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Yeah, I suspect that's what's going on with the hurricane path accuracy stat. Both today and 40 years ago, weather data from the affected region is very sparse (we have more weather buoys, but that's about it). The biggest difference is that today there are dozens of different models forecasting hurricane paths. Making it much more likely that one of them will get it right, and forecasters will be able to pat themselves on the back for correctly "predicting" the hurricane's path. This isn't necessarily a result of having better models. The more models you have, the smaller the margin of error. In other words, it will happen just from increasing the number of models, even if the individual models don't improve in accuracy.

I'd like to see that graph of improving hurricane track accuracy made using a single modern model (and no picking and choosing after the fact which model had the best results).

Serious question. why would you say driver's wages are not that significant? They have to do shifts, vacations, covering, redundancy, overtime...

I would imagine they'd be among the largest operational costs of running the transit. What else is there? fuel?

Capital and Maintenance costs would be there as well.

I just did a quick google.
https://ny.curbed.com/2018/1/3...

https://www4.uwm.edu/cuts/utp/...

Driver cost is a very large expense.
"Here, there are several reasons, one of which is labor; the biggest single cost on buses is the driver, who is paid by the hour. (The other major costs are fuel consumption and maintenance.) "

I tried to figure it out, but unfortunately my head exploded when I read this. https://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support...

FOIA requests can be used for targeted denial of service attacks, yes. Look at what this chick is doing to a public library: http://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcont... She's just a dumb blonde (look at her kooky museum tour videos) but she's still managed to deluge the library with hundreds of FOIA requests (demanding shit like "all the data produced on all employees' computers over the past year", etc.) She's a lone kook not even employed by a major industry, and the library has to hire two full time employees just to respond to her FOIA requests. If they are legally required to respond to them, most small research teams would easily be shut down by a torrent of FOIA requests coming from deep-pocketed industries.

There are lots and lots of people out there who use Linux for numerical number-crunching and scientific tasks.

I run Fedora Linux on my desktop and keep it running 24/7. One of the reasons is that I always have BOINC running in the background, doing work for The World Community Grid and Einstein@home. This way, I can be using my computer to help others even when I'm asleep, or away from home.

If no-one's using the M2070s, a project like Einstein@home certainly could.

Unfortunately, Affleck probably wouldn't have been interested according to my brief conversation with Kevin Smith

2xGTX260 are in theory about 1.5TFLOPS so that's welcome fuel on the fire :)

You can also configure common settings using the BOINC preferences and Einstein@home preferences pages. It seems common to use "location" to set up different preferences for different hosts, e.g. I use "home" setting for machines which are only good for GPU work, "work" for CPU-only systems and the "default" setting for both CPU/GPU (plus "school" settings for experimentation).

Also AIUI the latest client will use all your GPUs as long as they have identical capabilities - so it should use both your GTX260's. You do have to twiddle the XML for stuff like mixed GPU usage, but I've never found the drivers stable enough for that to work well (at least on my ragtag fleet of PCs). I'd hazard a guess it would get tricky if you throw "GPU utilization" into the mix (i.e. running multiple work units on the same GPU, which can speed things up - see the benchmarks thread). Anyway, sounds like you're doing more advanced stuff after one night than anything I've attempted to date.

2xGTX260 are in theory about 1.5TFLOPS so that's welcome fuel on the fire :)

You can also configure common settings using the BOINC preferences and Einstein@home preferences pages. It seems common to use "location" to set up different preferences for different hosts, e.g. I use "home" setting for machines which are only good for GPU work, "work" for CPU-only systems and the "default" setting for both CPU/GPU (plus "school" settings for experimentation).

Also AIUI the latest client will use all your GPUs as long as they have identical capabilities - so it should use both your GTX260's. You do have to twiddle the XML for stuff like mixed GPU usage, but I've never found the drivers stable enough for that to work well (at least on my ragtag fleet of PCs). I'd hazard a guess it would get tricky if you throw "GPU utilization" into the mix (i.e. running multiple work units on the same GPU, which can speed things up - see the benchmarks thread). Anyway, sounds like you're doing more advanced stuff after one night than anything I've attempted to date.

