Ornoth

You may recall hearing about the SETI@Home volunteer computing project back in 1999.

The idea was to collect a metric fuckton of data from the Arecibo radio telescope, split the raw data into digestible chunks, then farm the chunks out to thousands of volunteers, letting their home computers sift through the data looking for potential signals from extraterrestrial sources.

WCG screen saver

The sifting software ran in a low-priority background task as a screen saver. When you weren’t using your computer, its spare cycles could be used to perform useful scientific research. And *your* laptop might detect the first signal from intelligent life outside our solar system!

As an engineer, I’ve always had both work and home machines, plus older computers lying around gathering dust, so I installed the software and started processing chunks of data (“work units” in their lingo).

After running that for several years, in 2004 I switched to a different volunteer computing project: United Devices’ grid.org Cancer Research Project, which tried to find useful matches between ligands and key proteins. By that time I was a committed Pan-Mass Challenge rider, and contributing to cancer research was more important to me than looking for aliens.

I ran the grid.org software for another three years before they shut it down. During that time I processed 4,500 work units, volunteering 5.25 years of CPU time. When it finished, I wrote up a blogpost about my experience.

Then I migrated over to IBM’s new World Community Grid, which hosted numerous volunteer computing projects. Eleven years later, it’s still running… and so are my laptop, our printer server, and even my Android tablet!

For WCG, I’ve volunteered 34 years worth of CPU time from 12 different computers. I’m in their top one percent of users, having processed 70,000 work units for 19 different research projects that focus on topics as diverse as AIDS, Zika, Ebola, Malaria, clean energy, clean water, and more productive rice crops.

But as you might expect, my most sizable and rewarding contribution has been toward defeating cancer. Between the grid.org and WCG platforms, I’ve contributed 34 CPU years to a half dozen cancer research projects.

With the recent rise in cloud computing, the idea of farming large computing tasks out to home computers seems antiquated. But as long as the work units keep coming, I’ll keep crunching them, doing whatever I can to further the cause of eradicating cancer… while I sleep!

I thought I'd share an edited version of a posting I sent to my DargonZine writers.

I recently read an article on A List Apart, a Web designer site, whose angle was on improving how people write. It was specifically addressed to people who write weblogs, but it might be interesting for you to peruse. The article is http://www.alistapart.com/stories/writebetter/.

However, there was one suggestion in there that was a bold statement that I thought I'd bring up. It goes like this:

The advice “write only what you know” increases the likelihood that you will know the same things forever.

Now, I'm a big proponent of "write what you know", because those are the only things that you're going to have unique and revealling insights about. Furthermore, that understanding is what permits you to create interesting, plausible details and imagery about things you know. For me, being a good writer means being an astute and insightful observer of the world around you, and sharing those observations in your writing. How can you ever convincingly write a mangrove swamp or a three-masted schooner if you've never observed them for yourself? How can you plausibly write a character of the opposite gender, if you've never been inside one's head? My answer is: you probably can't do it credibly, and you certainly can't do it compellingly.

A meager substitute for direct observation is, of course, research. But I see that as changing the "what you know" side of the equation. Research is how we can succeed at writing about things that we know nothing about. But it's not the same quality as direct personal experience and observation. Research can allow you write about an unfamiliar topic credibly, though probably not compellingly.

And for me, the whole pithy saying (about never learning anything new because you write what's familiar) breaks down when you realize that writing is most definitely not the primary way any of us learns about the world. I can still "write what I know" without stagnating, because most of what I know, I learned not through writing about it, but through living, observing, and experiencing it in my real life.

So my corollary would be something like this: Writing what you don't know, without trying to fully "know" it, only demonstrates to others the limitations of your knowledge.

I know there are folks who take a less conservative view of "writing only what you know", but I thought I'd share, nonetheless. For me, my writing is heavily based on sharing my unique insights and observations with the reader, so writing beyond what you know is doomed to mediocrity at best.