The problem with people today is that they are taught that we are living in The One True Sacred and Immutable Biosphere, and that if that biosphere changes, well, that's just the end of everything. The fossil record shows that time and time again biosphere changes are not only recovered from, but that the net effect is dramatically positive in terms of long term diversity.
I would submit that the plants contribute to a net increase in entropy, and human activity is contributing to a net decrease in entropy (at least on environmental scales not related to transforming rocks into microprocessors).
Also, the drastic environmental changes lead to a decrease in biodiversity (the simpler hardy stuff survives and prospers, think nothing left but grass, cockroaches, and jellyfish).
Finally, I would submit that a lot of conservation is about doing more with less, and not necessarily doing less with less as opponents make it out to be. But the point is to understand the energy balance and how to go on without having to ignore terms in the equation.
Yep, with most of the big engineering firms I've worked for, it's maybe 5% hacking and 95% documentation and packaging. If you can enjoy doing mostly the latter (finishing the last 10% of a project that ends up taking 90% of the time), then you should be able to get along fine. If you spend all of your time doing the former, then you will quickly become reviled by your co-workers:-P
Here's the junk that seemed important to engineering companies:
ISO9001 : Is your shit documented? Do you know where the most current version of that documentation is? Most of the companies skirted the requirement by creating an unironically named "Desktop Instruction" linked from a desktop icon to a version-controlled file that basically said: "1. find problems 2. fix problems 3. document fix". BTW, you fail if you don't have a footer that says "Uncontrolled if printed" (but CS geeks never print anything anyway). And bonus if you can draw every process and procedure in flowchart form, which is actually a little bit fun:-P
CMMI : Is your shit version controlled? Can you rebuild an exact copy of something (and its documentation) that you delivered a month or a year ago? If you use version control tools, I think that automatically gets you to CMMI level 2, and if you use automated build tools in a version-controlled build environment, then you have most of CMMI level 4. I'm afraid that puts you well ahead of most project engineering teams.
Six Sigma (or some other Quality Management System) : Does your shit break? Your shit really shouldn't break, but if it does you ought to have some way to fix it so it doesn't break the same way again later. This might be the hardest thing to get down pat, but fortunately it's considered a "bonus" and not required by most projects. If you use a trouble ticket system, and the shit you fix stays fixed, then you're probably in good shape.
So, in summary, if you can find your way around some sort of toolchain that involves doxygen, mercurial, make/ant, cobbler, jenkins, and redmine, to the point that you can hand a junior engineering a piece of paper (oops, I meant email a link to a desktop instruction) such that the junior engineer can build their own working copy of the product by themselves with nothing but cold iron and a revision tag, then you're doing well.
But really, the real trick is to figure out how to get everyone on the project team to use the same toolchain:-P
3) Another example: Stainless Steel makes for very good wedding rings (geek factor aside). There are tons of quality steel rings out there nowadays, and they cost a fraction of the platinum/gold ones. Use the money you save on a top-notch honeymoon trip - you'll both have much more from it.
Aerospace nerd here, ended up getting her this: http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/r166b-d.html (the site has lots of other cool designs that might appeal to mechies and techies more than the typical jewelry store)
If you're going to have kids, better to get the right size afterwards though, don't think it's possible to resize this kind of ring for baby bloat;-D
Ice occupies more space than water. Melting of sea ice results in a drop in ocean levels, not an increase. only melting of land based ice results in a rise in sea levels.
But ice also floats on water. If you have ice floating in a glass of water, and the ice melts, the level of liquid stays the same.
But salty water is more buoyant than freshwater! So the icebergs would sit a tad lower as the salinity of the water decreases.
But TFA says it's mostly caused by the wind gyre that sucks everything up with a low pressure system. And the main effect has nothing to do with rise or fall of ocean levels, but with ocean currents that keep the North Atlantic relatively warm, but could plunge it into an ice age if the currents reversed (as was the case during the last ice age). Fun and amazing stuff.
Hmm, sounds like I come from a similar background to you... have you tried simply maintaining a resume / profile at monster.com ? Sorry to sound like a shill, but I pretty much got every job from employers and recruiters looking for me, rather than the other way around.
Even with a degree from an Ivy-League school, if the employer doesn't first have the position open (and not just because it's a formality when they're already trying to hire someone specific, which is the case with most official job postings), then your chances are pretty slim that they're going to create a position for you just because you have an awesome resume.