2xGTX260 are in theory about 1.5TFLOPS so that's welcome fuel on the fire :)

You can also configure common settings using the BOINC preferences and Einstein@home preferences pages. It seems common to use "location" to set up different preferences for different hosts, e.g. I use "home" setting for machines which are only good for GPU work, "work" for CPU-only systems and the "default" setting for both CPU/GPU (plus "school" settings for experimentation).

Also AIUI the latest client will use all your GPUs as long as they have identical capabilities - so it should use both your GTX260's. You do have to twiddle the XML for stuff like mixed GPU usage, but I've never found the drivers stable enough for that to work well (at least on my ragtag fleet of PCs). I'd hazard a guess it would get tricky if you throw "GPU utilization" into the mix (i.e. running multiple work units on the same GPU, which can speed things up - see the benchmarks thread). Anyway, sounds like you're doing more advanced stuff after one night than anything I've attempted to date.

E@h is GPL V2 actually. Thinking of something else?

It was a cut and paste from the original article, I doubt slashdot editors can edit a page on the http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ forum it came from.

But they damn well can -- and should -- point out that it's an error in the original source, and what the obvious meaning is.

It was a cut and paste from the original article, I doubt slashdot editors can edit a page on the http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ forum it came from.

Yeah. I've had LHC@Home on my specific BOINC project manager since 2004. It hasn't had much available work, though. Mostly I work on Einstein@Home (processes LIGO and other gravitational wave observatory data).

You can actually do slightly better than this using single numbers (rather than ranges) via Farey trees. That gives optimal memory usage for a given tree size, and doesn't require changing extant nodes to insert a new node.

At UW-Milwaukee's dorms, I used FFDeploy to do just this: create a silent Firefox installer for student and faculty machines with some built-in bookmark buttons for our student service websites, e-mail system and so on.

Doing this saves time and installs FF with a nice student-friendly UI right off the bat -- very useful in converting otherwise IE-centric students who don't care what browser they're using to Firefox.

I work at a university dorm as a network technician (UWM, incase you're wondering!), and fix ten to twenty computers a week infected with malware, often exactly this strain of rogue AV software.

The utility called ComboFix almost always cleans these infections up with no hassle. If that fails, or if examination of the logfile indicates that it didn't quite get everything, MalwareBytes Anti-Malware should take care of the rest, and if anything gets past BOTH of those you can take note of the infected file names that couldn't be removed and delete them from Knoppix or a BART LiveCD.

I only reinstall Windows as a last resort, or if ComboFix detects an unremovable rootkit (this can be found in the logfile.)

I currently work with the UW-Milwaukee School of Continuing Education and we have the OSHER life long learning institute (with about 120 other OSHER subsidiaries) and are always looking for competent, well meaning, volunteers.

We also have Public Allies which the Obamas were a part of.

You could also donate time to groups like the Wisconsin Association of Equal Opportunity or the Community Brainstorming Conference

There are a ton of other areas where you could volunteer your time and energy, but the simple fact is that the number of people with technical skills is significantly smaller than the number of projects that would benefit (HUGELY) from a couple of hours of your time.

Seriously, how long would it take the average /.er to build a decent website and compare that to how long it would take the average MBA.

I currently work with the UW-Milwaukee School of Continuing Education and we have the OSHER life long learning institute (with about 120 other OSHER subsidiaries) and are always looking for competent, well meaning, volunteers.

We also have Public Allies which the Obamas were a part of.

You could also donate time to groups like the Wisconsin Association of Equal Opportunity or the Community Brainstorming Conference

There are a ton of other areas where you could volunteer your time and energy, but the simple fact is that the number of people with technical skills is significantly smaller than the number of projects that would benefit (HUGELY) from a couple of hours of your time.

