PRO: You're donating cycles to find cancer cures - a worthwhile cause.
CON: Aliens are really cool. UD has no aliens.
PRO: The user interface of what you download is much better. SETI runs when in screensaver mode, or if the window is open. UD has an additional option of allowing it to run all the time, even with the window minimized. You can customize to have it run only at certain times on certain days. Like with SETI, there is a graphical rendering of the processing being done, but here you see an actual diagram of the molecule being rotated and manipulated and the protein it's trying to be matched to.
CON: It's only available for computers using Windows.
PRO: The packets, at least for the current agent, are completed faster than SETI packets.
CON: It doesn't notify you when it's done with a packet so you know to log in. It just waits for you to log in, and then connects without asking.
PRO: You can enter to win prizes, some based on how many packets you process.
CON: The progress-made bar is entirely wrong, showing the first 6% as completed in 6 minutes, but the last 2% taking a couple of hours.
PRO: The UD agent can download new pieces for different projects. Later this year, you'll be able to use UD to help digitize documents for online archives, or help understand DNA better. And any processing time you put in on any project goes to your personal total of time donated to UD.
CON: You lose those 200 packets you put in on SETI already.
PRO: You weren't catching up with your friends who started on SETI six months before you did anyway.
CON: Aliens really are cool.
So a reminder - if you want to get e-mail when I post an entry, rather than having to keep checking back, just sign up for my update list.
For anyone who is still watching the X-Files, what do you want to bet that Scully has her baby but we don't get to see it until next fall? And that we don't find out who the father is? Or, at least who Scully thinks the father is, because even if it turns out this is some type of conspiracy-formed miracle baby, if she didn't think there was a father she would have mentioned that by now. I really wanted them to have changed the tag line at the end of the opening credits to "The Truth Is In There" for these two episodes...
If you know who Douglas Adams is (author of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, for one), you probably heard that he died last Friday. I thought this User Friendly tribute to him was sweet. I remember reading all of his books many times over as an early teen and finding them hilarious and unique. You may not have known that there is a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy website at BBC Online that, in a small way, does what Adam's Guide did - offers a slightly haphazard mix of articles on making your way through your life or the world. Find out about the best places to view a rocket launch, or how to choose a supermarket checkout.
We're all irritated by people who misuse "literally", but it is an important feature of language that it isn't always used literally, and that the metaphorical meanings of phrases, in particular, are sometimes the most common. This article looks at the impact of literal thinking on science. It says:
Anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano concludes in his book, "Serving the Word: Literalism in America From the Pulpit to the Bench," that literalism is "a widespread characteristic of American thought," and a dangerous one at that. Literal thinking often leads to intolerance because it insists that that only one meaning can be right -- leaving no room for interpretation, ambivalence or ambiguity.
Perhaps surprisingly, literal thinking has caused almost as many problems in science as it has in other realms of life. Consider, for example, the trouble physicists had trying to determine the nature of light when they were stuck with literal interpretations of the terms "wave" and "particle." Light has obvious wave-like properties, and also obvious particle-like properties; but it is clearly literally neither.
In the end, physicists simply had to face the fact that light -- like so many other physical phenomena -- could not be strictly interpreted as either wave or particle. It required several interpretations, each dependent on context.
This points out how the language we use guides our thinking, and the ways in which our language really reflects the ideas we hold. Not, of course, that we can't move beyond our language, but it is worthwhile to look at it and the assumptions it embodies. [via Sigma Xi: In the News]
An odd animation of stick figures fighting in a martial-arts movie style. If you try to load this over a modem, it will take forever, but if you've got a fast line, it's sort of amusing. Obligatory Matrix allusion at the end, of course. [Thanks JRE]
Look - it's bizarre stuff you can make in your own kitchen! Their description says it better than I could:
This site is an ever growing warehouse of the kinds of projects some of the more demented of us tried as young people, collecting in one place many of the classic, simple science projects that have become part of the collective lore of amateur science. It is a sort of warped semi-scientific cookbook of tricks, gimmicks, and pointless experimentation, concoctions, and devices, using, for the most part, things found around the house. These are the classics. Strange goo, radios made from rusty razor blades, crystal gardens... amateur mad scientist stuff. If you happen to learn something in the process, consider yourself a better person for it.
I had to go off-site for details on the dangerous glowing pickle project. Definitely scroll down to watch her movie of a glowing pickle.
I've seen the criticism and ridicule of "speed dating", but I didn't know anything about its foundations, so I was intrigued by this article that describes the origins of Speed Dating and its recent offshoots. The basic idea is that a room full of single people each get to spend 7 minutes talking to each other one-on-one. The original system was an adaption of matchmaking and came out of a rabbi's desire to help Jewish people in LA meet and marry each other.
And, that, I think, is the reason the original system worked, to the extent it did. There was at least one common thread between all of the participants. The odds that I'll find a friend having a dozen 7 minute conversations with random members of the entire population is much lower than the odds I'll find a friend among a dozen random webloggers, random people from my hometown, or random people who heard about the service reading the same periodical I do. Its roots in matchmaking would also add to its success as merely a modern version of an old tradition. [via Alt-log]
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