To your point they also, like, wrote their own PHP interpreter. If you asked your Facebook interviewer about PHP you'd probably get an interesting answer!
I think the example of video games and movies is instructive - there's always a ton of "cut content". In software, we can always change the requirements to meet a deadline :)
No, the mysteries that "are deep, hard to understand, and not worth the effort" are why Scientific American is publishing this junk article. My lay theory is that SA hasn't been worth reading in decades and basically nobody can write well about quantum mechanics for a casual audience..
The skill-based matchmaking that's popular today is optimized for setting up a fair game, ie. theres a roughly 50/50 chance of either side winning. It makes logical sense, but it turns out nobody actually wants a fair match!
Rather the opposite - us-west-2 is big but not the biggest region, or the smallest, or the oldest or newest, it's not partitioned off like the China or GovCloud regions. Because us-west-2 is fairly typical it tends to be one of the last regions to get software updates, after they've been tested in prod elsewhere
It's probably been in a lot of movies, but I've always loved this scene in THE CORE where they land a space shuttle in the LA river: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GG1RwE_x6Vg
People here know offhand what they weigh in pounds, and the packaging on food lists macronutrient content in grams. The article could've listed g/kg as well, but for a US audience g/lb isn't particularly wacky.
The current theory is that particles are waves, or rather localized excitations ('bumps') in a field. One of the surprising things from quantum theory is that these bumps have a finite minimum size, and they can only increase in multiples of that size; this unit is what we call 'a particle'.
This model seems to work (makes accurate numerical predictions, etc.) for all the known fields other than gravity, so physicists think there should be a 'graviton', ie quantum of the gravitational field. But they haven't been detected directly and we don't have a good mathematical theory of them (for a bunch of reasons I don't understand, but I think "gravity is really weak" and "gravity is nonlinear" are a good start)
I had a bramble of related ideas in mind, and instead of putting in effort to untangle them I lazily let them came out as a pithy aphorism. But:
- Even if all of Musk's enterprises were aimed at colonizing Mars (like gp suggested), they can be quite useful here.
- Turning Mars into a self-sufficient habitat is both an absurdly long-term (and laudable) goal and no guarantee of survival. We have to worry about the problems of surviving on Earth today and, in the very long run, how to live in many other places.