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Help find gravity waves!

There’s another interesting new distributed computing project on the horizon coming soon. Like SETI@Home or Distributed.net, Einstein@Home is a project aiming to recruit masses of personal computers to process data from the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observator) project. The purpose of LIGO is to look for gravitational waves by measuring teeny tiny changes in the length of the two arms of the observatory that might be caused by gravitational waves.

From the Einstein@Home homepage:

Einstein@Home is a project developed to search data from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational wave Observatory (LIGO) for signals coming from rapidly rotating neutron stars, known as pulsars. Scientists believe that some pulsars may not be perfectly spherical, and if so, they should emit characteristic gravitational waves, which LIGO will begin to detect in coming months.
Bruce Allen of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s (UWM) LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) group is leading the development of the Einstein@Home project.
Einstein@Home is one, small part of the LIGO scientific program. It is being set up as a distributed computing project, which means that it relies on computer time donated by private computer users like you to search for pulsars.

The project is scheduled to start sometime in 2005 as one of the events for the World Year of Physics 2005, so sign up now to get the word when it starts!

Found at UIUC‘s Physics Blog.

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Where the heck did all this crap come from?

Ok, busy trying to get the place packed up so I can move it all to the new apartment on the other side of the building. Not worrying about getting everything boxed up because I’m only going to have to take it out of them after moving it practically next door. Still, I’ve got about 15 or 20 boxes cluttering up the living room and that’s only the bookshelves!
Most of the stuff will come off the shelves, closets or cabinets and go right back into them in the new place. The wife wants to box every single item up, but I’m resisiting. Besides, she’s going to be too busy studying to help much anyway.
Yes, we have entirely too much Stuff. Some of it we need to keep, some of it I’m sure we can get rid of and never miss it. The problem is deciding what’s what. Inevitably I’ll pick up something that should go into the crap pile, have a look and then it ends up in the keep pile.
Reminds me of a kid’s book I used to read. Something about a little boy who is supposed to clean up his room, so he gets two boxes, labels one KEEP and the other THROW AWAY. Things get put into the KEEP box, other Things get put into the THROW AWAY box. Then he starts going through the Things in the THROW AWAY box and decides it should really be in the KEEP box (because you never really know when a thingamabob or a doodad will come in handy). And then eventually everything ends up in the KEEP box. What I liked most about the book was the processes the boy went through to decide whether or not to keep the Thing.
Great book. I wish I could remember what it was called.

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Oh, another one!

Gee, I wasn’t expecting that next one to come quite so soon, but there it is, Tropical Depression 2 forming in the mid-Atlantic. According to the NHC’s first discussion,

THE DEPRESSION IS MOVING WESTWARD OR 280 DEGREES AT 18 KNOTS…
STEERED BY THE WINDS SOUTH OF THE SUBTROPICAL RIDGE. HOWEVER…
LARGE SCALE MODELS FORECAST A LARGE TROUGH OVER THE EASTERN COAST
OF THE UNITED STATES. THIS TROUGH WILL ERODE THE SUBTROPICAL RIDGE
FORCING THE CYCLONE TO TURN MORE TO NORTHWEST AND NORTH DURING THE
LAST PORTION OF THE FORECAST.

Oh sweet, NHC does RSS feeds now!

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Whoa, hey, where’d that come from?!

Ok, so while I was blissfully out of touch last week apparently tropical storm (now hurricane) Alex popped up right off the coast of South Carolina. No doubt the cause of my flight delays on Sunday. Fortunately it had minimal impact on South Carolina aside from making it a good weekend for surfers off Folly Beach and not much significant impact for the affected bits of North Carolina.
Next!

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Suggestion to airlines

Anyone who’s been to an airport recently will notice that the major airlines have installed those self check-in terminals. The idea is that you swipe your credit card so they know who you are and it spits out your boarding pass. Sometimes it doesn’t work, so you have to enter another piece of information, like your ticket number. Sometimes that still doesn’t work so you enter some other piece of information like the flight number. And if that doesn’t uniquely identify you to the system, you’re stuck standing in line waiting for a ticket agent to issue you a boarding pass.

So, airlines, if you’re going to do this, you need to make sure it’s much more robust and that it works for everyone. There’s not much point in implementing the check-in terminals if it’s going to result in long lines of hundreds of people who end up having to see the one or two ticket agents you only have on duty because you’ve reduced staffing (because the check-in terminals are supposed to be “more efficient”).