Profile: Discus

Personal background
I'm English, but currently living (and studying) in South Africa.


I've lived in quite a few countries (expat parents tend to get moved around a lot!) - the UK, Brazil, Argentina, the USA, back to the UK and now South Africa. Saw lots of stuff, but was to young to remember most of it (grrr!).


I'm doing an MSc in Ichthyology (fish!), specifically marine fish taxonomy, and my research topic is "a revision of the family Kuhliidae", a family of small, silvery, fairly insignificant fish, but hey, someone has to do it!


My favourite hobbies would be reading (sci-fi, fantasy and general science books), SCUBA diving and photography.


Next year I might be involved in a major project looking at coelacanths living off the coast of South Africa, which will be exciting.

Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
1.
If the universe is supposedly to all intents and purposes, it seems highly probably that extraterrestrial life exists. The problem is across such a vast expanse of space, detecting (or communicating with) it would be incredibly unlikely. Also, should they have used a totally different set of technologies (or abandoned "old" technology) we wouldn't be able to detect them using the radio scanning we are trying. Still, it seems hard to think of any other way of tranmitting information over a large distance other than using radio waves, but who knows?


Over such huge distances, I don't think there would really be so many dangers of getting into contact. Taking tens of thousands of years to send messages back and forth would also be rather tedious! Other than the comfort of knowing that there is life elsewhere, I can't see any likely benefits. Still, the earth is rather precious and it's getting rapidly messed up; it's time to sit up and take notice and do something about it!


2.
I think we should perhaps start a beacon; why rely on "passively" receiving signals when we could be sending them too? Encoding any sort of information easily for someone else to understand it is a serious problem as we don't know what they know! Basically, a regular series of pulses would probably be the best thing.


3.
Because my computer stays on all the time and it seems like a good use of an otherwise underutilised resource! I also like the idea of using my computer to help other scientists along with their work when I'm not using it. I am slowly trying to get other people in the department to run it on their machines too! I think the project is extremely worthwhile, and I wonder how soon other people are going to start thinking about using distributed computing for their computationally intensive projects. Keep up the good work! =) Work units seem to take forever on this machine (a celeron 333 with 256 megs of ram) - something seems to be wrong as I have seen people with machines only a little more powerful than

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