Fat carries flavor. Pure fat, like vegetable oil or shortening, is actually kind of unpleasant to eat. But many of the aromatic compounds that make food taste good or interesting can be easily stored in fat. This is why, for example, garlic butter will do a better job flavoring a dish than just tossing some garlic into the pot. (Even when you do cook with fresh garlic, the standard procedure is to first sauté it in oil. Why? So the oil picks up the garlic flavor). On top of this, fat is very good at coating our mouths, giving a more intense and longer-lasting experience of those flavors.

Especially when it comes to animal products, it might even be more accurate to say that "fat is flavor." The aromatics that make beef taste distinct from pork, for example, are mostly contained in the fats of those animals.

"Entertaining" usually means some event that you put effort into organizing. You invite the guests ahead of time, make some food, and often have a focal activity (watching a movie, doing a craft, gift exchange, etc.)

You'd probably need to provide some more information on the exact rules you play by. For example, if the rules are "Draw balls until someone wins" then each person has a roughly equal chance to win. If you are playing with N total people, that is 1/N. Play alone, and you're certain to win. Play with one other opponent and you will win 1/2 the time. And so on.

But your 20% win rate suggests that you're either playing with small crowds or by some other rules.

The cultures of China, Japan, and Korea were in close contact for millennia before they had any real interaction with the West. That's plenty of time for significant cultural exchange, even if the process is extremely slow. In fact, the conventional wisdom is that East Asian countries (especially Korea and Japan) have Westernized shockingly quickly given that the bulk of that process has happened over just the last century.

Religions in particular can spread very quickly before then sticking very tightly. Buddhism is primarily practiced in East Asia but started in South Asia. Islam started in Arabia but has adherents from Nigeria to Indonesia. Christianity started in Jerusalem (kind of) and is now practiced by at least a substantial minority on every continent. By comparison, taking Confucianism across some mountains or a sea is pretty easy.

The marketing component is big. Getting the game talked about in the spaces that potential customers frequent is hugely important but also requires a lot of resources and connections that developers don't often have. It's not just paid ads but trailers, criticism, launch events, merch, engagement from Twitch streamers, and all the other pieces of the hype engine. The difference between all the good games you've never played and all the mediocre games you have played is mostly marketing.

Also, like book or music publishers, video game publishers may also advance some money to the developers to fund the development of the game, working essentially as venture capital.

It's very difficult to cultivate a seedless fruit. Even if by magic you could acquire a bushel of seedless apples... how to you make more? Plant the seeds?

The (relatively small, actually) number of seedless fruits thus require some genetic and/or agricultural trickery to create. Seedless oranges come from grafting branches from one solitary mutant orange tree onto donor trees that would otherwise grow seeded oranges. Seedless watermelon are grown by cross-breeding two strains that are sterile when combined.

"Overweight" in this context doesn't have much to do with clothing sizes. It's a quasi-medical definition that is based on the BMI (a ratio of height to weight). Various medical organizations eventually landed on the idea that a BMI of 25-30 is "overweight," but this was a pretty arbitrary definition and doesn't mean much. Research on the links between BMI and health outcomes have not produced evidence that BMIs in the "overweight" range are associated with poor health, and there's some evidence that they can protect people from diseases that sap your energy. On top of this, BMI does not distinguish between men and women, despite the fact that women are naturally heavier for a given height.

The question of what should be considered "medium" or "normal" in clothing sizes is pretty separate. Different brands have completely different sizing schemes, and many are intentionally set up to flatter their buyers or for some other purpose than clearly communicating the dimensions of the clothing.

If we're talking about theory, it's not just possible but certain that there are more elements than those listed on the periodic table. An element is defined by the number of protons in the nucleus. You can theorize a new element with 69420 protons, and that's that.

What's harder is having that new element actually exist. Elements only get on the periodic table if we can actually observe them existing. Since the middle of the last century, physicists have known how to slam atoms into each other to create heavier elements. Any element heavier than uranium does not occur naturally on Earth and has to be created in a lab. We have created several elements this way.

There is therefore recent precedent for expanding the periodic table. Scientists are actively working on expanding it further, but it is difficult work. These super-heavy elements are very unstable, and creating them requires a lot of time, energy, and expensive equipment. On top of that, the process is fundamentally random, so each try has only a small chance of success.

Essentially, the corrupt leaders treat the people who enforce state power well, from the military and police commanders on down to the rank and file. This keeps them loyal in a direct sense and also makes them less sympathetic towards the people who are revolting.

