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| Personal background |
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| I'm living in Central, VT, working for an environmental science consulting firm doing GIS work. I am a fairly typical computer enthusiast in many ways, although my specific interests have always ended up being a little fringe-ish. I've been a huge fan of the parallel computing concept since I understood what it was, and eventually landed a quad-core Pentium III era Xeon machine for my personal workstation. At that time I was a huge BeOS user, thanks to a buddy from University who was really into Be and eventually went to work for them. At some point, however, I realized that despite my love for nifty hardware systems, such as SMP Xeon rigs, I just didn't have enough time or energy to keep the CPUs cranking on my own personal projects at full tilt... I was wasting electricty to keep the machine running when only one or two of the four CPUs was doing anything. So, I installed the classic SETI@Home client for BeOS, and joined 'Team BeOS' (or whatever it was called). I made some fair contributions to the team for a little while, but eventually, hardware moved on, and my needs moved on ... the machine ran BeOS until 2005, but I couldn't afford to keep it turned on all the time just cranking SETI work units, so it stayed turned off more and more. I graduated from that to using an iBook G4, which definitely didn't have enough extra power to spend doing SETI work units, so my contribution fell by the wayside. I'm now running a dual Quad-Core 3.0ghz Xeon Mac Pro, however, and realized I better keep it doing something :) Then recently I realized that my single quad core workstation at the office also was spending a lot of time turned on but not working hard. So I got it involved. It is just a Windows XP x64 workstation. I'm back trying to contribute, now, and hoping we can find something out there! |
| Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home |
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| Science is a religion in my mind, and I'm not a true believer. That said, whatever life is all about, it is ridiculous to believe that I/we are so special that there is nothing else going on. I have some doubt that ETI will communicate in a form that we can capture with our observatories ... but we simply don't have any better options, so we need to invest our energy into the only thing we've got until we come up with something better. The global computer - both of electronic processors and analog human minds - will only continue to increase in power, and having the infrastructure in place to make that work and take advantage of the interconnectedness of our reality is of unspeakable value. It saddens me that the US wants to pull out of Arecibo, but I know that what SETI@Home brought to the world can not be undone by shutting down the project - if Arecibo goes, we'll find another way to listen for, peer into, watch, and process the signs and signals that the higher reality is sending to us. |
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