I agree in principle, but I think you're being a little over the top. Most contributors (rich and poor) to today's scientific and engineering challenges work in an institute that has access to the publications they need. For those who don't, they can access most articles by typing "[ARTICLE NAME] PDF" into Google. This works surprisingly often. If it's not available, just e-mail the author for a copy. Authors want their work read and don't give a shit about the pay wall. The paywall might be there, but it's not really stopping anyone from getting what they need.

In our field we call "bean plot" a violin plot. I agree it's better than a box plot, but it's basically just a histogram. Beanplot or boxplot, I think it helps to overlay the jittered raw data. Even a box plot is far better than a bar chart (which is distressingly common and little better than a table).

They both can be deceptive if you read them incorrectly or they're designed to deceive. However, it's harder to deceive someone with a graph than with the results of stats test. I really think graphs lie less easily than statistics.

I don't think you even need to be pushing people to do Bayesian stats. You just need to force them to graph their data properly. In *a lot* of biological and social science sub-fields it's standard practice to show your raw data only in the form of a table and the results of stats tests only in the form of a table. They aren't used to looking at graphs and raw data. You can hide a lot of terrible stuff that way, like weird outliers. Things would likely improve immediately in these fields if they banned tables and forced researchers to produce box plots (ideally with overlaid jittered raw data), histograms, overlaid 95% confidence intervals corresponding to their stats tests, etc, etc.

Having seen some of these people work, it's clear that many of them never make these plots in the first place. All they do is look at lists of numbers in summary tables. They have no clue in the first place what their data really look like, and know good knowledge of how to properly analyse data and make graphs. Before they even teach stats to undergrads they should be making them learn to plot data and read graphs. It's obvious most of them can't even do that.

On average, reviewers have the same skill set as authors who will get accepted (since that is the pool they are taken from). If authors are getting it wrong then so will reviewers.

I have worked on the retina, as it happens. :) What the retina sends the cortex is information about the relative intensity of red/green or yellow/blue in light reflecting from surfaces. This light is heavily influenced by the illuminating light source. So much so that it's possible for, say, an apparently green surface to be reflecting mostly red light. Yet you see it as green. Up until visual area V4, neurons are reporting that the surface is not green but red. In V4 we first see "colour constant" cells, the activity of which relates to perception. The dress illusion surely has its explanation here and not in the retina. The phenomenon is called "colour constancy" and requires neurons that have access to large regions of the image at the same time. This doesn't occur in the retina but only later in cortex.

It's not so cut and dried, actually. A lot of colour vision requires processing in the cortex so there isn't necessarily a clear cut relationship between the number of cone classes and an animal's colour acuity. A great example is the mantis shrimp which has a large number of different cone classes yet has crap colour vision. I don't know what bird colour acuity is or how it compares to our own, but don't assume it's necessarily better because they are tetrachromats. For instance, the wikipedia says that pigeons are pentachromats but they may not have access to the fifth channel. Many birds also have colour oil droplets in front of some photoreceptors in order to further tune their range. In effect, this may give them more than 4 cone classes.

One option for this is Arduino. It's exciting to make stuff in the real world happen, plus they'll learn other skills like soldering. The gap between commercial stuff and what you're doing is either smaller or non-existent (if no commercial solution does what you want).

Whatever your political alignment, I'd hope you base your opinions and (in the case of politicians) policy decisions on more than anecdotal articles. Articles like that appeal on an emotion level, but that's all. You need to look at aggregate data on the state/nation level to evaluate how a policy is working. You can't do it based on an article your mate sent you.

Totally different thing. Most people who spend large number of hours on the internet are screwing around social media, etc. Hardly any of them will be reading reading Wikipedia articles or free on-line books for hours on end.

When Rust becomes a little more polished it will likely become very interesting.

Hence terrorism involving aircraft causes mass panic but road deaths do not. A large part of the reason we have this problem is due to our reaction to these events. Same goes for crazy shooters in malls and schools.

It's always been Amazon's stratergy to take a loss when entering a new market. They'll do that here too.

But it's no the high street that's responsible for the decay of the high street. Those shops that you mention don't exist any more because the manufacturing of the products they would sell has changed. Our electronics are cheaper and they are changing faster than ever (some of that is planned obsolescence, of course). It's often cheaper to buy new than to repair. Consumer electronics are now so well built and and idiot-proof that you don't need smart people to sell or explain them. Instead you need marketing and fancy adverts to persuade people to buy. The high street never stood a chance.

The Oxford comma is a style issue, sure. Commas in general are not, since their presence or absence can change the meaning of a sentence. I don't think the comma is an "example fail" or anything like the vi/Eamcs wars.