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| Personal background |
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That picture up there is obviously not really me, but since I don't have a recent photo scanned in, and since being offbeat is encouraged, you get acinonyx jubatus instead.
Lessee, about myself... I am:
- 24 years old
- male
- from Texas
(That should cover the "A/S/L?!?!!111@" portion, for the more obnoxious AOL users)
- single (not looking)
- a Mac user at heart, forced to use Win98 for a couple of years, and recently began enjoying Debian Linux on my own machine after five years of telnet and ssh.
- in posession of a shell account on The Artifex (www.artifex.org), a non-profit organization run by a longtime friend, and the main reason I started using Linux to begin with.
- also working on a website. You can browse some of the stuff that leaks out of my head at www.artifex.org/~wolfgang |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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Originally, I had read a recent thread on Fark.com discussing United Devices (another distributed computing project), and its cancer project. I downloaded and attempted to set up the software, (which is picky, doesn't get along very well with Wine (or real Windows for that matter), very much NOT the "idle, won't-interrupt-your-workflow" background app it claims to be),spent half a night fighting with it, and decided that, as worthy a cause as cancer is, I was not going to re-install my OS in order to run it.
That's when I remembered SETI@home from college lab computers of years past (around the beginning of 1998, I think), and decided to help out. As much as I'd like to build a crunch farm, I don't think it's in the cards, at least not for awhile.
To the question of life existing outside our own planet:
How could you believe otherwise? With the infinite number of galaxies, and infinite number of stars, many of which are nearly identical to our sun and which have planets revolving around them, I don't see how it isn't possible.
As to how or when we'll find life out there (or it finds us), I can't even begin to guess. Buy a SciFi dictionary and throw darts at it.
On sending a beacon:
Sure. Why not? Tell them about humanity at its best and worst. Include details on dancing, painting, weapons design, architecture, peace treaties, nuclear weapons, communications, diseases, cures, prejudice, tolerance, babies, abortion, war, peace, conservation, Mahatma Gandhi, Adolf Hitler, bulls, bears, wolves, sheep, climate, life, philosophy, culture, and perhaps even religion and politics, if there's enough room left on the disc.
I like that S@H, unlike the United Devices client, encourages everyone to participate, not just Windows users with Intel-based hardware. The S@H crew are obviously interested in what really matters: the research itself, not just fanatical recordkeeping.
I also think distributed metaprocessing is a fantastic idea whose time has come. |
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