(TL;DR: As with most other things, this is also because of Special Relativity)

By far, one of the most fundamental questions. However, after going through dozens of my own thought experiments on this and flipping over (though not deeply technical) a lot of extreme fundamental Physics, I still need a convincing answer. Though, at this point, I am satisfied with the extent of the explanation I have gathered from various sources. I have also learned to ask this question in the right way over the years. It's not "Why do like charges repel?" but rather, it's "Some charges repel each other. We call them like-charges. But why do they repel?" Rather than writing it here, I'd point the reader to this answer on Physics Stack Exchange where the answerer has summarized most of the points I would have otherwise jotted down here.

Easily the question that I have spent the most time on during my college days, and obviously one of the few that continues to baffle me to this day!
As we know, light sometimes behaves as a wave, and some other times (depending on the experimental setup, observation methodology, etc.) as a particle. This is, to me, simply absurd! And outrageous.
For now, I'm calling this "WaPar Theory of Light" (Pronounced 'vapor', has a catchier tone than Wave Particle Duality) but untangling this mystery will be my research topic if I get into a Physics doctoral program (which my partner has agreed to fund :)).

Disclaimer: This is my point-of-view/inference on what happened on MH370 rather than an official report.

The disappearance of MH370 has been a long-standing mystery in the aviation world. Given the lack of CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) and FDR (Flight Data Recorder) to conclusively prove anything, the loss of the aircraft has resulted in myriad theories that range from mostly logical to wildly suppositional to borderline conspiratorial trying to explain the incident.

My take on theoretically explaining a mystery of this nature uses a mental examination tool that I term "Sherlock's Razor" - which is nothing more than a blend of two popular analysis techniques - Occam's Razor (often inaccurately paraphrased as the simplest explanation is usually the best one) and Sherlock Holmes's assessment that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Rather than building the theory bottom up, I will take the approach of end-to-start order because it eliminates many questions raised across discussions.Firstly, in fact lastly, if the Captian (or the First Officer or a third party, and for the sake of simplicity, let's call them - perpetrator) was consciously handling the flight when it landed in the southern Indian Ocean, thereby destroying itself and was conscious throughout, then it's almost impossibly unlikely that they'd have flown south-east "towards" Australia where there could be potentially a lot more radars (Australia, Indonesia, etc.) and detection devices than flying southwards but towards the west at the same angle where there's barely any landmass. As the image below shows, flying the airplane a little westwards would have an even better chance of non-detection and non-recovery due to the remoteness of the central south Indian Ocean. Given this, I will infer that the airplane was on autopilot, at least at this point. 

Building on this assumption, if the airplane did manage to fly for that long without any interruption, it's safe to assume that there was no major fire at the point (which would have caused the airplane to come down sooner) or significant structural damage. This would mean that whatever caused the whole saga of MH370 was not a violent incident (like an explosion, major fire, collision, etc.) but rather a local, silent one - like a catastrophic power failure, a hijack gone wrong, depressurization, a minor fire that led to a chain of events, etc.)

At this point, it's out of order but nevertheless coherent to answer another glaring point raised by many analysts that it's a deliberate act (by either the Captain, the First Officer, or a third intruder) because the whole communication going dark and change in flight's direction happened precisely at the hand-off between two national airspaces when the Kuala Lumpur ATC handed MH370 off to Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh ATC. The handover could be a chaotic window because there's evidently scope for latency in communication between two ATCs if things were to go wrong. Based on this, many argue that this time was deliberately chosen. However, I point out that the handover is NOT the only interesting event that happened at this point. Another equally critical thing had occurred just before the hand-off - which warrants a similar extent of consideration. And that is the fact that the aircraft had risen to 35000 feet just minutes before the hand-off. Why is this important? It is noteworthy because if there were any incident at this point that resulted from a loss of cabin pressure (either gradual or semi-immediate), its effects would immediately become apparent at 35000 feet and above.

