So you have a file format going back almost 20 years, that supports embedding almost any kind of content anywhere, that has had new features bolted on almost constantly, and also is backwards compatible so that anything not using a new feature is readable by older applications, and is also forward-compatible so newer versions of the application can render these documents accurately. And people complain that said file format is too complex?

For a comparison, go read up on how complex the TIFF standard is, and that is, basically, a bunch of numbers corresponding to color values in a bitmap. The ancient base-standard document is 120 pages long.

I appreciate the post. This is what is happening in my friend's department.

He works in IT support. There used to be around 30 full time staff to support all major university functions. Email, blackboard, access to 3rd party sites, directory and security, stuff like that. As time went on, 20% of the staff were doing 80% of the work. You had new hires with no experience nor any desire to do any work of any kind. They were experts at making excuses as to why they couldn't do the work, or were overworked, or getting other people to do their work for them. Long story short, a department that ran efficiently at 30 people now has over 80 people to do the same amount of work. And, to this day, the same 8 people who did most of the work originally are still doing most of the work.

I can't speak to this paper but for the CERN papers the reason there are so many authors has far more to do with the fact that to get at the physics you need a 14-story tall incredibly complex detector that has its data collected and analyzed by software consisting millions of lines of code. You need a few thousand people to build and operate such detectors and to write and debug the code that analyzes the data to get at the physics. That's why there are so many authors.

Many of us would love to have our own table-top experiments but nobody knows how to make one that small which can get at the physics we are interested in.

There is an astounding level of ignorance in your posts.

But let's start with this: hydrogen is dispensed and kept as a gas, not a liquid. That means that pressure is important. The dispenser must ensure that there is sufficient pressure in the car's tanks in order to fill it.

Have you heard of Boyle's law?

Fueling stations need their own compressors:
https://www.neuman-esser.com/e...

Fueling nozzles get stuck to cars:
https://www.facebook.com/group...

Your facepalm applies to yourself and your aggressive commitment to remain ignorant, since all of my points could be easily searched for and confirmed.

All directions look back to the Big Bang because it happened at every point of the universe. The "Big Crunch" is pretty much ruled out by the accelerating expansion but this has introduced a new possible ending to the universe: the "Big Rip". In this scenario nothing stops the accelerating expansion driven by increasing dark energy.

As the expansion accelerates, the causally connected region of the universe shrinks and, if nothing stops this, at some point in the extremely distant future even atoms and then nucleons etc. will get ripped apart as the causally connected region shrinks below their size until it reaches the planck length at which point there will be a "big rip" as space-time itself is pulled apart. One intriguing, but complete guess, at what happens then is that the huge energy density triggers a new Big Bang at each and every point in the universe i.e. our universe will give birth to a new universe at every single point in it.

While that scenario is extremely hypothetical it seems a lot more optimistic end for us that just expanding forever until heat death stops everything...but it will be a while before we know whether it is right.

Fun fact: no one cares about your "I don't know" posts.

The argument for funding universities used to be that they were funded by the increased tax rate that higher earners pay because, with very few exceptions, higher earners have either benefited from a university education themselves or have benefitted from the works of others with university educations.

The great thing with that system was that those who needed a university education but who ended up in a lower paying job like teacher or nurse were not saddled with massive debts and instead had their education paid for by those going into business and earning far more employing an educated and healthy workforce. the great thing with that old social contract is that it justified higher taxes for the more wealthy and they, along with the rest of society, got to benefit from it. Instead now we have a system where it's hard to justify higher taxes on those earning more because they are almost entirely excluded from the benefits and jobs critical to society, like teachers, are becoming increasingly hard to fill.

Not in the UK because UK universities no longer have tenure. Unless something has changed since I left the government forced universities to employ lecturers on fixed term contracts that do not have to be renewed when they expire.