As a visualization guy, it always makes me happy to see such a good use of visualization. Thanks for providing some extra technical details here! A couple of questions, though:
1) What grid type does your simulation code use? If it's regular grid, have you considered switching to something more adaptive like AMR or unstructured grids?
2) Since I/O is your main bottleneck, have you considered further decimating your output and visualizing in situ to fill in the gap? I suspect your visual analysis is too complicated for current in situ techniques to cover everything you want to do, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

She was most likely accentuating vocal fry throughout the clip for the purpose of demonstration.

It bothers me that you complain about the speech patterns of other peoples - particularly those you deem to be "lazy / hippies" - yet cannot find the effort to capitalize your I's and fully spell out "people."

I thought for sure that you were going to segue into a joke about wooden knobs on audio equipment.

You wouldn't be able to look at it in this situation because they have to put it in a completely isolated the sample to get it cold enough. The article does sort of imply that it's in two places at once, but it's really just in two states at once. Since this is a piezo-electric material, it'd be two different sizes at the same time. If you could somehow look at it, it would always appear to be a single size. Which size it appears to be would be be random with some probability.

I'm using Twinview on a standard Ubuntu 9.10 install. While it's one big desktop stretching across two screens, you can set up metamodes in xorg.conf that allows windows to comfortably use a whole monitor (i.e. maximizing makes a window take up one monitor, not stretch across). If you're using an Nvidia card, the nvidia-setttings utility will even set this up for you. Both monitors are of course set to the same workspace, though. As far as I know, separate X servers are the only way to have each monitor on a different workspace.

I agree with the gist of your comment, but I have to nit-pick a little. Calories are a unit of measurement for energy. The use of the unit for food energy is ubiquitous nowadays, but the original definition had nothing to do with food.

How is that better? A caribou once bit my sister.

Just a comment but from what I see on the TV renovation shows, every window in California is single-pane and insulation is a liberal myth. In Canada you'd freeze to death, in Cali apparently you just crank the AC a little higher and wonder why the power bill is so high.

I moved to California from Wisconsin not long ago, and I'm simply amazed at how thin the windows in my apartment are. If the windows had any insulation at all we almost could've gone the whole winter without turning on the heat. Same deal with watering; they over water the grass to the point that it doesn't even dry out until late afternoon.

Where do you get your information about "the universities where the wealthy kids go?" Is there something you can cite, or is it a personal assumption that you believe to be common knowledge? You're right that Berkeley the city is indeed very liberal. However, according to a friend who attended UCB for a bit, the campus itself is actually much more diverse in opinion. Sure, my evidence is second-hand and anecdotal, but it's more than you provide.

I found this talk when I was doing a research paper for a sociology class. Its well-written and very funny, and does an excellent job of pointing just how ridiculous and arbitrary marijuana prohibition is. Section V - C - 2 is especially memorable.

http://www.druglibrary.org/Schaffer/LIBRARY/studies/vlr/vlrtoc.htm

The problem is whatever Vista is using for page replacement, not virtual memory itself. Let's say you're using 2 GB of physical memory, and then start up some memory-intensive program that uses another 2 GB. You're done; if you run out of space now, the OS can do nothing about it, and is forced to do something drastic like start killing off processes.

The question then is why isn't Vista making fullest use out of virtual memory? It is probably trying to proactively move little used pages out of physical memory to make space for new pages. Its an attempt at optimization--after all, if you're not using that data, why let it take up valuable physical memory?

You can simplify everything down to a few repetitious tasks.

"Seriously - how many [FPSes] are just the same [game] over and over again with different graphics? ...but by [the time you've killed something] you've pretty much seen all of the gameplay there is to see."

"Seriously - how many [versions of Solitaire] are just the same [game] over and over again with different graphics? ...but by [the time you've put one card on top of another] you've pretty much seen all the gameplay there is to see."

"Seriously - how [much porn is] just the same [thing] over and over again with different graphics? ...but by [the time you've seen one pair of boobs] you've pretty much seen all the gameplay there is to see."

Ultimately, you can simplify all of human experience down to repetition if you want. The definition of gameplay and fun differs by person. Even though WoW doesn't fit your narrow definition of fun, it seems to work for a lot of people. Look at the Penny Arcade comic you linked--sure, it pokes fun at the expansion, but I think Gabe is still pretty heavily involved in the game.