The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Given some of the things I see on TV and hear from our politicians, I don't blame people for looking elsewhere for some intelligence. Astrophysicists began recording radio frequency noise from outside our solar system many years ago. They collected so much data that they were completely unable to analyze all they had. There are only so many hours in the day. Then, in 1999, along came SETI@home.

SETI@home allows interested people like me to help with that analysis. After loading the proper software, observed data can be analyzed on anyone's home computer. The results are then returned to the SETI group. With lots of people involved, way more data can be addressed than possible on a single computer. I became involved almost immediately.

I ran the SETI@home software on my home computer for 4 or 5 years. Then I began to have problems. First running the software in the background while I was working on another program was slowing everything down. SETI made several changes in the software to try to overcome this issue, but failed. Then they changed to something called BOINC to handle the data transfer, and that just didn't work on my older machine. So I stopped. Up to that point I felt happy to have analyzed close to 600 pieces of data.

Last December I got interested again. BOINC now works on my computer. Two things have changed. First, SETI has come up with much faster algorithms for calculating the fast Fourier transforms necessary to analyze the RF data. And, secondly, my computer is also much faster. Just in the last 4 months I have a total credit of 46,027 units of analyzed data. It looks like my little computer has been very helpful, but that's just a very, very small part of the data downloaded from the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. However, it does make a nice screen saver as pictured above.