Are you kidding? An actor deserves to die because the character he played in movies was reckless? It's justice that he died in a car crash where he wasn't even driving?

These are the same forums who (rightly) criticize the media for ripping on violent video games after e.g. school shootings, but also mods a comment +5 insightful that alleges an actor is responsible for "impressionable youths" and "innocent victims" dying when trying to emulate his movie character. Absolutely incredible.

I would guess that you are not approaching mathematical textbooks the way you should be. You don't just read the exposition. You don't simply read the proofs. You have to do the proofs yourself. That means you have to go step by step, making sure everything makes sense. When you see a theorem, try to prove it first before reading the solution. Do the exercises in the book. Try to think about the results and see if they make sense, given what you already know.

There are certainly many poor math books, but if you haven't found any good ones then you either haven't looked very hard or are not using them correctly. You don't learn math by simply reading about it. You learn math by doing math.

Using verbose names in mathematics would be awful and make proofs, theorems, etc. impossible to read. It more than suffices to define a symbol before it is used. For example, what would we call Euler's totient function, phi(x)? numberOfIntegersFrom0ToNThatAreRelativelyPrimeWithNExclusive(x)? It doesn't work. How about the Zeta function? Or a Galois field? Good luck coming up with an intuitive way to refer to a Shimura variety.

Mathematics is so abstract that concise, English definitions usually do not exist. When something is first introduced it should definitely be defined, but it's up to the reader to internalize that. Furthermore, it's up the reader to invest the time necessary to learn (that nebulous "mathematical maturity"). Mathematics is hard, and there are things to criticize about modern education, but the usage of variables, naming conventions, etc. are not among them.

The situation you are talking about, where speeds are low, concerns special relativity, and it's obvious that low speeds do not make much of a difference. This isn't some "guess" that astrophysicists are making. It's a direct result of what special (and therefore) general relativity says. And astrophysicists do use general relativity.

I think that definition of "syntactic sugar" is too strict, since it's used to describe any feature that is merely a syntactical one. E.g., $ is syntactic sugar in haskell for establishing precedence, such as "foo $ bar x" which here translates to foo (bar x). This is particularly useful for readability when combined with function composition.

Did you mean to say the Java spec is longer than the C++ spec? Because I would think Java having a shorter spec would be a point in favor of its relative simplicity.

I went to a state school, and it was pretty much the same. The CS faculty seemed to prefer macs as well; I remembering my software engineering professor saying, "It's important that you test your product because we do not want our users to have to test it for us. We are not Microsoft."

I love Mint (though I haven't used it in a while), but Mint had the highest numbers at one point on distrowatch iirc. I think that's based on page hits though, so it's not exactly representative of downloads. Gnome 2 Ubuntu probably had the highest ratio of users to total linux users; now with Unity and Gnome 3 I have no idea.

That's good, because Albert Einstein was not fond of quantum theory ;-).

Hawking showed that when you combine quantum field theory with black hole physics then they will produce what is now called Hawking radiation. The black hole will eventually evaporate away through this process. What finally happens is the subject of recent controversy. The physics is well beyond me, but the idea of it is that several current assumptions concerning physics lead to contradictions when considered in the context of black holes (in particular, entanglement leads to subtle problems), leading some to posit the existence of firewalls.

More info can be found here.

I remember reading on Lubos' blog (I know, I know) that Nima Arkani-Hamed doesn't like that characterization of particles (FWIW, Lubos didn't agree).

Not for large (i.e., supermassive) black holes. You could pass the event horizon without noticing anything (other than possible effects on light, like lensing).

That's not ambidextrous. Ambidextrous means you use both hands equally well, not you use different hands for different tasks. I too am left-handed (throw and write left-handed) but I do many things right-handed (e.g., eat, drink, use scissors, batting, golf). It's not because anyone trained me that way; it just feels more natural. That being said, I'm not ambidextrous because there are tasks like writing and throwing that I do exclusively with my left. If you only write with your left then you can't be ambidextrous.

Linux Mint 14

Linux Mint was the first distro I used, and I think it's superior to Ubuntu as a first linux fistro (especially now with Unity). On top of that, it's a great distro in general, so you might not want to switch from it! In any case, it's a great starting distro, and then later you can move onto Arch.

I'm guessing you're intelligent enough to be disingenuous here and don't actually believe that; though if you prefer to remain ignorant because it feels less threatening to you then that is your right.