muddyrivers

I grew up in China. Line cutting has always been annoying, even infuriating, for me. The last few times I visited back, I noticed the young generations are much better in this aspect. There are rarely any improvements in this regard among my generation and older ones. So I guess we have to wait for nature taking its time.

Gawking is common in places that are not culturally diverse. I drove to many small towns in Midwest. I got stared at when I was walking around the town. Especially so when I entered local stores, diners, and pubs where everybody else was white. I could tell many store owners, waitresses, etc. were not comfortable when talking to me. I hope it is getting better.

I have similar experiences in both systems. Growing up in China, it is easy for me to navigate in US cities. Beijing is primarily of grid system.

The first time I went to Europe, I got quite lost in the city (Madrid). The second time was in Paris. I got some free time. So I walked around aimlessly in some neighborhoods, away from the popular tourist sites, appreciating the beauty, the history and the local people I ran across. It brought back the feeling I walked around the Hutongs in Beijing, which I enjoyed so much. Since then, I have been feeling very comfortable in navigating European cities with organic layout. In my case, it does seems there are two navigation systems, and I make subconscious switches based on the layouts.

The table corruption bugs were triggered when the load was very high, as far as I know. It happened twice to me. In both cases, the corruption couldn't be corrected.

The worse part was the corruption was propagated into replica, which brought up much more serious issue with Postgres's replication model. So the only solution was to install the latest good backup.

I think the media tend to use "depression" as a general term to describe mental illness. The persons who committed suicide may suffer other forms of mental illnesses. There are a great number of different types of mental illnesses, like there are a great number of different types of cancers, neurodegenerative diseases, etc. Instead of using accurate and specific diagnosis like lymphoma, we use a generic term "depression" in these cases. I think it shows both how little we understand the physiological basis of mental illnesses, and the lack of education in society in this regards.

Pollution is indeed a big problem. I think it is closely related to both economy and national psychology. The economy has to develop to a point that the government decides that it is preferable to slow down economy and allocate more resources to deal with pollution. One example is the recent ban of importing garbages. It will take years to clean the pollution.

Smoking/smokers problem has been improving. (Anecdotal evidence) Most men in my hometown were smokers when I grew up. So were my friends/classmates when they turned 20s. It was a norm in social meetings. The last few years when I visited them, most quit smoking. Based on my nephews, there are much less smokers in the young generation.

Diet might be another important factor. Asian tend to have balanced meals that include significant amounts of vegetables, fish, seafood, etc.

I think the condition is improving. More and more people realize the importance of balanced meals. It shows in grocery stores. They stock more variety of vegetables and fish than before.

As a molecular and cellular biologist in my previous life, I would say it is coincidence, although it is exceedingly rare, as you said. I don't see the possibility to acquire it, based on my understanding and training.

I want to provide some background, which is not typical, but pretty representative. In my 5~6 years as a biologists, I got my hands dirty extensively on 8~10 genes. It means I manipulated the genes in different ways via gene tools to try to figure out their properties. I knew every regions of these genes, even many single nucleotides, and what would happen if mutations occur at these nucleotides/regions. Other than that, I knew 50~60 genes very well. To this day, I can still remember most things about the genes. It is very sad that the random mutation happened to the lovely girl. If we only talk about statistics, the probability of the coincidence may be higher than we first thought.

You can have very messy code with an excellent language. You can also have beautiful code with a poorly designed language. Let's do a thought experiments. Have a pool of SWEs fresh out of school. Divide them into groups. Each group is given a language they are not familiar with. The pool of languages will include both commonly regarded good ones, OK ones, and bad ones. Ask the groups to do a middle-sized project for 3~6 months independently. Then we compile the projects, analyze their code quality. If the pool of SWEs are big enough, it will give us some insights.

This is true. However, it is more important to evaluate both the quantity and the "quality" of advantages and disadvantages.

For disadvantages, how serious are they, how easy are they to be abused, to creep into the codebase, to be prevented from happening again, etc.

It also depends on the team. If it is a small team of 5 people and they are all excellent engineers, I think whatever languages are fine. The 5 engineers will discuss and decide what features to NOT use, etc. and abide to them. If it is a team of 500 engineers, it will take much more efforts and eductions and much longer to achieve that.