Also, especially for engineers, you have that safe-haven in the military-industrial complex if you can land and maintain a position with a (job) security clearance. Sure, the standards and work ethic are often lower, but no H-1Bs there, go figure:-P
Heh, with python tkinter, it's standard practice to set up event loops by having functions call themselves (with all of its parameter objects included) at the end, and simply not worry about returning from any of the recursive function calls, ever.
Can't seem to find a link to a similar program now, but around middle school age my father sent me on a 2-week camp trip. In retrospect, it was pretty amazing... We traced our way down the Patuxent River watershed. We mucked around in the swamps pretending we were muskrats, smearing detritus on our faces. We canoed to campsites, jumping out of them and sheltering below the reeds as a freak thunderstorm blew through. We took two showers the entire time, one of them lasting less than 2 minutes. We rode a skipjack to Tangier Island, and shucked oysters which used to cover the bay and filter all of the water every 4 days. We built shelters out of branches and pine needles. We were scattered out on an island and spent 3 hours of alone time just out of earshot of the next human being. We were blindfolded and led to a tree in the woods, which we later had to go find. We wrote stories about what it would be like to be a crab or a seagull. And yes, there were campfires and songs and jokes and girls and all of those other camp mainstays as well.
Good, memorable times. And yes, it was pretty educational too.
Heh, I was actually a "substitute counselor" at Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth for a couple weeks about 15 years ago... It was more of an academic camp but that seems to be exactly what the asker is looking for. Also it's quite selective, but hopefully that works in your favor. I would readily admit without shame that some of those middle-school-aged kids were way smarter than my ivy-league-college-aged ass.
The self-paced math class I was tutoring was admittedly kind of silly, but it was a good format to allow all the students to proceed as fast as they individually could, while the instructional team would go around and help explain and provide motivation when necessary to keep the kids progressing. Once in a while we'd present a challenge or puzzle for the group. My dorm roommate was one of the CS instructors, and he would spend his evenings hacking away at some obscure vulnerabilities in the Linux TCP/IP stack.
Anyway, my substitute self excluded, I was certainly amazed by the quality of both the instructional counselors and students in the CTY program, it was certainly an exceptional summer school for geniuses camp program, should your kid be stimulated by that kind of challenge and good company.
Yep, Verizon is on my short list of companies I don't trust with electronic access to my charge accounts.
I pay for my FiOS line via snail mail, about every other month or so. They don't seem to charge any late fees for being a month or two past due, so I can stretch the postage stamps in my stamp book that little bit extra and pay 2-3 bills with one check.:-P
Yeah, these e-readers aren't going to replace schools, public or homeschool. They might replace some of the hassles of textbooks and worksheets, that's it.
A lot of the money we pay for schooling goes directly to the publishers who do textbooks and worksheets, so that's where you can expect to find the strong political resistance.
Meanwhile, teacher quality is one of the strongest indicators of student success. Using e-books to decrease the student:teacher ratio is just going to mean less customization of the lesson towards the student's abilities. Some e-learning programs might automate a bit of that self-paced leveling, but so far it's primarily the teacher who is monitoring student progress and making sure they stay focused, engaged, have the right resources available, and learning at the best pace for their capability.
Replacing teachers with TV, books, devices, etc. will likely have a detrimental effect on the student. Heck, even in the Diamond Age there was still a human ractive / low class prostitute that guided the little lady through the ultimate education device experience:P
It's not as good as I remember, but the writing is more engaging / less dry than Scientific American, and is actually somewhat useful in everyday life. Also tends to have wonderful explanatory graphics. Gives you a bit more coverage of biological sciences than some of the other recommendations I've seen here.
But really, just go to the periodical stacks at your nearest University Engineering library, I almost always find something completely random that engages me there.
Yeah, but on the plus side at least now it's one of the few "geeky" magazines you can get in exchange for airline miles (or other forms of otherwise worthless marketing points).
My wife also works for one of these school systems that recently issued iPads to students and teachers (P.G. County, MD). I was surprised that they actually did a good job of it... they actually budgeted for teacher training and for some course materials to be loaded onto it. The student iPads are locked down, so they can't install games and crap, but her iPad is relatively open (but probably somewhat monitored).
