The things you don't expect

To be listening to French rap with your 7 month old son at quarter past seven on a Saturday morning.

The list of other unexpected things is as long as my arm, but this seems pretty outlandish :)

Now, time to make some banana porridge...

We are (all) scientists

Y'all (well, the eagle-eyed amongst you) will have spotted a small image on the right-hand side of this blog, with a list of some random numbers and meaningless acronyms. For clarity, I've added the image again below:

This is my small contribution to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) - a silly acronym, but a very worthy cause. BOINC allows you to take the spare processing capacity on any computer you own, and donate it to scientific projects from around the world. Simply download a small piece of software, select a bunch of projects you're interested in, and it pretty much looks after itself from there. You can choose to limit the amount of disk space / processor / bandwidth usage, as well as what day of the week and time of day BOINC will run at (I run at 100% 24/7, on both the machines I have it installed on - HARDCORE). I'm mostly writing this post cos I'm chuffed that I broke the 100,000 credits mark (you get credits for the amount of tasks your machines have completed), but I think it's worthwhile writing about such a tremendously useful endeavour anyway.

The projects that I subscribe to are a mix of very worthy causes: Climate Prediction, fairly self-explanatory; and Rosetta, a project looking at ways to combine proteins that will hopefully lead to the creation of new medicines), and personal quests: SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) - how cool would it be to discover the first ET transmission! Right now, the desktop I'm writing this at is also analysing data that was recorded by the Arecibo radio telescope on the 10th December 2008, scanning for patterns, signal amongst the background noise of the cosmos.



Make this your good deed for the day - download and install the BOINC client, and put your machine's spare time to good use :)

AEP: falling slowly

My Last.fm AEP has dropped from 4.04 to 4.02. The reason? I would imagine it was as a result of scrobbling waaaay too many Christmas tunes over the holidays. Lesson learned: sign out of Last.fm before over-indulging in Christmas cheese...

Must go and listen to some of the more obscure items in my collection to try and get back to the snobbish heights of 4.04 - anybody in the mood for some sacred minimalist dissonant modernist compositions? :)

I'm a model if you know what i mean

To complete this evening's Fionn-flood, here's the boy-wonder rockin his new outfits from Eoin and Holly. Thanks guys!

Do the locomotion...

Fionn's first trick:

Oh good, now he's mobile...

Happy New Year to all my avid readers!