*twitch* My eyes!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker Have a look at what he's done with Postgres, Vertica, VoltDB, and the other systems he's working on. You may find that contributing to this project aligns you with some great, very intelligent people -- that's opportunity for learning, opportunity for contributing, and opportunity for good networking.

Also, while you're on the pubmed site, you might be interested in searching for other papers about the benefits of "delayed cord clamping" vs "early cord clamping." There are only a few cases where early cord clamping is beneficial, apparently. I was able to find many more articles on why delayed cord clamping is beneficial than I was on why early cord clamping is beneficial.

For those who like evolution: It's also interesting to think that for millions of years, man did not clamp immediately after birth. Unattended women wouldn't bother. And yet, here we are!

If you think that for every evolutionary tale there must be a creationary (whoah, what?) tale: do you think that $deity really made humans in such a way as to be entirely dependent on doctors to clamp as soon as a baby is born? Surely he would have taken care of that piece of awesomeness by introducing some new aspect of nature to handle it without our human intervention!

I first saw a video of Hans Rosling, who had some very unique ways of visualizing data that would otherwise be useless to a simple mind such as mine.

After I watched that, I found a piece of software called Tableau. I downloaded the trial version, and really liked how easy it made visualizing data for me. I can take the data I have, and Tableau will see how it's connected and allow you to generate visual reports of the data. I'm not saying that it'll work for everything, but it certainly does what I need it to extremely well, especially for my business intelligence initiatives.

I don't get how being tied down makes a person more independent.