A man, a woman, and two termites: interspecies cooperation in the search for extraterrestrials

In an unprecedented show of interspecies cooperation, formal mortal enemies - humans and termites, have joined forces in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. At one time this unlikely quartette was at each others throats: the termites were eating the home of the humans and the humans were squishing them on sight. It was all out war. Then one day a lone termite, Termie, wandered into the floppy drive slot of the family computer and began looking around, figuring things out. He is now running the computer operations for the entire household. Another termite, Termette, chases Termie for kisses, has big hair, and is a computer doofus. Much like my wife! Forced to live in the same house and seeking common ground, this unlikely foursome has joined together in a worthy cause and is now known as Team SETI.

Join us in the Team SETI petition to SETI@home! It is our conclusion that we should refocus the search for extra terrestrial intelligence and start looking for stupid ET's instead. They should be less cunning and easier to find. Email them today and lets do something we can get some darn results with!!

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. Using only the unused CPU cycles you don't use yourself, the program runs as a screen saver or you can have it run in the background or both. We run our SETI@home in the background during the day and full blast during the night leaving the computer on to keep crunching the data. We were running the program with the graphics window closed in OS9 with good results. Then we upgraded to OSX and we went from 9 hour units to 22 hour units. Now we are using the OSX Darwin-UNIX client with no graphics at all and it takes about 5 hours of CPU time to do a unit. I use a nifty little front end program called SETI Control by Bob Delaney that keeps me out of UNIX and lets me control things from my desktop. These days the units are exiting out the computers butt like so many flying monkeys. On crack. With winged sandals. And jet packs. And squished rocket sled faces. And high pressure air hose lips. This is a hobby my wife and I can do together without all the shrieking, punching, squealing, hair pulling, scratching and face slapping. You see, we used to mud wrestle as a hobby. Did I just share too much?

Anyway, it is easy to get started, just go to SETI@home and download the client for your platform, it supports Macintosh (OS9/OSX) and Windows (95/98/2000/NT/ME/XP) in a graphical format as well as UNIX, WinNT, OS/2, BeOS, Mac OS X Server, Mac Darwin-UNIX and OpenVMS in a text only format. There is no excuse for not helping out, if you can read this you have a computer capable of participating in the project.

Once you have the program installed it will download the data to work on. When it is finished it will send the results back to the SETI project and download another unit of data for it to work on. You can have it do this automatically if you have a constant connection to the Internet such as a dedicated phone line, cable, DSL or a T1 line. If you have to share a voice line with your modem you can set it to ask you before it downloads, that way it won't try to use the phone when you are on it like it was some rude Bronx neighbor on a party line.

That is all there is to it. You will be participating in the worlds largest distributed computing project in history. You can be a loner or you can join a team and share your work load. If you like, you can start your own team. It is really easy to do all of this, just go to SETI@home and within a few minutes you could be crunching radio telescope data.

Below we have posted our stats for each week. We have not saved them all, it is only after half a year that we had the presense of mind to document our efforts on a weekly basis. This web site is a good place to display this data, you should count your blessings that we aren't sharing the mud wrestling photos!!