clementangerine

It seems pretty off, though. For example, the page for Iceland says that winter is the peak time, but it's actually pretty dead in the winter with the peak in the summer. Seems like people start planning their summer trips around December (plane tickets for Christmas?). Other places seem shifted up a month or two - the page for Paris has the peak season around May-June, but it's actually more like June-August.

OP, if you want to improve this, could you get some actual tourist data and experiment a bit with which other metrics (various Google searches - something like taxi services might be more accurate to estimate how many people are actually traveling in the country at the time, hotel prices, plane ticket prices, etc) best predict the tourist numbers?

Go to his office hours, definitely. A common trap I've seen a lot of students fall into is that they think they can't approach a professor until they are impressive enough (have enough personal side projects, have read enough of their papers, have perfect grades in their class, etc), or they try too hard to appear more knowledgeable than they are. It's totally fine to just go and say "I'm interested in this, do you have any advice on what I should do to learn more?". You'll have a better time impressing him by following up on that advice successfully than you will trying to make a side project on your own.

> This doesn't explain why people turn specifically to opiates and not to booze or weed.

I think this is just because they are being prescribed more frequently. Unhappy people with no opiate experience aren't just going out on the street and buying heroin, but unhappy people who are prescribed opiates may become addicted. The argument the article is making is that happy people who are prescribed opiates don't become addicted, and that it makes more sense to treat the unhappiness than to restrict opiate prescriptions.

These are two separate issues, for the most part.

One possible relevant benefit of free college, though, is that it removes a lot of the bad incentives in the university-student relationship. If students aren't in the paying customer role, and universities aren't so strongly incentivized to sell as many degrees as possible, it's a lot easier to enforce strict academic standards. So it could actually improve the degree inflation situation.

They definitely do; I've had plenty of private conversations with non-American women in CS about sexism. I think Americans are just more likely to be openly vocal about it.

I'm not sure if this accurately represents how people remember things. It's normal to be a bit fuzzy on a topic a year after learning it if you aren't regularly applying it. What matters is that you can learn it again quickly, and I think preparation for technical interviews works fine for testing that already.