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| Personal background |
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Hi, I'm Malcolm. I live in Lancashire in North West England in the village called Freckleton, on the North bank of the River Ribble. I'm 33 at the moment and work down the road for BAE SYSTEMS in the Flight Simulators area. There I get to work with a great bunch of people who I describe as creative engineers - it's not your typical handle-turning job.
I do all sorts of things at work, but one of my jobs is to look after about 25 SGI UNIX workstations which provide graphics for the simulators as well as do some of the maths. In their off hours, I have persuaded a few of those computers to help me crunch some numbers for SETI@Home!
At home I have a three computers but they are there to assist in my main hobby which is music - listening, playing, writing, enjoying. As I demand more from my computing, I buy a new one and move the MIDI and audio from the old to the new. However, they all run SETI@Home. Unless I'm doing a lot of audio work, I leave S@H running as MIDI processing (Cubase VST) isn't affected much.
Music is great - it controls my mood and I can use it to express my mood. It reminds me of so many times in my life that certain songs have a significant sentimental value. In the main though, the era they come from takes me back to who I was then and what I was doing.
Over the last few months of 2001 I recorded all of my singles, vinyl 7 inch, 12 inch and CD singles onto one of my computers as MP3, collated them by year and burned them on to chronological CD-Rs that I can take around with me and play on an MP3 CD-R/ CD-A player. It means I have ready access to twenty years worth of music and can journey through time whenever I like. I use some CD based DJ kit to let me mix from one song to the next so I can do more than simply listen to the music. I like UK club/ dance music, amongst other genres.
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| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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As for SETI, or ETI, I would hate to think we are the only intelligent life in the universe - that would be terribly lonely for our ancestors. Given the vastness of space and the number of planets, I don't think we could be the only intelligent life.
SETI is valid as electro-magnetic emissions are quite possibly the first things we'll hear from any intelligent life as there will be a big gap between the first transmissions and the ability to travel between stars.
I shudder to think about the impact of discovering extra-terrestrial intelligent life on our lives. I would hope it would make us realise how pathetic most of the excuses we use to hate each other are. It may focus our energies on making our presence known elsewhere than this planet.
It may be worth specially transmitting information about us, say from the equator and the poles. The usual stuff such as prime-numbers, a representation of the basic elements of our life and a picture or two would be appropriate - I'm sure they'll figure out JPEG! The main problem is where to point it but something is better than nothing I guess.
That's why I run SETI@Home - it keeps my computers utilised, but there's the prospect of being involved in the discovery of a message from another planet, another civilisation, another intelligent species, another form of life. Wow!
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