HOMELESS CHRONICLES IN TAMPA - FUN WITH SETI@HOME, SUNDAY CHECK IN #ROW80 #NANOWRIMO 2 DAYS IN




SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a scientific area whose goal is to detect intelligent life outside Earth. One approach, known as radio SETI, uses radio telescopes to listen for narrow-bandwidth radio signals from space. Such signals are not known to occur naturally, so a detection would provide evidence of extraterrestrial technology.

Radio telescope signals consist primarily of noise (from celestial sources and the receiver's electronics) and man-made signals such as TV stations, radar, and satellites. Modern radio SETI projects analyze the data digitally. More computing power enables searches to cover greater frequency ranges with more sensitivity. Radio SETI, therefore, has an insatiable appetite for computing power.

Previous radio SETI projects have used special-purpose supercomputers, located at the telescope, to do the bulk of the data analysis. In 1995, David Gedye proposed doing radio SETI using a virtual supercomputer composed of large numbers of Internet-connected computers, and he organized the SETI@home project to explore this idea. SETI@home was originally launched in May 1999.

FUN WITH SETI

I've been keeping abreast with my writing for NaNoWriMo. Which reminds me: Q: What is this? (besides a really bad joke, and an even worse drawing):

A: 2 Men Walking A Breast. I could riff on this, with "2 Men Walking a Brest," although how you'd walk a whole European city is beyond me, or "2 Men Walking a Beast," but living where I do I see this every day. "2 Men Walking a Beast," either of the 4-legged or the 2-legged variety a-lenty, so this is not a novel enough thing to disregard around here. This is Nebraska Ave., 33605, 33602, after all. So too are "2 Men Walking a Beat;" the law enforcement kind, or the hip-hop kind to be found here pretty regularly.

THIS IS THE CHECK IN PART. I WROTE ACTUAL WORDS AND SENTENCES, COHERENTLY, AND FORMED PARAGRAPHS, TOO! Anyway, I am 4,432 words into this year's NaNoWrimo for 2013, as of day 2 and today looms, No biggie. I have my outline, beat sheet, the next segment plotted in my head (sort of) and all of that happy-crappy. Once again, poor #ROW80 has taken a hit, once AGAIN (remember the A-to-Z blogging challenge last spring?) and I owe her so much. Without #ROW80, none of this would be happening. I'm going to be checking in for Alex J. Cavanaugh's #IWSG this Wednesday (why do we not pronounce that Wed-nes-day? Just askin') In spite of the fact that I have spent the week feeling great, I have the WORST ABSCESSED TOOTH EVER. My left front central incisor is so badly inflamed, the infection had pushed up into my nasal cavity and has warped the roof of my mouth. Penicillin has stopped that pain. No pain pills, 'cause I'm on so many other things, I'd probably go on some weird acid trip, and I have an exceedingly high threshold to pain. Now the pain is gone, so it won't ruin the fun of my eating everything in site, whilst I write. Yay! Thank you, rotten oranges or whatever you are, dear penicillin!

I go through all of my SETI stats about twice a year; once in late spring and once in the autumn. Usually, I just print out my certifications to see how I'm doing. I stay off of the forums, because there is an über-bitch, who in the disguise of a helpful admin, delivers scathing lectures to the innocent lambs who want to know why their uploads failed. I'm a fairly adept practitioner of the Dark Arts, so I don't need any help, but I sure feel sorry for the poor unweaned, who start their posts with, "I just received a message that said Upload Failed..." The few times I read these threads, UB blasted back with something related to the user's fallibility as a computer user, insulted the user's children and also mentioned that the user's pets were ugly. Yikes! No help to be had there.

Anyway, after I printed my stats, which show I've process astronomical amounts of data received from the Arecebo Telescope in an attempt to find E. T.s. . . wait, what? Never mind. Which would make sense in the astronomical department, because it is after all, the universe we're scoping out. What a hash of sentences there. So, I printed my stats and then for grins, I went to the website that shows where my team fits in with all of the other teams. 

