Maybe because Watts are a unit of power, not energy. This is a U.S. report, so they tend to use Imperial units. 4,211 BTU works out to 4.4 MJ (MegaJoules). In Chrome I didn't even have to finish typing in "4211 BTU in Joules" before it gave me the answer.

Oh, and in English we always capitalize "English" and "German" (and, of course, other languages).

To "weather something" means to endure severe conditions (e.g. weather) and survive. Imagine being on a ship and getting through a severe store. You and your ship have weathered the storm (this is almost certainly the origin of the phrase). So the company called Mendeley, which is considered an upstart in the publishing business, has survived a storm of controversy (over being bought by Elsevier) and joined the other scientific publishers to protect their content behind a paywall (a website that requires payment to view the contents).

Your opinion would have more weight if it were not for the massive backlog of rape kits. Police departments seem to have no interest in clearing the backlogs.

Correct conclusion, but one point is entirely wrong. The police acted correctly, but only because there was no evidence to support her story and you can only convict people if you can prove guilt. There is no reason at all to assume that she was lying. The guy can not be found guilty, but that does not mean he is innocent.

And the best way to comment on another person's intelligence is to spell the word "Intelligent" wrong in your title! :P

Anywhere Software produces B4A for Android apps, B4I for iOS, and B4J for desktop Java. They all use a dialect of BASIC very similar to Visual Basic. The Android version, at least, compiles to Java bytecode and gives full access to the Android libraries, etc.

The first two are about $100 for a license and 2 years of updates, the third is completely free. There is a vibrant community, and the main developer is very active on the forums, answering many questions.

Samuel R. Delaney wrote a book (Babel-17, won the Nebula Award in 1966) whose central idea was that humans could not understand an alien culture until they could understand its language. The protagonist, a language savant, discovered that thinking in that language dramatically changed her logical and perceptive abilities.

My younger son, who grew up speaking Japanese and then moved to Canada, asked me to explain when to use "who" and "whom". When I put it in Japanese terms, he understood the concept perfectly (at age 8 or so) and has never confused them again.

They should visit the townships of South Africa, where it's entirely normal for someone to speak five languages (English, Afrikaans, and several "black" languages like Sotho, Zulu, Pedi, Xhosa, etc.).

Japanese also explicitly incorporates the sense of social standing of the speaker/listener, as well as the flow of obligation (ageru/kureru/morau) when one person does something for another. Makes sense where a society is such a complicated web of statuses.

With the modern Pascal IDEs (Delphi and Lazarus), you declare a procedure/function in the interface and press a hotkey that generates the skeleton for the implementation. It's fast and easy.

What I loved about Delphi, when I used it professionally 7 years ago, was compiling about 300,000 lines of code in under five seconds on a typical office PC. That kind of quick feedback made it easy to test things and find syntax errors.

Also built-in range checking on strings and arrays, ridiculously easy data-bound controls (at a time when even Microsoft was telling people not to use the VB ones), great set handling (as mentioned above, and I still miss it in today's languages), EXEs produced with no dependencies.

The Pascal (well, primarily Delphi) community was always very helpful, and most 3rd-party libraries came with source code.

A lot of people are complaining about "being/end", and I have to say that I prefer curly braces, but that is by no means a significant issue (especially because IDEs highlight and collapse blocks, and in fact write the "begin/end" for you).

I beg to differ. My former company has done it, and it's slick and beautiful. They have targeted clothing retailers, but the software could be used elsewhere.

There are also several excellent books for Scratch programming. My son used Super Scratch Programming Adventure and really liked it.

It was not a critique only of apartheid, but also of the situation afterwards, and the way that migrants from other African countries were (and often still are) being treated in South Africa.