Semantic quibbles

[sawyl]

I've got problems with a couple of the claims made by a piece in today's Guardian about the joys of being a meteorologist. For instances, the article says:

but still neither she nor any of her colleagues can look more than a few hours into the future. For this, big electronic models have to get involved.

Um, no, the model isn't electronic. It happens to be the case that the model is run on an electronic implementation of a Turing machine, but this is a contingent rather than necessary fact — L.F. Richardson imagined a vast number of people working in lock-step to solve the fluid dynamics equations. So electronic? No way.

And I'm not sure they get the right idea about how model improvements are made:

As we all know, however, though the models are continuously being improved - indeed it is the job of one man sitting near us to spend all day studying the computer and refining its performance - they still cannot get everything right.

Which makes you wonder what the hundred or so scientists working in NWP do with their time...