I agree that design patterns are good to know and they are definitely one of the things that you'll get asked in interviews, however, I think there is a bit of obsession with talking about design patterns themselves and not what's really important which is code quality. In short, if your code is written with good code qualities eg. Testable, loosely coupled, cohesive, open to extension/closed to modification etc, then design patterns will emerge naturally. In day-to-day coding you rarely ever have to implement a design pattern, most places where you need actually need a named design pattern there is already an implementation available, but your code should always have good code qualities. I work with lots of smart people who can talk about design patterns all day, yet often I find myself needing to modify others code, and not only are there no unit tests, (so I don't know if I'm breaking anything), but also there are often a lot of internalized dependencies that make unit testing or refactoring much more difficult than need be.

Self taught also, Mechanical Engineer by training. I've found my biggest gap to be fundamental CS stuff, I'm currently working my way through a book on algorithms: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Algorithms-Third-Thomas-Cormen/dp/0262033844/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266595707&sr=8-1 While the practical implications of knowing this stuff is limited, it's always good to have a deeper understanding, and it will help if you're ever in an interview with hard core CS types.

Ms. Frizzle rules !!

Seriously, I have 5 year old, and I end up reading him a book from the Magic School Bus series just about every night. The series is great for getting kids interested in science and the content isn't too watered down as many books for kids in this age group are. Also you can expand on the books by showing adding your own material like showing them pictures from the Cassini probe or from the Mars rovers, or talking about any science articles that you have read recently that tie into one of the stories.

The imaginative format of the books really appeals to kids; I'm betting you could do one on special relativity and kids would actually get some understanding of it, even though it's a subject that most adults are afraid to grapple with.

Also "Prehistoric Planet" on PBS is pretty good and has more content than your average "Popumentary" from the Discovery channel.

I agree and would like to expand on that. Although the human genome is understood how genes are actually activated is largely a mystery. The article tries to mix junk science related to genetics with parenting to tell us what we do or do not know about parenting. As a parent myself I'm very skeptical of most parenting advice from "experts" because it tends to ignore the simple facts that 1) All kids are different 2) All parents are different, so what works for one parent with their kid isn't necessarily going to work the same way for you. Being a parent is a little like being a gardener. You ultimately only have control over about half of the situation. Kids are born with a personality, your job as a parent is to provide an environment where they can learn and grow. As the garden analogy, goes if you start with tomato seed you're going to end up with tomatoes, you might be able to control how, many tomatoes you get and the quality somewhat but your role is to provide good soil and water, nature does the most of the work. I think people want to believe that they can control what their children become entirely and if they don't turn out as planned, then they are failures as parents. They should probably have more articles and how to communicate kids and on what you can learn from the experience as a parent, but that wouldn't sell nearly as many magazines as astrology posing as science.