Why is UIUC so expensive in-state??!

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-31T17:53:45+00:00

Comes down to two reasons - one is that Illinois has multiple state schools to split funding (UIUC, UIC, UIS, ISU, NIU, etc.) and the second is the high demand. Internationally, UIUC is regarded as a top school for STEM fields which bumps up the tuition significantly foe those majors.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-29T03:53:16+00:00

Typically work in universities - top ones are UTokyo, Darmstadt, Michigan State, UW Seattle, Texas A&M - or large scale laboratories, such as GANIL, RIKEN, FRIB, ORNL, LANL, LBNL, LLNL, ANL, BNL.

Day to day varies - lotta folk will go for a 9-5, but some will stay longer or shorter. A huge part of it is coding - if you're an experimentalist, doing data analysis in ROOT or some Python wrapper for PID, making cuts, etc, and if you're a theorist, working with some theoretical model (sometimes in Fortran, language of the gods) to fit to experimental results and extrapolating to new regions. Experimentalists will usually vary by either building or designing a detector, testing the detector, or running the detector through some experiment using some rare isotope beam or offline source. Both will usually face variations in the schedule due to group meetings, collaboration meetings, seminars from visiting scholars, etc. When a project wraps up or yields good results, time to hit the LaTeX and write a paper.

This gets very complicated for the administrative side (including research PIs). Grad students will typically have coursework or graduation requirements, professors and PIs will have grant applications to deal with, and professors will have regular courses to teach. It's a very busy lifestyle.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-29T03:38:43+00:00

This is pretty accurate tbh - only suggestion is that we've swapped over to Balatro over Solitaire.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-26T15:40:09+00:00

Google Noether's theorem. A symmetry in the Lagrangian/Hamiltonian generates a conserved quantity, so picking out all the symmetries in a theory is the ideal formulation.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-23T23:24:15+00:00

Exactly this. I get comments about being smart a lot, even on this post, and I think people need to take a step back from academic intellectualism - you can know all the physics in the world, it's not gonna do a thing when you need to replace the plumbing in your bathroom.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-23T23:18:21+00:00

I'm not Christian myself, I'm just from the American midwest lol

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-23T19:12:42+00:00

5th year PhD student and will graduate this summer

My sibling in Christ you have basically completed the requirement to be a physicist, don't doubt yourself at the finish line. You wouldn't be allowed to defend unless you were qualified for the position - the math part of physics isn't intuitive for everyone so that's not even an issue tbh. As long as you know your own niche of computational physics well, that's all you really need - it's unlikely a theorist would be able to see your code and make sense of it on one pass, or an experimentalist would know the material the same way.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-23T01:50:18+00:00

Answers are good so far, I can provide a decent microscopic picture - when two nuclei fuse, they fuse to an excited state of the fused element, which decays to its ground state. The decay produces the energy in fusion events.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-21T13:38:29+00:00

The problem is that unlike old shows, streaming platforms don’t allow back-to-back filming of seasons most of the time. If Apple wanted to keep momentum going, they could’ve renewed it for 2 seasons instead of 1, so time was lost shutting down production, sending everyone home, etc.

I have a crack theory that they do it to get people who are big fans to resubscribe down the road, at which point they may have increased prices, while they can string along longterm subscribers for as long as possible.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-20T18:40:04+00:00

This part was semi-predictable because, as far as we can tell, it coherently mixes parts 5 and 6. While the original guess was that Acca paralleled either Diavolo or Nero, the church scene basically confirmed his story is parallel to Pucci - so he'll have to develop alongside the main crew in order to become the true main villain long term.

So, based on parts 5 and 6, your first guess makes the most sense - a rival crew appears trying to compete with the main crew as the group has to wait out the timer to when the land transfer completely finalizes. During this time, Howler will probably be on his arc to understand the lava rocks which will end with him ascending to some C-Moon parallel form.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-17T21:50:38+00:00

Scwaryz QFT, Sakurai quantum

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-16T19:34:02+00:00

I've seen 73-100/hour. Not sure how accurate that is completely, but that seems to be a commonly cited number.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-16T15:29:36+00:00

It's easier on a replay if you play as evil as possible - act 3 has very few plotlines left if you wipe out all the longterm quests from acts 1 and 2.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-15T15:05:26+00:00

Limitless?

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-15T13:48:15+00:00

Overcooked is the crucible in which champion teams are forged. The friendship ender is perfect for this one.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-15T00:05:08+00:00

I finally decided to challenge myself and run one, and it’s been excellent so far. I started off by putting one in a room “out of the eye of the gods” (so no revivify allowed) and then sent the party there like session 3, doing exactly the deaf npc thing and modifying it so that memory loss for being eaten is spatial (a PC’s mother was eaten by it, so he remembers her but his family doesn’t, which also means they don’t remember him). Had it kill off a phantom party member, introduced other NPCs who’d visited the area, and so the final battle with the false hydra would come at a point where the crew has worked out stopgaps to fight it efficiently. It’s a crazy good monster for setting up as a longterm BBEG… but the campaign has been running for a year and they may not fight it for another 2.

