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This site lists a couple of free Smalltalk books. Unlike tons of Java books that're hard to choose, most Smalltalk books are of high quality.

This is an interesting concept..but i don't see how it's physically possible.

Actually, it's already been done. The programming language Linda by David Gelertner uses pattern matching.

Everything exists in a large tuple-space and objects can be "written" into the space. They are "read" by pattern matching. Objects can be passive data or active processes.

It's a very simple and elegant idea. The JINI and JavaSpaces projects use these concepts, which is probably why Lanier's article is on the Java site.

this page shows that this has been predicted as far back as 1993. It is nice to see climate theory match up with experimental evidence. Actually "nice" is the wrong word, I would certainly prefer if the whole global warming thing turned out to be a hoax. So far I am having very little luck on that wish.

... the story of the King and the Toaster. Good to see that heads will roll.

Man, the way things are going, MS might be better off resurrecting OpenDoc or something.

As we now have good models for why CO2 should cause temperature change,

Do we? Those models aren't based on the greenhouse effect of CO2 (which is easy to predict, and which apparantly can't raise world temperatures by more than a fraction of a degree). They're based on an assumed positive feedback from the greenhouse effect of water vapor: the idea being that that fraction of a degree rise from CO2 will increase evaporation from the oceans, which will put more water vapor in the air to cause a *real* greenhouse effect.

Needless to say, this is a hard theory to quantify; hence the need for all the supercomputers.

but not the other way round,

And this is just wrong. Ever opened up a hot can of soda?

There are currently 720 billion tons of carbon in the air. Sound like a lot? It's nothing compared to the 39 trillion tons of carbon in the oceans. And when you heat up the oceans, what happens? Same thing as in your soda: the solubility of carbon dioxide changes, and CO2 is released into the air. If the temperature goes up, the ocean releases CO2. If the temperature goes down, the ocean absorbs it.

So which is happening? Do temperature changes cause CO2 level changes, or vice versa? Hell if I know. I used to believe the latter, now I'm leaning toward the former. The most convincing piece of evidence I've seen is a paper (published and presumably peer-reviewed by Science, although it's been quoted by quite a few more biased sources since then). Atmospheric CO2 Concentrations over the last Glacial Termination has another graph showing those scary CO2/temperature correlations over about 12000 years... but with some less scary conclusions. It seems in their ice cores, CO2 changes lagged temperature changes by 800+/-600 years.

I am a physicist with a strong background in chaos theory and I am also one of the team who ported (but not yet optimized) the modified Boulder model on the NEC supercomputer in Lugano/Manno (not Bern, as incorrectly stated).

So yes, the effort is multidisciplinary and - at least in Switzerland - climatologists are well aware of the implications (many of them are physicists).

See <http://www.climate.unibe.ch> (I hope that NCCR/Climate gets a real website up and running soon) and <http://www.cscs.ch>

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On a side note, who decided what the 10 top algo's should be? Where's the skiplist?