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| Personal background |
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Hi! I am a dog. I have shortish legs and a big head.
I was born in 1990 at the California Institute of Technology. My very first
class was Applied Mathematics, or as us Techers call it, AMa95. As a dog,
I found I had a natural aptitude for complex integration and differential
equations. Still, AMa95 was hard, but I loved it and I loved math. Later,
I also learned to love linear algebra and nonlinear systems theory.
Nowadays, I solve most of my math problems numerically. I know, I know -
you are thinking, "That is cheating!"
"Yes," I would answer if I could speak, "I think it is cheating too but
that is what I get paid for."
Who pays me? Well, I can't tell you that. It might embarrass my employers
to be exposed as employing a dog. I earn a good salary, though, and I have
plenty to eat and a nice bed. And I get to do math every day, which I think
is a good thing.
Oh yes! I also like chewing on bones and barking at nothing. You should
hear me go, "Bark-bark-bark-bark-bark!" Just like that.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Sentience is pretty popular on our little planet - you know, dogs, dolphins,
bonobos, octopuses, humans, parrots (I could go on and on) but it is probably
pretty rare in the universe. Rare enough, maybe, that contact between extraplanetary
species isn't possible. That is not a bad thing, though. You just have to
love what you find.
Sometimes, though, I like to think that maybe someone sent out a bright
message a long time ago and that one day we will get it. It will tell us
things we could never think of ourselves, and then we will know that we weren't
the first and we will probably not be the last. Then we will add our own
message and send it out to the future. I wonder if we will have anything
important to say? Maybe we will just say "We were here, once, too!"
I like SETI@home for the reason above, and because there is a lot of math
in it and no one gets hurt or rich. However, after I hit 5000 units, I scaled back my SETI effort. I wanted to build more, faster computers so I could do more units and keep up with the big dogs. After some introspection, I realized I was developing a compulsion. Dogs do that sometimes - you know, that whole fetch thing. Anyway, now I only run SETI@home on my Athlon 1.4GHz (RH Linux 7.3). It's important to keep things in perspective. |
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