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Microwave but no oven was standard when I lived in Uni/students housing. Oven but no microwave seems quite frequent in France though - I'm French as you can guess.

In a sense, there are no real answers to these. Explanations for linguistic rules are no more than ways of remembering them. Different languages, even when the same concepts apply to them, have different rules about them. For example, "Curiosity killed the cat" vs. "La curiosité a tué le chat." French uses the definite article more than English does. Why? It just does. Russian doesn't have articles at all. In fact, over- or under-use of "the" is one of the main signs that tells me that the writer is a foreigner.

English treats month and day names as proper nouns, so capitalises them; French does not, while German capitalises everything. Go back a few centuries. and English capitalised every important noun, and the really important ones would get caps and small caps.

You have to replace the right term $599.976$ by $599.9976$. This makes the sum equal to $600.000079976$, or $600.00$ if you keep only two digits after the decimal point. Still pretty close to 600 though :)

I don’t know enough about the dynamics in academia, or the rate of progress in alignment to be confident in my assessment. But I don’t think it’s <6% something similar to this happens, so if people are introducing the field to mainstream academia, they should take precautions to minimize the chances of effect I described resulting in significant slowdowns.

These are just one native speaker's impressions, so take them with a grain of salt.

Your first two examples, to me, scan as being about abstract concepts; respectively: the emotion/quality of curiosity and the property of being in context.

This quora result indicates that it's a quality of "definiteness" that indicates when articles get dropped (maybe as a second language learner you're likely to already have this as knowledge, but find it difficult to intuit).

In those examples, the meaning doesn't rely on pointing at two specific "curiosity" and "context" objects that have to be precisely designated, it relies on set phrases "out of curiosity" and "in context" that respectively describe an unmentioned action or object. 

I think the article in the last example is dropped for a completely different reason. The "definiteness" argument doesn't apply, but my instinct is that this is simple terseness in the communication from UI to user. Describing every UI element with precise language would result in web pages that resemble legal documents.

If I understood correctly, babies cannot focus their eyes properly for the first two months, and this may indicate they are learning some universal 3D-spatial models into their heads, as a prerequisite for many of the other instincts they have as later developmental windows. So there has to be some thread of signals that string this system to the later affects/instincts, such as the fear of heights. 

It is also funny to relate the ability of many ungulate babies ability to walk immediately on birth, meaning there has to be some seriously robust set of instincts that coordinate this for them. This blurs the ... requirements... between instinctual and learned coordination, but I believe in the end all cortex-having brains would benefit from moving away from instincts and into learned models.

Articles are hard! I was lucky enough to be raised bilingual, so I'm somewhat adept at navigating between different article schemes). I won't claim these are hard and fast rules in English, but:

1 - 'Curiosity' is an abstract noun (e.g. liberty, anger, parsimony). These generally don't have articles, unless you need some reason to distinguish between subcategories (e.g. 'the liberty of the yard' vs. 'the liberty of the French')

2 - 'Context' can refer to either a specific context (e.g. 'see in the proper context'), in which case the articles are included, or the broad category (e.g. 'context is everything'). 'see in the context' is not ungrammatical, but its usually awkward, because without an adjective its unclear which context you are talking about. (And if you were referring to one that was previously established, you would use 'that context' or 'this context'). However, in the particular case of the button, 'see in the context' would be acceptable, because the identity of 'the context' is clear! I doubt a native English speaker would say that, though, because its not idiomatic.

3 - 'hide the previous comment' is actually correct here! However, in human-machine interfaces, articles, prepositions, and pronouns are often omitted to save space/mental effort.

I haven’t looked into it, but it’s my impression that high viral loads come from virus replicating in your body, when you don’t yet have immunity. Once you have B-cell immunity from prior infection, virus has a much harder time replicating in your body, and you don’t get the high loads.

Like… if you’re expelling some viral particles with every breath, and the only viral particles you have are from your roommate, and you’re immune… then it shouldn’t take long to go through the particles you breathed in from the roommate, if there’s no internal replication going on in your body to generate new ones.

Hopefully someone else can give a better researched answer though!

That did not of course stop stupid people from saying how stupid it would be to build things at sea level, no matter how much this was used as part of a project to protect the city, because guarding against climate change doesn’t involve the proper moral repentance, so it doesn’t count. The link is a New York Post article where this is the best objection they could find.

The New York Post article sounds to me overall positive but the journalist wasn't allowed to write a one-sided article so they had to bring up some bullshit argument given that the argument has been made by other people. 

One of the key questions here is how you would actually go about making this a reality. I imagine that if you make it a completely public project there's a good chance that the whole thing fails and becomes a political liability for the major that approved the project. It takes likely a decade to build and has the potential to produce political trouble in between.

There's no Robert Moses around to run the project. In the absence, it's worth thinking about how you would actually structure such a project and make it good politics.

@khushjammu will get this message as a notification (since they have RSVPed), but I think you'll have to send a private message to @smallsilo (unless they manually subscribed to the comments on this post), because it doesn't seem like LessWrong has proper user tagging.

If you do manage to set up a second group, you may want to organise to arrive 30 minutes earlier or later if possible, since that would make it easier for us to find our respective group members, and minimise any accidental "mixing". If a big group of us all arrive at once, that could look a bit sus, even if we are being sure to remain separated.