Below is the timeline (in MYT (Malaysian Standard Time) to give the reader crew's perspective of time):

1. 00:42 - Flight MH370 takes off from runway 32R at Kuala Lumpur International Airport
2. 00:42:53 - ATC gives Flight 370 clearance to climb to Flight Level 180, approximately 18,000 ft, and proceed directly to waypoint IGARI
3. 00:46:58 - ATC gives Flight 370 clearance to climb to Flight Level 250; approximately 25,000 feet
4. 00:50:08 - ATC gives Flight 370 clearance to climb to Flight Level 350; approximately 35,000 feet (This is where the aircraft starts its ascent to 35000 ft)
5. 01:01:17 - The Captain informs ATC that Flight 370 has reached Flight Level 350. So, at 01:01:17, the flight is at 35000 feet. Any gradual or semi-immediate hypoxia event here will start affecting the crew.
6. 01:07:56 - The Captain confirms again that Flight 370 is flying at Flight Level 350 (I frankly did not get why there was a need to confirm that again to the ATC but could it be an unwritten protocol?)
7. 01:19:30 - KL ACC instructs the crew to contact Ho Chi Minh ACC (HCM ACC). The aircraft passes waypoint IGARI as the captain replies, "Good night. Malaysian three seven zero." This is the final voice contact with Flight 370.
8. 01:21:13 - The position symbol of Flight 370 disappears from KL ACC radar, indicating the aircraft's transponder is no longer functioning. Malaysian military radar continues to track the aircraft, which "almost immediately" begins a turn to the left until it is traveling in a south-westerly direction

Two things to note from above:

1. The flight gradually ascended from levels 180 to 250 to 350 as expected and was at 350 level for 20 minutes (from 01:01 to 01:21 at which there has been some problem and the flight disappeared). So, if there was some gradual event that led to a hypoxia situation, it's not unrealistic that it unfolded around the hand-off period. Additionally, an interesting point to note is that the Captain's last words - "Good night. Malaysian three seven zero." is not standard. He was supposed to read back the frequency. It would be ideal to do a time-series check from the Captain's previous flights to see if this non-standardness was routine for the Captain or if we are looking at the onset of mild hypoxia here - the Captain not being able to crystal-clearly communicate in a standard way.  
2. Quite clearly, this event did not only affect pressurization but also other power systems. This rendered ACORS, the transponder, and SATCOM useless. Pilots possibly tried to send SQUAK 7700 but since that needs a working transponder, it might not have reached the ground. At this point, the pilots - as expected from them - would have adhered to the proper prioritization protocol of - "Aviate, Navigate, Communicate - in that order". 

At this juncture, I hypothesize that the autopilot was either manually disengaged or it disengaged by itself due to major electrical and/or other failures, and the pilot in command took the manual sharp left turn in a south-westerly direction as picked up by the Malaysian military primary radar. That was, in my opinion, not in an attempt to do an emergency landing at either Penang International Airport or Langkawi International Airport, a 13,000-foot-long (4.0 km) airstrip with an approach over water with no obstacles, but in an attempt to land at Sultan Ismail Petra Airport, which was actually the closest to check point IGARI. The landind itself never happened obviously, which means that either both pilots were fighting (literal) fire or other malfunction that did not let them think about anything else, or one of them was already incapacitated, and the other one was handling other issues at hand. Given the experience of both pilots, I'd unfortunately have to assume that the more experienced Captain Shah was incapacitated either due to fire or hypoxia, and that the less experienced co-pilot Fariq Hamid was handling the plane. (Likely unrelated, but as a side note here, I'd like to add that the copilot's mobile phone was detected by the BBFARLIM2 base station at Bandar Baru Air Itam on Penang Island at 17:52:27 UTC).
The most interesting event happens at 2:25 AM MYT. The SDU send a "log-on" request to the Inmarsat satellite. There are only a few instances when SDU sends such a request, and the most likely scenario here is that the SDU was restarted, implying the the power came back up!!! (Or, one could argue it was manually turned on again, but why would anyone do that if the idea was to fly dark and never be accessible?). This is also prominent from another angle because when power came back up, it not only reactivated SDU but other crucial equipments as well, including the navigation system. How do we know this? We know this because SDU needs the navigational system to be active to maintain the antennae pointed towards the satellite. This also could potentially mean the autopilot got re-engaged (if it was non-manually taken out earlier due to power failure). The re-engagement of the auto-pilot opens up some options for the aircraft's next set of turns.

