The gambler’s fallacy is pretty easy to get, as is the Monty Hall problem if you restate the question as having 100 doors instead of 3. But for the life of me I don’t think I’ll ever have an intuitive understanding of the birthday problem. That one just boggles my mind constantly.

Releasing someone who made an extremely successful drug distribution ring while also threatening tariffs under the guise of a fentanyl crackdown.

Predictable behavior from someone who’s only consistent action is his golf schedule.

They don’t directly mention it, but as I recall after that episode traveling at high warp speeds was greatly diminished and warp speeds above certain thresholds were only used in emergency situations/required special authorization. So not completely abandoned but they certainly didn’t build on the premise, which is a shame because I thought it was one of the cooler plot elements that was introduced in the series.

The Talos Principle - It’s pretty much purely a puzzle game with a nice dose of philosophy to drive the story along. Some of the later puzzles can get pretty difficult, and some of the optional challenges will likely take you a good while to figure out without guides.

Ya know now that you mention it, I don’t recall Congress ever explicitly delegating the selection of the “go” and “stop” colors to any government entity. Wonder if you could now use this as a defense against running a red light…

This was probably true for a bit after 9/11, but I can’t say I personally know anyone who currently feels safer flying on planes because of the TSA. Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to in person regarding this knows the TSA is a joke.

Realistically it’s now a government jobs program that is basically immune from ever being terminated because many politician benefits from having this program operate in their district/state/etc providing jobs that they do not want to lose.

You seem to be under the impression that they care about your safety. Rookie mistake. They care about the security of the airplane, not you.

I’m a researcher in the biological sciences at an institute which receives lots of government funding, and was at a university before my current position. We are not being paid to develop drugs. We are being paid to develop new knowledge that hopefully can be useful (in the broad sense of the term). Practically no one I’ve ever met during my time in academia is developing drugs, and the small few that were doing so were only researching a single, small part of a very long, complex process.

The R&D you are paying for is for us to typically find out that “Protein X interacts with Protein Y and causes Effect Z. When we delete Protein X then Effect Z goes away”. We might also find out that “Molecule Q can block the activity of Protein X, but has a host of issues that make it ineffective when given to Petri dish cells and mice.” This can give you a lead towards making a drug, but what we do is basically discover a possible starting point, nothing more. If someone wants to make a drug from this, they typically will start a company and get venture capital and angel investor money, as university labs are usually poorly equipped financially and talent wise to actually develop a drug (to speak nothing of pushing it through clinical trials). Transforming Molecule Q into a bona fide drug candidate is going to require a massive amount of work that most lay individuals are completely unaware of.

I’m really curious where this concept that the government is spending tons of money on drug R&D at publicly funded universities is coming from. It sounds great as a talking point, but from my perspective within the system it’s not quite how things work.

It has to be the former. I would be shocked if bats even outnumbered humans and rodents combined.

Sucrose has a solubility of about 200 g/100 mL water. I’m in American so I’ve never seen Australian food labels, but would they really label a sugar-saturated drink as having 200% sugar? I guess technically you can do that, but it seems a bit weird. In my experience % is usually reserved for liquid in liquid solutions, like alcoholic beverages.

I feel like this is a situation where going full Karen would be an acceptable response.