LHS 1140b has 5x the mass, but only about 2.4x the surface gravity (since the surface is further away from the center of the planet's mass). Which is still enough to make life difficult for large animals, of course.
But even if the gravity was 5g, you could get a lot bigger than bacteria. Regular mice from Earth can survive in 7G environments for months at a time. Bacteria apparently can survive hundreds of thousands of Gs.
Fair point, I should have specified "the professors and the administrators" need to do their jobs, not just the professors.
I also get it that colleges "need customers", but... two of the universities mentioned in TFA are Brown and Princeton. Both Ivy League, both top-10 in the US, both with applicant acceptance rates of 5% or less. These universities are NOT going to run out of potential students if they start cracking down and enforcing standards. In fact, if they start cracking down and if they're very public about the crackdown, this will help their reputation immensely, and will make them more attractive to prospective students (at least the ones who don't plan to cheat).
Long before LLMs, students would find ways to cheat on assignments-- either by hiring someone to write their papers for them, or by simple plagiarism. The penalty, if you were caught, was that you flunked the course with no appeal. The penalty for repeat offenders was that you got expelled.
The only difference here is that these students aren't getting appropriately penalized. These professors need to grow a pair and do their jobs, instead of rambling on thoughtfully about "best practices".
It did become "dated" faster than any of us would have expected, reading it back in the 1980s. But "dated" doesn't mean that it's bad or that it has aged poorly. It's still one of the greatest opening lines of any novel. The reason you can tell that it's a great opening line is that you were able to recall it word for word. You probably didn't even need to look it up to remember the exact quote.
Also, $70K is the median *household* income. The median individual income in Omaha is $41.6K. As gtall said, factor in taxes, healthcare, rent etc... then factor an extra $500-$1000 to register and title your new car, another $1000 annually for vehicle maintenance (except it'll be more than that because for $20K you're buying a used car), and factor in whatever you're spending on gas...
And this isn't possible. The chances of this plan coming to pass are precisely zero. It's a fantasy. Whether it's actually a good idea or not-- that's completely irrelevant.
The real-world effect of this proposal is that it makes the Democrats look like a bunch of loopy socialists. Since we're heading into some *very* important and *very* tightly-contested elections, this is a tone-deaf and deeply irresponsible move on Bernie's part. (If it was anyone other than Bernie, I'd suspect that he was a deep-cover Republican operative trying to discredit the opposition).
Taken by itself, that observation ("this phenomenon arises from individual behaviour rather than collectively emerging due to pedestrian-pedestrian or pedestrian-boundary interactions") doesn't quite rule out the hypothesis. I'd need to know more.
For example, I don't know how big the "circles" are. If the pedestrians are found to walk in relatively small circles, then they are effectively "patrolling" a small area of space and they know that any new pedestrians (or other threats) are necessarily going to emerge from outside of that area; they're going to keep their attention oriented primarily outside the circle and are going to keep their right side facing outside. So the very first pedestrian to enter the space will instinctively start circling counter-clockwise, even if there are no other pedestrians to influence his behavior. On the other hand, if the "circling" behavior consists of walking the perimeter of a large room, then you'd expect the pedestrian to circle clockwise, and the "self-defense" idea wouldn't fit.
Again, I don't know if the data supports, contradicts, or is neutral to the "dominant side is for self-defense" idea, I'd need to read the actual article in depth (sadly I don't have time to do that this morning). So it's just a bit of speculation on my part.
The last person that quit or was fired will be held responsible for everything that goes wrong -- until the next person quits or is fired.