Seriously, how long would it take the average /.er to build a decent website and compare that to how long it would take the average MBA.

I wonder if similar detection rates have been calculated for SETI (e.g., assume ET having a transmitter of 1 MW, at what distance would you still detect anything? And how many life supporting planets are in that range? ) This will depend a lot on the parameters in your Drake's equations, but they should at least give some order of magnitudes. I remember reading some skeptic article several years ago, which claimed that even with optimistic estimates, the chance of detecting anything would be absolutely zero.

Until that time, I rather waste my computer cycles on the LIGO data (Einstein at home) or one of the various medical applications (e.g. Folding at home), which produce scientific results today.

rats blinded by ingesting methanol had much of their vision restored by being irradiated with IR light

LIGO is however by now already working according to design specifications (it took a while for them to get there, but they should be there now). I guess that's why this is making the news now. Yes, they could further improve its accuracy and probably will, but even now I would think there's something weird going on? Because surely the design specs were thought out by the scientists to actually cover detection of gravitational waves according to current theories?

Here's a graph of what LIGO has been in terms of sensitivity over the years:
http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/FinalS3Results/G060009-02.jpg

The goal was to meet the purple line there, and what's weird to me now is that they just finished the S5 round with this outcome. Yes, they could go below it for further accuracy, but it would seem a bit like searching in the dark, not knowing what is going on...?

Some poster mentioned it earlier: If you priorities is to spend youd budget on the best way to save lives then research into Cancer or AIDS isn't the best place to put it, even within the medical research field. There are other diseases that kill far more people but get far less research dollars than Cancer/AIDS already! The money goes into areas where the research companies think there will be the best return on the investment!

That said, it is a fallacy to suggest that SETI might also result in a cure for all known ills by finding the aliens who already have the cures! Again, from another poster, the best thing SETI could do is offer a wake-up call to the religiously infatuated, perhaps providing some coffee flavoured smelling salts at the same time.

FWIW, I used to run SETI, before and after BOINC. I also ran a number of other BOINC clients, including:-
SETI,
Folding,
Climate Prediction,
Einstein searching for gravitational waves,
LHC helping with the Large Hadron Collider,
Predictor trying to predict protein structure from protein sequences,
QMC,
Rosetta,
Stardust,
yada yada yada
but removed it a year or so back as it did seem to get in the way rather too often.

BOINC was just too clunky. Why did you have to register individually with each BOINC project, be given yet another HUGE number, have to search for the interesting projects yourself. BOINC should have taken care of the registration once, then offered a drop-down of active projects. Selecting something interesting would do all the install stuff for you and allow you to control the shares from the Client - currently (or at least when I left it) if you wanted to alter the share of one particular project got you had to go to each Project's website rather than just set it within the client. Just clunky!

Anyway, I moved on, but I'd have to say I'm sort of interested again and may fire up SETI again for a while to see how things have progressed since I last offered some cycles!

Before I go further, I use CSS everyday I design, especially since I'm still learning all of it's annoying idiosyncrasies, mainly because (and I'm not the only one) the CSS language itself is flawed (constraints & variables being some of which CSS lacks). The idea of what CSS created for, style sheets, is great & is a step forward, but the way we have to use style sheets with CSS sometimes makes me wonder what an abortion feels like.

I admit, some days it seems to get *easier* to deal with since I actively remember the times I more or less lost my shit because the stupid code wouldn't render correctly in different browsers, so I also remember (most of the time) what to avoid, but I really don't think the full potential of style sheets will be fufilled with CSS as the way it is. Even with CSS 3 (I'm not touching HTML5; I'm one of those "wacky" people who think we should stick with what we have until it's stable enough to warrant additions; a more eloquent way of putting it has already been said: http://www.molly.com/2007/06/14/defy-the-pedantic-semantic-html5-and-xhtml-11-must-stop-for-now/ ), I just don't see the difficulties of CSS, which warrant most of the CSS books being made, being resolved anytime soon.

