This late morning was so foggy, I was
almost scared to go to work

This late morning was so foggy, I was
almost scared to go to work

Following the search for
extraterrestrial life with the SETI@HOME project and
huge amounts of further other projects that are being worked on
using a cross-platform distributed computing architecture named
BOINC, there is now a new
project for volunteer participants to help work on:
Stardust@HOME

The spacecraft Stardust
was launched in 1999 to catch dust particles of comet Wild 2.
Therefore a substance called aerogel was invented
which is capable of catching high speed dust particles and softly
de-accelerate them so they will stuck inside the aerogel and can be
brought home to mother earth without any damage.

The aerogel which holds the dust particles “maybe from beginning of
the universe” is now to be inspected by “you”. Since it’s almost
impossible to find a needle inside of a soccer-field, you can
imagine the work that has to be done to find particles from outer
space sticking inside the aerogel. So what has been done to solve
this problem ? “Simply”: The aerogel is scanned layer for layer by
a microscope and the images are stored in a database. From this
database you’re now able to access pre- and past-focussed images
and search for dust impacts.

Once you finished a short tutorial and training, you’re presented
new images to analyze mixed with already known images to test your
discovery “or spamming” skills.
Wow, that’s what I call science by wire….

VIA has just invented a formula to
measure ecology of processors.
In it’s “TreeMark” called index, VIA’s new C7-D processor
takes
a top position, by
only needing four trees over 3 years to compensate
the CO2 produced by the energy consumed for the processors
operation.

Compare your own
processor, it’s just that easy:

1 Assuming 27% standby mode, 3% sleep mode, 67%
idle mode, 3% performance  mode
2 Global
average carbon intensity of electricity
3 Based on
average broad leaf tree
Other “TreeMarks” ordered by their integer performance:

35 Trees = Mac Pro Quad Xeon 3,0 [115,3
SPECint_rate_base2000]
73 Trees = 2 x Xeon DualCore 2,8 [ 59,0
SPECint_rate_base2000]
53 Trees = 2 x
Opteron 285 (2,6) [ 76,4 SPECint_rate_base2000]
6 Trees = iMac
2,16
[ 34,5 SPECint_rate_base2000]
19 Trees = Athlon X2 5000(FX-60) [ 34,0
SPECint_rate_base2000]
21 Trees = Pentium D
820         [ 28,3
SPECint_rate_base2000]
18 Trees = Pentium IV 540J 3,2   [ 17,4
SPECint_rate_base2000]
2 Trees = Mac Mini G4 1,2
[  6,0 SPECint_rate_base2000]

VIA has just invented a formula to
measure ecology of processors.
In it’s “TreeMark” called index, VIA’s new C7-D processor
takes
a top position, by
only needing four trees over 3 years to compensate
the CO2 produced by the energy consumed for the processors
operation.

Compare your own
processor, it’s just that easy:

1 Assuming 27% standby mode, 3% sleep mode, 67%
idle mode, 3% performance  mode
2 Global
average carbon intensity of electricity
3 Based on
average broad leaf tree

Browsing through my computer library
archives, I rediscovered some demo screenshots of a computer
role-playing-game that I was programming together with Sun(Gerd) as
graphical artist, Loki(Reyk) and Bernhard for background story and
concept.

Today my wife came home with a recipe
from a friend. And we made a kind of bavarian bread dumplings, but
this time mixed with spinach and cheese.

Italian style, with parmesan cheese, cutted in slices and fried in
a pan:

Japanese Okonomiyaki style,
with plum sauce:

Oh, man, that was so delicious….