She's much more technically savvy than most teachers, and she's been able to put the iPad to good use, but not really for the way it was intended. She uses it to differentiate instruction so some of the kids in her room can work at a different pace.
The other big thing it helps her with is setting up a paperless work environment, where she can email instructions and worksheets to her students for completion. The administration is pretty stingy with photocopier paper quotas for teachers (when the copying machines work, that is:P ), so she pretty much appreciates having the iPads as an expensive workaround to not having other resources readily available:-P
All in all, she manages to use it as another (non-essential) tool. If the money was spent on lowering the student:teacher ration, that would be better. But in the hands of a teacher who knows how to use it as a labor-saving device, it's decent.:-D
P.S. The playing games as a distraction thing is just a classroom management issue that subby's wife has to deal with... kids would turn *anything* into a toy:P
Yes, RAIDs do not eliminate the need for backups, but there are plenty of benefits to using it on a home Linux server. Here's my typical setup using Linux SW raid with 2-4 disks partitioned somewhat like the following:
/ on RAID10. (The Linux RAID10 with the -f2 option). Allows reads in parallel, lowers latency under load (the driver will give the request to the head that needs to move the shortest distance, or the disk that is not busy serving some other request), and still allows your system to boot when (not if) one of your drives fails./var/tmp on RAID0 . I don't always set this up, since it's easier to just use tmpfs for stuff like/tmp nowadays. But it's useful to have some scratch space on your system for compiles or things that write a lot of temporary things that get thrown away./home on RAID5 (or 6 if you've got lots of disks), so the remaining bunch of data available on the drives gets pooled together and has decent performance. Also usually make/usr/local a symlink to/home/local , which tends to make it easier for me to carry my stuff between distros.
Had my system running this way for over 10 years now and it carried me through 2 disk failures. Mdadm is your friend.
The Roku box is the only Linux device I've heard of that can stream Netflix. The Android-based devices seem to work OK too.
I tend to not really care about all things TV&Movies, but if I really needed to have netflix working under Linux, I'd probably just run Windows under Virtualbox or something. The video bandwidth probably isn't high enough for HD, but oh well.
I would simply go find my entertainments elsewhere, but I'm one of those weird people who find entertainment in searching for entertainment.
Yeah, who needs SOPA when you have the US military to enforce royalty payments!
Yes, it's a new age of intellectual property imperialism! Except instead of the huge royal navies of England and France fighting pirates and collecting royalties on trade routes, we'll have the DoD DDoS attacks taking down all parties that don't pony up!
It's suiting for the US, much of whose wealth and economy is now based on imaginary assets, like patents and copyrights on, well, just about anything having to do with "popular" culture or business processes. What better way to make money for nothing than to have a piece of legal paper that says that people have to pay you money for doing ${thing}s? And then having a bunch of other people fund your military, the largest in the world, to enforce those payments?
Um, you might be forgetting that Apple already has a historical record of business without Jobs. Granted, they didn't appreciate him that much at that time...
Actually I think I liked that Apple quite a bit more than the Apple we had under Jobs. I'm not a big Jobs fan, but it's hard to deny that he had the clout and exercised a strong role at applying radical management to their product line. Without him, they'll probably lose focus and discipline and slink back into traditional management sluggishness like other big corps.
Sure, it may take some time to happen. And I do really appreciate the kick in the pants he gave to PDA/smartphone technology.
I'll also head this off and say that I'm not philosophically opposed to genetic manipulation of foodstuffs.
Yeah, the GMO debate seems to be getting into more or less the same trappings as the abortion debate; where one side of the argument might only think of it as first trimester, and the other side only thinks of it as third trimester (well, I suppose there are the "every sperm is sacred" people too).
But the GMO debate is even more ridiculous, in that you can just as easily make poisonous fruit through organic crop farming as you could make safe fruit through whatever selective breeding or advanced GM tools you have on hand. But I suppose if there's something people can agree on, its that they like "purity"... whatever that means.
And then there's sucralose / sucrose, the inorganic sugar substitute that's been showing up everywhere. It's indigestible, so you can't get fat from it! Yet, it doesn't seem to leave the body in the same detectable quantities that it goes in! Actually, I just avoid sucrose because it gives me headaches. And I appreciate the fine print on the food/drink labels that help me avoid it.
