1) Forums : General Topics : Why do you participate in Cosmology@Home? Who is the \"most surprising\" participant? (Message 4408)
Posted 6 Jan 2008 by Rich Alderson
Post:
I was in Chicago for the Winter Solstice festivals, and saw the article in the Tribune. (My wife said, \"Did you see the SETI thing in the paper?\")

When I got home, I fired up Safari, pointed it at the Cosmology@home site, registered, went back to my running BOINC and added the project, and waited. And waited. ...and waited.

I began to suspect that this was an Intel x86-only project, and my Mac is 8 years old, so I decided to check. Imagine my surprise, and disappointment, when I learned that it\'s not that I have the wrong Mac, it\'s that I have the wrong processor *and* the wrong operating system.

My mother put me onto astronomy with her college textbook 50 years ago; to the extent possible to the amateur who works in other fields, I have kept up with developments in cosmology for more than 40. (I knew what the main sequence of stellar evolution was when I was 14.) So I was really excited at the prospect of helping out in any way I could with this project.

And I\'m really disappointed that no one on the project has made it available to the tens of thousands of Mac users who have been working on, for example, SETI since before BOINC. (I mentioned that my Mac is 8 years old. The first application I put on the machine after taking delivery was SETI@home.)

So for now, I DON\'T participate--but not because I don\'t want to.