This is a terrible idea even though it gets suggested all the time. The cost of gathering plastic from the trash vortex in the ocean - a very expensive environment to operate in - is literally orders of magnitude higher than gathering plastic by buying and digging up a landfill. I haven't heard about anyone flipping landfills for a 10,000% return, which is what it would take to indicate that it's worth getting plastic out of the Vortex. You are going to spend at least $100, maybe as much as $1000, to get every $1 of plastic out. There are much funner ways to waste money - drugs and hookers, for example.

For a physicist or computer scientist, the principles of trigonometry are invaluable.

Dude, wtf are you talking about?

I have a masters in CS, and I work at a well-known brain-heavy company, and I never use trig or calculus. Algorithm and data structures matter constantly, databases, compilers, computer architecture, graphics, number theory, graph theory and combinatorics all matter occasionally. But I haven't had to take a sin or do an integral yet.