FYI, Bambi (the Disney movie character) is male.

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.