Oh, I think iOS will go into decline all by itself now that Steve is gone... without his iron fist to define the experience, it will stray. I mean, hey, it was less than a month, maybe even a week after his death that they rolled out the update with the frustrating page-turning animation which has my wife ready to fling her iPad across the room. Expecting more useless "bling" like this in the experience:-D
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with people today is that they are taught that we are living in The One True Sacred and Immutable Biosphere, and that if that biosphere changes, well, that's just the end of everything. The fossil record shows that time and time again biosphere changes are not only recovered from, but that the net effect is dramatically positive in terms of long term diversity.
I would submit that the plants contribute to a net increase in entropy, and human activity is contributing to a net decrease in entropy (at least on environmental scales not related to transforming rocks into microprocessors).
Also, the drastic environmental changes lead to a decrease in biodiversity (the simpler hardy stuff survives and prospers, think nothing left but grass, cockroaches, and jellyfish).
Finally, I would submit that a lot of conservation is about doing more with less, and not necessarily doing less with less as opponents make it out to be. But the point is to understand the energy balance and how to go on without having to ignore terms in the equation.
flooding the atmosphere with a caustic, corrosive gas that could, in high enough concentrations, make just about anything burst into flame.
Yep, with most of the big engineering firms I've worked for, it's maybe 5% hacking and 95% documentation and packaging. If you can enjoy doing mostly the latter (finishing the last 10% of a project that ends up taking 90% of the time), then you should be able to get along fine. If you spend all of your time doing the former, then you will quickly become reviled by your co-workers :-P
Here's the junk that seemed important to engineering companies:
So, in summary, if you can find your way around some sort of toolchain that involves doxygen, mercurial, make/ant, cobbler, jenkins, and redmine, to the point that you can hand a junior engineering a piece of paper (oops, I meant email a link to a desktop instruction) such that the junior engineer can build their own working copy of the product by themselves with nothing but cold iron and a revision tag, then you're doing well.
But really, the real trick is to figure out how to get everyone on the project team to use the same toolchain :-P
3) Another example: Stainless Steel makes for very good wedding rings (geek factor aside). There are tons of quality steel rings out there nowadays, and they cost a fraction of the platinum/gold ones. Use the money you save on a top-notch honeymoon trip - you'll both have much more from it.
Aerospace nerd here, ended up getting her this: http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/r166b-d.html (the site has lots of other cool designs that might appeal to mechies and techies more than the typical jewelry store)
If you're going to have kids, better to get the right size afterwards though, don't think it's possible to resize this kind of ring for baby bloat ;-D
Ice occupies more space than water. Melting of sea ice results in a drop in ocean levels, not an increase. only melting of land based ice results in a rise in sea levels.
But ice also floats on water. If you have ice floating in a glass of water, and the ice melts, the level of liquid stays the same.
But salty water is more buoyant than freshwater! So the icebergs would sit a tad lower as the salinity of the water decreases.
But TFA says it's mostly caused by the wind gyre that sucks everything up with a low pressure system. And the main effect has nothing to do with rise or fall of ocean levels, but with ocean currents that keep the North Atlantic relatively warm, but could plunge it into an ice age if the currents reversed (as was the case during the last ice age). Fun and amazing stuff.
Hmm, sounds like I come from a similar background to you... have you tried simply maintaining a resume / profile at monster.com ? Sorry to sound like a shill, but I pretty much got every job from employers and recruiters looking for me, rather than the other way around.
Even with a degree from an Ivy-League school, if the employer doesn't first have the position open (and not just because it's a formality when they're already trying to hire someone specific, which is the case with most official job postings), then your chances are pretty slim that they're going to create a position for you just because you have an awesome resume.
Also, especially for engineers, you have that safe-haven in the military-industrial complex if you can land and maintain a position with a (job) security clearance. Sure, the standards and work ethic are often lower, but no H-1Bs there, go figure :-P
Extra-strength Damitol(TM) always worked wonders for me.
That's what you get for letting slip in an errant "import skynet" statement...
Heh, with python tkinter, it's standard practice to set up event loops by having functions call themselves (with all of its parameter objects included) at the end, and simply not worry about returning from any of the recursive function calls, ever.
xkcd doesn't like being anthropomorphized.
