Good call on the de Broglie wavelength correction. I had misremembered it and if I'd given it a little more thought, it would have seemed obviously wrong.

It does serve to highlight how you're stating this incorrectly, though. The wavefunction doesn't represent the "size" of a particle in any meaningful way. If anything, psi squared describes the probability of finding a particle at a particular location. Analogously, if I describe your location as somewhere within the 1200 block of Broad St, it doesn't make sense to interpret that statement as saying you are actually the size of a city block. The QM wave description of matter has nothing to do with size (in any distinct and meaningful sense) and everything to do with location.

Quantum mechanics describes particle interactions in terms of waves, but it is not a statement that the wave-particle duality doesn't exist. Any actual interaction between particles requires decoherence and a collapse of the wavefunction to a more classical-like particle.

What you're describing here are pedantic objections, though, of which there will always be some to any question that isn't qualified to absurdity.

For your example, the rest mass of an electron is smaller than the mass of any atom, so the wavefunction of any electron will be smaller than that of any atom at the same velocity (de Broglie wavelength) and in the same environment (the "state" you describe is a function of being part of an atom, it doesn't apply to free electrons). Or simply, since an electron is a component of an atom, any constituent electron will be smaller than the atom it inhabits.

If you contrive a complex and unreasonable enough scenario, you can change the answer to most any question (e.g., is an electron smaller than the Earth). For most exams, reasonable assumptions are expected unless otherwise stated: at standard temperature and pressure, in the ground state, etc.

The correct answer to the question is that, yes, an electron is smaller than an atom.

Modern magnetometers in phones are pretty robust. After calibration, the one in my phone works fine right next to a 500 MHz NMR (~12 T [for reference the earth's magnetic field is around 50 uT]). The magnetic locks won't be moving around much, so the field it sees from them will be pretty static.

In that same line of thinking, I'm surprised that advertising to children (specifically, as in ads designed for children) is legal.

It's hard to think of a team of trained psychologists, armed with extensive market research and determined to manipulate minors for their own profit, as anything but despicably evil.

Are you saying that in cases of radioactive potassium, the body has a way of just shutting it down?

Which radioactive isotopes from Fukushima are you talking about that bioaccumulate?

So "low and constant" radiation from potassium is ok (because it's "natural", right, like botulism and being eaten by a bear?), but vague and unspecified Fukushima radiation is bad because it bioaccumulates (which is actually not the case for most of the released isotopes: Cs, for example is treated the same as your well-regarded potassium by animal tissue)? Many of the elements that bioaccumulate are more chemically toxic by virtue of being heavy metals than by being radioactive.

You don't understand your basic and crucial facts very well, either. There are enough real dangers in dealing with radioisotopes; you don't need to keep adding your own hysteria-based ones to the mix.

That's a pretty lame reason, actually. What use case (that's big enough to support an entire industry of "smart lightbulbs") involves:

o light fixtures that don't already have switches installed,

o users who are not industrious enough to move the lightswitch themselves,

o users who are too cheap to just have an electrician move it (this is shockingly inexpensive, by the way... typically cheaper than one of these bulbs),

o users who are fine with accidentally flipping the wall switch and making the whole thing inoperative or covering the switch with tape or something cheesy like that to keep people from switching it (or are industrious enough to rewire the switch and install an ugly blank panel but can't move the switch),

o and users who can afford (or rationalize) spending $60 or up on a light bulb?

I guess the intersection of most of that is gadget-addicted renters. Is that really a very lucrative market?

It does, but there are some legitimate uses for a modern embedded x86 board.

Orbit is just an extreme example of ballistic flight, so you could say that the ISS is flying.

So how does "specially protected devices that can be used to work with confidential information" translate to "open source"? Products with that many qualifiers tend to be extremely proprietary.

As to the paranoia, the Android in question was designed by a very close US ally and runs an OS designed by a US company. I wouldn't rule out the presence of "hooks" in their devices.

The software delivered on Samsung tablets isn't entirely open source, either. Anyway, iOS is built on Darwin (among many other open source components), which is open source, too.

None of Google's non-OS apps, including the Play Store, are open source. The words "open source" are not a complete explanation of this situation.

Maybe you can help me understand this because I can't seem to find it stated clearly anywhere...

Aren't the fees payed to the original miner of a specific block in exchange for continuing to validate transactions derived from that block? What happens to the transactions derived from a block when the original miner stops validating transactions (which is sure to happen by 2140) and what incentives do others have to validate transactions if the fees will just be going to the long dead original miner?

(If that's what happens to fees, then the end result will be a slow condensation of all bitcoins into the unspendable wallets of the long dead original miners. But first, people will stop wasting electricity validating transactions which only benefit them by keeping the whole system from collapsing.)

If that's not true and anyone can collect fees by validating transactions, and if the fees aren't tied to mining difficulty, at what point does it make more sense to just validate transactions in exchange for fees than to actively look for more coins?

There is a table for consistent transliteration from Western and Cyrillic alphabets. It does seem like a shame that the original script isn't at least stored in the contactless chip, though.

Have you? They don't type in and search the names on passports. Any passports in use have a standardized machine readable section (with transliteration conducted by the issuing state). Automatically testing other transliterations wouldn't be that hard of a task.

Are you sure that they're trying to produce the Metaverse and not just the anarcho-capitalistic dystopia part?