Um - I provided a reference for my comment. How does "you're insane" constitute an argument against a published work?

According to that book "Bounce" which looks at excellence in many different fields, not all Africans are good runners. According to the author, the region in Africa these people come from is actually one village, which just so happened to not have a very local school, meaning that children there did a 20 km round trip every school day, under their own steam. This led to a whole lot of young people clocking up the necessary 10,000 hours of practice to become world standard. Opportunity, not genetics, generates the observed differences, just like it generates the observed school differences between the sexes.

I'm confused by all of these 'eyestrain' issues - does no-one else read white text on a black background? I read books on my phone (SGS2, and before that on my Palm Treo 650), and yes, having a light-background got unpleasant, but reversing the colours is fine. (And okay, I agree battery life is an issue.)

Heh, me too.

At primary school in the 80s we did Logo (you had to write out anything you'd worked out earlier into your notebook to be able to make advances in next week's half-hour slot, I spent forever making the turtle draw a stick-figure in a top-hat) and some word-programming thing (where the highlight was typing until you nearly reached the end of the line, then carefully and slowly pressing one character at a time so we could all hoot at the word jumping magically to the next line, it was great!).

Then I went to a selective, all-girls high-school, where we were supposed to learn Basic, and Carmen San Diego. Maybe something else too, but I think I spent my time making Basic programs that printed stupid jokes about a particular teacher we didn't like, and getting my friends to run them. Awesome stuff.

Now, 20-something years later, I'm starting to learn Python at Udacity. All of that early exposure must have triggered something in me :p

yep, me too. Least painful, probably quickest, and surest, with not really enough time (hopefully) to ponder and fear my fate.

I disagree with your summary of their responses to Q4. I read them as:
Obama: I will make essential medicine freely available to those who cannot otherwise afford it.
Romney: I will keep the health system as is, and give more money to the pharmaceutical companies.
Which I thought were fundamentally pretty different.

I'm not American, and I found Romney's waffling answers really very difficult to focus on, the gods only know what questions he thought he was answering. I really don't know much about either of them (I would recognise Obama's face at least), but I've discovered today that Obama is pleasantly literate and Romney... isn't.

Agreed. (From an ex-academic.)

Agreed, phonetic and syllabic scripts are much easier to learn and to use - far fewer things to remember. But 'better'...? :p Better for the masses, yes. Better for creating beautiful, compact writing? Not necessarily. (For a language to have a truly perfect phonetic orthography, everyone must pronounce every word the same - have you seen IPA renditions of different accents/dialects? And the moment you have two dialects with slightly different phonology, even a phonemic orthography won't be perfect.) Ah, sorry, I'm probably wandering off-topic. And I'm just being a devil's advocate here too. I'm currently learning Pashto (written in a modified Arabic script), and them not writing vowels in their writing drives me nuts - it makes it impossible to read the damn thing >:/

Well, the meaning of a Chinese ideogram can often be gleaned from the combination of strokes/other ideograms used, even if you can't pronounce it (although there's often some guide to pronunciation in obscure characters too). This is kind of the reverse of English, where the pronunciation is more-or-less clear, but the meaning not.

So, should the written form represented the phonetics or semantics of what is said? English only approximates the first and doesn't come close on the second, while Chinese only sometimes approximates the first but often represents the second.

You can actually get loans that do this - allow you up to 12 months 'repayment holiday' or whatever it's called, for parental leave, illness, unemployment, whatever. You pay something extra for it, I think. At least, I was offered this option for my home loan that I got 2 weeks ago, in Australia.

Gah! I already told you I was jealous!! Yup, I'll drop you a line - I've only ever met one other /.er face-to-face, this should be interesting :p :D Keep living the life!!

(I'm actually 'back' in Australia!) Jájá, ég lærði að tala íslensku á meðan ég var tharna, og ég er meira að segja búin að taka íslending með mér heim :D And, no, I'm really not coping not being in Reykjavík - nothing beats living 2 minutes walk from everything. Okay, so the beach is a little further than 2 minutes from downtown, but my husband and I are definitely not okay with normal travel time to work being over an hour (as it is in Sydney). There's no time for 'life', only 'work'. Yes, I am madly jealous of you still being there! My current Devious Plan is to support any incentive at work that will allow me to work remotely, then, like a rat out of an aqueduct, we'll be back in the North Atlantic, dancing on the Pond when it freezes, and scouting out volcanoes again! So, you're in it for the long haul then? (PS, it is really strange that /. doesn't display thorn!)

Well said. My first really portable laptop had an 'external optical drive'. I had the laptop for about 5 years, and I plugged it in about 15 times. Old tech.

Although I must admit, when the wifi goes down, it has been great to just plug a cable in, to get access to the internet again to work out how to fix your wifi!

Yeah, in Iceland (see the kennitala thread above - not me, but I posted there too), you can pay for everything with a credit card. I used to bet my international visitors who panicked about not having kronur that I would pay them double if they could find something in Iceland that they could not pay for by card - hotdog stands, ice-cream stands, little kids coming to your door selling cookies, ... they ALL have the EFTPOS machines! It is very, very convenient.