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Hopefully Interesting
Personal blog · hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com · on HN as Symmetryscienceeconomics
Hopefully Interesting is a personal blog at hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com about science and economics. Since 2012, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 41 times, most often “Seveneves and the Roche limit”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-03-22, and you can follow it by feed.
41mentions?
4HN people?
2012–2025first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- Seveneves and the Roche limit2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2015-06-19
What Hacker News says?
http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/ I basically just write about whatever I'm interested in. Here's a sequence I did on rocket engines and what is fundamentally different between chemical propulsion, electric propulsion, nuclear propulsion, etc. http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2015/03/rockets-some... Here's something I wrote on how language can influence and distort our perception of danger. It got pick…
Comment linking /2019/06/sometimes-you-need-new-word.html
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted Normalizing Ratings as a story · 51 points
HN discussionThey copied my blog post! [1] Ok, that's actually extraordinarily unlikely, and I'm glad that other people think we need to look at Bitcoin through the medium of exchange/unit of account/store of value trichotomy and I'm glad that they seem to be going forward with using bitcoin as the basis for an electronic money system without denominating anything in bitcoins. [1] http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2014/07/…
Comment linking /2014/07/thoughts-on-bitcoin.html
on “Bitcoin: the Stripe perspective”Submitted Three Views on Conscoiusness as a story · 1 points
HN discussionVery nifty, but the fragmentation of bodies wouldn't look anything like in Seveneves or this sim in real life. http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2015/06/seveneves-an...
Comment linking /2015/06/seveneves-and-roche-limit.html
on ““The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason””Submitted Seveneves and the Roche limit as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA blog post I made putting this and the timeline of life on Earth on the same graph: http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-eq...
Comment linking /2018/03/the-drake-equation-again.html
on “Timeline of the far future”Submitted Book review: The Righteous Mind as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThey just throw stuff out the back of the rocket really fast to move forward, like any other sort of rocket. The nice thing about electrical rockets is that they decouple the energy used to throw the propellant from the chemical energy generated from burning the fuel, so you can end up throwing it out fast for very efficient rockets if you have enough electricity. http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2015/03/rock…
Comment linking /2015/03/rockets-electric-propulsion.html
on “First firing of air-breathing electric thruster”Generally I think people tend to underestimate how quickly life arose on Earth but underestimate how quickly it took for life to turn into complex life. Just judging from how things went on Earth we should expect cemosynthetic life to be relatively common but photosynthesis to rarely arise, much less eukaryotic cells or multi-cellular animals. I drew out a timeline comparing how long it took various stages of life t…
Comment linking /2019/04/how-likely-is-it-that-there-was-life-on.html
on “I’m Convinced We Found Evidence of Life on Mars in the 1970s”And as far as I know its not something that's come up in the subliminal priming research, which is how we know most of the structure of how we recognize numbers and letters. I do wonder if it works like this for everybody, though, or if it could something specific to him. As for names I did a blog post[1] speculating that remembering names might correlate to how you deal with the following: >So, imagine someone is w…
Comment linking /2018/12/ways-of-thinking-and-remembering-names.html
on “A man who can read letters but not numbers exposes roots of consciousness”I think it's helpful to look at a timeline of life on Earth when thinking about that issue. http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-eq... Life's gone through a lot of changes over the time it's around. 10,000 years ago there were already humans and the Neolithic revolution was well underway and agriculture was just starting. Multicellular life was one of the big revolutions but eukaryotes and befor…
Comment linking /2018/03/the-drake-equation-again.html
on “Our Solar System Is Even Stranger Than We Thought”Or its lifetime Fukushima produced 100 Gigawatt-years of electricity and the disaster is expected to end up killing 180 people assuming a linear no-threshold radiation model. A typical coal plant will kill between 280 and 40 people generating that much electricity. By contrast, Chernobyl killed somewhere around 20,000 people (also assuming linear no-threshold). http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushi…
Comment linking /2013/12/fukushima-vs-coal.html
on “The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples”Sorry, should have included a link with that. http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs...
Comment linking /2013/12/fukushima-vs-coal.html
on “It's time to dispel the myths about nuclear power”Chernobyl was horrible but Fukushima didn't actually cause any more damage than a typical coal power plant generating the same number of megawatt-years. http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-vs...
Comment linking /2013/12/fukushima-vs-coal.html
on “The Way Humans Get Electricity Is About to Change”I was doing some back of the envelope math for a blog post last night[1] and it looks like we're not that far away from the limits of what's possible - at least for non-reversible computing. Getting rid of a bit of information as in a Nand get is always going to cost at least 2.75 zeptoJoules and current transistor technology can do it for an attoJoule, so just another factor of 360 to go. Of course then we can try…
Comment linking /2017/04/the-coming-interregnum-after-moores-law.html
on “Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled”No need for this data, the Fed is happy to talk about the ways it sometimes coordinates with banks in pursuing economic stability. I was just reading The Power and Independence of the Federal Reserve and that goes into this a bit. My problem with the system is that we have the same organization charged with regulating the banking system and macroeconomic stabilization. These are obviously related but that means it's…
Comment linking /2015/12/economic-regulation-and-insitution.html
on “Study finds increased possibility of information leaking around Fed meetings”The problem is less our ability to make the drives themselves have a high TWR (thrust to weight ratio) so much as that the power generation necessarily required to run them is very heavy. See here: http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2015/03/rockets-elec...