I know I'm not the only one who begrudgingly uses CSS (I realize they are other technologies to use instead or to supplement CSS' shortcomings, I'm currently looking into that...), and I know I'm not the only who thinks something new should be made to address what CSS fails to do. I'm not talking about HTML5, nor CSS3, and defintley not FLASH (although, personally, I think if HTML & CSS were to somehow utilize a plug-in for browsers to render shit properly, standards would be able to compete with FLASH, but I'm just rambling there).

While googling out of frustration, I came across this:

PSL (Proteus Style Sheets): http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~multimedia/papers/jucs/jucs.html

Why Current Style Sheet Standards Have Failed to Improve Document Engineering: http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~multimedia/WWW8/webEng.html

I know every single Pure-CSS zealot is going to moan & groan at me for thinking differently than them, but honestly, PSL seems like a way better idea than simply adding on to an inheritantly broken style sheet language in which books & books need to be made to tell people what hoops to jump through to get it work. I don't know, I guess that sounds stupid to too many people; often I've let that prevent me from expressing my not unreasonable doubts.

Sometimes I feel like some poor bloke who time traveled back to the Titanic but can't prevent anything due to paradox. :\

Before I go further, I use CSS everyday I design, especially since I'm still learning all of it's annoying idiosyncrasies, mainly because (and I'm not the only one) the CSS language itself is flawed (constraints & variables being some of which CSS lacks). The idea of what CSS created for, style sheets, is great & is a step forward, but the way we have to use style sheets with CSS sometimes makes me wonder what an abortion feels like.

I admit, some days it seems to get *easier* to deal with since I actively remember the times I more or less lost my shit because the stupid code wouldn't render correctly in different browsers, so I also remember (most of the time) what to avoid, but I really don't think the full potential of style sheets will be fufilled with CSS as the way it is. Even with CSS 3 (I'm not touching HTML5; I'm one of those "wacky" people who think we should stick with what we have until it's stable enough to warrant additions; a more eloquent way of putting it has already been said: http://www.molly.com/2007/06/14/defy-the-pedantic-semantic-html5-and-xhtml-11-must-stop-for-now/ ), I just don't see the difficulties of CSS, which warrant most of the CSS books being made, being resolved anytime soon.

I know I'm not the only one who begrudgingly uses CSS (I realize they are other technologies to use instead or to supplement CSS' shortcomings, I'm currently looking into that...), and I know I'm not the only who thinks something new should be made to address what CSS fails to do. I'm not talking about HTML5, nor CSS3, and defintley not FLASH (although, personally, I think if HTML & CSS were to somehow utilize a plug-in for browsers to render shit properly, standards would be able to compete with FLASH, but I'm just rambling there).

While googling out of frustration, I came across this:

PSL (Proteus Style Sheets): http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~multimedia/papers/jucs/jucs.html

Why Current Style Sheet Standards Have Failed to Improve Document Engineering: http://www.cs.uwm.edu/~multimedia/WWW8/webEng.html

I know every single Pure-CSS zealot is going to moan & groan at me for thinking differently than them, but honestly, PSL seems like a way better idea than simply adding on to an inheritantly broken style sheet language in which books & books need to be made to tell people what hoops to jump through to get it work. I don't know, I guess that sounds stupid to too many people; often I've let that prevent me from expressing my not unreasonable doubts.

Sometimes I feel like some poor bloke who time traveled back to the Titanic but can't prevent anything due to paradox. :\

5) Virgin births are rampant throughout ancient mythology, and most sun gods underwent a virgin birth on December 25 (it being the traditionally accepted date when the days visibly begin to grow in length). Many also had 3 wise men follow a star in the east to see the birth. It was practically a requirement of godhood in an age when sun gods were generally considered the most important deities. If you didn't have the trappings of a sun god, you would not have been accepted by Roman society. (This also explains why the Christian sabbath is Sunday.)

