SETI & Crunching news

The UC Berkeley Space Science Laboratory Domain Name Services (DNS) server has been having problems for the past 24 hours, and a wildlands fire near the Space Sciences Lab has prevented SSL personnel from fixing the problem.

Because of this, any server functions (i.e. password reset, forum notifications) that require email interaction are not working for most people.

If the problems continue tomorrow its likely that BOINC clients will eventually lose access to the SETI@home servers until the DNS server can be repaired.

SETI.Germany is again organizing this Year's event in honor of the 40th Anniversary of the Wow! Signal. Further information can be found here. The event will run from Aug 15th, 4.00 UTC to Aug 29th 2017, 4.00 UTC.

Ryan Lynch works on pulsar research at the Green Bank Observatory. In this video, we sat down with Ryan to chat about how to paint the world's largest steerable radio telescope, and what modern convenience he misses most while living in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone.

https://youtu.be/fF9JaLyWuUI

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We took a GoPro Omni 360 VR camera up to the top of the Green Bank Telescope, the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. Join us on Part 1 of our journey, as we check out the telescope wheels that each carry more than a million pounds of weight, and learn about the 2004 individually controllable panels that make up the surface of the dish, which is larger than a football stadium.

The SETI@home back end is getting closer to completion.

• Our algorithms for removing RFI and finding repeated signals work fairly well.
  
• We can inject "birdies" (synthetic signals) to measure how well they're working.
  
• We've developed tools for browsing, drilling down, and visualizing signals and candidates.
  

At this point we need to manually scan lots of results, looking for cases where our algorithms don't seem to be working perfectly. If you like, you can help us with this.

At Berkeley SETI Research Center, we've long been friends and collaborators with Professor Michael Garrett and the team at Jodrell Bank. We're delighted to continue our collaboration as the Breakthrough Initiatives announce a formal partnership with Jodrell in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth: https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/News/11

Although this partnership doesn't involve data from telescopes at Jodrell flowing to SETI@home (at least at the present time), the sharing of data, algorithms, and strategies will benefit the science programs at Berkeley and Jodrell, as well as at other telescopes involved in Breakthrough Listen and in SETI in general. You can seen an interview with Mike, recorded a few weeks back, at https://youtu.be/ZRMiuCFACCw, and take a 3D tour of the Lovell telescope and control room at Jodrell at https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=B8UZb1joxsG.

For more news from Berkeley SETI, follow us on social media:
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Engadget has published an article on SETI which includes discussion of Breakthrough Listen and SETI@home.

The Atlantic has published a new article entitled A Brief History of SETI@home featuring interviews of Dan Werthimer, David Anderson, and Eric Korpela.

Berkeley SETI's Steve Croft is joining other SETI and exoplanet researchers on Deep Astronomy right now (4 pm PDT, 2300 UTC). If you join live you can ask questions of these scientists.

Once again I need to explain our policies on free speech, as I've been getting lots of nastygrams both here and on twitter and facebook.

First, let me explain our relationship to the UC Berkeley administration. Despite the fact that I met with the Chancellor once for about 15 seconds, the UC administration neither knows nor cares that SETI@home exists. Threats of quitting SETI@home or withholding donations will be about as effective as kicking a stray dog because you don't like something the dog catcher did. They won't notice. They don't care. They get no direct benefit from SETI@home, so here will be no effect on them, or the on University. We could shut off our servers tomorrow, and nobody in Sproul Hall would notice a thing.

So here are our project commandments on free speech.

0. Thine speech is free as in freedom, not free as in beer.
1. Thou mayst speak thine mind.
2. Thou shalt do so in the appropriate forum.
3. Thou shalt recognize that speech has consequences to thine self and to others, some legal, some financial, some painful.
4. Thou shalt not force others to pay for the delivery of or the consequences of speech they may not agree with.
5. On public SETI@home forums, thou shalt use language a parent would not mind their 12 year old hearing.
6. Failure to obey the forum rules will result in moderator action. If thou dost not understand, see thou commandment 4.

In other words, if you want to be heard on the current controversy, try the Politics forum. Then use twitter, facebook, instagram and whatever social media you want. SETI@home in general and me in particular have no power to effect change of any sort.

It sounds like there's still going to be a riot in Berkeley tomorrow because a group of white supremacists and a group of left wing anarchists are ignoring commandments 2, 3, and 4. The people of Berkeley and the people of California will be picking up the tab for their "freedom of speech" whether they want to or not. And personally, I think that's what's been missing from the whole discussion.