dphidt

If there's a prior in the community, my impression (as a neutrino physicist) is that if anything it's more toward Majorana than not, in the absence of evidence either way. It is surely nicer from a theory perspective, with a (seesaw) mechanism to help explain the very light neutrino masses, and lepton number violation that helps in the case for leptogenesis as an explanation for the universe's matter-antimatter asymmetry, etc. One way I think about it is that it's pretty interesting either way: Majorana demands physics beyond the Standard Model, while Dirac would seem to suggest that lepton number is more than an accidental symmetry of the Standard Model, implying some unknown quantum number. Meanwhile, many experimental searches for neutrinoless double beta decay go on, with many new/clever ideas to carve through the quite large allowed parameter space.

I am curious why the door plug is not a plug door — that is, a design wherein the desired panel would be installed from the inside and sealed by the differential pressure, like a cabin door. This part looks more similar to cargo door; those usually have to open outward for space, but what is the design constraint for this case?

+1 for GeoWorks which ran a lovely suite of bundled programs amazingly well on a 286, and was preinstalled alongside MS-DOS on some systems in the early 90s. Despite being a quality product, apparently development was a major pain (expensive documentation and bad workflow), while Windows rode a wave of third party software to market domination. An interesting footnote to the Windows story of the era, and a cautionary tale perhaps. But FWIW I still run Ensemble in a VM :).

Another perspective on this is that departments will have a long term hiring strategy that balances breadth of the overall research program against depth in a particular subdiscipline, with the goal of building a coherent ecosystem with good opportunities for faculty and students. That may be a factor beyond a candidate's control, but not necessarily just anticompetitive behavior in the hiring process.

Even better, the actual in situ delays are measured and compensated for, and it works independent of the physical connection (and through fiber/copper, switch layers, etc.).

It's also assumed that "i" is an integer, a contextually plausible but potentially bad assumption. By one interpretation of the prompt, foobar(9) should print "yam" but foobar(9.5) still "baloney", for example.

They are primarily coming from neutron capture (electron + proton -> electron neutrino + neutron). During much of the collapse even these weakly-interacting neutrinos get trapped behind the high-density shock wave. As it expands and the density becomes lower, they escape in what's known as the neutronization burst.

I am a physicist working as a physicist! My field of experimental particle physics, at least, is very hacker-ey: we develop instrumentation hardware, low-level data acquisition software, database and web apps for experiment operations and monitoring, and the like, beyond the data analysis. Of course, there are many industry opportunities for people with this kind of experience. In addition to the issues pointed out in other comments (small number of academic positions, salary differences), I think there are two cultural factors that are helping people transition out of academia: an increasing awareness on the part of advisors and institutions that students need more broadly marketable experience, and a corresponding decrease in the stigma of leaving academia. As one example, I routinely see notices distributed for Insight data science programs within our community.