Dopamine isn't used only for reward signaling. It is also used for aversion. "Yum, let's get more of that!" and "Ick, let's stay away from that!" are both incentive-driven thoughts.

And it's also used for other things, too. Parkinson's disease is treated with drugs that activate dopamine receptors, but L-Dopa isn't an addictive drug.

One formulation of Murphy's Law: "If there's more than one way to do a task, and one of those ways will lead to disaster, someone will do it that way."

Running this backwards: If you don't want someone to cause a disaster, you make it impossible to do the task that way.

> You'll be amazed at how clunky the resources allocation process is, and how much it costs the company in tech debt and money.

"I just want to serve 5TB of data. Why is this so hard?"

Only if you want your company to fail horribly.

If the process doesn't work right, you fix the process. Someone figures out what went wrong, and they figure out a better way of doing the task, and then that specific problem doesn't happen any more.

Firing people for making mistakes is an effective way to get people to hide mistakes, push blame on others, and otherwise make problems much worse.

There's a management joke: A worker who just caused a million-dollar failure is called into the manager's office. Worker says, "Well, I guess you're going to fire me." Manager laughs and says, "Fire you? We just spent a million dollars training you!"

Once a blood-borne infection is sufficiently common, it doesn't matter which little biting parasite is carrying it. It may have jumped from rat-flea-human to human-louse-human transmission.

A quantum particle isn't exactly a solid chunk of stuff. In some ways, it's more accurately pictured as a ripple in the fields that make up the universe.

It so happens that these ripples only come in whole-number sizes (they are "quantized") — so you can have no electron, or one electron, or two, etc., but you can't have half an electron or seven-fifteenths of an electron.

(That's what makes it quantum physics. In classical physics, there was never any rule that you couldn't split a chunk of matter down indefinitely. That turned out to just be wrong.)

What are "fields", though? A field is just some quantity measured at each point in some space and time. An example of a non-quantum field is the wind on the surface of a planet. The wind has some value at every point on the globe. (It might be zero, if the air is still.) And it changes over time. A breeze and a tornado are two different phenomena in the wind field.

(The wind is a vector field; at any point, it has both a magnitude and a direction. Air pressure and temperature are scalar fields; at any point, each has only a single numerical quantity. Gravity is a vector field; mass density is a scalar field. There are other more complicated kinds of field too.)

Why does it matter that particles are ripples and not tiny solid chunks? Well, one reason is that a ripple is inherently spread out, whereas a solid chunk has an exact single location.

And while solid chunks can only interact by bumping into each other, ripples can interact through interference — they can reinforce or cancel each other out. Solid classical-physics chunks can't do that.

(For another non-quantum example: Interference between ripples is also how, for instance, noise-cancelling headphones work: they make a sound wave that cancels out the noise.)

It's this interference that explains a lot of the "weird" effects in quantum physics, like the double-slit experiment. It's not that a particle "really is" a solid chunk that's magically in two places at once; rather, it never was a solid chunk at all, but a ripple that can interfere with other ripples, including its own echoes.

> There may be some use cases for hubs still, but generally they should be avoided.

There is no such thing as a hub for modern wired Ethernet anyway; Gigabit Ethernet requires switches and full-duplex links.

(One thing we used to use hubs for is security monitoring: run your Internet traffic through a hub and attach the intrusion detection system(s) there; since the hub mirrors all traffic to all ports, your IDS can sniff it all. These days you'd use a network tap or a span port for that.)

Shoo-bee-doo, rocksteady crew, find him an octoped ingenue.

Oh, to be clear, I expect the current China political regime to collapse horribly following the population crash it created.

Humans turn out to be really good at making more humans. We don't have any kind of shortage of human-making. Any time anyone says something that ends with "... and then, the humans would stop making more humans!" they're basically saying "I AM A CLOWN BUTT, BUH BUH BUH!"

In exceptional cases where psychotic human dictators have prevented normal reproduction (see: 20th century China) there are, fortunately, other repositories of humans who have maintained normal reproduction. When China's population crashes, it can be replenished from other parts ot the planet.

The mathematical solution we need!

They don't. The question was about the minimum number of straight people.

No such minimum exists, since lesbians can have gay sperm donors!

I'd suggest reading Plato's allegory of the cave and then coming back and asking more specific questions.

Every house & apartment should have a sink plunger and a toilet plunger.

It's not confirmation bias. They literally do have to deal with a drain full of concentrated flesh-eating chemicals.

They only encounter it when it doesn't work; and it's a hazardous chemical that makes their job harder.

If your sink drain is blocked up, here are some things that could happen:

1. You just call the plumber.
2. You try plunging it with a sink plunger; that works. You don't call the plumber.
3. You try plunging it, but that doesn't work. You call the plumber.
4. You put drain cleaner down it, and it works. You don't call the plumber.
5. You put drain cleaner down it, and it doesn't work. You call the plumber.

The plumber only sees cases #1, #3, and #5. They don't see the cases #2 and #4 where you were able to unblock your sink yourself.

The plumber's opinions come from the cases they see:

• Case #1 is usually a really easy fix.
• Case #3 is less easy (because the clog is bad enough the plunger didn't work) but still okay.
• Case #5 is now a sink drain full of nasty chemicals that want to eat organic matter (including plumbers' skin).

So from the plumber's perspective, they'd rather you didn't use drain cleaner. They never see the upside of it (case #4), so for them it's always the absolute worst.

> tensor tympani

Relevant Wikipedia: tensor tympani muscle

> The tensor tympani is a muscle within the middle ear, located in the bony canal above the bony part of the auditory tube, and connects to the malleus bone. Its role is to dampen loud sounds, such as those produced from chewing, shouting, or thunder. Because its reaction time is not fast enough, the muscle cannot protect against hearing damage caused by sudden loud sounds, like explosions or gunshots.

One possibility is a minority shareholder lawsuit.

You might own a majority of the company, but the company still has obligations to the other shareholders too. It's still supposed to be working for the profit of all shareholders. If you take a profitable company and turn it into your own personal slush fund, its other shareholders can sue for damages.

It's a matter of what properties you care about: making something cold, vs. breaking up ice to stop it from being slippery.

In the ice-cream maker, you're trying to transfer coldness out of the ice and into the ice-cream, to make the water in the ice-cream freeze. It doesn't matter to you that the ice melts in the process.

On the road, you're trying to melt and break up the ice so it's less slippery. You don't really care about coldness.

Most of the energy involved doesn't go into changing the temperature; it goes into shifting water between solid and liquid forms. This is the latent heat of fusion ... where "fusion" doesn't mean nuclear fusion like the sun, but rather water physically fusing into ice.

Do they at least tell you that they've done so successfully, though?

When you say "official", I assume you mean that the copyright on the set logo art, the product logo, and maybe the font have been cleared with Hasbro?

Any details you found particularly interesting about that negotiation?

> How would people be able to correct a mistake if they made one while using morse code?

........ (that's eight) is used to mean "error", and then just send the correct text.