A taste of Linux.

A global network of computer users has clocked up more than 4,000 years' worth of computer calculations in under three months as part of a huge grid project.

Since November, thousands have joined the World Community Grid (WCG) which uses idle computer time to help solve serious health and social problems.

Over 4,000 "teams" have been running a simple program which processes proteins for the Institute of Systems Biology.

The Seattle-based institute is working out the role of proteins in bodies.

The calculations completed so far by the thousands of ordinary desktop computers mean that the WCG has done 22% of the total analysis needed for the institute's 'Human Proteome Folding Project'.

By the time the project ends it is predicted that more than 20,000 years of computing will have been done.

Each protein analysed by the 'Human Proteome Folding Project' has to be analysed five separate times to be sure of results.

The hope is that a better understanding of the roles certain proteins have will lead to the development of cures or better treatments for diseases like cancer, HIV/Aids, and malaria.

Protein analyses can take years to complete on powerful supercomputers alone.

A global network of desktop computing power doing the analysing means that time can be reduced to a matter of months.

The WCG project, backed by IBM, is similar to others, like the successful Seti@home run by the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life project which examined radio signals for signs of alien communication.

Another, the Smallpox Research Grid, linked together more than two million volunteers from 226 countries to speed-up analysis of 35 million drug molecules in the search for a treatment.

The subjects of study for the WCG teams are chosen by an international advisory board of experts specialising in health sciences and technology.

The board evaluates proposals from leading research, public, and not-for-profit organisations, and aims to be involved in up to six projects a year.

I have been involved in the past in the SETI project, and am currently crunching for the 'Folding@home' project, with the science behind it being explained here. If you use your computer all the time and leave it going overnight, why not try subscribing to a distributed science project of your choice and let it benefit science without impeding you or your work at all. I find it quite interesting and can recommend it, plus theres also the chance of good-natured competition too.

Source - PCs do thousands of years of work

A three-year-old has become the youngest member of the high IQ group Mensa after taking a series of tests run by psychologists.

Mikhail Ali, from Bramley, Leeds was put through his paces by experts at the University of York.

Mensa spokeswoman Caroline Garbett said: "We have 25,500 members and fewer than 30 are under the age of 10."

Mikhail's mother Shamsun, 26, told the Yorkshire Evening Post: "We knew he was a gifted child."

Ms Garbett said the testing had been carried out independently by psychologists at the university as Mensa do not normally deal with youngsters below the age of 10.

Mikhail undertook a series of tests involving maths, picture and logic puzzles and number sequences.

Mrs Ali added: "Every day he amazes us, but underneath it all he's still our little boy too.

"He still plays with his toys and demands food."

A spokeswoman for the university said they were trying to contact the member of staff who carried out the tests to verify claims that Mikhail has an IQ of 137, putting him in the top two per cent of the population.

Source - Three-year-old passes Mensa test

This might be a bit late but I do like this .....

Some time ago I found this somewhere on the web and I thought it was worth reprinting here. I just wish that I could remember the source.

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You may already know that personal writing will improve your emotional health, but recent studies completed by scientists at Southern Methodist University and Ohio State University College of Medicine have proven that writing contributes directly to your physical health too.

Tests conducted by a team of clinical psychologists and immunologists demonstrated that subjects who wrote thoughtfully and emotionally about traumatic experiences achieved the following results: increased T-cell production; a drop in physician visits; fewer absentee days; generally improved physical health.

According to these studies, writing about your deepest thoughts and feelings in a personal, private notebook is a powerful tool for you to add to your healthful living tool chest.

Journaling or personal writing takes many forms. Its history is rooted as far back as the 10th Century in Japan when "Pillow Books" were used to record daily lives and thoughts. Today, the term journaling is usually used for personal writing that explores the inner world of the Self. Psychologist Ira Progoff, is generally credited with being the father of modern journaling. As a student of psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Progoff's work provided a way for individuals to explore ideas, thoughts, and dreams.

Here are some tips for you on how to use a journal for your health. Most men resist personal writing until some traumatic experience, such as divorce, serious illness, a change in the job or work environment, or the death of a friend or loved one, forces them to seek extra help. Even everyday frustrations can provide topics for your writing. Journaling works every time it's used.

You don't need special tools or abilities. You can use any notebook or paper for your writing. Although there are many blank books available in stationary and book stores, notebook paper or a class notebook will work just fine. Since journaling is for your own use, spelling, handwriting, and grammar are not major concerns. The purpose of writing in the journal is for you to get your feelings and experiences down on paper. You're not writing for a grade or for review by someone else.

Writing in a journal uses simple techniques. Here are three that will get you started.

Reflective Writing:
Be an observer of your life. Write about events that are happening to you or around you, in a way that helps put them into perspective. This is especially effective when writing about life changes, job or career, relationships or illness.

Begin writing with the phrase, "It was a time when...," then let yourself describe the event in detail, use as many of your senses as possible. What were the sounds, smells, sights, feelings, etc. that were present?

