I can read the entire slashdot page of comments for this article in 10 seconds. Why? Because I know all I'm skipping is uninformed BS. It seems no-one here has the faintest clue to the reading process. I have first hand experience in psycho-linguistic experiments, and I can tell you that saccades are quite probably an essential part of the reading process: eyes just don't wander around at random, they fixate quite precisely to recognize groups of characters or short words in their context. Very short words, like articles and prepositions can sometimes be skipped altogether (leading to a certain class of reading errors). And in experiments where you show subjects one word at a time, it's obvious that information gets lost when you present the words too quickly.

It might be possible to speed up reading a bit, but the faster, the more it resembles skimming. And when you try to force that onto the reader by presenting every bloody word (something skimming avoids), the reader is going to get tired from the effort, and confused since he's got no way to go back. Very lousy idea.

[i]None of the processes outlined in this article, ..., can run away.[/i]
As an engineer and former scientist, I don't buy that. That would require tremendously detailed and thorough understanding of the climate and the oceans. And "not running away" is just not a sufficient condition. I know a process that will stop ACC and is guaranteed not to run away: kill all human life. But is that what we want?

Problem from my part with that: in 20 years or so, no young adult will be able to read today's literature anymore. Anything written before 2014 will fall in obsolescence and will be forgotten. Compare that to English: they've kept their spelling, and we can read literature from the 1800s without too much pain. So, for the sake of laziness we should forgo anything else? Well, no.

It's not extortion, it's corruption. The Cosa Nostra also doesn't accept the money personally.

So, it *is* corruption.

Precisely. And the fact that it had happened before, should have made him extra cautious.

So now you need Chrome if you want Google Now notifications? What's next? Some Google Docs feature that only works in Chrome? Maps?

There is a European law that forbids email providers to use knowledge of the contents of email. Anyway, your point was: it isn't a legal question. But anything, and certainly access to personal information, can be ruled by laws, hence it is a legal question.

Anyway, your profile text speaks volumes. I'll copy it here: "If I seem a little confrontational, it's probably because you are an idiot. I will argue any side of any point if you demonstrate that you haven't put in a little thought or research into what you typed. Things I hate: - Knee jerk responses, where you have a prepared rant for a subject even if it is unrelated - Posting what "everyone knows". Here's a hint, if everyone knows it we don't need to read it - Associating everything to the news of the day. Facebook outage was obviously the NSA getting backed up? Ha ha, you're stupid. - Wasting everyone's time Finally, if I catch you parroting a talking head, you're wrong. I don't care if I agree with you - that means we're both wrong. But I'm going to call you out for it. Is this my first account here? Hardly. Only? No. This is the account where I tell you how and why you are wrong, because someone should. If I call you a fuckstick, it's probably because you are the most egregious of many mental errors on a subject, and most worthy of correct"

Clicking a check box does not overrule the law. You ignore my "stupid analogy" because you don't have a counter-argument.

> It's not a legal question at all. If you use the service you have accepted their terms and so have given them permission to do this.
That *is* a legal question. If the EULA says: we own your first born, is that so just because you checked a box on a web site? Nope. There are laws governing the reading of email, and Microsoft has to obey those rules like everyone else.

We might not know much about memory, we do know that language learning requires many, correlated changes in the brain. You need to learn to identify German words, their meanings, classes and features, the rules which operate on these classes and their exceptions, and the combination of meanings, plus all kinds of idiomatic, opaque expressions. You cannot expect a bit of electricity to facilitate making those changes to all these different processes and still be "compatible" with each other much faster. And if you don't understand that about brain processes, why would you be able to claim aforementioned effects?

It sounds like medieval experimentation to me.

Quote from the article: "Lee’s first plan was to use tDCS to learn German, but when he realized that language-learning would still be a huge time commitment, ..."
How serious can you take someone that thinks learning German is going to take a 10 minutes instead of 10 years because you strap a 9V battery to your head?

Of course it's bollocks. There's no proof that it has got anything to do with religion or religious activity at all. What would be the baseline for that? A group of people with the same IQ, activities, socio-economic status, age, family, etc. as the religious group, but non-religious. If that is done well, and finds a sizable (I'm avoiding the term significant, as most people interpret that as p .05) difference, then you might start to conclude that being religious has an effect on whatever you measured, be it some physical aspect of the brain or stress levels.

What this study apparently found, is that people with a thicker cortex more often said that religion was important to them. It doesn't even have to mean such persons are actually religious: one possible explanation is that a thicker cortex makes you say a higher number when asked how important religion is to you. So that's already pretty shaky.

Then there was no control w.r.t. the other possible factors involved in the thickness of the cortex (such as hereditary traits; we all know that religion is strongly correlated to that, so that's a serious confound), and the relation to stress is that "the researchers had found that people who said they were religious or spiritual were at lower risk of depression". So they add up 1 and 1, and find the result is strawberry.

The sad thing is that this stuff gets published. Not that I mind that the data gets published, but that people can write such unwarranted conclusions and the editor doesn't tell them to take out the speculation, that bothers me.

Can't say I do. Can't say I do.

Amazing. Someone else replied similar, see above. I think I'd compress it. Our eyes don't process all that detail. But if you don't want to, the backup solution is really easy: either you see the original disks as backup, or you get an extra set of hds...