Astrologically, the story is explained by the belt of Orion (the three wise men) pointing to Sirius (the brightest star in the sky) which was low in the eastern sky where the sun rose on the winter solstice, all of which occured under the sign of Virgo (the virgin).

Incidentally, the sun gods as a rule traveled the world with their 12 disciples, were then killed, placed into a cave for 3 days, and then resurrected, thereby saving humanity. Astrologically, this is just esoteric symbolism for the sun traversing the 12 signs of the Zodiac, finally losing the war against the forces of darkness on the Winter Solstice, remaining in this darkest mode for 3 days where the sun spent more time "under" the earth than over it, before being reborn again, initiating a new year and new crops, which were essential to the survival of humanity.

The most prevalent sun god during the Roman Empire was probably Mithras, who had Persian origins. The story of Mithras had all of these elements, but also borrowed them from earlier traditions. The oldest one we know of, and possibly the original, was the Egyptian god Horus. The sun-disk on Horus' head was adopted directly into Christian iconography, eventually evolving into the modern halo. Horus was called Iu-em-hetep, or Iusa in Egyptian, a name which evolved to Yeshua (Hebrew), then Iesu (Greek, who had to drop the trailing 'a' which would have implied the feminine), then Iesus (Latinate form of Iesu), then finally Jesus around the 1600s when the letter J came into usage.

The current Christian version of the sun god story comes from the Council of Nicaea, which at its heart was an attempt to establish a universal Roman religion to eliminate the religious feuds that were occupying the empire at that time. As a universal religion it had to incorporate the essential elements of all the major competing sects of the day, so sun god symbolism figured heavily in the resulting unified doctrine. Constantine's miraculous "conversion" however, was more likely political expediency - an attempt to centralize and control worship from Rome. And it worked, for over 1000 years. Still doing a half-decent job today, in fact.

Name one standardized exam that provides a comprehensive assessment of everything that needs to be considered to "certify" college graduates as qualified and hireable employees in any field, scientific/technical or otherwise.

Off the top of my head, how about:

(1) The ACS exams in chemistry.

(2) State RN license exams and board certification exams in medical specialties.

(3) The bar exam.

(4) The FAA exam for getting a license to fly an airplane on instruments.

(5) The CPA exams.

Need more? I'm sure I can find a round dozen with a few more minutes thinking.

Does it measure every area of knowledge...blah blah blah

In other words, is any test absolutely perfect? Of course not. Nothing is. But I believe we were talking about the real world, not Black 'n' White Land were anything not utterly perfect is ipso facto utter garbage. In our real world, "imperfect" exams do a damn good job sorting out competents from lookalike fools. A much better job than such feel-good fluffy stuff as recommendations from people who like you, or grades assigned according to some mysterious secret formula by someone of whom I've never heard.

How about we reverse the challenge? Why don't you find me a job in which people's lives are directly in your hands (like surgery, piloting, or critical care nursing), and which does not require a comprehensive exam before you start the job?

Here's what happens if you implement a do-or-die exit exam: learning of any important area of knowledge, skill, or ability that is not on the exam will get worse, because students will shift focus to learning (by rote memorization, if possible) all the things on the exam and they will ignore all the things that aren't.

Well let's hope so. See, either it's a good exam or it's not (in my case "good" would have been defined as "testing the skills employers really want.") If it's a bad exam, well, a poor or half-assed implementation doesn't prove an idea is shit. Otherwise Linux 0.1 would have been the death of Open Source Software, ha ha. But if it's a good exam, then students should not be spending time learning what's not on it, because that stuff isn't, in fact, "important." You just think it is, or wish it was. And a nice side-effect of the exam would be that it will dispel that illusion.

you'll see that overreliance on exit exams is at the top of most experts' lists of what has gotten the Indian educational system into this mess in the first place.

Sure. And lots of "experts" have theories about what makes the stock market go up and down, or how to boost employment without waking up inflation, or which team is going to win the Rose Bowl. Get back to me when there's factual measurable proof of this remarkable (and to my ear laughable) proposition.

