It probably isn't if you're coming at the material for the first time, or after a long break. I took a 15-week course in Linear Algebra a few months ago, and we only covered about half the book in that time. I spent just about every weekend and evening doing those exercises. It's very time consuming.
However, if you gave me my old College Algebra book, I might be able to skim through it in a month of weekends and refresh myself on most of it, because I've used that stuff a lot in various jobs. Same goes for a lot of (but by no means all) programming books. I'm immersed in that stuff daily, so I can get through it pretty quickly.
> Periodically over on Stack Overflow (and in many other programming forums) the question comes up about what books are good for programmers to read. The question has been asked and answered several times, in several different ways. The same group of books always seems to rise to the top...
That's not discrimination against young people because it's not saying that young people aren't allowed to ride the bus, just that they have to pay the regular price. (Also, most children in the U.S. are bused to school for free. Is that not the way it is in the UK?)
Use some common sense. For how many values of $x that would be the subject of an interview question are 5 year olds going to be better than grandmothers?
That's all fine and good in an environment where people can actually come to physical harm, but this article is about academia. I think we need to stop excusing asshole behavior in academia and IT.
Yes, the impact of a 1 percentage point increase is significant, but it's nowhere near the bloodbath that an increase of 18 percentage points would be, which is how I think most people would read "increased risk by 18%."