This is about right. The linked study may not be very good, but the hypothesis is plausible.

I'm a nonbeliever with a (very smart) manic-depressive sibling, and said sibling has done way better during periods of religious belief than during periods of unbelief.

Putting aside ontological questions, religions give you an automatic community. You can find a church or equivalent, with people who will listen to you and help you and take you seriously. You also get texts/legends/liturgy that give you ways to think about stuff. There's also a lot to be said for ritual itself, for daily and weekly practice.

As I get older I'm less ready to assume that people who don't think like me are *complete* idiots.

Calculus has become institutionalized as the filter in college teaching: show us you can get through that, and we'll let you do what you want.

If we could start over, a lot of stuff could be done differently. We could teach basic probability in high schools. A lot of discrete stuff could be taught early. And so on.

I agree with this.

But think about the difficulties facing someone trying to start a new journal -- perhaps a new journal in an emerging field. If I'm in Pune and want to start a journal, I'm going to have to work extra hard not to look fake.

For the most part I agree -- one reason I'm reading and typing this on a Thinkpad.

But let's talk about read-only tasks.

First, a lot of those are now easier on a tablet than on a PC. Faster booting up, simpler interface. Touch what you want, it opens, you read/watch it. At the moment, anyway, tablets have better screen quality.

Second, ease of use and screen quality mean that activities are migrating from print and TV/DVD to tablets. I read a lot of pdfs as part of my work. Like you I watch zero TV, but I'll sometimes unwind with 10 minutes of Daily Show and I've started to watch an occasional episode of "The Thick of It" on Hulu, which is available nowhere else. My wife reads books and watches video on laptops or tablets routinely.

Maps, reading for work or pleasure, looking things up, video ... there's a lot of read-only in most of our lives. I haven't quite made the move, but I'm planning on buying the next version of a Nexus 10 that comes out. At work, I've seen a lot of colleagues who used to turn up at meetings with laptops bringing tablets.

could be very useful.

I went to Northgate Mall in Seattle three weeks ago looking to get either a Nexus 4 or a Samsung galaxy s3.

Samsung products were everywhere.

The only place I could find a Nexus 4 was the Tmobile store, and yes, what tipped me to the Nexus was trying it out.

There was an unaffiliated tablet/phone store elsewhere in the mall that had a Nexus 7 and maybe a 10, but you had to look hard for them.

It still seems weird that you would need to open a whole store as opposed to striking deals for retail space for your stuff, though.

yes. I'm not an expert, but there was clearly some combination of physical and psychological illness, though there's nothing definitive on what. Even by the standards of gentleman scientists he was awfully slow, and you can argue that science was ill-served by his slowness.

And yeah, in mid-19th-century Britain you would be criticized by the religious establishment, but it's not like they could hurt him or deny him an audience. The dude was wealthy, and a near-recluse in any case.

Darwin was a great scientist and had virtues we should honor. But we're ill-advised to turn fragile mortals into heroes.

Yep. I was going to ask for a chainsaw robot army, but not these.

"Boys aren't receptive to women when they are kids" a. Speaking as a former boy, bullshit. b. If you can't deal with women who have authority, that may be your problem.

"girls' type of behavior" What, like paying attention in class and getting their work done?

What actual research on labor markets shows is that this is not how they work: there's plenty of evidence of ongoing discrimination in hiring and promotion. You're reasoning from an abstraction rather than data.

With a big monitor and a little discipline you should be able to do this. Meetings are harder, especially if you need to be prepared for questions on a lot of stuff -- it can still be easier to find things in a well-organized sheaf of documents, and you're not vulnerable to network outages or your laptop suddenly deciding to reboot. But as tablets get better and cheaper this should change. A couple years ago, less than half of us in a meeting would be using laptops for documents, now, especially if it's younger folks, we all are.

thank you

You notice it immediately if you know which is which. "Matter" is a different question. Ordinary writing has enough redundancy that you can introduce a lot of error and still have the meaning get through.

Yes. Go look at the Gardenweb appliance forum, especially contributions by Kaseki. But kitchen renovation is a whole world to itself.