I love the new additions to the landscape. We need them!

If I can add a little plug... With the potential rise of Citizendium and the continued media circus surrounding Wikipedia's foibles, it's a good time to review the current state of Wikimania and consider what these disruptive technologies mean for the future of "authoritative" information sources. If you've ever wanted for a general overview of Wikipedia or needed something to point to when asked, "Wikipedia? Isn't that just a bunch of lies?" then the 1-hour screencast titled "Why Wiki?" is for you. The online video is my perspective on the pros and cons of Wikipedia and how it stacks up to traditional publication formats.

Incidentally, the new logic board runs at least 15C cooler for me... it used to go up to 65 degrees C when idle, and maxed out at 97 degrees C under full load (with Einstein@home)! Now it's usually about 50C idle, and haven't seen it get above 80C yet under load. Not sure if the new board is inherently cooler, or if they tweaked the fans...

The arxiv.org original paper can be found here. From what I understand of the original paper, they only did a non-rotating black holes. This paper is a significant step forward in numerical relativity because they were able to actually get information out about the gravitational waves that carry the energy away from the two black holes and allow for the inspiral to happen.

As mentioned in the paper, a lot of previous work has been done on this problem. Up to this point, one of the methods used was a circular orbit approximation.

The detection of gravitational waves will be a huge step forward for General Relativity and these simulations are very important for the groups doing the data analysis like the LIGO Scientific Collaboration Group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who work on the data analysis of the scientific runs from LIGO. It allows them to test their detection algorithms more accurately so that when(if) they detect an event, greater confidence can be given about the detection.

If you'd like to pitch in yourself and help the LHC project, running LHC@Home is a great way! They use your CPU cycles to simulate particles traveling in the LHC. The server might be out of work units at the moment, but there are, of course, other cool projects that use the same BOINC client that you might not have heard of, like Einstein @ Home that helps the LIGO project searching for gravity waves.

Both the WSJ article and the slashdot discussion which followed failed to mention that with BOINC one can quite easily donate cycles to other efforts besides searching for ET, such as Einstein@Home: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/

I am surprised nobody mentioned Einstein@home - http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/.
This experiment uses distributed computing to process their results,
and you can participate.

Been running Einstein@home for long time now, have like 71,000 credits.

Millions of us are running it. We have not found a single magnetic wave
in the place. I wonder if we are looking in the wrong direction ?

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/

If I find one, I can convert these credits to frequent flyer parsecs.

Boinc itself isn't really a replacement for seti though, it is simply a manager
You choose which projects you wish to subscribe to, and how long you want any particular project to hog resources for and away you go.
At first i ran seti alone, but recently I have been running the Einstein@home and LHC@Home client on a 33% resource share basis with Seti.
Einstein, looks for spinning Pulsars and the LHC is a client from CERN running simulations of particles spinning around the new Six Track large hadron colider.
The LHC project has just finished sadly, but I think I'll move onto the Rosetta project, which is looking to work out various protein structures and interactions and how they can be used.

If, like me, you always fancied running a few other projects other than Seti but didnt want the hassle of manually deciding which client ot run then Boinc is a real boon and well worth the few minutes needed to set it up.

Have a go, I think you will like it!

How noise is eliminated - from http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/ Noise sources: seismic & thermal vibrations, particle-like quantum behavior of the laser light. The standard method used to search for signals in noise is known as 'matched filtering' or 'optimal filtering'. 1.) Begin with good theoretical anticipation of what the signal is expected to look like. 2.) Signals are analysed from perspective of many points in the sky where pulsars are expected to be. 3.) Dopplers shifts due to earth's spin and motion around the sun are accounted for. 4.) Multiply the output of the detector by this waveform, and average over time T. The resulting integral has two terms, one whose expected value grows like the square root of time T, arising from random noise in the instrument, the other which grows in proportion to time T, which is due to the pulsar signal. So if there is enough data, and enough computing power, and the exact sky position and frequency of the pulsar is known, a big enough T can always be chosen such that the term due to the source dominates the term due to the instrument noise.

