benbreen

I'm a medical historian and I think about this all the time - it's a more complex question than it initially appears to be. The typical line of reasoning is to assume that medical treatments…

There are some fictional worlds that come to mind that present a positive future (I'm not particularly well versed in it, but isn't that the whole appeal of the Star Trek universe?) What I t…

Blog post by the lead author of the paper: http://tedunderwood.com/2014/10/22/distant-reading-and-the-b... …

See also this recent article in Current Biology, cited by Reuters: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(14)0... …

The basic premise of the article (that there are three distinct industrial revolutions with "fallow" periods dividing them) seems to me to be very easy to poke holes in. It's not as if …

Lots of interesting bits in this interview, but this stuck out to me in particular. Not sure I agree, but it's unusual to see a professional writer/artist take a stance like this: "List…

Ligatures and letterforms like the "long S" (ſ) actually arose as a result of printing, interestingly. If you look at 13th century manuscripts created in Norman England, they're extre…

A paper by the author of the Nautilus piece that was on HN's front page earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8464304 …

n=1 of course, but I've been using the beta on a 2013 Macbook Pro for a couple months now with no problems besides Safari crashing more often than usual. No issues with Photoshop and performance …