This is my team, highlighted in green. There are 64 members of my team, but only 10 of us are active. I guess the rest are out on missions. The standing joke is that everyone was once CIA, or DOD; some kind of spook for some alphabet agency or another. They're probably doing piece-work for the NSA. NASA is only 5 slots ahead of us. I love the randomness of "Get off my lawn!" This whole project is full of stuff like this. 

Even with all of their brain power, we're still ahead of UC Berkely, UC Davis and BooYah! This Man's USMC! Our team consists of people with cats who puke on keyboards, but can do some mean hacking and cyber-spying, so I was a natural fit.

Number 69 is Marquette University, one of my mom's alma maters and I like that University of Florida is number 52. Keep it up! Go Florida. Maybe we'll win the Inter-species Regionals this year!

The number one spot is held by Team USA *yawns* but I was thrilled to see that the U. S. Air Force is number three, behind the U. S. Navy (boo.) GAY USA is number 5, which is great, because the universe is not only about radio frequencies, it is about transmitting in the Ultraviolet all the way to the Infrared. So, we've got rainbows covered. SQUEE!

An explanation of how radio frequencies and the color spectrum fit can be found here.

Team number 4's team name is some kind of random code. Way to go. My next team name is going to be "dice = std::bind ( dist]" and then everyone will think I'm some kind of either great genius, or crackpot. Except for "Get off my lawn." That team will totally get it. O How I Hate Ohio State is at the 21 spot. I don't really hate 'em. it's just what Michiganders say. It's a knee-jerk reaction. Oh, and "The Pirate Float" at number 16, is going great guns. I bet they say, "Aargh! I'm a pirate!" a lot at String Theory and GUT (Grand Unified Theory) conferences. 

Rounding out the top 100, of over 500 teams, are University of Michigan and Michigan State (not shown,) and EMU in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I love the "Master Strategy Group." This is vague and sinister, yet kinda creepy. More spooks? To be a good spook, you have to have a great cover, like the Villages. The crazy cat people get overlooked every damned time, but you never know what we're gonna do. Number 94 are the University of Florida GATORS. I can damn-guarantee you that if they were number 94 in FOOTBALL, they would be rioting up in Gainesville. At number 95, we have "ShallowThought." What a great name for a team. 

REBLOG: IF THIS DOESN'T BRING TEARS TO YOUR EYES, YOU'RE MADE OF ROCK

FROM THE BLOG OF AUTHOR COLIN FALCONER

IF THIS DOESN'T BRING TEARS TO YOUR EYES, YOU'RE MADE OF STONE

“We all need to play the music that we hear inside. To do that, some of us have greater mountains to

climb than others. For the Landfill Harmonic, it’s a mountain of trash.” 

Landfill Armonic - Orquesta Reciclaje via NPR

Having known from a very, very young age, that music would be a part of my life, I am always gleeful when I run across things like this. I think that without music, as Beethoven would say, "life would be a mistake." I've tried to act upon this in every way possible, I mean, look at me, I ended up a viola player. The butt of jokes in symphony orchestras the world over.

A funny thing happened during this journey, apart from the getting sick, homeless, having a complete bastard of an ex-husband, Bill Nunnally (you really didn't think you were going to skip mention in this post did ya, ya tar-hearted meany-pants philanderer and liar extraordinaire? You're in for the long haul and you know you deserve it, Lithia, but enough about you. This took a whole 2 seconds of typing.)

The music never died. It just won't quit. In case I think it's gone, I have these friends? Angels? People who have come to know me, yet have never clapped eyes on me and yet understand that ours is a shared passion. The passion to make music. To that end, we have the Recycled Philharmonic. How awesome is this? After all, before Pablo Casals learned to play cello on his gourd that his dad crafted for him in Puerto Rico, when little Pablo was, like 3 years old, way back in antiquity, people were beating on hollow logs with sticks and then jamming said sticks into hollow gourds.

This was actually in the Weekly World News. Y'know the rag that used to feature Bat Boy, so there may be some veracity issues. . .

