So you're a geek, and you are pretty much the go-to person in your circle of friends and co-workers when it comes to personal computing. Maybe - like me - some of those friends are kind of broke a lot of the time; and again like me (and like most serious geeks), you are a Master Scrounger. And you use that skill to put together a computer every now and then for one of those folks. Personally, I probably put together two or three decent machines a year for people - no charge.
Maybe you don't know much about the science of Climate Change - but like all of us here you'd like to do more to help our beleaguered planet. You can. It's easy. It's very helpful. It's also free. And you really don't need to do anything more than you're doing right now.
Interested?
I'll bet you've heard of this: The SETI@home Project. The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. If you've heard of that, then you might know about BOINC - the program used by that project where people (basically) put a special screen-saver on their computer that connects to the SETI Project over the internet and runs calculations to help the project out, using whatever resources on the local computer it can, without interfering with what the computer owner is doing. It's sort of like time-share. Properly, it's called 'distributed computing'.
And no, I'm not going to get into anything technical about it. That's not the point of this Diary. It's pretty easy to figure out, if you have an interest. And you (or someone for whom you've built a computer that you installed it on) can watch lots of cool and pretty stuff happening as the program crunches numbers...
But BOINC is BIG. There are millions of users. And there are a lot more projects that use it than just SETI. One of them is ClimatePrediction.net.
From their site:
"Climateprediction.net is a distributed computing project to produce predictions of the Earth's climate up to 2100 and to test the accuracy of climate models. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers - time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity."
Sounds straight-forward, doesn't it? It is. Useful too. And if you check their front page, you'll see that they've already run 57,784,243 model year simulations.
Do you have any idea how valuable to the science of Climate Change this is? It's huge. A few million people running tiny bits of code on their own computers, and then sending their results in to be integrated into a massive pot of information, is like running a bunch of super-computers all at once.
Like I said, I'm a geek. I had a nice career run as a large network admin for about 15 years - but it got unpleasant as I got older. All that 24/7 crap. So nowadays I'm an antiquarian bookman: much happier and better rested, if less well-paid. But there's a lot of people with crappy or busted computers - there are always a few with no computer at all. And I try to help out where I can.
I used to just put a box together and give it away. But now I put a rider on that contract: "Here's a computer for you. I installed an office suite, photo-editing, some nice games, and a bunch of other stuff. I also installed a screen-saver called BOINC. It only kicks in when you're not doing anything, and it helps the world out some. You can use it even more by changing some settings, and contribute even more, if you want to - but I do ask that you leave the settings at least where I put them. Think of it as rent."
By the way, even if you're not a geek and don't build computers for other people, you can install it on your own machine.
Click on the link. Read.
Every little bit helps.
And remember kiddies: every time BOINC is installed on a computer, a splintered two-by-four gets stuck up James Inhofe's ass just a little bit further...