The World Community Grid
Dec 9th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
There’s a fine article in the New Yorker about retroviruses and their role in human evolution. It explains why we don’t lay eggs any more, among other things. And the explanation is beautiful and elegant.
The idea that paleovirology will shed light on our evolutionary past is a blast. That we carry a lot of DNA for genes no longer expressed is old news but I’ve always wondered if someday we’d be able to rewind things and discover all kinds of hen’s teeth and a better understanding of how things came to be. Now it’s beginning.
This is exciting stuff and all the more so because of the pace of change.
The latest Economist has a nice article in its Technology Quarterly on the growing application of idle computer time of networks of thousands of PCs on the Internet to scientific problems (Spreading The Load).
Up to now I haven’t bothered to contribute my computer time to finding little green men, but the range of projects available now includes some compelling science to which ordinary people can contribute at almost no cost. Climate change modeling, drug testing, gene sequence matching… take your pick, or let your PC work for all of them, which is what I’ve done. I have joined the World Community Grid.
Do these projects give back to their contributers I wonder? At the least they are owed accounts like those in the New Yorker that a non-scientist can understand.
The same New Yorker provides a nice metaphor for things reaching a level of complexity beyond the power of an individual to manage. The
B17 stage
is the term coined in a fascinating article on medical checklists and their role in improving your odds of surviving intensive care. When the first B17 plane was flown it crashed because of pilot error. Now checklists, introduced to address the problem, have spread from aviation to medicine, with dramatic results.
Scientific highlight of the week was watching a recording of Craig Venter’s Dimbleby lecture on BBC TV: A DNA Driven World. Science bellylaugh of the week: the story that Jim Watson was blacker than he realized.
