Jeff Sohrt writes:

>Wirt writes:
>
>>     o To date, one year later, after a quarter-billion
>> analyzed packets,
>> nothing has been detected that appears in any way to be a
>> non-natural signal
>> nor a local signal artifact (i.e., nothing extraterrestrially
>> intelligent).
>
>Okay so...
>Maybe we've just missed the boat entirely.
>
>Perhaps these ET beings, if they do exist don't transmit, emanate, give off
>or produce any kind of detectable RF for us to pick up with our current
>technology.  That's a lot of processing gone to waste.

It depends on your definition of "waste" -- negative results are still
results.

However, if you're interested in something a bit closer to home, Stanford
University has started up a distributed computation project they call
Folding@Home, which uses spare processing power to compute protein shapes
based on primary structure (amino acid sequence). The home page for the
project is <http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/>.

Protein shapes are important because it's the shape of a protein that is
the key to its function. Understanding protein function will permit
better and faster drug design, among other benefits. Current methods of
protein structure determination aren't very satisfactory because they're
difficult and time-consuming -- and they require that proteins be taken
out of their usual watery environment, which changes their shape to start
with.

Computational techniques are still in their infancy, primarily because
they take so much power to execute for any significant protein. The
Folding@Home project has developed a new method of computing the dynamics
of a molecule that allows the computation to be spread over multiple
computers -- hence the new project.

The project currently has Windows and Linux clients. When they finish
their Macintosh client, I'll be handing my SETI@Home "credits" to Team
HP3000-L and switching to [log in to unmask] That's not because I think SETI
isn't worthwhile; it's just that I have a long-standing interest in
computational biology, and this looks like a project worth following from
that standpoint.

But if you think SETI isn't a good waste of time, and you'd like to waste
time some other way, the Folding@Home project may be just what your
computer needs to keep busy at night.

-- Bruce




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