WordPress will turn 5 years old on Tuesday, May 27!!
Happy birthday, and thanks for bringing blogging to the masses like you have. I like being able to blog right here on my own site!
Your birthday is responsible for the shortest post I’ve made, any viewers I have appreciate that!
I know, the title probably sounds like a chore related with doing laundry… It ain’t!!! It’s actually medical research.
Folding is what proteins do when they do what they do do. When they fold wrong, bad things like Alzheimer’s, and other problems occur. This can explain it better than I can.
Thousands of hours of thousands of computers working on the same thing yield microseconds of real time simulation. Folding @ Home is their way to reduce the time it takes to simulate this process. People volunteering the unused processor time on their computers is what makes this possible. Each computer is given a project to run and then report the results back, and then receive another assignment
This is much faster than trying to simply use “supercomputers” to do the work. Being a fan of technology, I ran across DL.TV some time ago. They support Folding @ Home, and have formed a group (number: 757391) to promote a bit of community and even a bit of friendly competition to other groups participating in the Folding project. Their site is www.dl.tv. If you don’t see a group that interests you, DL.TV would love to have you as a new group member! Check out their episode 200, where Robert Heron intervies Vijay S. Pande, a professor and the creator of the Folding @ Home project.
As I said, the competitive spirit is friendly, with everybody knowing that medical science and mankind being the real winner. EXTREME Overclocking graciously operates a wonderful site dedicated to Folding news and stats.
The Stanford site has software to download for just about everything out there including the newer video game consoles!
For those worried about errors, each assignment is repeated several times by different computers. This helps prevent unintentional and malicious errors from being introduced. The same repetition would occur if they didn’t use anything but their own computers.
As I look for more plugins for WordPress, it has occurred to me how some sites are almost painful to visit as more and more things show up on them supposedly making for a “better visiting experience”. It seems that many simply have features fighting to be noticed. Of course this takes away from the “experience”!
Balance is hard to achieve, I know. I am constantly adding, and then removing features from what I have here on the site. I have broken my forums once, and my photo gallery three times (one day I broke it twice!) fiddling with things. I’ve also added toys enough to have my site flash more than a cheap Christmas tree only to come to my senses and clean things up, hopefully before too many people noticed and ran for their lives.
Since WordPress 2.3 supports tagging, I may do away with the category scheme and stick to tags only. I think tagging is easier to implement, and a lot more flexible in the end run.
I think the adage of always “leaving them wanting a bit more” holds in online experiences, too. Hopefully visitors here will find plenty of interest without being overloaded.
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