Unless a flash ad in one of your open browser tabs has gone rogue, it's likely you've got a few spare processor cycles available on the PC you're using to read this.

And if someone were to appropriate just a few of them -- too few for you to notice -- then you and all the millions of other web surfers out there could be harnessed together like some kind of gigantic insectoid computing hive mind.

The result would be one of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

That's the dream, anyway, of a project called MapRejuice. It's MapReduce - the algorithm invented at Google that powers more or less all the massively parallel processing on which the web's biggest businesses rely - but implemented in javascript. And it runs in the background of any webpage on which it's installed.

You could be running it right now without even knowing it.

Using the spare cycles of the world's internet-connected PCs is nothing new - SETI@Home has been doing just that in service of parsing radio signals from outer space since the late 90's. There are also dozens of projects that use the BOINC system on which SETI@Home runs, in order to serve scientists who need cheap access to supercomputer-scale computing power to work on problems ranging from cryptography to protein folding.

But MapRejuice doesn't require special client software, which means pitching in on giant computational problems could be as simple as leaving the appropriate browser window open.

Right now MapRejuice, which remains primarily a proof of concept, isn't doing that much. The graph on its homepage reveals, in real time, that it's doing about 300 jobs per minute right now.

Its ultimate capacity? Well, how many spare cycles do all the world's internet browsers have?

If you've got a site that serves users who wouldn't mind contributing a little processing power to the project, you can grab the line of code you'll need to drop into your site's HTML here. Or, if you've got a gigantic problem in need of a MapReduce cluster of nontrivial scale, sign up your project here. And if you just think it's a cool idea, you can vote for it (it's an entry in the node.js contest) here.

The enormously complicated computer models that help scientists project the future of climate change are pretty kick-ass, despite the fact that they're developed by scientists and not formally-trained software engineers. But not all the software that climate scientists crank out is elegant. According to a new paper by Steve Easterbrook, professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto:

...[Most] data handling and analysis tools [that] are used for processing the raw observational data and the results of simulation runs, and for sharing climate data with the broader scientific community...[are] built by the climate scientists themselves, who have little or no training in software engineering. As a result the quality of this software varies tremendously... some data processing tools are barely even tested.

There are only a handful of fields in which scientists write their own code--bioinformatics, mathematics and physics come to mind--so it's a minor miracle that people who have spent their lives thinking about atmospheric physics and the paleohistoric climate record are able to produce software at all.

Which is one reason why formally-trained software engineers have a lot to offer climate science. Easterbrook's paper, Climate Change: A Grand Software Challenge, outlines all the ways that programmers (and those who think like programmers) could use their skills in service of preserving a livable climate for generations to come.

The most obvious way programmers can help is by developing tools that can handle the massive datasets and earth-system models required to simulate a changing climate. Many of these models are run on customized and constantly-evolving supercomputer systems, which can make reproducing individual experiments almost impossible. In addition, the data are processed in so many different ways that adequate metadata (currently missing) are required to allow scientists other than the ones conducting the experiments to meaningfully engage with that data.

The video below shows an experimental run of a climate model with a resolution so high that it approaches that of a traditional weather model. (This is what scientists do when they want to show off the size of their supercomputers.)

Other areas Easterbrook would see coders tackle go beyond the actual software used to model climate, and include the difficult task of, in essence, educating other scientists, policymakers, activists, journalists, and ordinary individuals about responses to climate change, including both mitigation and adaptation.

Visualization is a powerful educational tool, but Easterbrook notes that..

...scientific simulations are often built without concern for how the results might be communicated with broader audiences, while visualizations developed for non-scientists are often built without good connections to the latest science. Research in this space will bring together the latest science with expertise in visualization and information design, to develop interactive tools for a variety of non-specialist audiences.

Easterbrook's paper helps us imagine a future in which budding coders will keep the people of the U.S. and the planet plugged in to what's happening to, and what's to be done about, Earth's climate.

It's a worthy goal. Current climate models mostly show us eating bark and spit-roasting our pets in the blasted hellscape that's left after we've nuked each other over whatever crumbs of arable land are left.

Climate model image courtesy NCAR.

Watching Web video on a computer can be an irritating experience. Nothing illustrates this quite as powerfully as trying to watch clips streamed from the internet on a TV.

A host of new set-top boxes from Google, Apple, Tivo and Boxee, not to mention add-ons for Wii and Xbox, as well as the built-in features of certain Samsung TVs, already are set to bring video transmitted via the Internet to your television. But only a handful of platforms--notably Boxee, Roku and Tivo--are currently are currently offering video from the internet--the kind of material that has made sites like YouTube so popular.

Without anyone realizing quite what happened, Roku has gained an early lead in this race, probably because of its super-easy setup, low price and ability to stream Netflix. That got Roku boxes into a million-plus households, and, as Steve Jobs can tell you, market share is step one when trying to convince partners to create content for your platform.

Roku boxes allow developers to create and freely distribute apps--called "channels"--that let any existing streaming service play through a Roku and the living room TV.

But Vimeo's newly updated software and Roku app makes it even easier to watch web video from a TV. Like Netflix, it allows you to create a queue of things you'd like to watch later. Unlike Netflix, the app is populated with an incredible library of high-quality indy content. The standouts are mostly shorts and music videos created by an international group of film school and animation students. It's the kind of cotton-candy internet ephemera that people pass along on Facebook, Twitter and on blogs.

A Qualitatively Different Viewing Experience

Viewing web video on TV is qualitatively different from viewing it on a PC, or even, I'd argue, a tablet computer:

- Watching Washerbots on my television without a chat window open or an interruption from my email client, I notice all its charming quirks, and when the visual gag rolls around, I laugh out loud instead of just smirking and posting it to Twitter.

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