The aircraft had three autopilot modes. The standard mode for en-route navigation is LNAV, which navigates along a great circle route between waypoints, adjusting the aircraft's heading to compensate for wind. Other modes will maintain the aircraft's heading direction or the aircraft's track (flight path in a straight direction). Depending on what mode the aircraft was in, an abrupt southwardly turn and the close-to-straight path of the flight from there on until its eventual fate could be surmised as due to the sudden and swift reengagement of autopilot.

Finally, two simple points I'd like to make again on why it's unlikely that pilots deliberately ditched the plane.

1. There was absolutely no reason for pilot(s) to manually restart the power, thereby turning on SDU that would send out vital clues, if this whole thing was deliberate. The SDU log-on request at 2:25 AM MYT has to be non-manual.
2. The average weight of the 41-ish items (by the time of this writing) of floating debris recovered is around 5 kg. The zero fuel weight of the Boeing 777-200ER was around 175,000 kg. This implies up to around 35,000 items of debris, which in turn implies a severe impact. If the pilot(s) really wanted to make it disappear with least number of clues left behind, they'd have tried to ditch the aircraft in order to reduce the number of floating debris, and this doesn't seem to be the case at all.
3. If the pilot(s) were still controlling the plane during its southward travel and really wanted to take it as far away from civilization as they could, they'd fly it away from Australia and not towards it. If pilot(s) had done so much research, it's unlikely they'd have missed Australia's JORN tracker that could have potentially detected the plane (although it did not as it was not operational on that day!). They'd fly it south west, more towards Reunion but far south.
   
   

At the very heart of it, Machine Learning (or at least Regression) is common sense - assigning proper weights to factors causing an event based on historical evidence (data, technically). For example, you can assign a score to whether someone will clear your company's interview process (say, a technical interview in a software company) by identifying factors like experience, past employers, college, number of Leetcode questions they have solved (lol ;)), etc., and then based on historical data, learning what factors get what weights. But my question is, why should even that work? Why should the universe behave in a way the events are predictable this way?

Well, it turns out that all of this is due to one of the very prominent theorems in Statistics called the Central Limit Theorem. The central limit theorem (CLT) establishes that, in many situations, for independent and identically distributed random variables, the sampling distribution of the standardized sample mean tends towards the standard normal distribution even if the original variables themselves are not normally distributed.

This forms the basis for a majority of applications we see in Machine Learning, notably Regression Analysis. Here is another illustration of the theorem at work.

Well it turns out I was "seeing it wrong" all along. The statement that atoms are 99.9999% empty is a bit misleading. It's true that the nucleus of an atom is very small, but it's also very dense. The electrons in an atom are much less massive than the nucleus, but they are spread out over a much larger volume. This means that the electrons actually occupy most of the space in an atom.

So why can't we see through objects if they're mostly empty space? The reason is that the electrons in an atom are constantly moving around. When light hits an object, it interacts with the electrons in the object. The electrons absorb some of the light's energy and then re-emit it in different directions. This is what causes us to see objects as opaque. There's also a caveat though. For example, how is glass transparent then? Glass is transparent because the energy of the photons of visible light is not enough to excite the electrons in the glass molecules. When a photon hits an electron in a glass molecule, the electron can only absorb a photon if the energy of the photon is equal to or greater than the energy gap between the electron's current energy level and a higher energy level. The energy gap in glass molecules is too large for the photons of visible light to excite the electrons, so the photons are transmitted through the glass.

If the electrons in an atom were perfectly still, then light would pass through the object without being scattered. However, this is not the case. The electrons are always moving, so they always scatter light. This is why we can't see through objects, even though they are mostly empty space. So, the next time you think about how empty atoms are, remember that it's not really empty at all. The electrons in an atom are constantly moving around, and they interact with light in a way that makes objects opaque.

This might look like a silly question, but there is an underlying fundamental question. There are things that are uniform - circle in 2D, sphere in 3D etc. If anything in 2D is NOT a circle, there must be a reason why some segment of the circle had more or less radius, making it not a circle. Meaning, there is a "specialty". This exlains why most fruits are spherical. However, to this day, I couldn't figure the reason, evolutionary or not, behind the awkward shapes of mangoes and strawberries!

I do think this response on Quora is sensical though doesn't conclusively answer.

Obviously, there are a plethora of research papers that discuss this. Unfortunately, most of them focus on "where does the brain store memory" rather than categorizing how it stores different kinds of information. I'd be goddamned if all the different types of information were stored in the exact same manner and using the same strategy!

