Second the rec on Sadava. I strongly preferred it to Campbell, the other standard intro bio text, which I found insufficiently precise. I'd go to make an Anki card about some concept, only to find that Campbell's discussion lacked enough precision for me to state exactly what was going on. Sadly, I haven't read another biology book (having been quite satisfied with Sadava's), so I can't make a Luke-compliant recommendation.

Book's homepage: http://www.mcafee.cc/Introecon/

There seems to be threeish versions about:

1. The original (the one your link goes to), which McAfee believes may be preferred by the mathematically sophisticated or engineers. This is the one I'm personally using, currently.

2. A second version, meant to improve accessibility, which McAfee expects professors considering the text to prefer

3. Version 2.1, which appears to be a refinement of version 2. Includes solutions to exercises, cosmetic improvements, and "small edits for consistency of notation and for clarity."

(I'm vaguely reminded of Debian-Ubuntu-Mint Linux distros. Yay open source?)

http://markmanson.net/std-guide

There are theoretical reason to expect long-term harm from it.

Such as?

I wouldn't be surprised if every single principle of effective learning has, by someone, somewhere, been co-opted into a dark art.

From a technical perspective. However, many of my friends respond to fb messages and not emails. Near as I can tell, they're young enough that, when establishing a "best way to contact me," they chose "website I'm going to be on anyway."

I think, now that they're graduating college, they're going to have to get themselves a professional email, but the best way to contact them socially is going to remain fb because, for most social stuff (or at least, social stuff my friends and I get up to), we don't really need any more features than fb has, which I find disappointing, being in the minority who could really use everything you listed.

Thank you for the reply. I somewhat disagree that this detracts from the purpose of the thread—I find signalling via grammar (a) nonobvious and (b) useful, making my comment very much in place in a thread about instrumental rationality (albeit less so in a questions thread)—but I do very much appreciate the feedback.

In that case, "it's" is a contraction equivalent to "it is". For a possessive, use "its".

Examples:

Practical advice from its members.

and

It's inspired by the stupid questions.

(What's the point of paying attention to this stuff if you're communicating clearly? Briefly, signalling. If I notice you've made a grammatical error, on average, I estimate you're less well educated or not invested in making the writing worth my while than in the opposite case, and am less likely to finish reading if I get bored or have to expend mental effort to understand what you're saying or something. Also, there's an aesthetic element: error-free writing is, ceter paribus, more pleasing to read.)

(Also, wondering if this was downvoted because someone thinks I'm incorrect, because they think I'm being an ass, or for some other reason.)