A Short History of Music, You Won't Find in Any Book:


Oog, or Ogg got the bright idea of tying a few pieces of yak hair to the top of the stick and affixing it to the bottom of the gourd. Voilá! He had him the first proto-type plucked instrument. A bent stick with eohippus tail hair became a bow and pretty soon, the whole cave was stringing away.

I am not sure how long it took Oog and Ogg and crew to discover that by shortening the string length of their now-bowed instruments would change pitch, but I'm guessing it didn't take long. As far as organized groups of like sounds and all that, I didn't take music anthropology in college, I was too busy studying the viola and playing things like Bach's "Unaccompanied Cello Suites" transcribed for viola. The piece Bebi is playing "Unaccompanied Suite #1 in G Major, Prelude" is the first juried piece I played in university. It is absolutely thrilling to hear it played again and so well. His interpretation is well-nigh flawless. 

Music and the arts are the things that differentiate us from the animals; although, I wonder sometimes. We have cats and elephants painting and I believe I saw dogs doing interpretive dance, although I would argue against that as an art form. It's more like the Emperor's New Clothes school of Arts, like the Concerto for Vacuum Cleaner and Symphony Orchestra I once was forced to sit through as a student, because our music professors were working out their hostility issues, or something.

Anyway, this is a love letter to all of those musical people; the musicians with notes in their hearts and beats in their souls, and it's not from me. I'm just a conduit. I was inspired by something ancient and something from so long ago it is an atavistic feeling, but most shared things such as this usually are. Thank Colin Falconer for this lovely find. I must go now; I have a viola that is yearning for some Bach, Sibelius, but absolutely no Mozart!

You can find the Landfill Philharmonic on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/orquestadeinstrumentosreciclados.cateura

There is also a Kickstarter for funding here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/405192963/landfill-harmonic-inspiring-dreams-one-note-at-a-t

#ROW 80 4TH QTR 2013, MID-WEEK CHECK IN - HOW'M I DOING?

I'm probably committing some kind of mortal sin by using a contraction in a title, but I'm feeling a bit reckless and devil-may-care these days. I just got ANOTHER call from the doctor's office. All of my studying for my latest round of blood work, got me an S-Minus (for Unsatisfactory, per Sundae Rye; a term I never knew existed, but I love it.) Anyway, my hemoglobin is a bit less than 10, which is after taking iron and B-12 shots and all the other hooey. Well, shit.

So, now, the dreaded colonoscopy. The test is fine; it's the drinking and "cleansing" I can do without, and I know what they're gonna find. Bupkus. So, enough of that. As to goals? I feel good, I know after a screaming run to the ER, that I'm NOT going blind; no glaucoma, no macular degeneration,  just the usual lack of depth perception and inability to make my eyes track. 

I tried explaining to the 3rd doctor, I saw on Saturday night, how my brain perceives images. I said, "does that make sense?" He said, "No." As long as I don't have glaucoma or macular degeneration, or diabetic neuropathy, I guess it's between me, my eyes and my brain. I still don't know what in hell's going on. 

Writing? Meh. A little here, and a little there. Trying to get my stuff together and gather resources for NaNoWriMo, which is coming up, and trying to hang with Alex J. Cavanaugh's IWSG group, since I got a huge case of stage fright when I got just a RETURN email from the Florida Writer's Association and told them basically, "Oh. Hell. No." This from someone who can make a total ham of herself on a stage either talking, or playing the viola. WTF?

So, in keeping with that, I thought you'd enjoy what passes for random or what used to be called whimsy, which this is actually neither of those two, because I worked hard on this; I really did. I wrote it a while back and it's the closest thing I have in my writer's "repertoire," that comes to spooky, although, I think the operative word here is "spook" as you'll see in the post. So much for goals. One thing, though. I typed this in a record 10 minutes. Last year, this would have taken an hour! Let's hear it for better living through chemistry? Now I'm off to noodle around on Wolf; that's a definite reward!

PUTTING THE "SPOOK" BACK IN SPOOKTACULAR? OR, E. T. PHONE HOME