English ivy is a ground spreader, at least where I live. It won't grow on the ground if it gets a lot of sun, but ground shaded by trees will turn into a thick mat that is impossible to pull up. Some yards have it growing as a ground cover in the flower beds. You can't pull it off walls or the ground easily. It grows tendrils (roots?) into anything porous, which makes it extremely difficult to pull up. If it's growing on the ground, it's just a thick mat that is impossible to pull up. And while I wouldn't call it a fast spreader, if you ignore it for a couple of years, it will start to take over.
Source: I used to work for a yard company, and I have it in my own yard.
The back and forth over Paris Hilton spending time in jail comes to mind, especially give how public that tug-of-war became between the judge and the sheriff. But I guess that could be considered to be more about wealth than about beauty.
I've sold lots, some of which were obviously chopped out of vehicles with a sawzall (vehicles that I legally owned, btw). They've always scanned my ID, took my thumb print, and mailed me the check after a couple of days.
This will probably be what I do. The metal scrap yards are in a town nearby where there has been a lot of meth lab activity so I think just the fact that I'm not one of those guys will help.
I had a math professor who I'm pretty sure was borderline autistic. His son actually was autistic. While he wasn't the best math teacher I've ever had, he was very good. (Didn't help that I can't comprehend delta-epsilon proofs.)
That was true 20 years ago. The question is how much do you ease up the brake on that specific wheel, and then how much do you reapply it? You need to know the coefficient of friction of the road to know this. Modern controllers are doing a physics simulation of the entire vehicle, and part of this is the weight transfer as you go around a corner (which is partially influenced by the CoG). They then do a physics simulation of the hydraulic brake circuit so it knows how long to run the pump to build up the desired brake pressure.
Now of course this is combined with stability control (since that is required by law) and both of them are controlled by the same code.
(On a related note, I've spent way too much time reverse engineering the calibration for the ABS for a Silverado truck. Ridiculously huge program, ridiculously complicated, and I have a sneaking suspicion that the source code is a mess.)
Software for these controllers are usually codegen'd from a Simulink model (or equivalent dataflow language), which contributes to the difficulty in reverse engineering.
Source: I used to work for a yard company, and I have it in my own yard.