penismightier.com

For many years many of us have been devotees to SETI, the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. The SETI group was based out of Berkeley and would occasionally record raw data from radio telescope arrays and then would have their volunteers (people like us) process it. You can read the Wikipedia article on SETI here. The Pen SETI stats page is available here.

Since 2001 many of us have been devoting all of our spare computer cycles to searching for aliens, even going as far as to load up many of the computers at our respective workplaces with the software at one time or another. It didn’t cost us anything, and since most of us run our computers 24 hours a day it gave us the illusion of some of that time not being wasted.

Unfortunately SETI has kind of died over the last few years. With the start of many ‘more useful’ distributed computing projects and the lack of fresh data for the SETI clients to process the interest in the program has faded to the point that we only had about 7 people still active on the pen team last month, out of a one time high of 141.

With those things in mind eod started a Folding team. Folding is run by Stanford, and devotes your spare CPU cycles to protein folding. The idea is that the distributed computing model can help find cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, and many other diseases. Now instead of searching for aliens we’re curing cancer!

If you’re interested in joining the pen folding team visit http://folding.stanford.edu and load the client.

The pen team is number 119090 and the stats can be viewed here.

As a warning, the windows ‘graphical’ client will disrupt games that use the OpenGL engine. If you load the graphical client then you will want to pause it before starting games. The command line version doesn’t have this hangup but does require a bit more skill to install and run.

Help pen cure erectile dysfunction^* cancer! Join the pen Folding team!

^*Note: Folding and team Pen can not actually cure erectile dysfunction unless you send me pictures of your sisters.