Most people who proclaim some universal hatred for California that I've bumped into seem to fall into two overlapping categories, those that have certain political beliefs that feel the need to distance themselves from nearly every aspect of the state, and those don't want or know how to seek out an appropriate social circle and are unhappy with what they get keeping to themselves (e.g. the type who say you can't find friends in LA).

Actually, there is a third, someone imitating those two thinking that is what you do about some places, which might be what this guy is actually doing. Considering he over inflates a controversy about the Cuban sandwich, and then says Tampa sucks so it doesn't matter. Even if I agree the key lime pie is more iconic for Florida, the modern Cuban sandwich is pretty much a Florida dish and exceptional even when done wrong.

Chocolate in spicy food works if you make it subtle and not overwhelming, like a good mole poblano sauce.

You have a fair point that any degree can be a risk without a plan to pay for it or for making bad career decisions. But that risk is not uniform across majors. I have seen people study the "wrong" branch of physics and others that just wanted to bail out of the slow, bottlenecked climb of academia, and they all went pretty quickly into industry jobs, often unrelated to their particular field of study. Anecdotally, the few physics majors I knew that ended up unemployed out of grad school were the ones that were holding out to stay in academia within some competitive subfield, while I know several people with graduate degrees in the humanities that are working retail or unemployed. More formally, there are some attempts at gathering stats around to track employment of different majors (APS does for physics) and there are some wide variations in employment and underemployment.

And while grad students are poor, there is quite a bit of variation there. Engineering and science majors typically get tuition covered in grad school and a stipend for doing work that contributes to their thesis, allowing most to come out without any debt. Many places have very limited number of TA positions to pay for humanities majors, and so a lot of those grad students end up with no income from working on their thesis and have to pay tuition on top of that. Unless they came into grad school with money or work an outside solid job at the same time, that makes it very difficult to come out of grad school without debt.

As already stated, attending university does not need to be about getting a job. But like any other large expense in life, your current and future job prospects can factor heavily into decision making. Just as if you have a huge passion for expensive sports cars or flying a high end airplane, you might want to consider saving up prior to fulfilling those passions instead of going into massive debt.

I wholly advocate using universities for more than just advancing a career, including pursuing interests in the name of just pursuing interests. But it can still be a bad life decision if you try to combine it being both a career decision and interest without understanding the risks involved, or otherwise pursuing it without a solid plan to cover the costs. If you end up spending 20 years paying for it, even people with a strong interest in what they studied in school may end up with regrets or second thoughts.

The memory of some system wit hysteresis implies some change of internal state and is not at issue with the kind of time invariance Noether's law refers to. Unless you use rules/laws that abstract away that internal state to get a description of what is going on, then you end up with a system that might not conserve energy (via exchanging it with whatever you abstracted away). Otherwise, "repeat an experiment at a different time" implies setting up everything the same, including the same starting point in whatever hysteresis effect you are dealing with.

I didn't have a chance to read the wikipedia article beyond seeing it had an introduction section. Her theorem basically amounts to there being an equivalence between certain kinds of symmetries in laws of physics and laws that state something is conserved. For example, the idea that an experiment should act the same anywhere if you recreate the same conditions, i.e. just moving everything from empty point A to empty point B, mathematically implies that momentum is conserved. Rotational symmetry, that turning things to point in a different direction doesn't change things, implies conservation of angular momentum, and being able to repeat an experiment at a different time implies conservation of energy. As long as some really basic laws of physics (basically an extension of Newton's laws) are true, then conservation of energy and the time symmetry will always be a pair, with violation of the former implying violation of the latter.

Most metals not containing iron (or a lot of nickel or cobalt) won't have a problem with the static magnetic field. Although the RF fields can induce heating in some conductors, and the switching gradient fields can induce small currents that then interact with the static field. This shouldn't be an issue for most metal implants (electrical implants can be a different story), although I've heard warnings about metal implants related to the ear, as the effects would be in the audio range. That could be detrimental to a musical instrument, and I don't know if that would have any impact on the image quality from the fMRI.

I think in general, a lot of MRI related equipment is avoids any metal when possible to make it clear it is safe anyway. Having worked around strong magnets before (not MRI machines though), I've seen a few minor accidents and problems involving stuff that "should" have been safe, but was not properly tested beforehand.

"Why give the unstable a new reason/idea to..."

That is an excellent reason to shut down the whole internet and to never say anything. Coming up with a reason of where and when exactly to draw a line is much, much more difficult, and typically very subjective.

(Seriously, I've had that line of reasoning told to me as why I shouldn't make devices that others could get hurt if they replicated, why I shouldn't teach basic electronics to kids, and even once as a reason why no one should ever make liquid nitrogen...)

It is kind of nice to keep political (and a few other topics) separate from everything else. For people and places that I go to for political discussions, I try to stick to ones that are polite and thoughtful, among other characteristics, even though some people there are on opposite sides of an issue. It kind of sucks to have to apply that criteria everywhere, to avoid places because they have a few people who can't be reasonable, or at least civilized, about things.

Besides, few things can kill the fun of a place like watching people you thought were cool become unhinged over stuff, regardless of whether they are on the opposite side, same side as you, or are discussing a topic you don't even care about.

In some jurisdictions, it is illegal to remove the scent gland from skunks because it is considered unnecessary surgery on the animal (i.e. isn't needed to improve their health, and instead is for the benefit of the owner). It seemed like such places are also places that don't allow for cats to be declawed. People still own skunks in such areas assuming they aren't outright banned, as properly raised they almost never spray from what I've heard. I don't own one myself and this is only what I remember from some time ago from talking to a couple people who did have one over the years.

For #7, I don't think there is any age that should show up on a quiz. Since "matter" isn't precisely defined in general science, it is not a well formed questioned. I suppose it could be a leading question in an intro philosophy class where you are more questioning the definition of "everything," or a question in a physics class in one of the few subfields that specifically uses matter to refer to things with rest mass (why have a quiz like this at that level though...). Otherwise it amounts to, "Are things made of stuff?"