In Solid State Physics, a hole is a quasiparticle denoting the lack of an electron at a position where one could exist in an atom or atomic lattice. Velocity of electron, though is more than that of a hole! I haven't been able to find a "fully convincing" explanation to this (though there are plenty of arguments about this).

An analogy I use for this (I'm aware it's not the most accurate, but for understandability) is if we define "darkness" as absence of light, I'd not expect "darkness" to travel slower than the speed of light!

Fair disclaimer that this first came up in up our middle school lunch discussions, at which point our knowledge of these topics were rudimentary at best.

So when one of the friends in our group asked why wouldn't we (meaning (the government of) India where this discussion was happening) simply print more money and distribute among the poor who could use it to buy ration and other basic amenities, the prompt answer from the smartest one in the group was that the ink that India uses on banknotes comes from the US who regulate them based on the gold reserves in India, and the ink for the US itself is regulated and supplied by the United Nations! And everyone seemed to agree that it made absolute sense.

And then we were in high school where we witnessed this "printing money" in our class in a different way. A newly appointed teacher of Social Studies was very liberal in their evaluation of answer papers of exams, and practically half the class got over 90 out of 100. There were a dozen students with 100 out of 100. This "liberal evaluation" was indeed the equivalent of "printing free money". What ended up happening was disastrous indeed. Given everyone had more marks now all of a sudden, the cost of "getting a rank" (meaning the top ten in the class) shot up drastically (Hyperinflation). Everyone fought for 100 out of 100, despite with the exact same levels of knowledge and skillset thay used to have when they were getting well below 75 out of 100 (Everyone is rich but nobody has valuables). But most importantly, since that "free marks" wasn't backed up anything tangible, there was no value for it outside of the classroom where that teacher taught.

So when the final exams came, and the evaluation was done by a publicly chosen set of teacher from all over the state, the marks of these students collapsed. This was because the students couldn't leverage the "free marks" they had got outside of classroom because there was no acceptance of it outside. We realized later that this is the equivalent of a country printing a lot of "Rupees" (the currency of India) but unable to use it to pay for the oil imports because the rupee is not accpted by the supplier.

Finally, this brings up a different question! So, what about the US Dollar? That's a reserve currency, the world's exchange currency. And it's not even back by gold reserves anymore. So, if the US does keep printing dollars, and maybe use it to pay offshore bills/interest, what happens??

I'd say that it will lead to a rising inflation internally, and a lack of confidence in dollar outside leading to other countries becoming less likely to hold or trade it, whose combined effects will result in global economic instability.

Throughout literary history, writers were articulate enough to express emotions using words. It had to come to the time-deprived sms generation to employ innovative tactics like emojis!

Evolutionarily speaking, there's no doubt whatsoever that egg came first. Birds evolved from dinosaurs. One of the key changes that happened during this evolution was the development of a hard-shelled egg. This allowed birds to lay their eggs on land, where they were less vulnerable to predators. The first bird eggs were laid by dinosaurs that were very similar to chickens, but not quite chickens themselves. These eggs hatched into chicks that were also very similar to modern-day chickens.

However, when most people ask this question, they actually mean - 'Which one came first? Egg or whatever that laid that egg (which should have come from a similar egg in the first place)?' Even to that, the answer still lies in a "change model" where a cycle itself is part of a larger cycle that evolves the smaller, constituent cycles (in this case, of a chicken-egg cycle).

More than the correct answer, which is not easy to obtain given the explosion of knowledge via the internet, what's more interesting is how the line of thought progressed twenty years ago (around which time this question was first asked in Science class in primary school).

Student: Ma'am, why does the water extinguish the fire?
Teacher: Well, because the water is cold.
Smarter student: But even the hot water extinguishes a fire?
Teacher: Ah yeah. So, because it's liquid.
Student: I see. But kerosene and oil, which are also liquids, don't and, in fact, appear to make it more intense?

As you see, it wasn't apparent at the first attempt, unlike what you'd imagine in the Quora/ChatGPT generation. Today, however, we know that water extinguishes fire via a combination of cooling (water absorbs heat from flames making it less sustainable) and smothering (fire needs Oxygen, water vapor which has only dissolved Oxygen, cuts off access to Oxygen).

