Do you believe in science? Of course you do! Are you the owner of a computer? Heck yes! How about a Ps3, they Fold too?! Do you think that the Freepers should be beating us Kossacks at a friendly science based competition? If you said, "No" then please follow me below the fold to see how you can get involved today. Join the Daily Kos Folding Team! Team 48083
Since the last Folding Diary, Team Daily Kos has surged all the way from 402nd place all the way up to 292 place. That's awesome for a team that has only 30 active members. Unfortunately as of recent the team has lost a couple of it's heavy hitters. This is a call to arms. Perhaps you've heard of Folding before, or maybe even tried it and thought it wasn't worth your time. Well, it is. With our community tipping over 220,000 progressives ALL with computers, we need to double our number of active Folding members, and if you have a video card, I'm looking at you! (hence the WOW tag)
Back in late 2005 our wonderful Hekebolos created an official Daily Kos Folding team. I'd imagine most of you are asking yourselves, "What is folding??" Simply put, Folding@home is a project set up by the Pande Group, a nonprofit that resides within Stanford University's Chemistry Dept. This project uses your computer hardware, especially Video Cards! to compute small chunks of equations that are geared toward medical research, namely, analyzing amino acids. (the backbone pretty much everything in the human body) By joining the Daily Kos Folding Team you will be directly helping figure out cures for Cancer, Alzheimer's & more. This video is much better at explaining protein folding than me.
http://www.youtube.com/...
Back in March, Teleporno, Lonestarlefty, Terabytes and Topshooter all posted kickass diaries trying to rally together some Kossacks to embark the journey that is folding. I was lurking around the site as I do every day, and upon seeing one of these diaries I joined the squad. After a little research I realized that my gaming computer that I built from parts off Newegg had amazing folding potential. I immediately realized this was one way where I could help our community, and I was excited. I guess you can say I've been a computer geek for life. My old man just retired this year after being a sys-admin for 20+ years. Growing up our house looked like a bomb had gone off inside the computer section at a Best Buy. Computers are fascinating to a child, and growing up and seeing the changes in technology was not only fun and addictive, but highly beneficial for my advancement, I truly believe that. So if your kid likes video games and you have the means, buy him a graphics card, and use it to fold for us.
These links do not contain viruses, and Folding@home is completely safe for your computer.
A list of Folding clients to download.
Grab the first one if you have a run of the mill PC, either Pentium 4, or dual core. Run the setup, and in the configure menu put in the Daily Kos team number, 48083!!
If you have a video card, grab one of the top two. Run the setup, and in the configure menu put in the Daily Kos team number, 48083!! If you don't know what client to download, contact me and I will be more than happy to help you every step of the way. The setup isn't really that hard, and once it's setup the rest is easy-peasy.
If you have a quad-core beast, try and follow this. If you are interested in this route and have any questions please contact me. It's not that tricky, we can set it up in 10 minutes.
Here are some helpful folding links:
Extreme Overclocking Daily Kos Folding Stats
Official Folding@Home FAQ
Kakao Stats Team Daily Kos Page
Basically we are doing much better than we were, but we are capable of so much more. OTOH Team Redstate.org has logged less than 3,000 points in the past week.