After three rum and cokes, some of the language choices seem to be not completely illogical. I'm sure when I come back to the macros I'm writing when completely sober tomorrow, VBA will make my eyes start bleeding again.

There are three categories of knowledge: things I know that I know; things I know that I don't know; and things I don't know that I don't know. My goal has always been to maximize the second category, minimize the third, and acknowledge that things in the first category likely have components in the second and third.

Had a similar situation: sitting on the floor with the laptop, the newfie decided he wanted my attention and flopped down on the laptop. Snapped the screen right off.

The problem with mathematics is the abstract presentation as opposed to practical applications. For proof, look at any Wikipedia page on statistical tests. The mathematicians have edited them so that they are absolutely correct and absolutely useless for anyone wanting to actually code and execute a T-test or a simple ANOVA. My greatest "Aha!" moment came in grad school when I realized that the integral calculus that I pounded my head into as an undergrad was really just determining the area under a curve, and that one could accomplish the same thing with a sheet of graph paper, a pair of scissors, and a good scale (draw the curve, cut it out and weigh it, cut out a 4x4 block of squares and weight it, then calculate the ratio -- you've now integrated the curve using simple algebra and up yours Sir Isaac!). Oh, and LyX is excellent for typesetting equations.