Top all-time · #3922
Brian Koberlein
Personal blog · briankoberlein.comsciencewriting
Brian Koberlein's personal blog at briankoberlein.com covers science and writing. Since 2014, 20 different Hacker News readers have linked it 29 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-28, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Brian Koberlein's blog to explain astronomy and physics topics, including dark matter, what astronomers mean by 'metal', and how brightness changes limit an object's size.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The writings of Brian Koberlein
What Hacker News says?
I was working from the idea of a nyquist or sampling rate needed to "perfectly" reproduce a wave form. I know this works for lower frequencies but I have no idea how well it translates to something like optical frequencies/light. You can find frequency from speed / wavelength: f = v/l or in our case f = c / l since we're dealing with light. I was using 635nm as the wavelength (basically a red laser). That gives you:…
Comment linking /2015/04/14/thats-about-the-size-of-it/
on “Camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second”Submitted Known Dark Matter Isn't Enough as a story · 30 points
HN discussionI wonder if you just asked 1000 people to draw a spiral without any other context, would there be some handedness/chirality to the drawings? My guess is there would be. https://briankoberlein.com/blog/gripping-hand/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27852139/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/658702.pdf
Comment linking /blog/gripping-hand/
on “The Spiral Staircase Myth (2020)”Submitted Three Peaks at the Big Bang (2014) as a story · 25 points
HN discussionIt's not an assumption, though. https://briankoberlein.com/2015/06/03/sizing-things-up/ > Basically if an object is changing brightness, it can’t do that at a rate faster than the time it takes one side of the object to know what the other side is doing. That time is limited by the speed of light, so if you know the rate at which brightness varies, you know the maximum possible size of the object. Since these object…
Comment linking /2015/06/03/sizing-things-up/
on “Galactic Beacons Get Snuffed Out in a Cosmic Eyeblink”Submitted Yes, Virginia, There Are Black Holes as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSome info on the word metal as used in astronomy: https://briankoberlein.com/post/hydrogen-helium-metal/ The short answer is that the fraction of metal is so low, they don't care enough to call it something else.
Comment linking /post/hydrogen-helium-metal/
on “Supernova shoots a dying star made of metal out of Milky Way at 2M MPH”Submitted The Quiet Web as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSpace is called space for a reason. I feel like even scientifically knowledgeable people have a hard time wrapping their heads around just how much space is out there. Here's a good place to start: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.... Signals diminish with the square of distance. SETI would never hear anything from other stars unless it was broadcast with insanely high transmit power or wa…
Comment linking /blog/et-phone-home/
on “Adaptation to a Viscous Snowball Earth Ocean as Path to Complex Multicellularity (2021)”Submitted From Both Sides Now as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIt's here: http://briankoberlein.com/2013/11/07/massive-issues/
Comment linking /2013/11/07/massive-issues/
on “Known Dark Matter Isn't Enough”Submitted A More Magnetic Mars as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe next part, linked now at the end, is also informative: http://briankoberlein.com/2014/08/20/already-know-quite-bit/ Especially for the graph taken from http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.1320
Comment linking /2014/08/20/already-know-quite-bit/
on “Known Dark Matter Isn't Enough”Submitted The Universe Is Still Not a Hologram as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFirst see footnote 1 of the first page of the preprint linked at the top. The authors are jumping the gun. That's fine for theorists, but bear in mind that they are literally in the dark on a number of telescopic observables, any of which would shoot down the idea in the preprint. Some of these are achievable by EHT. See e.g. Olivares et al. "How to tell an accreting boson star from a black hole" (2020) < https://di…
Comment linking /blog/proca-stars/
on “A Sun-like star orbiting a boson star”Submitted Pointless as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Fermi's Ghost as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted So Mode It B as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Hall Pass as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Timescape as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Dark Matter of Time as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Other Worlds as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Living with Flare as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted In the Area as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Perspective (2015) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Lithium Express as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cosmic Pi (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Fading Truth [a scifi short story] as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The primeval atom as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
