I think many people are faced with a choice of studying physics or chemistry at a graduate level and, since up until then chemistry is generally much harder work than physics if you are an above average student, gravitate towards the subject where their ability so far has made life easy for them.
I still remember my introductory chemistry lecture at uni where the instructor said that a whole bunch of us had coasted up until now, and that in his experience those that had had to work hardest to get there, even if they had lower grades, would be the ones to succeed (he was right!)
This matches my experience studying chemistry after graduating from highschool with 0 effort. Studying chemistry is hard work in a lot of different fields: brute force memorization, understanding the intricacies of arcane heuristics with multiple (historically inspired) levels of "reasoning", applying lots of basic math and some higher math, applying some higher math in the context of more modern and somewhat less confusing models, and doing manual work in the lab with all kinds of equipment. It was a lot of fun, but I wasn't ready for the insane amount of work that I needed to put in.
For comparisson, I've also done some courses in economics and business administration – 0 effort, just like basic school.
I'm a little confused by your anecdote. High ability students who coast along gravitate towards physics, which is easier for them. But your professor said that the chemists had coasted?
They also charge differently (extortionately, some might say) for different speeds of data feed, although I'm not sure if they have tiers just for HFTs.
The HFT is wasteful but isn't bad for human traders, they tend to get better prices. It's bad (sometimes) for huge investors (VHNW individuals, hedge funds, pension funds which I guess represent regular people) that want to make large trades without moving the market but there are also winners here - e.g. if Johnny the day trader buys a stock that Texas Teachers Fund is selling huge batches of, he's better off if HFTs are causing price changes to propagate more quickly.
Rice cookers are super lenient with water quantities. Sometimes they "beep" for being done a little early, I've found that leaving the rice for like 10 minutes in the cooker after it's officially done to help a lot with consistency.
Also are you sure you aren't using parboiled rice, which needs slightly different measurements?
Leaving the rice also to rest for a while after it was cooked will also help prevent the rice from sticking on the rice cooker. No need for high end rice cooker.
Yes, I'm using regular rice. My main issue is not even the end result (although the rice ends up pretty dry/sticky depending on the amount of water) but rather the fact that I end up with a puddle of starchy water on my kitchen top.
I've been using this foolproof method to make medium or shortgrained white rice for years. Quantities for two people:
* One Nutella glass[1] worth of rice (don't overfill, the "peak" of the rice should be in line with the rim
* Wash the rice in the rice cooker bowl several times, drain by tipping the water out without letting the rice flow out. You'll be left with a small amount of water in the bowl
* One full Nutella glass worth of water.
Put the rice cooker on! You can also add salt/coconut milk/etc to taste without adjusting the above.
Those little Nutella glasses are great, very handy in the kitchen.
No lip and non-airtight lid means they're excellent for keeping things like sourdough starter. The lid won't pop off, and it's easy to scoop the starter out cleanly.
It's funny that the larger glasses are comparatively useless (except for holding huge quantities of Nutella) with their massive shoulder and lip.
I'm more familiar with that one than the one in swindon. It looks extremely terrifying from above, but what it actually looks like from the ground is a bit of a weird run of roundabouts one after another. If you take them one at a time rather than consider the intersection as a whole, it works fairly simply. It's actually shockingly intuitive.
Compared to the nearby roundabout onto the M40, which is of a much simpler design, but is covered in traffic lights, the Wycombe magic roundabout is actually much better at moving traffic around.
I wonder at what density of wind farms they begin to interfere with each other's generating capacity. Presumably within one farm the turbines are sufficiently spaced that the reduction in power is minimal, but how large can an individual one get? Or is the amount of energy they take out of the wind negligable?
You pretty much answered your own question: compared to the size of the coast, the amount of energy these wind farms capture is negligible. You might see a reduction of power if you built a dense farm up and down an entire coast, but even then, the ocean is big compared to these farms.
Edit to add: the Hornsea wind farm featured in this article is 2.5 GW and about 400 sq miles. [0]. The total energy capacity of existing generation assets is on the order of 7,500 GW [1]. Let's double that, so 15,000 GW, which would be about 2,400,000 sq miles. There's 1,015,756 linear miles of coast [2]. We know Hornsea is roughly square, so a 20 mile deep set of turbines doesn't interfere with each other, so that gives us ~20,000,000 sq miles of usable coast for wind, and again, if we double the existing electrical generation for the earth, we'd cover 2,400,000 sq miles. (obviously not all of that is usable, but we're talking orders of magnitude here) There's really no conceivable situation where we'd build enough wind farms to interfere with each other.
A maximum of 60% of the winds power can be extracted from wind (Bet'z law [1]) and modern turbines are only capable of catching 80% of that. There's lots of research in optimal spacing.
I read that a rule of thumb was 4-5 diameter widths between turbines at right angles to prevailing wind and then 7 diameter widths between rows facing the wind
I don't have the answer handy, but I do know there is a ton of research that goes into wind farm optimization. Location of the towers, cost to build, etc.
I am curious how much small elevation differences impact optimal positioning of turbines, as that is a non-issue with offshore wind. The turbines in land-based wind farms are not in a nice grid like the offshore wind farm. https://openinframap.org/#9.68/41.6112/-92.4971
The excerpt from an abstract below mentions the wake turbulence can cause other turbines to shut down.
"...The distance between the turbines is among other things dependent on the recovery of wind energy behind the neighboring turbines and the increased wind load. Models for the mean wind speed and turbulence intensity in wind turbine parks are considered with emphasis on modeling the spatial correlation. Representative limit state equations for structural failure of wind turbine towers are formulated. The probability of failure is determined taking into account that wind turbines are parked for wind speeds larger than 25 m/s resulting in reduced wind loads. An illustrative example is presented where illustrative models for the spatial correlation is taken into account"
Gartner et al. need to be seen as trendy and at the forefront of each industry they are in, so as you say there is never a trend they won't jump on. I suspect there is some value in actually talking to their analysts to work out which products actually work well, and which failed implementations are really due to client problems, but their written reports aren't much more than a list of the biggest players in each sector.
I still remember my introductory chemistry lecture at uni where the instructor said that a whole bunch of us had coasted up until now, and that in his experience those that had had to work hardest to get there, even if they had lower grades, would be the ones to succeed (he was right!)