This doesn't always work. Oppressive regimes get overthrown all the time. Importantly, this usually happens because the people who enforce the power either decide to stop, letting the revolutionaries walk into the palace, so to speak, or to seize power for themselves in a coup d'etat.

Charter schools operate with public money and have to meet certain requirements, specified in the "charter" they sign with the government. However, they have a lot more freedom in how they operate than traditional public schools. This typically means that they use non-union teachers. They can often have different educational philosophies, with some being more strict (uniforms, lots of homework) and others being less strict (wholistic learning, no grades, etc.)

So the first benefit of charter schools is that they provide an alternative to traditional public schools. If a charter school is unique in a way that you or your child like, then it could be a good fit. The evidence on charter schools being all around "better" than traditional public schools is more mixed. Parents who send their children to public school consistently report being satisfied with their choice, but not all charter schools improve student achievement on things like standardized tests.

First, this is not a phenomenon that is unique to the US. Protestors in many places, including the UK, are often arrested or otherwise controlled by police. Protestors in the US are often left alone.

But because you asked about the US specifically, the US Constitution protects a right of freedom of assembly, but this has essentially never been interpreted as a license for large groups of people to do whatever they want. Police will often monitor protests and order them to disperse if the crowd becomes particularly agitated or disruptive. If protestors don't disperse (or actively resist police control), police might starting making arrests.

Where exactly this line should be drawn is enormously controversial and contentious, and both police and protestors have been known to behave poorly. What happens can depend on the issue at hand, the demographics of the police and protestors, and the general political climate.

Interest rates are rising quickly everywhere due to the efforts of central banks to bring down inflation. Essentially, the central bank in the UK is making it more expensive for regular banks to borrow money. In a sense, those regular banks borrowed the money for your house from the central bank, so they're seeing the exact same kind of squeeze you're seeing, only they can pass it on to you by raising your rates.

Every bank is getting squeezed like this, so it will be impossible to find a rate like the one you had a few years ago. However, it could be worth it to talk to a competing bank to see if they can offer you better than your current bank. In an era of rising prices, some businesses will try to raise theirs higher than necessary and hope nobody notices, and the best way to police this is with competition.

It is said that certain very old violins (and some other string instruments, but the violins are more famous, and hence more expensive) are better than anything we can produce today, either because the materials (very particular kinds of wood) are no longer available or reverence for a particular craftsman (especially Stradivarius). These old violins are in fixed supply and so have their prices driven up by the large number of collectors and virtuosos who want to own/use one.

Other instruments are generally not affected by the same beliefs, so a top-notch piano made yesterday is considered as good as, if not better, than every other piano. This means that supply can keep up with demand, and prices are in the ballpark of what it takes to produce the instrument. Organs are a bit of a weird case, as many of them are built into large and famous buildings. They're probably left off these lists of expensive instruments because there's no feasible way to "buy" them. If somehow you could, some organs would likely cost more than a Stradivarius violin.

You're mostly right with some technicalities:

1. If the item in question was not frozen all the way through after one day in the freezer, it would indeed take longer to thaw if left there for a week instead

2. Extended freezing, especially in a home freezer, dehydrates food. This could cause it to take longer to thaw, depending on the circumstances of the thawing.

There are two main drivers of GDP growth: population and technology.

Population is straightforward. GDP measures how much "stuff" we make. The more people, the more stuff. So long as populations continue to grow (which is not guaranteed and somewhat of a different issue from economic growth), this will contribute to GDP growth. You can remove the influence of population by instead considering GDP per person ("capita")

The second driver of GDP growth is technology. As we learn better or more efficient ways to make stuff, or even invent all new categories of stuff to make, we will make it more stuff with less effort. GDP per capita has been growing due to technological advancements pretty much continuously for the entirety of human history (local exceptions like the "Dark Ages" in Europe ignore the Islamic and East Asian worlds, which were doing just fine at the time).

So it's possible that aggregate GDP may fall in the future if populations start shrinking rather than growing. However, we can reasonably expect that we will retain knowledge of all the productive technology we have today - it would take some sort of true cataclysm to undo that - so GDP per capita will only fall if we spend less of our collective time working. We haven't yet gotten to a point where decreases in labor time have outpaced technological innovation - people have generally pursued the higher standard of living rather than increased leisure time - but it's possible in principle.