SETI Telescope

Public Debate: “Are We Alone?” Watch the Video

SETI@home Chief Scientist Dan Werthimer participated in an exciting public debate with planet-hunter and skeptic Geoff Marcy on April 30, 2010 on campus of the University of California at Berkeley. The topic: “Are We Alone?” covered the range of issues related to the search for extraterrestrial life. Watch the video transcript here.

Posted by The GNUinator

SETI Telescope

In E&T’s second International Year of Astronomy feature, we discover that destinations for future space missions may be decided not by agencies like NASA, but by groups of ordinary people engaged in citizen computing.

Question: what kind of person does it require to detect gravity waves in the universe, or calculate the 46th prime number? If your guess is a doctoral-degree holding scientist or mathematician, you are incorrect.

We live in a world where cutting-edge technical research can be done at home. Now, with nothing but a computer with an Internet connection, any user can participate in over 50 ‘citizen-science’ projects around the world. They are for amateur astronomers, ordinary people, groups of volunteers, or even anonymous users.

I found this article on the SETI@home website.

You can access the entire article at The Institution of Engineering and Technology

The only thing I would add is that I like to participate in these projects by using a computer running Linux rather than Windows. The reason is that Linux has a lower overhead for the operating system so more of your resources go into doing the actual calculations required to get the job done.

Posted by The GNUinator

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Recently we published Introduction to BOINC which said that older computers could be useful for processing Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing, BOINC, work units. These computers, retrofitted with Linux instead of Windows can contribute to the public good by looking for pulsars in outer space, searching for life on other planets, studying protein folding, finding new prime numbers and so forth. Indeed, Linux User and Developer Magazine from the UK devoted a cover story to BOINC some years ago. They called BOINC responsible peer to peer networking, as contrasted with irresponsible peer to peer networking which is associated with theft of copyrighted music, etc.

When I was in high school General Dougles MacArthur appeared before a joint session of Congress. MacArthur had just been fired by President Truman over the issue of supremacy of civilian authority over military leaders.

MacArthur concluded an emotional presentation by recalling a song they used to sing at West Point.

For months afterward Old Soldiers Never Die, They Just Fade Away was a hit song.

How does this apply to BOINC? Well I happen to have two IBM ThinkPad 770Zs. They are Pentium II machines with 320MB of ram, they run at 366MHz and their operating system is Slackware version 10.2. One of them processes Einstein at Home work units. The typical work unit will take about five days to complete on a 770Z. The cycle is get a work unit – process it – upload the result – get another work unit. The objective is to run the wheels off until the machine dies of old age or fatigue.

The other 770Z processes Prime Grid work units. This BOINC project looks for new prime numbers of the form K*B^N+/-1 and B^N+/-K and other kinds of prime numbers.

Do I have any idea what these number forms mean? Well, frankly no I do not. I do know that prime numbers are used in computer security and for other useful purposes. So that is the idea behind BOINC. The volunteers who contribute unused CPU cycles are not required to know the science involved. They just need to be willing to help out. Frankly I think this is a better use of old computers then having them thrown in land fills.

Posted by The GNUinator

We Have Links

Astronomy Picture of The Day was added in honor of my sister. See Sis You’re No Valley Girl on this blog. Our links are divided into Blogroll, Public Interest, and Science and Stuff which includes computer science, BOINC, climate science, wind, and other things. Notice the link for Junk Science Judo. This material was produced by The Cato Institute and I think it is valuable. More recent material produced by The Cato Institute seems to me to be excessively negative.

I am struck by the number of bloggers appearing on cable television. For example on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources on CNN there appeared Jeff Jarvis blogger at Buzz Machine as well as John Aravosis blogger at America Blog. I’m happy to have both on my blogroll. Speaking of happy, I was glad to see Jane Hamsher, blogger at Fire Dog Lake, on The Rachel Maddow show recently.

Posted by Gypsy Chief

Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing

Use the idle time on your computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux) to cure diseases, study global warming, discover pulsars, and do many other types of scientific research. It’s safe, secure, and easy:

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well yes downloading and installing the BOINC client software is simple. There is more to this than you might think.

For one thing, this can get competitive really quick. There are teams all over the world vying to produce more completed BOINC work units than any other team. For another, one may participate in multiple BOINC projects at once.

In addition, participation in BOINC projects has implications for the use of old computers. I define old computers as computers which originally shipped with some version of Windows. From time to time Microsoft announces End of Life for Windows versions such as Windows 98 for example.

What happens to a computer with an old no longer supported version of Windows? Computer professionals have struggled with this question for years. It has been estimated that only 22% of discarded computers are disposed of properly. Too many of them end up in landfills where they harm the environment.

One answer I think, is to put them in strong hands and set them to work producing BOINC work units.

When I say strong hands I mean blow Windows off the hard drive and install some Linux distribution instead. I do not mean this as an anti-Microsoft rant. Consider this. Older versions of Windows were never too secure so they are not very safe on the Internet. After End of Life announcement the third party addons like Zone Alarm and AdAware stop being supported as well. These old computers lack the horsepower to run a newer version of Windows. That is just a fact. But these old computers will run Linux.
Slackware is one Linux distribution which works well with older hardware.

You may have heard of SETI@home, that is, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligience. This is the original project in which the University of California asked for the public’s help to perform calculations needed in the search for life on other planets. Hundreds of thousands of people responded worldwide. Years later the university decided to scrap the original SETI@home client software and to replace it with BOINC client software which could be used to support network computing on a variety of scientific projects.

Today one such effort is the BBC Climate Prediction project where users run thousands of simulations to see what is the effect of small changes in sulphur or carbon dioxide.

This is an ambitious project which requires much dedication as a single climate prediction model can run on your computer for months. In this case an obsolete computer will not do – you need something with more horsepower. However, old computers can still do lots of good things. I have, for example Pentium III computers which produce Einstein at home work units. These look for pulsars in space.

Why is this post categorized as ‘the press always gets it wrong’? Well, you might remember that CNN produced a special report asking ‘is anyone out there?’ … an intriguing question. The report focused on the SETI Institute. The executive director was interviewed and SETI raw data collection was shown. What was not discussed was SETI@home where thousands of regular computer users donate unused CPU cycles to process the raw data at no cost to the SETI Institute or the American taxpayers. Dan Brown (The DaVinci Code, etc) described SETI as a government boondoggle. That is his opinion, but he didn’t say a thing about SETI@home.

Posted by The GNUinator