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After 19 years of being a Microsoft user, I’ve decided to make the switch. I just bought my first Mac.

Band humor.  A medley of Lady GaGa songs played on bassoons.

This is interesting.  I’m curious to see exactly how my stats in the AQUA@home project suddenly jumped to over 77,000,000 points.  I know my old computer is not working THAT hard!

We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.” People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.

— Franklin Roosevelt

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Outdoing the likes of Ferrari and Audi, which have already installed solar panels onto the roofs of their manufacturing plants, Renault has partnered with Gestamp Solar to launch what it says is the largest solar energy project in the automotive industry. The project will see solar panels eventually covering a total area of 450,000 m2 (4,843,760 sq ft) at Renault plants in France, generating 60 MW and cutting the company’s CO2 emissions by 30,000 tons a year.

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I have been donating computer time to SETI@home since 2001. The following is an excerpt from a fundraising email that I received:

“Though the SETI@home project has been active for over ten years, we are still branching out and exploring new scientific directions. As you may know, the data that your computer analyzes comes from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. While Arecibo is an immensely powerful telescope, it cannot see the entire sky. In the coming year, we hope to be able to start collecting data at The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, allowing us to listen in on parts of the sky that, up until now, we have not been able to reach.

Furthermore, in February of 2011, NASA is slated to release data from the Kepler Mission, containing the location of several new exoplanets that could potentially be home to intelligent life. In 2011, we hope to perform a targeted search of the Kepler field, looking for signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. This search would also be done at the Green Bank Telescope.

In order to carry out these exciting new plans, we would like to ask you again for your support. SETI@home has always been a collaborative effort on a global scale; there is no other project on Earth that is quite as dependent on the help and contributions of the global public. In order to keep SETI@home up and running, as well as accomplish this year’s scientific goals, we need your help. To make a secure tax-deductible donation click here, which will take you to a page of instructions on how to donate online or through mail via check. Any amount that you are willing to donate this holiday season would be a great help. Your contribution will not only allow SETI@home to continue to run as it has for the past ten years, but also provide the opportunity to expand the search for intelligent life in exciting new directions.”

Morning meditation. This video followed by 5 minutes of mindfulness meditation.

“Genius is 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent inspiration,” Edison famously claimed. He knew a thing or two about what it takes to push oneself up the incline of expertise to the pinnacle of mastery. Unfortunately, most of us don’t seem to recognize that gaining mastery over a domain takes serious hard work over an extended period of time. We continue to act as if genius were in-born: We think that some of us have “it” and most of us don’t. As a consequence, too few among us gain mastery over any domain. We lead a life of mediocrity and by the time we realize this–by middle age–we feel it’s too late. This is perhaps why we are least happy and most depressed at the age of 46.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sapient-nature/201104/go-go-grow

One of the volunteer distributed processing projects that I participate in (Milkyway@home) has surpassed one petaflop (a thousand trillion floating point operations per second), and is now equal to the second fastest supercomputer in the world.

From Scientific Computing Magazine

At this very moment, tens of thousands of home computers around the world are quietly working together to solve the largest and most basic mysteries of our galaxy.  Enthusiastic and inquisitive volunteers from Africa to Australia are donating the computing power of everything from decade-old desktops to sleek new netbooks to help computer scientists and astronomers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute map the shape of our Milky Way galaxy.  The collected computing power of these humble home computers recently has surpassed one petaflop,  a computing speed that surpasses the world’s second fastest supercomputer.

The project, MilkyWay@Home, uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which is widely known for the SETI@home project used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Today, MilkyWay@Home has outgrown even this famous project, in terms of speed, making it the fastest computing project on the BOINC platform and perhaps the second fastest public distributed computing program ever in operation (just behind Folding@home).

The interdisciplinary team behind MilkyWay@Home, which ranges from professors to undergraduates, began the formal development under the BOINC platform in July 2006 and worked tirelessly to build a volunteer base from the ground up to build its computational power.  Each user participating in the project signs up their computer and offers up a percentage of the machine’s operating power that will be dedicated to calculations related to the project.  For the MilkyWay@Home project, this means that each personal computer is using data gathered about a very small section of the galaxy to map its shape, density and movement.

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Between 1971 and 1977, the EPA hired photographers to travel around the country and take photos of life in America.  Now 15,000 of these photos have been digitized and released to the public.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/collections/72157620729903309/