There is a huge backlash against Duolingo, it doesn't really teach anything, it is gimmicky, you can get to the end without being fluent, all of that. It is a pity, it is actually very good now; the long courses, French, Spanish are superb, they incorporate a lot of well established techniques for effective learning in a fairly easy to understand gamified environment; apart from chess which is clearly just for fun, Duolingo seems sincerely committed to a long term goal of producing an effective learning tool. If you finish one of the big courses, you really have learned a lot of the language, productive fluency will always require conversational practice, but it does all the rest of it extremely well. I think there claim that you can reach B2 is fair, conversation aside; I imagine that's on the way. It would be nice to see them push the very short courses beyond 30; languages like Yiddish, Irish, Navajo and Welsh have smaller populations who want to learn them, but within those populations you have people genuinely committed to learning.

Surely this improves language learning, by making things like gender agreement more complex you need to pay more attention to gender agreement rules. This double checking you mention as a negative is really positive for language learning. Furthermore, you are made more likely to remember examples if they have more emotional salience, positive representation of gay relationships or gender roles will produce positive feelings of pride and recognition in some and, it seems, anger in others like you; no matter, the important thing for learning is emotional response.

He didn't say it at the time; he said later, much later, that he thought it. The better quote is from Bainbridge: “Now we are all sons of bitches.”

So _United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby_ should try visiting Europe; it will blow his mind.

Why do we go around in circles on this; it isn't like they didn't think of it, or thought of it and decided not to do it out of cussedness - the rocket walls are thin, if they grab it hard enough to make a difference it will crumple so they need to land it which they nearly did.

That's not true, you switch between chromos and Linux without rebooting; on a cheap chrome box it works great; chromos for browsing and playing movies, two key presses and you have Linux for programming or whatever.

The original article has the affiliation wrong; he is at the University at Reading, not the University of Bristol.

It would have save WILL GARDNER. There, arguement won.

Eclipses demonstrate that the moon and the sun are exactly the same size, what are the chances? It's clear one or the other isn't real.

An interview with Randall Monroe by someone who doesn't know we've deciphered Linear B. WTF.

Even better, the Pocket Spacecraft project has started its Kickstarter

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1677943140/send-your-own-pocket-spacecraft-on-a-mission-to-th

"We’ve developed a very low cost, open source, open access, mass space exploration system that anyone can use, and we need your help to send your very own Pocket Spacecraft, and thousands of others, on a first of its kind expedition to the moon."

A dude from the project had a stand at the recent RPi day in @Bristol and the whole thing is awesome, thousand of spacecraft thinner than a floppy disk will crash land on the MOON!

Irish elections are decided by a transferable vote in multiseat constituencies; the counts are quite difficult, most take a whole day and recounts in individual constituencies can take days and, on a few occasions, weeks. One perhaps surprising thing is that we like the delay; one reason the insecurity of the electronic system was take seriously was that were was a general lack of enthusiasm for speeding the count. Irish votes are first sorted and then counted, in public; a species of political activist, called tally men, watch the sorting and make estimates of the outcomes, these are discussed on the radio, on twitter, around kitchen tables, in pubs and the gradual unfolding of the count, with its estimates and predictions, with the anticipation of coalition talks and general horse trading, forms a sort of political theater and moment of political engagement which is part and parcel of our system of government. I think we did not want to loose that and there was some dismay at the swiftness with which the results were announced in the three trial constituencies. That removed any real will to make the count more efficient, coupled to the problem with security, that halted deployment.

I think this is what Samuel Beckett meant when he explained he wrote in French rather than his native (Hiberno-)English because in French "it is easier to write without style".

Also if you don't want to see it in 3d you can just close one eye.

ahem: Dublin had 150k, Philadelphia 40k.