Stating something is undoubtedly true would be anti-science, especially according to the falsifiability definition. But it should be noted that this wasn't (and in my opinion shouldn't) be meant to divorce science from truth: in fact, Popper (who popularized falsifiability) stated that "there are criteria of progress toward the truth".

I've had pretty good luck using Siri with the music cranked up in the car. I haven't done much testing, but I suspect that my habit of speaking at the microphone on the bottom of the phone or holding it up to my face helps, that way it can do its usual noise cancellation thing with the secondary mic. Unfortunately, my results with siri aren't as good as other's overall, due to my poor enunciation (I have a slight lisp) :/

Seems you are correct that there is no logic behind it, but that it's just a very commonly used and well-tolerated error: grammar girl's analysis.

I've been starting a textbook project myself recently (it's a lot more work than I first anticipated to flesh out the material and formatting, even with latex, and I haven't even started with the graphic design) so this is quite interesting to me. I saw that ibooks author will export to pdf, my biggest question is: will this be compatible with print-on-demand services? Surely some folks are still going to want dead tree versions, and some topics don't need lots of media interaction. Apple would do very well to consider hosting their own print-on-demand services for this (hmm, sort of like they did with the cards iphone app...)

Another thing I would love to see is some sort of "preview this book" like Amazon's. If Apple is to be believed, this is going to open up book publishing quite a bit, which also means lots of competing books with the standard web-2.0 and appstore quality distribution.

I'm very sorry to hear your situation. I certainly hope the best for your family. I don't really have any advice, but your story reminded me of something I heard on NPR a while back that might at least be of interest:
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/12/140336146/for-the-dying-a-chance-to-rewrite-life

Well I certainly can't speak to the linguistics aspect, but I didn't recognize date and population size numbers to be totally made up; there is some research (peer reviewed at least -- this isn't my area) putting initial expansion ~65K to 100K years ago [1,2] and some supporting a tight population bottleneck down to a few thousand individuals (*effective population size) at that point as well [2, 3].

1. http://www.pnas.org/content/103/25/9381.full
2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047248498902196
3. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v475/n7357/full/nature10231.html?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20110728

I think I'd have had a lot better luck if I trusted a robotic spouse rather than my recent non-robotic one.

In addition, the list of alarms has the general "list of stuff" UI on the iphone. Having a consistent UI for certain types of tasks (adding something to a list) aids in learning to use the UI; once someone learns to add an item to one list they'll transfer that knowledge to new situations (won't they?!). Though I'll admit that "Add" may be better than "+" in these cases (though you again run into localization issues, but since it's a general UI item Apple could probably handle that system wide).

It's a tricky trade off: UI concepts should be consistent and generalizable, but also as descriptive as possible. These are at odds at times.

I think this interview may be interesting, given the reference to Angry Birds in particular:

Peter Vesterbacka, Maker of Angry Birds Talks about the Birds, Apple, Android, Nokia, and Palm/HP

Note: that article is something like two months old now, things may have changed since then for them.

Agreed. The biggest usability change for me so far, aside from the overgenerous whitespace, are the folded preview-comments. I noticed that Re: subjects are missing the original subject (probably a plus, since it's redundant information), and (Score: X) information seems to be missing from them unless they are top-level posts. That's a shame, since I routinely use that as a filter for whether a post is likely to be interesting enough to fold out and read.