This is one of those questions that made me go to the fundamental definitions of basic entities - what is temperature?; what constitutes a vacuum?; does true vacuum really exist?; what about a quantum vacuum?; etc.

Vacuum does not have a temperature in the traditional sense. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energy of the particles in a substance. In a vacuum, there are no particles, so there is no kinetic energy and therefore, no temperature.
However, the temperature of a vacuum can be defined in terms of the radiation that is present. The cosmic microwave background radiation is a faint afterglow of the Big Bang. It is present in all parts of the universe. The temperature of this radiation is about 2.7 Kelvin, so in a sense, the temperature of a vacuum is about 2.7 Kelvin.

Another way to think about the temperature of a vacuum is in terms of the heat transfer that can occur. Heat can be transferred through conduction, convection, and radiation. Conduction and convection require particles to be present, so they cannot occur in a vacuum. However, radiation can travel through a vacuum, so heat can be transferred through radiation in a vacuum.

The heat transfer rate through radiation depends on the temperature of the objects involved and the distance between them. The only things present in a vacuum are cosmic microwave background radiation and any objects placed in the vacuum. The temperature of these objects will determine the rate of heat transfer between them.

So, while a vacuum does not have a temperature in the traditional sense, it can be thought of as having a temperature of about 2.7 Kelvin, and heat transfer can occur through radiation in a vacuum.

As an extreme materialist who subscribes to reductionsist principles, I'm convinced that we are alone in this vast universe (at least when we are talking about similar intelligent life akin to us). I believe in the statistical fact that the hype and hoopla about the scale of the universe caused by linguistics induced bewilderment through phrases like "trillions of stars in our own galaxy and trillions of such galaxies in the known universe" is severely dwarfed by the chance of occurrence of the low key mutation that caused human voice box to be able to produce complex sounds and thus language, which is just one of a gazillion requirements for intelligent life. On one hand, trillions of galaxies and each has trillions of stars and each star could potentially have 10 planets on average - only gives us 10 power 19 total candidate planets. On the other hand, the chance of mutation that triggered voice box changes leading to language in the long run is estimated to be 10 power minus 60. Consider billions of such mutations and their probabilities. You get the idea.

So the question I'm asking is not if we are alone in the universe, but why are we alone in the universe! Why here? Why us?
The closest convincing answers for this come in the form of "rare --region-- hypothesis"

This universe, given its Fine Structure Constant value is rare.
This galaxy is rare.
This planetary system is rare.
And finally, and most importantly, our floating blue planet is rare.

I consider myself a (evidently self-proclaimed :)) coffee connoisseur, sipping around four cups of coffee a day. From various ways of making an aromatic cup of coffee to understanding the supply chain of sourcing coffee beans, I like all aspects of coffee drinking. Included in that is understanding the biological effect of different types of coffee. While the answer to this question on coffee keeping us awake is easy to find online (this TED video being one of the explanations that breaks it up effectively), it's still going to be my secondary subject of PhD when I retire, albeit at a much deeper level :-D

Obviously, there are many contending theories proposed by both anthropologists and evolutionary biologists, but my money is on the premastication or the kiss-feeding theory.

Regardless to the later political and cultural reasons, the historical or the evolutionary reason is simple that right-handedness is the majority. Because of that, In ancient times, most traffic was on the left side of the road as it allowed right-handed individuals to keep their sword hand closer to potential adversaries. This practice continued into the Middle Ages, and many countries, including Britain, adopted LHT as the standard.
However, during the French Revolution, a shift towards RHT occurred in France, possibly as a way to distance themselves from the British monarchy. As France's influence grew, many countries in continental Europe adopted RHT.

Sometimes, I question the validity of this question. But that could also be because I haven't found an explanation that satsisfies me. The question fundamentally boils down to the nature of time and there's no conclusive, all-encompassing explanation of it (not to be confused with the meaturement of what we call time).

The evolution of a single heart in vertebrates, including humans, is an intriguing question that has been explored by evolutionary biologists. While many organs, such as kidneys, lungs, and eyes, have evolved in pairs, the heart has remained a singular structure throughout vertebrate evolution. Several factors likely contributed to this evolutionary outcome:

Efficiency and Coordination: Having a single, powerful pump for blood circulation provides a more efficient and coordinated system for delivering oxygen and nutrients throughout the body. A single heart can generate stronger pressure and maintain a more consistent flow, ensuring that all tissues receive adequate blood supply.

