Science
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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 Gradient Descent Work?
An illustrated, animated companion to an ICLR paper that shows what gradient descent actually does on a bumpy loss lands…
How Does Shazam Work?
A clear walk-through of audio fingerprinting, from spectrograms to peak hashing, culminating in a small working song-rec…
How Euler Did It
An archive of Ed Sandifer's MAA column that walks through individual discoveries of Leonhard Euler, explaining the origi…
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 Hot Will It Get
Pick any country and decade to see projected temperature rise under different emissions scenarios, then sort the world b…
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…
How likely is 'likely'?
A quick quiz asks you to put numbers on phrases like probably, likely and almost certain, then plots your answers agains…
How LLMs Work
An interactive visual deep dive into how large language models work, built around Andrej Karpathy's lecture and explaine…
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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 Many People Are In Space Right Now
A single-purpose page that answers exactly one delightful question: the current number of humans in space, with names an…
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 Normal Am I?
A webcam experience where face detection algorithms estimate how normal you are, showing what such software guesses abou…
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 Products Are Made
An encyclopedia explaining how everyday and unusual products are manufactured, from pencils to pianos, with materials, s…
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