Tuesday, March 11, 2003

From BoingBoing: SETI@Home identifies 150+ possible alien intelligences The SETI@Home distcomp project has borne fruit: 150+ signals that match SETI's criteria for probable alien intelligence have been identified, and the project is going back to the Arecibo radio-telescope-array to take a closer look at them. "This is the culmination of more than three years of computing, the largest computation ever done," said UC Berkeley computer scientist David Anderson, director of SETI@home. "It's a milestone for the SETI@home project." SETI@home users should find out the results of the re-observations - what The Planetary Society, the founding and principal sponsor of SETI@home, is billing as the "stellar countdown" - within two to three months. Though excited at the opportunity to re-observe as many as 150 candidate signals, Anderson is cautious about raising people's expectations that they will discover a signal from an extraterrestrial civilization. Link 6:04:46 PM

Controversial Cleaning Cleaning art to make it clearer alters the work in a way some find unacceptable. "If one were to suggest that a Bach Cantata should be transposed and reconstructed to make it 'listenable' to a wide audience, many would find the proposition unacceptable. The same might be said of remaking T. S. Elliot's 'Wasteland' so that the poem would become 'understandable' to neophytes and school children. The situation surrounding a painting from the past is rather different in one crucial aspect, however. Re-writing Bach's musical score for a new redaction or Elliot's poetic structure for another less complex one does not affect the original text. The correct, uncorrupted text is still there and can always be consulted. Such is not the case with a painting which has been made more readable. The restoration operation requires that making the object more readable be conducted on the original, unique and only text itself." ArtWatch International 5:42:20 PM

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