Huh. I have a B.S. in Mathematics. Some schools offer two tracks for Mathematics, one a BA and the other a BS.

I found that pretty funny too. I also find it painful to see heatmap used in a cartographic sense.

I've been developing GIS software since 1996, and I have to tell you that while no one toolset is ideal, I've found ESRI's the easiest to use in a production environment. I've use most of the open source GIS tools, even written some papers on them (that apparently were good enough to be cited by other authors), and yet I keep coming back to ESRI's suite.

Perfect, no. Better than the alternatives? definitely. I also like the developer community around ESRI's products - much more friendly and helpful than those associated with OS products. IMHO of course.

If there is no causative effect, then why spend more money on education with the goal of improving weight and fitness?

There certainly is evidence (the number of fat kids) that current educational programs have not worked. But then the typical government response to a program that is not working is to start another program to fix the broken program. Which always works.

In the end, we have no one to blame but ourselves. We demand certain tastes and products, and then bitch when those demands are met and we get fat. That's just human nature in action though, I'm afraid.

But blaming the schools is the easy way out. Actually getting the attitudes of the public to change is hard, as is convincing the policy makers that change is needed.

Shit rolls downhill, and at the bottom of this hill are the school cooks.

Did you pay to get that stupid, or is it all self-non-taught?

The food pyramid has been around for decades now. That is a direct educational outreach, with boatloads of cash going to preaching that message. The Government also has educational programs for teachers, nutritionists, and other "professionals."

The take away from all this is that it has done no good, and may have done considerable harm, since we are fatter than ever.

I thought that Jamie Oliver failed because he cooked up food the kids hated and he was a pretentious jerk while doing it.

The Government has spent billions of dollars educating Americans about better food, and we've gotten fatter and dumber as a result. Maybe we should listen to less to "experts" and more to our grandmothers - there didn't seem to be all the angst about food back then, nor all the obesity.

Spot on. I use nearly all those on a daily basis doing GIS development. I am just now finishing up a tool that creates isopleth maps from soil sample data, and have also created code to make choropleth maps from all kinds of sales data. That's Linear Algebra, Graph Theory, and Stats in a big way.

When I was a Math student, back in the day, Programming was considered by many to be a branch of Applied Mathematics. I still hold that to be true.

Um, WW2 operations in Germany continued into the 50s. Nazi death squads continued to operate for several years.

And don't forget Korea, which is still an active, albeit very low key right now, war.

Apparently you missed the news that McCain supporters were pulled over by police. Or that Ron Paul supporters are dangerous militia kooks.

I don't think it's a Republican/Democrat thing. When a group comes to power that feels they have been oppressed, the first thing they do is exact revenge. Sometimes that's lopping off heads, sometimes that's making fun of the opposition.

Regardless, the theme continues throughout history.

I use 1-K kerosene to heat my workshop. The Amish in our area use it to heat, cook, and light their homes.

First off, kerosene lamps don't have to be "foul-smelling". That usually means that a wick isn't adjusted right.

And you can easily get plenty of light from the right lamp - check out the Aladdin lamps that are used in parts of the US (don't know where else might use them). Simple lamp, cheap fuel, equivalent to a 60w bulb.

I like LEDs, most of my flashlights use them. But kerosene lamps have proven themselves over many, many years to be reliable and cheap. Introducing LED technology to countries without manufacturing capability means that they are just going to continue to be dependent on others.

Wow, I re-read my post and still can't find where I claimed my experiences were scientific either.

But nice rant. Maybe you could make a movie of your life and call it Anger Management.

Meh, it goes both ways. How many younger coders feel they are god's gift to the industry?

Personally, I welcome anyone who wants to be a programmer. Show me you want to learn, and I will mentor you. I will also listen to your ideas and will likely learn something from your fresh insight.

But show me you are an asshat, and I'll treat you accordingly.

I'd note that everything you mention above has been an issue for the 24 years I've been a programmer.

The customers always want more features or a different interface, interfacing with other systems has always been a problem (witness SNA, EDI, and a host of other painful solutions), some programmers have always felt that the "new" generation is less talented, and in 1984 the CFO at the company I worked for spent most of his time writing Lotus macros and "designing" how our freight dispatching system would work.

That said, anyone who has been in the business for more than a day has seen paradigms come and paradigms go.

All that usually means is that someone, somewhere, is making a shitload of money from convincing someone else that they need to change the way they are doing development.

Not only is your experience not "scientific" (as if experiences could be), it is not typical.

I worked in higher education for many years. The consensus among my colleagues was that homeschooled kids were usually in the top tier of academic work and had no more problems with social interactions than any other college freshman.

In short, they were normal students who were better prepared academically that the majority of their peers.