>> Is screw disconnect the same as a quick-disconnect?
No, but a quick-disconnect would be even more convenient for letting the lawn-mower through. I'm pretty sure that a quick-disconnect lets you "unplug under pressure" without soaking your pants.
I'm just cheap, and I have so many valves in my network that I can always close off pressure to a leg and just unscrew the hose connection. That's good enough for me.
I like having all the extra valves in my network. I'm still playing around (I can't call this "designing " it!). But certainly, any branch or zone with sprayers needs a valve so that I can run drippers and dripline for hours, while the sprayers run for only 15 or so minutes.
What I found after a year or so is that I would kind of like to have the mainline that goes around the house always be pressurized so that I could run just ONE set of sprayers or drippers and nothing else. Also, then, I could spot-water anything by hand without top-watering things near sprayers.
>> if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature
I like that quote. The biochemists who WERE trying to create new genes from scratch had to give up. These guys thought they could improve on Nature and create more efficient enzymes or yeasts.
BZZZT! Wrong. They have libraries full of attempts to synthesize "better" genes, but any time they want something EFFICIENT, even for industrial processes, they have to hunt around in Nature to see what they can borrow from and perhaps tweak for specific purposes.
Then they do plug-and -play like the regular old "GMO" engineers, taking one natural gene complex for Column A from Genus Zed, and one for Column B from Kingdom Bacteria, and shoot them all into some test plant to see what they can see.
But the proud attempt to out-do nature by deduction and synthesis consistently failed. Pride goeth before a fall!