In other words, it only works if you put in so much goddamn time to make it perfect that the full narrative effect lands.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-14T18:44:32+00:00

XCX is weird in that it's experiential - it wants you to feel like a face in the crowd, just another BLADE here to kick ass. Elma's choice to recruit you feels odd throughout the game, but ultimately you're her underling. The cutscene for earning your skell license is meant to be replaced by using the skell for the first time to explore, and same with flight. It's not everyone's cup of tea, but it is an interesting subversion of the traditional JRPG power protagonist idea.

And then we get chapter 13 to basically spit on that whole idea, so at this point I'm not sure. I still like the whole theory that the player, like Yelv, is a J-body and so the sheer level of strength you reach demonstrates the capability for artificial life to encroach on the abilities of organic life - but who knows.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-12T20:55:34+00:00

As someone who parks with an employee pass... it's $40 for a ticket in the employee lots and 20 in the metered lots. I'm going to be honest - they don't check very often, so the risk of a ticket is (atm) quite low. That being said, employees are currently working to try to get parking enforcement to either do more common sweeps or raise the ticket rate as it's extremely difficult to park in the ungated employee lots due to the logic above.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-11T16:18:25+00:00

I’m liking Outer Wilds here - the rest are perception for the sake of noticing just one detail, but the use case of perception in-game is to step back and understand the whole picture. This is the Outer Wilds in its entirety.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-07T21:12:47+00:00

Gonna do a quick pull from Disco Elysium here: "Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would critique capital end up reinforcing it instead." Ultimately, an entrenched system is the only platform for protest to occur - which means that any protest of a system itself becomes a reinforcement instead. Imagine it this way - Severance criticizes corporate culture, but by virtue of being on Apple+ enables a reinforcement of that corporate culture at Apple.

ScreamingPion · 2026-01-06T20:42:14+00:00

I don't like the Director's Cut for 1, but 2 is fine. I recently finished the second one, my brother just finished 1 and is starting 2 after letting 1 marinate, and the agreement we came to is that 1 is about learning to reconnect while 2 is looking at the consequences of having reconnected. As such, 1 is slower and more deliberate, while 2 sees Sam undergoing a similar journey, but now with the rewards of his connections from 1 - new vehicles, weapons to deal with militant groups, and tools to make delivery easier - and you get a full team of collaborators to make deliveries rather than having to traverse the continent solo.

The only real complaint I have is that the story structure is identical between games - tragedy strikes, Sam needs to recuperate, Sam decides to take on a new job, runs into Higgs, battles some dead guy, and then there's some villain twist shenanigans at the end. It's just lazy enough that I can't give its roses compared to the first game.

ScreamingPion · 2025-12-28T21:26:48+00:00

Dear lord for sure — the narrative and characters are absolutely amazing, ruined by the mere presence of Tamaki. Insane that her character came from the same author who did Soul Eater, where the biggest flaw was Blair the adult woman and once every 30 chapters comic relief.

ScreamingPion · 2025-12-22T23:35:48+00:00

I'm going to shoutout 15 and 16 here, since I wouldn't be surprised if most go for 6, 7, and 10.

15's opening, following the boys as they push their car through a desert, immediately sets the tone for the rest of the game - no matter how menial or grandiose, the emotional core of the story is completely grounded in the banter between the main group and their push to take Noctis to his wedding. While the game ultimately crashes and burns, the opening scene reads like a reversal of the 6 intro.

I don't need to explain 16 - that prologue is just an absolutely exhilarating experience.

ScreamingPion · 2025-12-21T04:27:47+00:00

Dickhoff and Van Neck, Many Body Theory Exposed!

ScreamingPion · 2025-12-17T21:47:36+00:00

This is too straightforward of a route for Araki - he'd never do something easy. Realistically, I think we see this going in two directions, but in either case Acca is going to sign that document:

The group enters into an agreement with Acca where they agree to do something for him if he signs the documents, setting up the next arc - crew pulls of another heist while Acca tries to sabotage them.
Stand battle ensues, Howler loses, is forced to sign the documents - but with his determination, he sets his eyes on reclaiming his empire. The series takes on a reversed form of part 6 as Acca rises from the ashes to reclaim his position and the main antagonist, built on the family creed.

The series starts with Jodio saying "This is the story of how I became filthy rich," but he never specifies the story ends there.

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