Lists don't make such great HN submissions because there isn't much to discuss about them other than the lowest common denominator (or greatest common factor?) of the items on the list, which in this case is electricity—a pretty generic topic. It would be better to pick the most interesting article on the list and submit that instead, so that there's something more specific to discuss. Does anybody want to nominate one?
This is the best one. I'm a professional in this area (physicist turned EE), and coming by this explanation took me a lot more time and energy than just reading his article. Transistor action is a wonderfully subtle yet powerful phenomenon.
(In the same vein, of hard questions with easy-ish answers once you do the research, but that no one ever answers: why is N-type silicon better performing than P-type, down there at the most fundamental level? And whither the P-channel depletion mode MOSFET?)
I dislike Beaty's writing style and fondness for pedantry (though I concede that clearing the air about definitions is extremely valuable), but his explanations are accessible and they are always correct in ways that few other sources are, and that's amazing.
My parents were grade-school teachers, and my dad almost got fired for defending the idea that nickel metal is magnetic.
But it's right there in the grade school textbooks! The only magnetic materials are IRON AND STEEL! PERIOD! (Oh and also the blood in your veins is bright blue like paint. And gravity in space is zero.)
Back in the 1980s I decided to do something about this (via science museum exhibit designs.) Then I discovered the great power of "educational memes," like engineering your own Vaccina viruses which spread all through the textbooks, jumping from author to author and innoculating millions of little kids against the bad information.
But to do this successfully, I'd have to write website articles which 1) correct the misinformation in textbooks, 2) didn't draw attention from powerful critics who would put a stop to all that and, also 3) didn't create even worse mistakes!
This "lifting-force counter-meme" has now spread system-wide. Air doesn't split before the wing, then rejoins behind the wing. Instead the so-called"path-length" or "equal transit-time" explanation is wrong, and actually the air above the wing will greatly out-race the air traveling below. The parcels are split, but then they experience significant "phase shift," so they never re-join again (this as long as lift is being created.)
Something of the kind was around here recently. I'd guess most people get resistors easily, and most people know they don't know transistors. But the apparently simple capacitor can weird out with the ideal model.
Latest news: apparently Shockley had to distort the explanation of the BJT transistor, saying that it was a "current amplifier," because the FET had been invented twenty years earlier, and FETs are obviously voltage-input devices. Since transistors already existed, the early Shockley transistor patents were being rejected by the patent office for "prior art." They thought the latest device was just another crystal triode invention like the FET invented by JE Lilienfeld around 1923.
"Why three prongs" is a classic, but it seems to have been submitted 11 months ago.
I would suggest "[Nikola] Tesla's Big Mistake?"[1]. It's never been submitted, and I think single-wire power transmission would be surprising to many. Plus, it's some neat history.
Tesla is vindicated: it turns out that this whole article was debunked in 1936, but the debunking was based on an error. Single-wire transmissions are not against EM theory after all! Zenneck surface waves had long been disproved, but since 2005 the disproof is now debunked again. See:
As a result, Corum's company "Viziv Technologies" has built a thirty-story plastic Tesla-tower out in Texas wilderness, and is now performing Earth-resonance experiments down at 12KHz broadcast frequencies. See tower construction slideshow:
I went with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23444361 but if either of you (i.e. you or greenyoda) want to email us in a couple months (enough time to let the hivemind caches clear) we can send you an invite for the articles you suggested. Thanks!
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...