First of all, I replied to a comment wondering about other people's calculation strategies, so I provided mine. Secondly, "I like doing problems like this in my head as I feel that it helps practise my short term memory". Thirdly, :), I haven't attended american school so I am not used to multiple choice.

It's not that complicated mental arithmetic is ever necessary in every-day life, but practising solving problems like this in your head strengthens your ability to disassemble a problem into solvable parts and remembering the solutions to the simple problems long enough to reassemble them to a complete solution. This is useful, at least for me as a programmer. I imagine that having a good short term memory is good for anyone. You don't go to the gym because it will ever be useful to pull a really heavy lever 20 times, but those muscles may be useful for something else.

I do 47 * 3 like I would on paper: 7 * 3 + 4 * 3 * 10 (i.e. ((4 * 10) + 7) * 3)

But on the more complicated problem I used the following strategy:
28 / 4 = 7
8 / 4 = 2
so 288 / 40 = 7.2

7.2 * 29
is 7.2 * 30 - 7.2
is 72 * 3 - 7.2
is 216 - 8 + 0.8
is 208.8

I like doing problems like this in my head as I feel that it helps practise my short term memory.

Am I the only one thinking that all they are saying is that the animal Homo Sapien Sapien is easier to domesticarte if you do it early? Surely this is the case with most species?

There is a colour difference on the links though, but maybe too slim for some monitors.

Heard of meditation?
You can't forcefully subject other people to it but you can start with yourself.

(As a side note, we do have television. It is similar to what you describe)

Exactly. My first thought was savant. There seems to me to be a balance between how many details one remembers and how well one can create abstractions. People who are very good at abstract thinking are so because they throw away irrelevant details and remember the bigger picture. Their pattern matching has gone up a level if you will.

not quite there yet, but soonish: https://bespin.mozillalabs.com/

is there a reference for this? Not that I question what you say, I'm just curious. Is it public what "new systems" they use?

Does the fact that Mozilla has patched Fx mean that I am compromised using any browser but Fx on my mac? How about Chrome?

I am just about to buy a new laptop and I think this just convinced me to go Linux.

First responders cannot formally declare anything, that's true, but if they think she is dead she won't get much help. Maybe she hit her head or maybe she has something blocking her breathing. She might just freeze to death because someone mistook her for dead and didn't wrap her in blankets.
That said, I am undergoing training as a first responder and we are instructed to not bother with checking the pulse, too many false readings, both positive and negative. We check breathing and whether they respond to voice, touch or pain (in that order). If they don't have pulse, they are not breathing, and if they are not breathing you do CPR no matter if they have pulse or not.

or divide by ten and increase by half? And it's not like it has to be exact. Seriously, do it a few times and it sure is faster than punching in the numbers on some device. And it might help keep your brain oiled up. Although, I live in country where you generally don't tip, so admittedly I never have to do this.

Yes let's all start eating concrete instead of expecting a responsive UI.

The thing I am talking about mostly is how Fx closes your tab and delays of a noticeable amount of time before relaunching it in a new window. It also loses the state of running flash applications like videos (which Safari and chrome handles). The whole experience gives me the feeling that it is a hack emulating chrome and safari rather than stable functionality.