The arrow was lost, replacing it with a “=“ below: 2 Mg3Si2O5(OH)4 + 3 CO2 = Mg3Si4O10(OH)2 + 3 MgCO3 + 3 H2O.

This is what wikipedia says, not sure if it is what TFA is about: Magnesite can also be formed via the carbonation of magnesium serpentine (lizardite) via the following reaction: 2 Mg3Si2O5(OH)4 + 3 CO2 Mg3Si4O10(OH)2 + 3 MgCO3 + 3 H2O.

Wow, quite an impressive insight. Are you a psychologist by chance? ( no irony intended )

I think the deniers don't like to admit (whether consciously or unconsciously) that GW/AGW is happening because the mitigation would be in conflict with their ideological or moral beliefs (turns out there is a correlation between opinion on GW and political beliefs). I wish they rather followed the example of George Carlin, who said fair and square that he doesn't care about humanity (anymore), rather than doubt the science.

If that was the case, perhaps we'd find out that people who don't care about the future of humanity are in a majority, and perhaps I shouldn't be concerned about the future of humanity in the first place. At least I'd feel better when reading discussions about climate on Slashdot.

A nice explanation, but I can't resist a nitpick: Typical jigsaw puzzles are in P, because for every pair of pieces you can decide whether they fit together or not without having to consider other pieces; therefore solving this amounts to traversing an unoriented graph. An NP jigsaw must have the possibility of multiple pieces fitting one piece in general.

Right, and STD stands for a sexually transmitted deviation.

Yep, I mustn't forget to stop by on Kerona to "win" some on a slot machine. :)

If you need to be very flexible, which is typically when you are doing research from scratch -- devising/changing your algorithms often, visualizing the data, etc., I'd suggest MATLAB. It allows you to program and evaluate stuff very quickly. If you are able to vectorize the problem you are solving, it is also very fast, since it uses highly optimized vector/matrix handling libraries.

Once you know what you want to do and how, you might want to implement your stuff in other languages, as MATLAB is cumbersome, if you for example need to process text or perform networking ... or actually do anything that cannot be vectorized. In such a case one choice would be Python, that has lots of libraries for everything.

As for C/C++ (or even Fortran :-o), I would avoid these unless you need to address a bottleneck that cannot be solved by use of an optimized library. And even in such case, I would only rewrite the bottleneck in it, nothing more, and interface with higher-level languages. Programming in C/C++ is literally a minefield for beginners. Updating/refactoring your code in C/C++ takes much more time than in higher programming languages, as you need to take care of many issues related to low-level programming (compared to Python or Java, even C++ is a low level language). Actually I'm surprised that so many people recommend it.