Point Rationale

Jonathan Jeckell
Jonathan Jeckell
Joined: 11 Nov 04
Posts: 114
Credit: 1341945207
RAC: 1

RE: Firstly : awkward

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Firstly : awkward social pauses upon mention of E@H. Been there, done that, got a wardrobe full of tee shirts on that ! So these days it may perform as a well executed conversation ending. :-)

Ah, well, it does serve as a Darwinian search mechanism to weed out people I don't want to talk to anyway. Well...except my wife.

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Secondly : The Credit Issue Discussion. We have this on a regular basis here. It is our prime group-think bonding ritual. We have proposed it as a demonstration sport for the next Olympics. In the category of Arena Sports, and I think as a sub-category of the javelin. AFAIK no one has died yet on account, though much blood has been shed .... :-)

To clarify, the only reason I care about that is to optimize what I have on hand to maximize useful contributions. And it's kind of interesting trying to reverse engineer what's going on in my hardware and the algorithms. For example: overclocking my i7-5820k from the stock 3.3GHz to 4GHz seems to have made no difference at all. Some machines with lower MIPS/MFLOPS/Clock speeds crank out units *faster* than...well, you get it. And my Raspberry Pi2 array is part of what dragged me down this rabbit hole...

Jonathan Jeckell
Jonathan Jeckell
Joined: 11 Nov 04
Posts: 114
Credit: 1341945207
RAC: 1

I wish the forum had a "like"

I wish the forum had a "like" button now. ;-)

That is indeed how it turns out, believe it or not...sometimes. But it does serve as one of the Darwinian selection mechanisms to screen out people I don't want to talk to anyway. The gate swings the other way when people start talking about the Stanford Band antics at the Rose Bowl, or a very large Venn diagram encapsulating most things sports related, which surprises some people given my previous career.

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Quote:
Mentioning this at parties in most of my social circles results in kind of an awkward pause ...

You're obviously going about this the wrong way ;-) :-).

The thing that works best in a social environment when people ask the awkward question about what you are doing these days, or how you spend your (obviously) copious amount of free time, is to start out slowly and ask this question in return. "Do you know that Einstein made certain predictions around 100 years ago and there is still just one that has never been directly observed?"

That tends to stop the idle chit-chat in its tracks as the others within earshot suddenly prick up their attention :-). You pause for effect and pretend to be thinking carefully and then you say, slowly and deliberately, "Well ... I'm involved in a project ... that will make that first ... direct ... observation.

Suddenly, everyone's interested, and wants to know more :-).

Of course, it's entirely up to you how you maintain that interest :-).

AgentB
AgentB
Joined: 17 Mar 12
Posts: 915
Credit: 513211304
RAC: 0

RE: To indicate, and I

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To indicate, and I might add rather poncey/sage-like, that the science value is independent of your intentions. Which for me at least I flip over to give thanks to contributors absolutely regardless of how you got here, or why you stay here. So if credits float your boat then more power to you ... :-)

{ But beware a little considered piece of logic : the reason why E@H is a volunteer project ( hardware, electricity costs, internet connectivity ) is because the project doesn't have the money to do otherwise. }

Cheers, Mike.

There is a subtle "good-will" value to E@H that many scientific projects would envy. Outreach.

It costs a lot of resource to attract and keep public attention. To engage thousands of the public in a personal way, be actively part of that research, and teaching real and leading edge science (even just a little) adds kudos to the project and science in general.

Gary Roberts
Gary Roberts
Moderator
Joined: 9 Feb 05
Posts: 5842
Credit: 109389340115
RAC: 35906811

RE: If I hurted someone (or

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If I hurted someone (or many) I am confused because I did not wish this.

I'm absolutely sure you haven't offended anybody. Nothing to worry about.

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By the way, how to look at my contribution from "before" ? I don't even remember my linking codes !


