Contributing to Society

Rather than endlessly heckle the economy and what not I thought I'd also do something else to contribute to society, lol. I therefore now have my Playstation 3 and my personal computer doing more than just providing me with entertainment.

Folding@home

You can help scientists studying these diseases by simply running a piece of software.

Folding@home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

As of today, my personal computer is also doing some work. In fact, it is doing work as I type this and I don't notice any performance degradation at all. The reason I don't notice is that folding@home only uses the spare capacity of my computer to do the work. Okay, now I'm watching this video while continuing to contribute to society.



How cool is that? Why wasn't I doing this sooner? Oh well. At least I'm doing it now. It feels pretty good. It would not surprise me if it added a week onto my life just knowing that I am actually doing something to potentially improve someone's life. That brings me to a new label for this post... real prosperity. This really is no illusion.

For those interested in furthering the cause, I would invite you to learn more about folding@home in the link above. I also would like to invite you to join team "IllusionOfProsperity". Right now there's just my PC and my Playstation 3 working on solving some of the diseases of mankind (although MANY other computers and gaming systems are also working). Should you feel so inclined to join me, my team number is 172023.

The software comes pre-installed on the Playstation 3. It's good to go. The software for the PC was easy to download and simple to install. There are quite a few versions of it since it runs on virtually every computer out there. Even this old Windows 2000 based machine is supported. That said, you still need at least a decent machine by today's standards. A Pentium 3 probably isn't going to be fast enough. I'm still a folding@home newbie, but I'd be more than happy to help with the process in any way that I can.

It's not an entirely free lunch of course. Nothing ever is. My computer is using a relatively minor amount of extra electricity right now but the Playstation 3 in the other room is using more than it would normally be using (since it would otherwise be turned off). In the coming days I will provide an estimate on how much it costs per hour to contribute using current electric rates and monitored electricity usage, at least as it applies to my two systems. In theory, I expect my Playstation 3 to be less than 4 cents per hour to operate. I won't know until I test it though.

Perhaps we can make the Illusion of Prosperity an actual reality. Perhaps we can leave the children and grandchildren of the future more than just a large pile of debt. Wouldn't that be nice?