Space Constraints: The thoracic cavity, where the heart resides, has limited space. Accommodating two hearts would require a larger body cavity, which could impose other anatomical and physiological trade-offs.

Synchronization Challenges: Coordinating the contractions of two hearts would pose significant challenges. Precise synchronization would be crucial to avoid conflicting pressure waves and ensure efficient blood flow. A single heart eliminates this synchronization issue.

Evolutionary Trajectory: Early in vertebrate evolution, a single heart proved to be an effective and efficient design for blood circulation. As vertebrates diversified, this basic design was retained and refined, leading to the highly specialized and efficient heart we see in humans and other mammals.

Adaptive Advantages: A single heart may have provided certain adaptive advantages, such as reducing the risk of circulatory complications and simplifying the overall cardiovascular system.

Evolutionary History: The ancestral heart in early vertebrates was likely a single-chambered structure. Over time, as vertebrates evolved, the heart became more complex. It started as a simple, tubular structure and gradually developed into the four-chambered heart seen in mammals and birds. Once the four-chambered heart had evolved, there may have been limited selective pressure for the heart to evolve into a paired structure.

In summary, the evolution of a single heart in vertebrates likely reflects a combination of efficiency, anatomical constraints, synchronization challenges, and adaptive advantages. This design has proven to be remarkably successful, enabling vertebrates to develop complex circulatory systems that support their diverse lifestyles and physiological demands.

According to this research, Primatologist Signe Preuschoft traces the smile back over 30 million years of evolution to a "fear grin" stemming from monkeys and apes, who often used barely clenched teeth to portray to predators that they were harmless or to signal submission to more dominant group members.

Simple answer - unless the "medium" of transportation is flat (like a road, which is human-made), wheels won't work, or at least far less efficient than all other modes of transport like legs, fins, slithering etc. So, natural selection did not favor it.

It's also why wheels in humanmade transport appeared well after using horses and camels, once there were flat roads or rail tracks where the wheels can "roll".

It also answers why most auto-insurers don't cover if you're not driving on paved roads. If not natural selection, you can always see the convergence in capitalism. ;)

The current understanding of sexual orientation is that it is a complex trait influenced by a combination of genetic, harmonal, and environmental factors.

Turns out this is one of the more straightforward Fermi questions to solve, thanks to the highly concentrated population of the world around Asia. With China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, parts of Russia, and Indonesia - all in the world's top ten populations - if an hour falls in the sleeping window of these countries, it's safe to assume that's when the majority of the world is asleep.

If we assume 11 PM to 7 AM as the sleeping window, this turns out to be when it's 4 AM in China. That will be 1 AM in Pakistan, 1:30 AM in India, 2 AM in Bangladesh, 3 AM to 5 AM in Indonesia across its three timezones, and 11 PM in Moscow timezone, where the majority of the Russian population reside.

Thus, 8 PM UTC is the time when most people in the world are asleep. So, a planet-wide disaster happening at 8 PM UTC would cause maximum destruction given the slowest response, with the maximum number of people sleeping. Or, analogously, a planet-wide boon/blessing happening at 8 PM would have the slowest positive impact.

What is the very beginning of everything, and why there had to be a beginning at all is my all time favorite, unanswered question!

This can be answered in two ways, but my favorite and the easier explanation is basically just two words - Planck Length.

Essentially, the world is quantum and thus, so is the length. You cannot further divide Planck length, making Zeno's paradox solvable through Physics.

I will give $100 to anyone who solves this (or satisfactorily explains WHY it cannot be solved in an undefined interval). I'm therefore calling this my micro-Clay problem :)

The answer for both is more non-technical than technical. The existence of separate tournaments/awards has little to do with gender based talent but has more to do with historical context (Chess was historically a male-dominated game) and encouraging participation.

One of the easiest to think through and figure the answer out.
The reason why clocks move clockwise is because the earliest clocks were sundials. Sundials use the shadow of the sun to tell the time. The shadow of the sun moves in a clockwise direction, so the clock hands were built to mimic this natural movement.