I don't recall precise details but I think that all you need to do is login to the account that was active at the time that Classic was closed down. Here is an abbreviated list of accounts that may have belonged to you. I've taken these entries from a user search for "Tiers" over at Seti.
[pre]
Username and ID RAC Tot Cred Country Join Date
Tiers (ID 9603651) 822.50 39,811 France 14 Nov 2011, 11:21:04 UTC
TIERS (ID 8294898) 0.00 579 France 16 Dec 2005, 13:29:47 UTC
tiers jacques (ID 3077652) 0.00 0 France 2 Sep 2000, 15:03:28 UTC
Tiers (ID 1777686) 0.00 0 France 24 Aug 2000, 15:02:22 UTC
Tiers (ID 1320570) 0.00 0 France 20 Oct 2000, 21:12:22 UTC
Tiers (ID 562262) 0.00 0 France 3 Sep 2000, 21:16:20 UTC
[/pre]
The first entry is your current ID at Seti which you added in 2011. I believe the second entry is the one created at the time of the transition from Classic to BOINC. Certainly the date looks correct and the account does have BOINC credit. If you know the email address you had at that time, you may be able to login to that account and see the recorded Classic details you had at the time. Unfortunately you can't merge those two entries to become a single account with all your details. If it was extremely important to you and you could grab the attention of the right Seti Admin, that person might be persuaded to do something manually to merge them. I have no idea if anybody would do this as it would be like opening a whole can of worms if others saw this happen :-).

Cheers,
Gary.

Richard Haselgrove
Richard Haselgrove
Joined: 10 Dec 05
Posts: 2139
Credit: 2752720467
RAC: 1460444

That's actually not quite the

That's actually not quite the best advice. Hang on a moment while I refresh my memory.

OK, go to http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sah_classic.php

You'll be in the very final category: "If you're already using BOINC". Click on the link at the end of the final line - 'Claim your SETI@home Classic workunits'. After that, you're on your own - it tells me I've already done it, and it's a one-time process.

Basically, you can't 'combine' your classic and BOINC contributions into a single number (the units are different), but you can claim and display your classic contribution as a codicil to your current account. The process may even retrieve and display your original joining date at the SETI project, but I'm not certain about that.

You will certainly need to know the email address you used as your classic account ID, and you may be asked for your SETI classic password as well. As I said, It's been a long time since I did it, and I can't access the form to refresh my memory. But I hope that sets you on the right path.

Mike Hewson
Mike Hewson
Moderator
Joined: 1 Dec 05
Posts: 6534
Credit: 284710168
RAC: 110462

RE: We humans are

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We humans are competitives, even when we compeate for "nothing".


There was a time ( E@H ) when credit was calculated by your own home computer and not allocated by project fiat at the server. BOINC is open source. There were those who would roll-their-own client software with some relevant tweaks to enhance the reported credit value, which would then be accepted server side. Of course there were variants aplenty of such clients, politely called 'optimising'. Then the dysfunctional sociology really kicks in : bunkering, sniping, close combat trench warfare to rid cyberspace of Credit Cheaters etc .... absolutely true. I kid you not. Enacted by what otherwise appeared to be some very clever people of significant analytic ability. What a waste of talent.

With the passage of time I feel it is safe now to divulge my own response to this phase, I thought ( paraphrase ) "what sort of milieu of stupidity have I got myself involved with ?" So there does seem to occasionally arise some Alice In Wonderland components.

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) We often bemoan The Internet as a monolithic structure. I think this misses the target somewhat. Certainly the ( relative ) anonymity and ( apparent ) physical safety of interaction has rather lowered the threshold for people to reveal what could remain occult in face to face encounters. The infrastructure per se does not generate any content. People's cognition does that. Whether you prefer any given content or not, it does come from within someone else's mind(s). For me at least such revelation can be very heartwarming and pleasant, on the converse also seem too scary for words to encapsulate. So there are some real sick puppies out there .... of which, say, the comments section of nearly any YouTube video is a quick and accurate study*. Anyhows a project like E@H has a marvelous ability to attract and/or generate pleasing material and social interaction.

* I accidentally scrolled down from one showing the Falcon 9 landing at LZ1 : in one thread it took a mere three (3) posts to go from rocket guidance control systems to climate change. Probably I was just witnessing ancient enemies stalking one another, yet again. Or troll finesse. Or whatever. But the vitriol !

I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...

... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal

Tiers Jean-Francois
Tiers Jean-Francois
Joined: 24 Nov 11
Posts: 60
Credit: 2057002
RAC: 0

Thanks a lot Gary for those

Thanks a lot Gary for those infos.
Tiers jacques is not me.
I'll try to remember my mail address at the time the transfer to BOINC occured.
I did not remember I had so many WU completed ! I thought they were only 145...

Cheers
Jean-François Tiers

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