A while ago I ran an experiment testing the acuracy of the 5-day forecast. While my sample was small, I found the forecast for the 5th day had only a 50% chance of nailing the basics (precipitation or not, significantly higher or lower than the average temperature).
After reading a great article by Howard Rheingold on “community computing” this month in Wired, I decided to help improve this situation. The Climate Dynamics project would, in the words of a researcher, “introduce as entirely new form of climate prediction: a fuzzy prediction, relecting the range of risks and probabilities, rather than a single ‘best guess’ forecast.”
I thought this was a better use (read: helping everyday people) of my idle CPU cycles and bandwidth than testing cryptography or looking for extraterrestrial life.