avani

How would they fairly choose what ads to place?

I'll second the recommendation of getting a pen you really like.

The next step is going to depend on your boredom threshold. If you can do it, find an article or two, ideally a few pages each, and copy them word for word in longhand. The goal of this exercise is for your brain to get bored enough to naturally push you to go faster. For legibility, add in that if it's unreadable by your partner/friend, you have to redo that article (and not pick another article: that would be too interesting :).

If you have more time, handwriting a nightly journal or regular letters to someone is a more pleasant way to achieve the same goal. As writing more than a few words at a time becomes rote, it will naturally get better and faster.

"... but the fact is being a great artist and knowing differential calculus are mutually exclusive."

Either you missed a 'not', or you need to stop and think about the number of people you've just insulted with this statement. Math and art have been strongly intertwined for a very long time, from the Golden Ratio of the Greeks to Da Vinci to Escher (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_and_art). Those who are good at math are frequently good at art partly because they can understand abstractions and separate them from 'icons' of objects and ideas. I would instead state that it is the rare great artist that doesn't have the ability to quickly pick up continuous math concepts.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, only addressing the point of bullying:

While you and yours may have the support structure and innate tendency to become stronger as a result of early-childhood bullying, I think the schools' argument is that the potential harm in a student being bullied to the point they hurt their future educations/careers is greater than the potential good of bullying for those who can withstand it.

Social fortitude is like any other aspect of development in that some children will obtain it sooner than others. Those that get there first become the popular kids and the kids that simply don't care. Those that don't arrange themselves into ``safe'' cliques or take what the other children say to heart and believe that they are stupid/ugly/weak and will never be able to change. If the parents are not available, the school would need to be able to provide individual support to nurture these kids to the point where they can stand up for themselves. This is difficult in public schools, so the alternative they are using is to encourage all the children to spend time together.

Now, devil's advocate aside, since I believe I can provide the type of supporting atmosphere that will help a kid toughen up, I would likely not send my child to a school like this. However, faced with the problem of unreliable parental involvement, I can somewhat understand the school position.

I had to fact-check this because some sites (including Ars) are incorrectly reporting that Apple does use Optimus.

Here is a link from Apple Insider discussing Apple's graphics switching: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/10/04/13/nvidia_says_ne...

I'm surprised this statistic isn't brought out more in articles that call cancer, heart disease, etc. diseases of the developed world vs. the modern world, the difference being that instead of living in a pure time of organic everything, many people simply didn't live long enough to develop our modern diseases.