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

If they do, not all is lost! ::))

(My kids range from soon 11 to soon 2 y.o. And they have the same whitish un-tan I had myself when I was the same age.)

I have discovered that siblings get back at you when you get kids of your own.

All my kids will think of is LEGO, that's what they spend all their money on. Myself, I'm thinking of giving them an Arduino, a couple of motors, sensors and diodes and install Processing/Wiring on their computer - just to see what they'll come up with.

I was with you all the way to "remove". If it's a one way ticket, chances are there are only psychopaths and narcissists left! ;)

Does that imply that it would be permissible för 8 y.o. kids to get behind the wheel of a Marsian rover? I'd say that would make my kids enthusiastic emigrants... ;)

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.

My 20 month old girl likes her OLPC very much (inherited from her siblings, they now have a normal computer with Ubuntu on it). She usually gets stuck in the search mode after a while though, so some supervision is needed.

Oh, we also have a spare 80's keyboard which we place in front of our laptops when she wants to join me or the wife while 'putering. Gives her something to do, and us a barrier between the real keyboard and her. This is needed, as she has well deserved her nickname "Godzylvia".

That would have been Bill Gates cheating Paul Allen, actually. But that's even further off topic...

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.

Bullshit. That software is already sold outside the US, and thus it already supports SI units (unless it's written by the boss' nephew, which is one more reason to throw it out).

And really, do you think the conversion snafus don't cost anything?

In the civil cases it is not a question of guilt and crime in the formal sense - you're not a criminal because someone sued you (and the epithet 'criminal' sparked this thread, remember?).

In the cases of the speed tickets the ruling does still not come into effect until the appeal period has lapsed. Furthermore, there have been successful appeals to speed tickets too... ;)