Can't seem to find a link to a similar program now, but around middle school age my father sent me on a 2-week camp trip. In retrospect, it was pretty amazing... We traced our way down the Patuxent River watershed. We mucked around in the swamps pretending we were muskrats, smearing detritus on our faces. We canoed to campsites, jumping out of them and sheltering below the reeds as a freak thunderstorm blew through. We took two showers the entire time, one of them lasting less than 2 minutes. We rode a skipjack to Tangier Island, and shucked oysters which used to cover the bay and filter all of the water every 4 days. We built shelters out of branches and pine needles. We were scattered out on an island and spent 3 hours of alone time just out of earshot of the next human being. We were blindfolded and led to a tree in the woods, which we later had to go find. We wrote stories about what it would be like to be a crab or a seagull. And yes, there were campfires and songs and jokes and girls and all of those other camp mainstays as well.
Good, memorable times. And yes, it was pretty educational too.
Heh, I was actually a "substitute counselor" at Johns Hopkins' Center for Talented Youth for a couple weeks about 15 years ago... It was more of an academic camp but that seems to be exactly what the asker is looking for. Also it's quite selective, but hopefully that works in your favor. I would readily admit without shame that some of those middle-school-aged kids were way smarter than my ivy-league-college-aged ass.
The self-paced math class I was tutoring was admittedly kind of silly, but it was a good format to allow all the students to proceed as fast as they individually could, while the instructional team would go around and help explain and provide motivation when necessary to keep the kids progressing. Once in a while we'd present a challenge or puzzle for the group. My dorm roommate was one of the CS instructors, and he would spend his evenings hacking away at some obscure vulnerabilities in the Linux TCP/IP stack.
Anyway, my substitute self excluded, I was certainly amazed by the quality of both the instructional counselors and students in the CTY program, it was certainly an exceptional summer school for geniuses camp program, should your kid be stimulated by that kind of challenge and good company.
Oblig link: http://cty.jhu.edu/
Yep, Verizon is on my short list of companies I don't trust with electronic access to my charge accounts.
I pay for my FiOS line via snail mail, about every other month or so. They don't seem to charge any late fees for being a month or two past due, so I can stretch the postage stamps in my stamp book that little bit extra and pay 2-3 bills with one check. :-P
Yeah, these e-readers aren't going to replace schools, public or homeschool. They might replace some of the hassles of textbooks and worksheets, that's it.
A lot of the money we pay for schooling goes directly to the publishers who do textbooks and worksheets, so that's where you can expect to find the strong political resistance.
Meanwhile, teacher quality is one of the strongest indicators of student success. Using e-books to decrease the student:teacher ratio is just going to mean less customization of the lesson towards the student's abilities. Some e-learning programs might automate a bit of that self-paced leveling, but so far it's primarily the teacher who is monitoring student progress and making sure they stay focused, engaged, have the right resources available, and learning at the best pace for their capability.
Replacing teachers with TV, books, devices, etc. will likely have a detrimental effect on the student. Heck, even in the Diamond Age there was still a human ractive / low class prostitute that guided the little lady through the ultimate education device experience :P
It's not as good as I remember, but the writing is more engaging / less dry than Scientific American, and is actually somewhat useful in everyday life. Also tends to have wonderful explanatory graphics. Gives you a bit more coverage of biological sciences than some of the other recommendations I've seen here.
But really, just go to the periodical stacks at your nearest University Engineering library, I almost always find something completely random that engages me there.
Yeah, but on the plus side at least now it's one of the few "geeky" magazines you can get in exchange for airline miles (or other forms of otherwise worthless marketing points).
geek:geeky::sports:sporty ?
Sounds good.
My wife also works for one of these school systems that recently issued iPads to students and teachers (P.G. County, MD). I was surprised that they actually did a good job of it... they actually budgeted for teacher training and for some course materials to be loaded onto it. The student iPads are locked down, so they can't install games and crap, but her iPad is relatively open (but probably somewhat monitored).
She's much more technically savvy than most teachers, and she's been able to put the iPad to good use, but not really for the way it was intended. She uses it to differentiate instruction so some of the kids in her room can work at a different pace.
