Just inflate your prediction so that you have a high confidence. There is no useful information in such arbitrary numbers.

No, absolutely not. That would be an authoritarian fallacy.

Ever heard of copy and paste? You could even link to the post. All you're doing here is deferring your argument, which is pretty clumsy. In reality you're just hoping people will lose interest and ignore all the holes poked in your posts.

Two different viewpoints. You could also say that with cheaper food people have moved more and more towards very rich foods and that in turn leads to obesity. If people were to eat more unrefined foods they would get fewer calories for the same volume and more minerals and micronutrients. But the rich stuff is certainly tastier, which is why people eat so much of it.

"3* Would you rather read a book in a traditional printed format or on an electronic book-reading device like a Kindle?"

Without any preconditions this question is pretty useless. Have these people tried an e-reader for a substantial amount of time? Are they heavy readers or just random people who might only ever read occasionally? Does the question include all the added conveniences of an e-reader or merely the visual aspect of reading?

For me personally there are definitely printed books which look better than e-readers, but there are also a great number of prints which look so terrible that I find it much more comfortable to read an electronic version.

2. e-readers are perfect for this too.
3. If you're so inclined you can do this on an e-reader too.
6. The paper industry is notoriously dirty. If you get through a lot of newspapers and books you're better off buying an e-reader.

Being academically noteworthy probably qualifies something as nerdy more than anything.

Well, there sure are scientific reasons to believe that Adam wasn't the first man. Which makes sense. For that matter there aren't any scientific reasons to believe anything Genesis says.

But we're talking about the in-story world, in which it's pretty clear that Adam was the first man and there is no mention of any pre-existing society. So far you haven't provided any scientific of scriptural reasoning why the first generations got by without incest.

The decimal points imply you know it with kind of accuracy, where in fact nobody does. 1 Billion is definitely on the low end of estimates. A 10 year old study puts the number of L2 speakers at 1.5 Billion, and some higher estimates think the number is over 2 Billion.

The low estimates tend to rely on old statistics and look at stuff like population growth, which ignores the effect of cultural influences like the internet. For comparison the number of internet users has more than quadrupled since 2003, a time when most connections were also too slow for video. Of course a lot of this growth is from China though.

The way you worded your post implies that English was recently ahead of Chinese. I don't know if that was the case. But one thing most experts agree on is that English is rapidly growing

With the rise of the internet English has been on a surge. There is absolutely no indication that it's about to be overtaken by Spanish or -gasp- Mandarin, which is considered impenetrable by most the world's population.

Why would you want to memorize each location? It's all about memory efficiency and maximizing the mutual information. Predictability will inevitably suffer, but that's a fair trade off for some applications.

Which can you remember or communicate better, both of which have about the same precision:
1) Shot Mental Sunbeam
2) All of the following characters decimal characters: 61.5299 -144.4334

Of course it's not very useful for businesses, it works against their branding. It's mostly useful for remote locations or stuff not on Google Maps (fairly common in some countries).

Any civilization capable of interstellar travel would surely be capable of detecting or presence anyway.

It's not necessarily about contacting them. Even just discovering intelligent signals would be pretty cool, wouldn't it? That's scientific discovery, or would you dismiss this as "entertainment"?

If you replace the screen protector that's an extra 10 dollars you paid. Screen protectors also scratch much easier than gorilla glass, and most people don't bother replacing them when they do get scratched anyway.

Not sexy enough. Unless you're really clumsy it's a problem that's easily avoided anyhow: Use a case. But considering how many people buy iPhones or don't bother with a case I'm guessing people just simply don't care enough. They'd rather just deal with a broken phone every couple of years.

Scratches and glare on the other hand show more immediate results.

The quality of advice is probably more of an illusion. These are sales people going on the recommendations of publisher bulletins. It's not feasibly for anybody to read all the new arrivals in a bookstore.
Bookstores play more of a formative role in contemporary culture: They buy stuff they like the look of from the publisher, get exposed to whatever the bookstores put on display. The stuff people buy get's talked about and the assistants learn to give advice on the popular books.

But unless your interests happen to overlap you probably won't get awfully helpful advice on anything outside of mainstream pop culture. Which is probably why bookstores have reacted by reducing their stock of specialty books. Who is seriously going to ask the lady at the bookstore about which technical manual is better or in which ways a certain historian might be biased? Amazon's recommendations and user reviews are much more useful.

You will often find physical books in clearance sales or other bargains. And they also tend to lower the price with a new edition. ebooks on the other hand have a very sticky price.

People also know that charging the same price for a DRM'd piece of digital data is bullshit, which makes them perceive a price-parity with physical copies, or a $1 rebate as expensive.