Just Messing Around
I bought a new digital camera today and took a few pictures. Here’s one. Can you guess what it is?
A Whole Lot of Conversion
Thanks to my good friend Sean for pointing me to this fantastic web tool. It converts just about everything under the Sun.
Silence of the Lambs, The Musical
Stellar Countdown
Finally, years of using the Seti@home software has paid off:
The SETI@home screensaver that crunches data in search of intelligent signals from space has produced a list of candidate radio sources that deserve a second look. After an equivalent to a million years of computation aided by more than 4 million computers worldwide, the researchers have highlighted where in the sky to find some of the most promising choices.
In March, for their project called ‘Stellar Countdown’, three members of the SETI@home team travelled to Puerto Rico. Their task was to point the Arecibo radio telescope at over 150 spots identified as the source of possible signals from intelligent civilizations. To determine if a strong radio signal is more than random noise, a glitch or a passing satellite, Arecibo’s 1,000-foot diameter radio dish–the world’s largest– listened again to promising locations and frequency ranges.
The candidates for re-observation are particularly strong signals or ones that have been observed in the same spot more than once, some of them five or six times.