The other big thing it helps her with is setting up a paperless work environment, where she can email instructions and worksheets to her students for completion. The administration is pretty stingy with photocopier paper quotas for teachers (when the copying machines work, that is :P ), so she pretty much appreciates having the iPads as an expensive workaround to not having other resources readily available :-P
All in all, she manages to use it as another (non-essential) tool. If the money was spent on lowering the student:teacher ration, that would be better. But in the hands of a teacher who knows how to use it as a labor-saving device, it's decent. :-D
P.S. The playing games as a distraction thing is just a classroom management issue that subby's wife has to deal with... kids would turn *anything* into a toy :P
Yes, RAIDs do not eliminate the need for backups, but there are plenty of benefits to using it on a home Linux server. Here's my typical setup using Linux SW raid with 2-4 disks partitioned somewhat like the following:
/ on RAID10. (The Linux RAID10 with the -f2 option). Allows reads in parallel, lowers latency under load (the driver will give the request to the head that needs to move the shortest distance, or the disk that is not busy serving some other request), and still allows your system to boot when (not if) one of your drives fails. /var/tmp on RAID0 . I don't always set this up, since it's easier to just use tmpfs for stuff like /tmp nowadays. But it's useful to have some scratch space on your system for compiles or things that write a lot of temporary things that get thrown away. /home on RAID5 (or 6 if you've got lots of disks), so the remaining bunch of data available on the drives gets pooled together and has decent performance. Also usually make /usr/local a symlink to /home/local , which tends to make it easier for me to carry my stuff between distros.
Had my system running this way for over 10 years now and it carried me through 2 disk failures. Mdadm is your friend.
The Roku box is the only Linux device I've heard of that can stream Netflix. The Android-based devices seem to work OK too.
I tend to not really care about all things TV&Movies, but if I really needed to have netflix working under Linux, I'd probably just run Windows under Virtualbox or something. The video bandwidth probably isn't high enough for HD, but oh well.
I would simply go find my entertainments elsewhere, but I'm one of those weird people who find entertainment in searching for entertainment.
Whatever... just don't tell my wife about them!
Yeah, who needs SOPA when you have the US military to enforce royalty payments!
Yes, it's a new age of intellectual property imperialism! Except instead of the huge royal navies of England and France fighting pirates and collecting royalties on trade routes, we'll have the DoD DDoS attacks taking down all parties that don't pony up!
It's suiting for the US, much of whose wealth and economy is now based on imaginary assets, like patents and copyrights on, well, just about anything having to do with "popular" culture or business processes. What better way to make money for nothing than to have a piece of legal paper that says that people have to pay you money for doing ${thing}s? And then having a bunch of other people fund your military, the largest in the world, to enforce those payments?
Subjugation! Success!
Um, you might be forgetting that Apple already has a historical record of business without Jobs. Granted, they didn't appreciate him that much at that time...
Actually I think I liked that Apple quite a bit more than the Apple we had under Jobs. I'm not a big Jobs fan, but it's hard to deny that he had the clout and exercised a strong role at applying radical management to their product line. Without him, they'll probably lose focus and discipline and slink back into traditional management sluggishness like other big corps.
Sure, it may take some time to happen. And I do really appreciate the kick in the pants he gave to PDA/smartphone technology.
I'll also head this off and say that I'm not philosophically opposed to genetic manipulation of foodstuffs.
Yeah, the GMO debate seems to be getting into more or less the same trappings as the abortion debate; where one side of the argument might only think of it as first trimester, and the other side only thinks of it as third trimester (well, I suppose there are the "every sperm is sacred" people too).
But the GMO debate is even more ridiculous, in that you can just as easily make poisonous fruit through organic crop farming as you could make safe fruit through whatever selective breeding or advanced GM tools you have on hand. But I suppose if there's something people can agree on, its that they like "purity"... whatever that means.
And then there's sucralose / sucrose, the inorganic sugar substitute that's been showing up everywhere. It's indigestible, so you can't get fat from it! Yet, it doesn't seem to leave the body in the same detectable quantities that it goes in! Actually, I just avoid sucrose because it gives me headaches. And I appreciate the fine print on the food/drink labels that help me avoid it.
Oh, I think iOS will go into decline all by itself now that Steve is gone... without his iron fist to define the experience, it will stray. I mean, hey, it was less than a month, maybe even a week after his death that they rolled out the update with the frustrating page-turning animation which has my wife ready to fling her iPad across the room. Expecting more useless "bling" like this in the experience :-D
Personally I would never eat peas after Mendel had his hands on them.
<sarcasm/>