Could you expand on that a bit?

I was amused by something that I heard on the radio this morning.  They were interviewing one of the people who is involved in a project to reduce the spread of West Nile virus.  Apparently this group has developed a computer simulation that tells them where and how much to spray.

Host: So how does this program work?

Expert: We give it input and it gives us output.

There was a moment of dead air before the host asked if she could expand a bit on her answer.

Intarweb bad!

I love this program.  I made a small tweak to a query and ran it again today.  After only a few hours of run time it quit with a meaningless SQL error (constipated server or something).  At least it didn't give me the "fatal error - all data lost along with the program that tried to retrieve it".

Gotta love automation.  This is only slightly slower than it would have been to send a junior clerk to the basement to bring back a couple tonnes of file folders and pass them over to a medieval monk to make calligraphy copies of the data.  ;p