Merry Christmas!

I don't do any programming, so I'll happily let Staffan, Tim, Graham and others figure out the best technical setup for the Azimuth Code Project. I'll only get involved if it seems like the pleasure of arguing about the best way to do things is preventing you guys from getting anything done. But of course it's good to argue a bit, in friendly way.

When it comes to the Azimuth Code Project, I think I'll mainly stick to:

1. dreaming up programming projects that are _not too hard_,

2. helping programmers with math and physics,

3. developing the Azimuth "brand" - publicizing things, organizing things, explaining them.

Items 1. and 2. of my previous email were both about the Azimuth "brand"!

I have lots of ideas for easy programming projects. Tim knows enough of them to keep him quite busy. These easy ones lead naturally to two somewhat harder ones - I can explain these in a lot more detail when I get back from Vietnam:

1. After Tim gets the delayed action oscillator working, we can try to do some ENSO modelling as [described here](http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0603083).

1. We can try to take a stochastic resonance model, feed in publicly accessible data about the [[Milankovitch cycles]], and see how well it matches the observed ice ages!

>Think more in terms of verbs than nouns.

That's easy, because I don't know any nouns.

If you like writing interactive programs or programs with nice graphics, I could certainly come up with things like that. For example a program that shows the trajectory of the Hopf-bifurcation-with-noise evolving "in real time". Extra credit for being able to adjust $\beta$ and $\lambda$ with a slider or something. Even better if we can zoom in!

All these "pretty" things are probably more important for attracting students and non-experts than for persuading experts in climate science that the Azimuth Code Project is important. Both of these are worthwhile goals...