The thing that gets me is that these people are all really smart. If someone is willing to lie and do math, why not work at an unscrupulous pharma/finance company? They'd make way more money and do way less work. I'd even argue that fraud in the private sector is less unethical - if investors give money to a fraud they deserve to lose it, and regulators take an adversarial stance and have whole orgs (in theory) policing fraud like the SEC and FDA.

It takes a really particular kind of scumbag to seek a position of public trust, make a bunch of trainees financially and professionally dependent on them, accept taxpayer money intended to help cancer patients, then commit fraud.

In my experience, there are some niche conferences that have no name recognition, but are amazing. A lot of people haven’t heard of the Gordon conferences, and some of the other top ones in my field are open source package user group meetings and company hosted conferences, which could easily appear low-value at first glance.

The 10K+ attendee conferences have lots of name recognition, but I found them to be effectively useless for accomplishing any goal (they’re not even that great for networking), and they could easily be a series of recordings for what you get.

So, I think it’s reasonable for folks to roll the dice on some conferences, because some of them are really hidden gems (and if they suck you can always audible it to a free vacation).

What in the world is the original context here? Have these people never encountered a puddle before? Her foot is completely immersed in gutter water and his white pants are about to be soaked and gross.

I like how the first message is in both languages, but the second is only in English.

The Surviving Mars OST is spectacular, though the gameplay is just good.

New construction sometimes doesn’t even help, when developers knocks down an old affordable 12 unit apartment building and build a luxury 36 unit building, you’ve created -12 units of affordable housing.

The argument I hear against this is that the 36 people who move into the luxury apartments moved from somewhere, and so 36 other apartments become available. The reduced demand for the vacated apartments then drives their prices down.

Of course, housing as a market is super distorted for a bunch of reasons so this effect is muddled. But I think it would be a net negative to fully disregard supply and demand in a market-based economy and preserve 12 affordable units in favor of 36 luxury ones.

Largely agree with all your other points though.

Maybe I'm missing context, but why the downvotes on this?

Three of the six currently operating maglevs are in communist china

Not a huge fan of the Israel situation but it does seem like they often stay out at the US's request:

During the 1990–1991 Gulf War, Iraq carried out a missile campaign against Israel, in which it launched 42 modified Scud missiles (designated Al-Hussein) at Israeli cities with the strategic objective of provoking Israel into launching retaliatory attacks and potentially jeopardizing the multinational coalition formed by the United States against Iraq, which had full backing and extensive contributions from other Muslim-majority states; Israel did not respond to the Iraqi missile attacks due to American pressure, and Iraq failed to gather support for its occupation of Kuwait.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq%E2%80%93Israel_relations

I'm more of a chemist than a physicist but I had a similar difficulty understanding fractional distillation.

If the concept maps, the key thing is that the length of the path through the heat exchanger means a lot here, and that different parts of the heat exchanger can have different temperatures.

With short path lengths/little exchange time you'd have a heat exchanger like you describe - It just reaches a temp half way between the two regions it connects. But, imagine you replaced the single heat exchanger in this setup with two heat exchangers hooked up in series with a unheated middle room connecting them - Then the outside temp could be 0C, the first heat exchanger temp would be 5C, the small room's temp would be 10C, the second heat exchanger would be 15C, and the heated room would be 20C.

In this situation, the air coming out of the second heat exchanger and into the heated room is 15C instead of 10C.

There's no actual need for the middle room, you could directly attach the two heat exchangers end-to-end to achieve a similar result.

In essence, a heat exchanger that heats the incoming air to 18C is just a bunch of the heat exchangers that you are thinking of stacked so that the output of one is the input of the next, with a temperature gradient that forms between them.

DW news (dw.com) is pretty good and not too sensational. They’re like German PBS with a whole English side of the site.