I've known a lot of math people, and /on average/ I think they're more capable of programming useful code than the other college graduate groups I've spent a lot of time working with (psychology, economics, physics) /on average/.
That said, the best mathematicians I've known were mostly rubbish at real programming, and the best programmers I've known have come out of computer engineering or computer science.
If you need a correct, but otherwise useless implementation, a mathematician is a pretty good bet. If you need performance, readability, documentation, I'd look elsewhere most of the time.
We have only a single advanced civilization to use as a comparison point for the strength or our telescopes, and that's ourselves. From my understanding of it, the most powerful broadcast we've made out is 15-20MW for an over the horizon radar system, and that only ran for 40 years or so. I don't have an exact answer, but my understanding is that even for our largest radio telescope, 20 megawatts at a distance of 100 lightyears would be below the noise floor.
Nuclear tests are slightly more visible than that, but only occur periodically, so you'd have to have a telescope facing the right way by coincidence. Basically, if there's an Earth-like civilization 200 lightyears away, I think we would be entirely blind to it, and that's over a tiny distance in the scheme of things.
The farthest known exoplanet is 27,710 lightyears away, and was discovered by the transit method - but this was made possible because the planet is very big (bigger and heavier than Jupiter), and orbits quite close to its star (with a 43 hour orbit). To be detectable at that range, a signal has to be stronger than some stars are bright.
At the Walmart near me, there's a whole set of checkout terminals intended for only a few items, but except for the absolute busiest times, they'll put carts to block them off, including the ones in the regular self checkout area. There's a line, but they physically remove access to some perfectly functional terminals just because.
Why have laws restricting bottles of wine to specific sizes in the first place? Surely as long as it's labeled clearly it's sufficiently easy to know what you're getting.
I don't think anyone will actually make it, but it would be cool to have an arrangement of accelerometers and microphones that you can put on the side of a packaged gift, shake it, and get a guess about what it is.
A harvesting robot that can tell how many days from ripe an avocado is, so the grocery store can have like... "ripe today" avocados, "ripe tomorrow" avocados, "ripe in 2 days" avocados. They'd come in small cardboard boxes, and they could just shift the boxes or signs over by one each day, and have more boxes if they get avocado deliveries less often.
Machine learning clothing/hairstyle/general fashion advice would be neat, but probably too open to manipulation to sell certain brands to be practical.
Tools to help developers put houses at the best spot on a lot, for things like water mitigation, tree safety, garden space in good sunlight, wind noise, and privacy.
Search tools that aren't terrible on shopping sites, and news sites, and research journals and things. The days of "we asked Google to do it for us" being good enough are long over.
The major strategy on CWR is pretensioning, but there are also multiple kinds of expansion joints used in different circumstances. I'm not saying it's impossible to do the same with a vacuum chamber, but I am saying there's no simple reliable answer, and certainly no answer so obvious and bulletproof that it doesn't even require testing before you could start construction.
Elon Musk either didn't know or didn't care that his company wasn't doing the required engineering and testing to make a real functioning hyperloop.
If any part of the hundreds of miles of tube suddenly stops being a vacuum chamber, every train all along the tube is going to be hit by air rushing in, at the speed of sound, with all the turbulence that implies, while its already moving at full speed. It might be possible to engineer a capsule that will keep the people inside alive when that happens, but it is not at all the same as e.g. rail, where "stop moving fowards" depletes essentially all the energy in the system.
Very long pipes use expansion/contraction sections that may not be possible for a vacuum sealed system that has to be incredibly straight to allow the passage of a train, and can flex pretty significantly for earthquakes, seasonal temperature changes, etc.
The article I saw on the situation didn't mention the previous trial, or his failure to comply with discovery obligations, just that a judge ruled he was liable before this trial. Now that I realize the story is "lawyer fails to defend himself properly, so his defense goes poorly", it makes a lot more sense.
Serious question: Why are so many of these trials starting with the judge deciding guilt before any evidence or testimony? I mean, obviously, Fuck Giuliani, but this is not the way I remember due process working, and I would hate for it to become normal to go... "Ehh, we're sure enough that he's guilty, so we don't have to decide that at trial." There are so, so many cases where that's the wrong answer, and it's not obvious until evidence comes out at trial, and this kind of "the judge thinks you're guilty, so fuck you" process is only one step removed from "the cop told the judge you're guilty, so fuck you."
A major factor is the window manager you use, and the settings of that window manager. I'm not up to speed with it, but I think this one is GNOME.