[X] My Assistant

[deglr6328]

What is going on with SETI@home? I have in the past, (like many of the other users of this board I suspect!) run the SETI@home screensaver on my computer. I ran it for about 4 years and then uninstalled it. Not because I was fed up with not having an ET directly send to me personally a big "HELLO THERE" message, but rather because I saw little in the way of actual science being done with the SETI results we volunteers were all producing and because there seemed to be no plan for any kind of endpoint of the project in the future.

I recall seeing in a 2000 edition of Scientific American a plot of the already searched parameter space by SETI@home and it looked like most of our galaxy was searched and found empty obviously, of "type I civilizations" and higher. (ah. found it) Now, its been 6 years since then and we've since viewed ~97% of the observable sky from Arecibo at least once since the start of the project (~86% at least twice). Why are there no papers published on this result? It IS a significant result even if its negative one. Were there SETI papers published that I've just not seen? The SETI and SETI@home web sites are of very little help when looking for actual peer reviewed published papers that the projects have produced.

[dvandorn]

I can also really relate to Emily's discussion of writing technique. My natural writing style is rather like Emily describes hers -- long sentences with conversational-tone punctuation. And sentence fragments. For effect.

At least, in my case, there is some sort of switch I can throw in my brain, and I can just start cutting the sentences down as I write them. And I can go through what I just wrote, give it a short once-over, et voila, short, action-verb sentences.

My first drafts are usuallly in final draft or next-to-final-draft shape. I just have this little problem with typos -- in specific, with hitting the space bar just a fraction of a millisecond early. One of the worst examples of this is when I write the short connecting phrase "to the"... it tends to come out "tot he."

Ever tried to use a spell checker to find something like that? When the words "tot" and "he" are both perfectly valid English words? Considering the subject matter I'm usually dealing with, though, I can just do a word search on "tot" and find every instance...

-the other Doug

[ljk4-1]

SETI@home killed off ?

Placed in sarcophagus rises again

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27885

By: Nick Farrell

Wednesday 23 November 2005, 07:18

DISTRIBUTED computing experiment SETI@home will be switched off on
December 15 as it becomes part of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for
Network Computing (BOINC).

BOINC has been developed at UC Berkeley as a framework for volunteer
computing projects like SETI@home.

According to a press release, those who are currently using SETI@home are
being asked to visit here for instructions.

The workunit totals of users and teams will be frozen at that point, and
the final totals will be available on the web.

The BOINC site will allow boffins to build other volunteer computing
projects in areas like molecular biology, high-energy physics, and climate
change study.

A spokesSeti said that those who want to keep looking for aliens can do
so, but they will also be able to donate computer time studying climate
change or other BOINC projects.

[dvandorn]

Hmmm... upon reading this thread last week, I went ahead and started running SETI processing again. I've got a much better system now than I did back when I ran it a few years ago, and I figured it would be more useful now.

When I went out to the SETI@Home site to download the software again, I got the BOINC client. It's been running fine for me over the past week and a half or so.

So, a lot of people are already using the BOINC client, it would seem. It's sort of a nice name, too...

-the other Doug