The LSC (LIGO Scientific Collaboration) thinks a little bit different about that.
In their document "First report on the S3 analysis" (http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/PartialS3Results) which is based on the Einstein@Home community efforts they say:

"However, the numbers of sources and their distances from us are uncertain, and in their first few years of operation it is quite possible that the LIGO and GEO instruments may not detect anything."
"So far, we have not seen any evidence for pulsar signals in the S3 data. As described earlier, this is not surprising, because LIGO is not sensitive enough to guarantee that we will see one or more pulsars."

LIGO is going to be upgraded ("Advanced LIGO"), which will improve the detection of events by the factor 100-1000.
Maybe the theory of grav-waves is even wrong, who knows... :-)

Both sites are asking for public help processing the data, via a special screensaver called Einstein@Home.

--Greg

Gravitational Radiation - the cosmological reference, not the meteorology ones.

Some other gravitational wave detection projects

Some anomalies in gravity theory

and, of course, Einstein@Home

The user experience might have suffered a little with the switch to BOINC, but think of what has been gained: a generic distributed computing system, where projects can fairly easily package up their computational problem for SETI@home-like processing, without having to go through all the work of setting up the distributed computing infrastructure! And with BOINC, you can specify what percentage of your cpu resources you want to go to which processes... it's like the United Way for CPU cycles. (-:

I work on the LIGO project, which is searching for gravitational waves using several huge interferometers (one out in the desert of Eastern Washington at the old Hanford Works, were Plutonium was made for the Manhattan Project; the other currently being belted by the hurricane down in Louisiana, 3002 km away). I was really impressed by the Einstein@home talk at the most recent meeting. The computation by the Einstein@home project is really very valuable to the LIGO project. If you want to run Einstein@home, it will really help LIGO.

Some pictures from LIGO: http://www.livejournal.com/users/nibot/tag/ligo
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LIGO

I love it too, I was running the Climate Prediction along with SETI... but now I've switched over to the Enstein one. http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/

From the Site:

Einstein@home is a program that uses your computer's idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors.

"There is an interesting phenomenon that occurs amongst medical students, called Interns' Disease: when they are studying certain aspects of health, they become more aware of their own health."

And every time I've heard it, it's been from a northerner...

Well, being in Virginia, you'd have a better perspective than I would, seeing as I learned the language in Los Angeles (as far as I can tell, US Geography is non-Euclidian: West is completely orthogonal to North/South, while East is not. After all, Los Angeles is well south of Mason-Dixon if you measure by latitude.)

I will admit to merely parroting sources, rather than having done the research myself. Interestingly, though, at least two of these sources are from Charlottesville. I'll actually be visiting them this coming weekend, so I'll ask around.

I went through a struggle to track down the dialect survey, only to discover it doesn't have "y'all" at all. There are some interesting items, however:
http://cfprod01.imt.uwm.edu/Dept/FLL/linguistics/d ialect/maps.html

I was referring to the LIGO client

No thanks. I don't donate to people who claim to own data.
They also make no mention of license terms or client source availability.

Two different pieces of software.

* Create an account. ...
* Download and install BOINC. ...
That's it.

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/news.php

Jm4498

If anyone cares, we have a team Slashdot.

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/team_display.php?team id=584

If you run einstein@home, get yer arse on it.

http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/

Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring.

Some of the problems are of local origin and can't be fixed anywhere else:

1. Defective and counterproductive educational philosophy, and
2. Bureaucratic empire-building at the expense of the putative purpose of the organization.

For a couple of very informative yet entertaining rants on these subjects, I suggest that you read this regarding the former, and this regarding the latter. Then read the rest of the first site, especially some of the links.

but picture the next "Little Mermaid" movie ...some sequence involving the electric slide