I'm glad they are not using lat-long anymore, but my main concern was the method of integration. I fully accept that there are climate models that use more modern approaches in the vein of the fluid dynamics community, like this one http://dev.mitgcm.org/pdfs/96JC02775.pdf but I'm having trouble linking such models to those used in the IPCC reports. Can you point me to some methods papers?

My biggest concern with climate modeling right now is that climate scientists are not the equal of computer scientists, and this gives one pause [wikipedia]:

So one of their approaches to solving Navier Stokes is to use finite difference methods, while the entire field of fluid dynamics moved away from that decades ago (because it is inherently unstable!). This is why all the climate models predict wildly different outcomes for the future: their results are only as good as their boundary conditions, which can only be measured in the present. To me, that's kindof a big deal.

I'm rather fond of Scotsmen, not to mention Ghandi when he said "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

Indeed - my spidy sense tells me there's prior knowledge hidden under all those 250,000 yet-to-be-leaked state department documents!

Videogames are not that different from traditional sports: there is a rule set that exists to define the sport, but those rules do not determine the quality of the player. In fact, a good player never complains about patches, because she can change her strategy accordingly. The evolution of the starcraft II beta is a good example of this. To me, there are two measurements that determine the quality of every sport, and it helps to motivate why we appreciate some sports more than others: Game-critical decisions per minute and secondly, the skill of execution in carrying out those decisions. The first is easiest to measure (at least with video), but the latter is a little more subtle - I think it's related to the number of degrees of freedom involved those actions (think of how many wrong ways there are to hit a baseball). Basically, every decent sport should rank highly on both of the scales.

Overpaid my ass. Esports are not mainstream enough for all but a few to be paid to play. The sponsors haven't quite woken up to reality yet. Take the HDH invitational : every single game had more than 100,000 views, yet the prize pool was a mere $2500, and that was apparently the largest prize pool for a foreign starcraft tournament.

I grew up watching COPS, and I thought it was the anti-COPS show. Just listen to the theme song.

You're right, it's about whether such features add to the feel of the story. By the way, I once saw a man in RDR rear his horse suddenly and jump down for seemingly no reason. I stopped my horse and walked it over to him. The guy was taking a leak on the side of the road. When he finished, he muttered something, got back on his horse and kept moving. I couldn't help feeling a little embarrassed.

As far as maintaining your character is concerned, I think that's something Rockstar tried with San Andreas. The majority of people complained that their character had to eat and exercise to stay in shape. I think it's partly that feedback and in part because Rockstar is trying to reflect a lot of the tropes of Western cinema. For example the dead-eye mechanic does a pretty good job of making you feel like the-man-with-no-name: walking up to a bunch of bad guys yammering at you and taking them all out in a split second, though not historically accurate, is pretty damn satisfying.

Maybe if there's enough articles - a year's worth for each journal. I suppose someone would have to download each one individually - where there's a will there's a way right?

This has bothered me a lot lately. Bittorent to the rescue?

#cnnfail was the twitter hash tag used when CNN neglected to cover the Iranian protests last summer. It's what prompted CNN to include a twitter feed in their broadcasts. Kevin Smith is the writer/director of Dogma, Clerks, Chasing Amy and other counter-culture cult classics. He complained over twitter about getting kicked off a plane for being too fat. Southwest Airlines was forced to make a few public statements defending their policy. I mention these stories as examples of how twitter is helping shift the balance of power away from mainstream media and corporations and toward the public.

My point in the comparison is simply to illustrate that the benefits of twitter as a utility outweigh the costs of whatever spam that might get through, just as with email. Twitter does not need to duplicate the functionality of email for it to be genuinely useful to society.

Like many others here I use gmail to make spam negligible, and I'm sure enterprising people will do the same for twitter should spam become a real problem. Twitter's value comes in what you stand to gain by using it, not by what you think is currently necessary. Think about the effects of #cnnfail or Kevin Smith's Southwest Airlines incident. Compare the effects of a single subversive tweet to all the hundreds of letters you might write your congressman. But aside from its role in society, its personal value is in who you choose to communicate with, just as with email.

The suggestion that we should stop using twitter because of spam is quite strange. Has spam stopped you from using email?