Setting the world to rights - results

Thank you for all your wonderful and thought-provoking suggestions for how to improve the general state of popular education. There were nine unique suggestions and some more from robhu and rysmiel who tried to sneak round my one suggestion only stipulation. Foolish people! Do not cross me when I give explicit warning that I'm in a mean mood.

Anyway, I promised there would be prizes, so here goes with the winners. *drumroll*

Highly commended:

• quizcustodet: Conservation of energy and momentum, with a really practical implementation suggestion.
• elusis: Correlation does not imply causality, because it's definitely a single fact that has lots of powerful implications. And because her implementation suggestion was the funniest thing I read all week.

Runner up:

leora: Be the one who acts. It's extremely original, and comes with some very interesting psychological background, and it's the kind of thing where simply being told it goes a long way towards getting the desired effect. I highly recommend you read leora's comments on the issue, because you'll likely learn something.

( and the winner is... )

Thank you to all who participated in such an interesting discussion. I very much like having chewy stuff to think about that isn't my thesis, at the moment. I also like the way the competition drew comments from several people who aren't regulars in my LJ; it's always nice to meet new people or hear from habitual lurkers. Yay.

CSS / design help

So I've created two styles for my journal, and I've been fiddling with them on and off for a while, but I've now got to the point where I'm relatively satisfied. However, I'm a complete beginner at this whole web design lark, so I would appreciate some feedback (and technical help if you're good with this sort of thing).

( survey for those feeling helpful )

I don't think it validates and I have a feeling it's not terribly accessible, this stuff. But I don't really know where to start with those things. Well, that's not true, I know where to start with making standards-compliant CSS, but not how to do that without breaking everything. So if you have suggestions about those aspects they will also be welcome.

Addendum 12.3.05: I have played around with the Belle Epoque style to try and deal with some of the problems raised. So please could any helpful web design gurus compare the old version (Belle Epoque, the default), with the proposed new version (Under construction) and tell me what you think. It all fits together perfectly at low res, but I suspect I'm going to be left with a lot of white space at high res. I'm hoping it's better to have the white space in the middle than on the right. Thanks for all your lovely suggestions!