I'll give you an analogy that I keep fine-tuning to understand dreams.

Imagine a Costco store (or a big retailer of that sort) whose timings are from 9 AM to 6 PM. The day-time-store-manager Pete is in charge of managing the supply chain for that day, resolving any issues, tending to emergencies, managing finance of the day and such chores. Pete also keeps a perfect record of everything he did by writing them down in the ledger.
At 6 PM, the store is closed. You ask why? Well, Pete is tired, and the supply chain is running thin. Items need to be replenished for the next day, a daily audit of the finances need to be done, the supply trucks need to be welcomed to refill - you know a lot of maintenance stuff need to be done. The cost of running the store 24x7 by setting up and managing an alternate nightly crew is just too high for the nature of profits the store is making.

At night though, while the store is closed till the next morning 9 AM, somebody needs to manage the above mentioned maintenance things. That's where the night-time-manager Jake comes in. Jake doesn't do everything that Pete did. He only does what is needed for the next day for the most part. However, there is a major difference in how he does things. He keeps NO RECORD of what he does! He doesn't write down anywhere.

So, the next morning when Pete (and customers come in), the store looks fresh, it looks replenished. But Pete has no idea on what all went on at night because Jake keeps no records. The only way Pete would know what Jake is doing is if he abruptly barges in to the store at night! However, Jake is kind of an extreme introvert, so the moment he sees Pete, he simply runs out of the store! Pete, however, would be able to get a vague glimpse of what Jake was doing, but not a methoical list though (because Jake never kept any record).

That's our day time consciousness Pete, and night time consciousness Jake. While being in REM sleep, humans do vivid dreaming. However, experiences of REM sleep are not transferred to permanent memory due to absence of norepinephrine, and due to the fact that the hippocampus, the brain region responsible for memory formation, is less active during REM sleep. But when you wake up the next morning (when Pete comes in to work), things look fresh. You feel fresh. Whether Jake did anything at all last night would still be an unknown as he doesn't keep records for the next morning.
However, if Pete barges in abruptly at night, meaning if you wake up in the middle of the sleep/dream, there is a very good chance you'll be able to narrate your dream, though seemingly not making much sense!

In one word, stoically. Our entire neural system is developed evolutionarily to help us survive the everyday problems. Fortunately, quantum characteristics of nature don't show up often in real life scenarios at macro-scale. Thus, there was no way for the brain to adapt itself for the quantom world's "weird" behavior. However, as human race advanced, and as Schrodinger put forth his famous equation, the brain was caught between a crossfire of logic as it knew it and quantum weirdness. But I believe the way to take it is stoically, knowing that the universe we see and live in everyday life is just a tiny part of the actual, generic universe.

As I kept thinking about this question over many years, the question itself has evolved (no pun intended) in my mind. The concept of genes having an "ultimate goal" is not accurate from a biological or an epistomological perspective. Genes are fundamental units of heredity that carry instructions for the development, functioning, and maintenance of living organisms. Their primary purpose is to pass on genetic information from one generation to the next and ensure the survival and reproduction of the organism. So, in a way, though "ensuring the survival and reproduction of the organism pool they're made of" could be termed as their goal, it's just an emergent behavior. And if that indeed is the 'goal', clearly we are far away from it. It has to also solve many puzzles that obviously go against that idea, the biggest such being the evolution of sexual reproduction. In my opinion, this is a mathematical framework or a model where a certain set of sequences are happening because they're least entropic (which is besically what makes them easy to reproduce the processes/mechanisms).

From that perspective, I do agree that for an intelligent species like humans, both the question of suicide as put forth by Albert Camus and his answer/explanation that why it is NOT the solution are relevant.

Personally, I believe in the "hard work" of Andrew Wiles, who proved Fermat's Last Theorem with a complex, 129-page proof after years of research, rather than in the "potential genius" of Fermat, who claimed he had a 'marvelous proof.'

An investigative start-up's potential first project :-)

Again, as someone who believes in a combination of Occam's Razor and Sherlock's Science of Deduction, I do not hold the view that Area 51 might have aliens and alien spacecraft. However, I agree it's a place where all kinds of cool and weird defense-related experiments exist.

One of the mysteries which, if they really wanted, would be easy to solve. But clearly, it will never get solved.

I realized that there are actually two questions in this.

