As a Finn living in Japan, our preference for silence is certainly very compatible. I have never lived in one of those "small talk" cultures, which makes it hard to compare.

I do recall having a visitor (couchsurfer) over from US and having the bus driver get angry at us because we kept talking loudly in the crowded bus.

In Finland I feel like my signal-to-noise ratio is being judged. If I kept talking when I had nothing important to say, people might start taking me less seriously. I recall my dad commenting on someone "you should really listen to that person, when he speaks it is always something important".

Finnish IRC channels get pretty funny, as they often become idleness contests when no-one wants to break the silence with something insignificant.

I've noticed the "backchanneling" when speaking in Japan. I often need to make a conscious effort to keep saying "hai" periodically when talking, otherwise it may be assumed that I have either stopped listening or don't understand what the other person is saying.

In Brazil we have the exact opposite "loud" culture. It seems like people try to make as much noise as they can in an effort to get attention. Really annoying.

Did this bus story happen in Japan or Finland?

Bus story was in Japan, no doubt. (Knowing Finland to some extent.)

People should take a look at vixra.org for distributing PDFs if they don't want to go through the filters at arxiv.org and similar places. At vixra.org, the person downloading the paper does not need to give any auth permissions and log in.

Do you mean "uploading"? Also as a reader, something being on vixra is an extremely negative signal as to its quality.

Not really. Readers here tend to judge by merit rather than origin.

I was hoping to read this, but the encumbered download process prevented that.

I spent a little time this morning reading thru the vixra sections for some fields I'm familiar with, and it's pretty much all cranks (some of whom have dozens of papers). Like look at this: http://vixra.org/abs/1512.0336 or this : http://vixra.org/abs/1509.0249 or this : http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0227 or even this: http://vixra.org/abs/1504.0134

Some of these makes Otis Eugene "Gene" Ray TimeCube rants seem cohesive and well thought out.

You can also just scroll down and read the article on the page.

Prefer to read in Papers or LiquidText, but Academia wants my contact list first which is a special kind of scummy.

    academia.edu would like to:
    - Know who you are on Google	
    - View your email address
    - View your basic profile info
    - View your contacts

Thank you. Apparently I'm blind.

Well, it is really non-obvious, to the point that I think they're clearly trying to hide it. The white space expands to push the start of the paper below the fold no matter how large your window is, and the "READ PAPER" text is light grey on white.