The physicist involved are also skeptical of their own experiments. That's why they independently build two experiments, ATLAS and CMS, that measure the decay product of the collisions (in addition, they are also a number of other more specialized detectors).
The design of these detectors are rather different, and they are build by different team, yet are are giving consistent results.
So of course they are common assumptions, but they did do their homework to try to mitigate this.
In similar news, researches recently found that Madagascar was colonized by Indonesian people, not people coming from mainland Africa. Moreover, there were only about 30 female settlers (no information about male settlers as the study was done on mitochondria DNA, which is only passed from mother to child, but not from father to child).
The Bach metaphor is really bad. I believe Hofstadter referees to the canon by which Bach inscribed "Ascendenteque Modulatione ascendat Gloria Regis" ("As the keys ascend so may the glory of the king also ascend"). Bach did not mean that after going up an octave the king's glory would have returned to it's starting point.
I think your analysis is way off. The problems you cite are not problems of size but of population density. And I would not think that anybody in their right mind would argue that the cure for Africa's many problems is more population
You cite length of borders as an issue. Borders grow as the square root of the size of a country, and if we assume that population & resources grow linearly with the area of a country, securing borders is actually easier for big countries.
The cost of having a strong enough security forces and of building adequate transport infrastructure should not depend on the size of the countries, but on the population density -- when expressed as percentage of GDP.
Africa's population density is not exceptional in any way:
Africa: 30 person per km^2 (and this includes the Sahara where basically nobody lives -- almost a third of Africa)
South America: 21
USA: 31
Mexico: 55
From your description you don't seem to really use the db, so can't you roll your own specialized data structure?
If each record is 20 byte, 1/2 million per minute for one hour is about 1/2 gig, so you can keep everything in memory.
Fro what it is worth, from my experience doing research it is very important for your sanity to work with other people that are about the same level of competence as you. That means other grad students or young post docs. Working with professors that "have achieved ground-breaking theoretical results" is very frustrating. The difference in knowledge between you and them is enormous; what is hard for you is trivial an uninteresting for them. So they are not very interested in working with you for the same reason you are not very interested in doing research with a first year student.
With somebody that is about as advanced as you, you can bounce off ideas, have interesting discussions, and learn a lot. And then got discuss with the professor.
Another problem with working with world class researchers (as a grad student) is that you will not learn the most important part of research. The hardest part of research is finding questions, not answers. Good questions that is. Questions that are interesting and unsolved, but solvable. This is very hard. If you work with someone that is really very strong he will have more ideas than time to investigate them. So you will at best become good at solving problems, but you will not learn how to find problems. In mechanical_fish's comments, he says that most researchers "publishing over-complicated solutions to easy problems, or non-solutions to difficult problems, or incomprehensible solutions to niche problems". This not because they are dumb or lazy, it's because they can't do the hardest thing in research: find good questions.
Another thing (that others have already pointed out): expect failure. Good research is hard. In fact even bad research is hard. Doing new things is hard, doing interesting things is hard, and doing new interesting thing is incredibly hard. So most of what you try will end in failure. Get used to it or get out of academia as quickly as possible. Not many people have the right mental constitution to live a happy life while they continuously fail. Look around you; you will probably see many people that are not happy with life. I think this has something to do with it.
Another solution is to keep the Ctrl keys where they are (note the plural), but hit them with the side of your hands: you just need to roll you hand a little bit to the outside. It takes a little practice to do this reliably, but it cures pinky pain (at least for me).
Use the hand that is not hitting the key: for C-s use your right hand for the Ctrl, and left for s. C-n the other way round. For Meta, make sure that both alt keys work, and use your thumbs: M-x right thumb and left fourth finger.
- You can't do this for C-M combinations, but they are few and far between.
- You have to have a keyboard where the keys "stick out" a little. So it does not work on laptops.
The only real issue I had was that moving around is a little slow and awkward: When going back and forth from C-f/b to C-p/n your hands are moving a lot. So I remapped C-f to C-; and C-b to C-j (and similarly for M-f & M-b) and now I can press Ctrl/Meta with my left hand and move around with my right one: bliss.