The Freepers are winning. Dailykos is being shamed. And not in politics, but in science!
OK, I exaggerate. But it IS true that our Folding At Home team is getting its butt handed to us by the Freeper team.
Currently the Freeper team is ranked #58 out of 47393 teams in terms of work units processed; our own Daily Kos team is only ranked #360.
And there's no way that should be happening. We're bigger, better and smarter than they are. And they hate science, for crying out loud!
Now, I know some of you are asking yourselves, "What Is Folding At Home?" I'm glad you asked!
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project (much like SETI@Home) run by Stanford University--read all about it at the link above. Basically, the project is about harnessing the power of individual idle PC's to create a giant supercomputer capable of simulating the folding processes of the proteins that DNA sequences code for. This will help us better understand the way molecular biology functions, and also help understand the causes of various diseases--such as Creuzfeld-Jakob, Alzheimer's, etc.--that have to do with misfolding of proteins. And, of course, once we figure out exactly WHAT is happening with the misfolding proteins, we can probably develop targeted drugs to STOP that from happening. In essence, we could stop diseases like Alzheimers and Creuzfeld-Jakob before they even get started.
The people at Stanford have won numerous awards for their groundbreaking research, producing over 40 research papers on the topic and generating hundreds of news stories. This stuff is for real, and it's on the cutting edge--and you can help today!
How it works: Individual computer users can download the client program in whatever format they need, and configure it to their specifications. What the client does is connect to the main server and download a "work unit" for the individual processor to analyze. When the "work unit" is completed, the PC sends the analyzed data back to the central server--one more protein folding permutation has been analyzed and sent for processing!
And the best part is that you can tell the program how much of your computer's resources you want it to use: so if you have a speedy machine, you can tell it to use 50% when active, and 90% when idle; if you run a slower rig, you can have it run at 5% and not notice any performance degradation.
Users have the capability to join teams. They way they do this is by selecting the "configure" option once they've downloaded and installed the program. So come join the Daily Kos team by configuring your client with TEAM NUMBER 48083--that's the Daily Kos team number.
It's totally safe and bug free, and you can run it even if you already run SETI@Home.
So Join the Team--AND KICK SOME FREEPER BUTT FOR THE GOOD OF SCIENCE!
[N.B.: I post this diary every couple of months or so in the hopes that more people will see it and join up; I know that some of you have joined, but forget to turn your applications on. The distributed computing community is large and rather progressive, and they take note of the biggest, baddest teams out there. With 100,000+ registered users, there is no reason why at least 400 of us can't join in on this project, help cure some diseases, and make yet another name for the great Orange beast.]