A couple I'm aware of that aren't in the list:

- Aardappel (visual functional programming) [1] - Widget Workshop (something like a cross between The Incredible Machine and visual programming) [2]

[1] http://strlen.com/aardappel-language [2] http://www.old-games.com/download/3399/widget-workshop

Widget Workshop is what got me into computers!

I have very fond memories of Widget Workshop as a kid. Glad to see it mentioned!

Am I correct in thinking that instead of symlinking .bashrc, etc. to new_bashrc.sh, you could simply have them 'source new_bashrc.sh'? This would also mean you could keep all your dotfiles in a git repository without worrying about the symlinks.

Just for interest, this still can be done with unique keys: Officer Alice handcuffs prisoner and wants to hand off to Officer Bob. Officer Bob locks prisoner with his own handcuffs (prisoner is now wearing two pairs), then Officer Alice removes hers.

Embedded Vimeo videos never seem to play for me, and the video is apparently private on Vimeo so I can't view it there either.

Sorry about that, the video being private in Vimeo is out of my control :-(

I hope I'm not the only one who finds this article poorly written; I got a better understanding from the list of bullet points on the slide than I did trying to follow the rambling paragraphs below them.

A better reason to replace lists with trees might be for parallel execution. I enjoyed this talk by Guy Steele on replacing lists with trees in Fortress: http://vimeo.com/6624203

I've not read it, but I think you're looking for "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Timothy Ferriss

If you leave aside the fact that they're talking about Pointcast, the article gets a lot of things right in terms of what is now possible with RSS feeds, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr, NetFlix, Hulu...

You could do worse than Lua if you're going that route - it's small, clean, and fast, designed for embedding and you can move smoothly from simple config files to complex scripted behaviour.

"What is required is the wholesale adoption of the standards applied in the pharmaceutical industry drug trials: double blind trials (aka peer reviewing)"

I think the gentleman who authored this article neglected to look up the terms in question.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_experiment#Double-blind_t... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review

Rofl. I gave up on the article after the first paragraph, so I missed that nugget.

Did he explain how you conduct a double blind trial on climate change? That's like asking me (an astrophysicist) to conduct a double blind trial on the Big Bang.

It's not possible to do trials on some systems, either because there is only one or because it's impossible to manipulate it. In those cases, you are unfortunately stuck with collecting data and building (physically reasonable) models where you try to match those data and suggest new data which are predicted by the theory that can be used for testing it.

It is important to do the latter. Just because you can adjust a bunch of parameters in the model to match existing data doesn't give a lot of confidence in your model, because of the feedback loop that causes you to work on the model until it fits the data. What you need to do is then say "given this model, we predict x" and then go and look for x.

From what I know about the climate modeling, it would be nice to see more of the latter. I know there are some things (development of regional patterns of changes) that match the models, but I don't know whether those were pre- or post-dictions.