1. Why is there no Perfect/True Random Number Generator?
2. How does the gender classification happen in humans?

The answer to the first one is simple, and that's because the physical world is definitely deterministic in classical systems (meaning, given enough information about the system, you can always predict the next state), and in quantum systems which introduce randomness at quantum levels, even though there are quantum RNGs available that generate random numbers through quantum vacuum fluctuations, these do not conspicuously show up at macro levels for any large physical systems to leverage.

The answer to the second question - that of gender "creation" - is also a known one. This is how it happens in a nutshell (pun unintended):

1. Sex Determination System in humans is XY System. There are a plethora of other such systems throughout living systems.
2. In humans, the presence of the Y chromosome is responsible for triggering male development; in the absence of the Y chromosome, the fetus will undergo female development. If you were wondering where exactly a chromosome lives, you can check this. Very specifically, a single gene - SRY - in the Y chromosome present on the Y chromosome acts as a signal to set the developmental pathway towards maleness.
3. Now the question is further simpler - how and when does the Y chromosome enter? (meaning if it had not, there would only be females and a different kind of reproduction system). It turns out that males have an XY pair of chromosome, and females have an XX. Meaning, that wherever that Y came from, must have been from a sperm cell (from father) because an egg cell (from mother), purely from a logical angle, wouldn't have had it in the first place.
4. That boils down the question to - how does the body maintain a balance of male and female sperm cells and maintain randomness in having one of them fertilize an egg cell?
   Yes, there are male and female sperm cells. That just mean that, given sperm cells are haploid, a male sperm has a 23rd chromosome that is a Y and a female sperm has a 23rd chromosome that is an X. If the male sperm fertilizes the egg cell, the resulting new life will be male (as it will a Y from father's sperm cell and an X from mother's egg cell). If a female sperm cell fertilizes the egg cell, the resulting life will be female. (as it will get an X from father's sperm cell and an X from mother's egg cell).
   Thus, everything is now reduced to - how does the sperm cell get determined as a male sperm cell (with Y chromosome) or a female sperm cell (with X chromosome).
5. To answer that, two things need to be noted. First, sperm cells (being haploid) do not reproduce. Secondly, there has to be, thus, a process where a different diploid cell (the one with 46 chromosomes) gets divided into this haploid sperm (one with 23 chromosomes) so that the other 23 chromosomes can come from the egg cell of that mother.
   That different diploid cell that gives rise to haploid sperm cells happens to be germ cells. Germ cells give rise to sperm cells through a process called Spermatogenesis. Spermatogenesis has several distinct stages, but none more interesting than Spermatidogenesis, which is where the cells undergo diploid to haploid transition. So, the next question is that what factors influence this process of Spermatidogenesis that give rise to male and female sperm cells.
6. Turns out the crux of Spermatidogenesis is Meiosis! And Meiosis I is the exact stage where the diploid primary spermatocytes divide into hapload secondary spermatocytes. Further close look at different stages of meiosis shows that, due to a process called Synapsis, the X and Y chromosomes of any sperm cell are near-perfectly divided into two haploid cells with one of them being an X (female sperm cell) abd the other being a Y (a male sperm cell), thereby maintaining the balance again!


Aah, that was an anti-climax! Summarily, gender creation seems random not because some process is maintaining a random behavior, but because of the opposite - a process (Synapse during the Prophase stage of Meiosis) is actually maintaining that there is NO randomness there!

Interestingly, the categorization is largely democratic within the Academy jury. According to the official rules, the leading role and supporting role categories are tabulated simultaneously. If any performance should receive votes in both categories, the achievement shall be placed only on the ballot in that category in which, during the tabulation process, it first receives the required number of votes to be nominated. In the event that the performance receives the number of votes required to be nominated in both categories simultaneously, the achievement shall be placed only on the ballot in that category in which it receives the greater percentage of the total votes.

I mean, I only included these because I want to highlight that as knowledge sharing exploded, how easy it got to get answers to these questions. When I was growing up, I literally had to find a book or a newspaper article that answered this. With internet - on Wikipedia, and then on Q&A sites, it got exponentially easier. Then, with GenerativeAi, even easier.
I believe the next step in knowledge explosion is "Neural Share" - sharing thoughts and answering questions between brains.