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| Personal background |
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| B.A. History, NMSU, class of '94. Today I'm an engineering grad student at UT El Paso. I'm an amateur astronomer so I'm fortunate to be able to live in El Paso, Texas, where a short trip into the desert provides incredible views of the night sky. I love to ski late spring dry desert powder under blue southwestern skies and also to surf (when I can get to a coast.) I prefer B5 to trek, Macs to PCs, wine to beer, and computers to most people, though I do like people I can trust. |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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I'm flummoxed by Fermi's paradox: why don't we see any evidence of life out there? Its not that we haven't been looking. Are we looking the right way? What have we missed? Is life rare? Are we a biochemical one of a kind? Have we been lucky not to have killed ourselves off yet? This is the best way to help myself answer these questions, at least for now.
What do I think about Seti@home? Hey, if my spare cycles can help, great. Its not like I was using them anyway.
No suggestions for the guys who are running Seti@home, from what I've been reading on the message board you guys are already swamped. The new Seti@home is a fantastic improvement over Seti@home Classic, which used to crash my eight (now ten) year old Pentium so often I had to remove it after finishing only a single block of data. Its great to be back, and the new software -- combined with a new iMac G5 -- seems to be rock solid stable (not to mention a whole lot faster.) The only problem I can think of has been a strange fetish I've developed: cruising eBay in search of old Macs I can upgrade a bit and turn into dedicated Seti@home slaves . . . Back to work you obsolete blueberry! CRACK!
The ancient Pentium? Nobody wanted to buy it so its now running an early version of Slackware and hosting an old school one line BBS for a local astronomy club. I'm no lefty but It just seems horrendous the way old computers are just thrown away. I can remember when getting time on a computer was akin to getting time on a major telescope. How is it possible that computers have become toxic landfill in China, useless even to some of the poorest people on our planet? I know its more complicated than just plugging in the old computers and crunching numbers (Seti@home classic was proof of that) but those computers were incredibly useful only a short time ago.
Imagine if just one profitable industry took all the old computers nobody wanted and applied them to a problem the way Seti@home has? How about a problem like controlled nuclear fusion and the end of the fossil fuel economy? Would that be worth giving those companies enough of a tax break to offset the cost? Its a tiny step I know -- a bunch of ratty old computers against the implacable laws of physics -- but its a start, and you always start somewhere. Robert Goddard started with a daydream.
OK, bastante! Enough preaching for today, I'm heading to the park. If you see me there, say hello! |
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