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Alt-week 12.15.12: rivers on Titan, electric handcuffs and crashing into the moon
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days. Space, it's the final frontier, where no-one can hear you scream in frustration at not knowing who the villain of Star Trek: Into Darkness is, as well as where 50 percent of our stories take place this week. NASA's planning to crash satellites into the moon, someone's patented an electo-shock handcuff and there's a river on Titan that you wouldn't want to canoe-down. This is alt-week.
Dear Aunt TUAW: I made the switch. What do I do with my old system?
Dear Aunt TUAW, I did it. I made the switch. Mountain Lion and those hot Retina display MacBook Pros finally brought me to the Mac Side. So, what do I do with my old Windows system? It runs Win 7, is reasonably functional, and in need of a task. What do you suggest? Your loving (new) nephew, Colin Dear Colin, Auntie is sure there are many fine uses for your old system. There are always flowers to press, doors to hold open...but she thinks media servers and public web installations are two of the best. Whether you're running XBMC in the living room (plays back nearly everything you throw at it, letting you watch a wide range of video files) or Firefox in the Kitchen (great for news, weather, and recipes), old computers provide the perfect solution for always-on items that need to perform with minimal intervention. There's also the SETI project, which uses distributed computing to help analyze radio telescope data. Or you could go wild and install Linux, to see how the other other half lives. Your system is emotionally end-of-lifed anyway, now that you own your new MacBook. By trying out these projects, you ensure that when the PC does conk out and you're tired of performing fixes, you'll feel more as if you got your full worth out of it. If you're not in the mood for an in-home install, you could just sell your system on Ebay. Make sure to wipe your drive, and ship any OEM Windows disks that came with your computer. Auntie is, admittedly, not a Windows expert, so she's going to turn the question over to her nieces and nephews. What solutions can you recommend for Colin's old PC? Hugs, Auntie T.
SETI comes back from the financial dead, gets a check from Jodie Foster
Roswell devotees, dry those tears -- the search for alien overlords frenemies is back on. Four months after going into financial "hibernation," SETI's Allen Telescope Array has been temporarily resuscitated thanks to an infusion of publicly raised funds from the SETIStars program, and Ms. Jodie Foster. The web campaign for those-who-believe raised over $200,000 in just 45 days, enough cash to get the Paul Allen-funded dishes scanning the skies for at least five more months. Tom Pierson, the institute's CEO, is hoping to secure long-term funding for the project from the U.S. Air Force, which could use the array during the daytime "to track orbital objects that otherwise might pose a threat to the International Space Station and other satellites." However Pierson manages to keep the fleet of skyward-facing ears afloat, one thing's for sure -- the truth is out there and tracking it's a hustle.
SETI suspends search for alien life, E.T. weeps in the silent dark of space
Our progress toward intergalactic fellowship has suffered another blow, as SETI suspended operations of its Allen Telescope Array. Funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the array is a collection of radio dishes that scan the skies for signs of life; now it'll be in "hibernation" mode until 2013, when the institute's new round of funding begins. SETI hopes to raise $5 million to bring the Array back online before then, while it continues to use other telescopes around the world, including the Hubble Space Telescope. The budget woes are especially bitter given the number of recently identified alien planets – NASA's Kepler mission found 1,235. If any of them are broadcasting the next Wow! signal, let's hope it doesn't fall on deaf earthling ears.
Confused school district fires sysadmin for running SETI@home: 'As an educational institution we do not support the search for E.T.'
We've dealt with a number of confused and outright foolish school administrators in our time, but it seems like Arizona's Higley Unified School District might be run by the most bonkers of the bunch: they've fired IT director Brad Niesluchowski for running SETI@Home on some 5,000 of the district's machines. Why? According to confidently-underinformed superintendent Denise Birdwell, Higley Unified "certainly would have supported cancer research," but does "not support the search for E.T." Well, that's just peachy -- except that her flippant dismissal of SETI belies a complete ignorance of one of the oldest and most respected distributed-computing projects in the world, and what it's actually looking for. Oh, but it gets worse: Birdwell thinks SETI@home -- which primarily runs as a screensaver -- was somehow slowing down "educational programs in every classroom," and magically estimates that it's cost her district "$1 million in added utility fees and replacement parts," with a further huge cost required to remove the software. Completing her transformation into the worst-possible stereotype of a school district superintendent, Birdwell's even got the local cops on the case. Yeah, it's idiotic, but it could be worse -- we can only imagine the hell that would have broken loose had Higley's machines been a part of the renegade Engadget Folding@home team. Update: So there's apparently more going on here as well, including allegations of stolen equipment and -- inevitably -- downloaded porn, but none of that explains why Superintendent Birdwell is giving press conferences where she slams SETI. Check the more coverage links for the full story, and make sure to hit the source link for the video.
BOINC client lets Mac users contribute cycles
If you encountered a labful or officeful of Macs in the early 2000s, chances are good that a bunch of them were running SETI@Home, the 'contributed computing' project to search through radioastronomy signals for the telltale signs of an extraterrestrial civilization. While the classic SETI@Home application was closed down in December of 2005, the successor client for grid science is alive and well: BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, recently updated to version 5.8.15 and happily Universal Binary. OS X users are full peer clients along with Windows and Linux machines.You say finding LGM isn't your cup of MIPS? You can contribute to plenty of other projects affecting life here on Earth via the BOINC client and the World Community Grid, a 'meta-project' that aggregates work on several key initiatives (protein folding, cancer, climate and AIDS research) and lets you split up your processing power between your choices. You can sign up and start helping immediately; if you like, join the TUAW team and have your contributions tracked with fellow Macnatics. Note that the BOINC client from boinc.berkeley.edu is several versions newer than the one you get from WCG (5.8.15 vs. 5.4.9), so best to download from the source and then register.Of course, in the interest of environmental sensibility: please don't leave your machine powered on just to run BOINC; save a watt and let it go to sleep when it's truly idle.
SETI@home claims its first major discovery: a stolen laptop
Although this case doesn't represent the first time a thief has been tracked down by the very item he / she swiped, it does mark the first time in the history of SETI@home that the number crunching actually discovered something substantial. In another tale of good things happening to diligent people, a Minnesota husband installed the Berkeley-created software onto his wife's laptop to run whilst sitting unused, but he probably never imagined that having it check in with the California-based servers every so often would help him track down a crook. The lappie, which just so happened to house numerous crucial documents from his wife's writing collection, was jacked from their possession on New Year's Day, but as any determined and intelligent being would do, James Melin monitored the SETI@home database until the missing machine logged back into the UC mainframe, where a subpoena was then used to unearth the physical location of the stolen property. As of now, no arrests have been made, and while no pertinent documents were deleted or tampered with, Mrs. Melin noted that the perpetrator (or the eventual underground buyer's) taste in music was among the worst she's ever heard of judging by the foreign tracks that were gifted to her when the laptop returned. But what we really have here is just another good reason to join Engadget's Folding@home team![Via Slashdot]
