work?
A clear walk-through of audio fingerprinting, from spectrograms to peak hashing, culminating in a small working song-rec…
How Fast the Days Are Getting Longer
An astronomy explainer on how many minutes of daylight we gain each day through the year, why it peaks at the equinox, a…
How Grasshoppers Jump
A clear illustrated explanation of how grasshoppers jump, covering the catapult mechanics of the legs and the neurobiolo…
How I Fixed a Parasitic Drain on My Car in 408 Days
A detective story of tracking a mysterious battery drain in a 2013 Mazda3 over more than a year, with clever diagnostics…
How I Got My Laser Eye Injury
A radiation-safety enthusiast tells the real story of how he damaged his eye with a laser, with sober lessons about what…
How Intelligent Are Cats?
A long essay from the sprawling Messybeast cat archive on how cats think, learn and solve problems, and why they do not…
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Article
How Long Is the Average Dissertation?
A grad student scrapes university records to chart how long dissertations run in each academic field, from compact math…
How Lossless Data Compression Works
A Quanta Magazine story on how one student's wish to skip a final exam led to Huffman coding, the algorithm that shrinks…
How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
Paleoanthropologist John Hawks looks at a Reddit post of an ancient jaw fossil spotted in travertine tile and explains h…
How Much Would It Cost To Build The Death Star?
A playful back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much steel the Death Star would need and what it would cost, concludin…
How Passive Radar Works
An illustrated explainer of passive radar, which detects aircraft by listening to reflections of existing FM and TV broa…
How People Actually Lie With Charts
A research write-up showing that most misleading charts shared online are not doctored axes but correct graphs used to s…
How Silica Gel Took Over the World
The surprising story of the little silica gel packets in packaged goods: their wartime origins, chemistry and how they e…
How Slide Rules Work
An illustrated explanation of how the logarithmic scales on a slide rule turn multiplication into addition, with diagram…
How the Soviets Put a Lander on Venus
How Soviet engineers, after repeated failures, built Venera probes tough enough to survive crushing pressure and furnace…
How to Avoid Losing Items? Holding Pens
A short, practical essay on why we lose things at home and how designating a holding pen for items in transit keeps keys…
How to Cheat at Settlers by Loading the Dice
A researcher bakes dice to load them, rolls them thousands of times and uses p-values to show how much of a Settlers of…
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