Comment linking /2015/03/rockets-electric-propulsion.html
on “Breaks Observed in Rover Wheel Treads”If you look at probability distributions rather than single estimates for every term in the Drake Equation then the absence of visible aliens isn't so unlikely. http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/media/eps/jodrell-ba... And just the existence of life doesn't mean there's complex life. We don't have a firm lower bound on how long life took to arise on Earth after we got liquid water on the surface but it can't h…
Comment linking /2018/03/the-drake-equation-again.html
on “Space Is Full of Planets, and Most of Them Don't Even Have Stars”I tried to do the math once to figure out if Japan would have been better off building a coal power plant instead of Fukushima, the nuclear plant that had the worst disaster in any western country. It was a surprisingly tough question. https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2013/12/fukushima-v...
Comment linking /2013/12/fukushima-vs-coal.html
on “Three Mile Island nuclear plant restart in Microsoft AI power deal”If I were to bet on which fabs were able to get to the final process node for traditional silicon transistors, my money would probably be on Intel and TSMC, since they have the most volume on advanced processes and spend the most money on new fabs and process research. And TSMC is the biggest commodity fab. The reason it becomes cheaper is that your development costs for both the process and the design get amortized…
Comment linking /2012/02/dark-silicon-dun-dun-dun.html
on “RISC creator is pushing open source chips”I think we're supposed to assume they went out and got more carbon somehow. It would have made more sense if they'd carried the comet parts into the cleft but I'm willing to forgive it. Of course the physics of the moon blowing up are totally wrong but I'm willing to swallow a single impossible thing and keep going. http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2015/06/seveneves-an...
Comment linking /2015/06/seveneves-and-roche-limit.html
on “The Day the Moon Blew Up”I'd actually written something very similar, without the rigour, a few years ago. http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-eq...
Comment linking /2018/03/the-drake-equation-again.html
on “The Timing of Evolutionary Transitions Suggests Intelligent Life Is Rare”Huh, I did a blog post about this just last night. Basically, people's personality has an impact on whether they have kids, personality is heritable, fertility won't be low forever given current conditions but who knows how conditions will change. http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/05/falling-fert...
Comment linking /2018/05/falling-fertility-rates-shouldnt-be.html
on “US Births Dip to 30-yr Low; Fertility Rate Sinks Further Below Replacement Level”Yeah. One danger for life is the star cooking it. But the other is that the solar wind will tend to strip away a planets hydrogen if life doesn't develop photosynthesis to give the planet an ozone layer fast enough. It took life on Earth most of a billion years[1] fooling around with chemosynthesis before photosynthesis took off. It's a hard step and life around a red dwarf would be on a much more stringent timefram…
Comment linking /2018/03/the-drake-equation-again.html
on “The timing of evolutionary transitions suggests intelligent life is rare”That's a common misconception. Moore's 1965 paper was about economics but when the phrase "Moore's Law was coined in 1975 it was referring to Dennard Scaling as a whole. https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2019/03/what-is-moo...
Comment linking /2019/03/what-is-moores-law.html
on “The Unsustainability of Moore's Law”So, getting up to 25.5 km/s with a rocket with an exhaust velocity of 30 km/s means you need the wet weight to be 2.33 times the dry weight. Last I checked [1] you can get 77 W/kg with photovoltaics so you need you'll need 1402 kg of those in addition to the 226 kg of engine for a total of 1626 kg. Round that up to 2200 kg for structure and tankage and so on for a total we mass of 5126 kg where 2926 kg of that is fu…
Comment linking /2015/03/rockets-electric-propulsion.html
on “Thruster for Mars mission breaks records”Not really, and the scenario has some other problems too[1]. But all sorts of books have fantastic premises, just look at Lord of the Rings! I can accept an awful lot of improbability in a book's setup as long as the plot given that premise makes enough sense. In Seveneves it did so I was happy. [1] http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2015/06/seveneves-an...
Comment linking /2015/06/seveneves-and-roche-limit.html
on “An Interview with Neal Stephenson”On the other hand we haven't been able to establish a firm minimum amount of time from when Earth got oceans to when it got life. It took a long, long time to add photosynthesis to cemosynthesis, a long long time to create eukaryotes, and a long, long time to create multicellular life. I made a timeline: http://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/03/the-drake-eq... Interplanetary pollution seems to happen pretty q…
Comment linking /2018/03/the-drake-equation-again.html
on “Something on Mars Is Producing Gas Usually Made by Living Things on Earth”In the long run more agreeable (in a Big 5 sense) people have more children and agreeableness is fairly heritable so don't expect the decline in birth rates to last forever. https://hopefullyintersting.blogspot.com/2018/05/falling-fer...
Comment linking /2018/05/falling-fertility-rates-shouldnt-be.html
on “The world might run out of people”