Write about the event as though you were observing yourself. Use "she" and "he" rather than "I" in your sentences. Describe the activities as an outside observer. Frequently this helps give perspective to an otherwise very personal experience.

Cathartic Writing:
Write about your feelings, all of them. Put your pain, fear, anger, frustrations, and grief down on paper. Say what you want to say, need to say, on the page. The journal won't judge or criticise you. You can use it as a safe place to let out everything you feel. Sometimes you may choose to throw away your writing, or burn it as a rite of letting go of the event.

Seen just now on the BBC technology pages ..

Source - Warnings about junk mail deluge

The amount of spam circulating online could be about to undergo a massive increase, say experts.

Anti-spam group Spamhaus is warning about a novel virus which hides the origins of junk mail.

The program makes spam look like it is being sent by legitimate mail servers making it hard to spot and filter out.

Spamhaus said that if the problem went unchecked real e-mail messages could get drowned by the sheer amount of junk being sent.

And theres more, lots more. It sounds worrying and will inevitably put up the costs of phone bills for those using dial-up, however, once the problem is known and recognised then steps can be taken against it. So it looks like we'll have new releases of anti-spam programmes, or just updates to them, to deal with the problem.

If I hadn't read this in a reputable newspaper I would've thought that this was some sort of joke, but its not, its real.

The long shadow of Dracula
Monica Petrescu in Bucharest.
(Filed: 06/02/2005)
Last week, six men were jailed for ripping out the heart of a corpse they believed was 'undead'. As Monica Petrescu in Bucharest writes, to many Romanians, vampires are not legend but terrifying reality

It was just before midnight as Gheorghe Marinescu and five of his relatives crept into the graveyard in the small Romanian village of Marotinul de Sus. They knew which plot they were looking for – a simple earth grave with a wooden cross bearing the name Petre Toma – and quickly, but quietly, set about digging.

When they had dragged the body out, they waited. Then, at the stroke of 12, Marinescu began the ritual that they had been planning for weeks, one that had passed from generation to generation in their family. They drove a pitchfork through Petre Toma's chest, opened it, drew out his heart and then put stakes through the rest of his body. They sprinkled garlic over the mutilated corpse and then, carefully, laid it back in its grave.

They left the cemetery with the heart impaled on the end of the pitchfork and went to a crossroads where Marinescu's wife, son and daughter-in-law were waiting. There the group burnt it, dissolved the ashes and then drank the solution.

The scene last July would fit readily into any number of films about vampires and the Dracula legend but Gheorghe Marinescu is real. Last week he and his five relatives – Mitrica Mircea, Popa Stelica, Constantin Florea, Ionescu Ion and Pascu Oprea – were sentenced to six months in jail for the unlawful exhumation of the body of Toma, 76, a former teacher and a man they believed had risen from the dead to drink their blood while they slept.

News of what the Marinescu family did made headlines in Romania, but in a country where a large minority of the population admit to openly believing in the "undead", football bosses employ witches to cast spells on foreign teams and a couple recently named their newborn son Dracula after premonitions of impending danger to him, many were unsurprised by what they read.

Mihai Fifor, an ethnologist at the Centre for Studies in Traditional Cultures and Societies in Craiova, said, "This particular ritual is quite unique but there have been many cases of people claiming that they are being hunted by the dead and vampires. There are a number of other rituals that exist for this type of situation where people believe they need to kill vampires."

Romania has been associated with vampires in the minds of many Westerners ever since Bram Stoker wrote his classic horror story, Dracula, in 1897. But in Romania the belief in vampires and the threat of the undead stretches as far back as the 15th century leader of Wallachia – modern-day Transylvania and other parts of Romania – Count Vlad Tepes Dracula, who was the inspiration for Stoker's novel. Stoker merged the Middle Ages belief in vampires, which had become entrenched in Romania and many other parts of central and eastern Europe at the time, with the historically documented bloodthirstiness of Tepes's rule. In doing so, he created the story of Count Dracula who rose from the dead to haunt the deep, dark forests and castles of Transylvania, preying on young victims and drinking their blood.

Today, the country's tourist industry still makes millions from his legend. His castle in Bran in Transylvania – Dracula Castle – draws tens of thousands of enthralled holidaymakers every year. There is even a Dracula theme park under construction.

But while Dracula and vampires are just a fascinating legend to most people outside the country, to many Romanians, mostly in rural areas, they are a terrifying reality. After his arrest, Marinescu said: "If we hadn't done anything, my wife, my son and my daughter-in-law would have died. That is when I decided to `unbury' him. I've seen these kinds of things before.

"When we took him out of the grave, he had blood around his mouth. We took his heart and he sighed when we stabbed him. We burned it, dissolved the ash into water and the people who had fallen sick drank it. They got better immediately. It was like someone took away all their pain and sickness.

"We performed a ritual that is hundreds of years old. We had no idea we were committing a crime. On the contrary, we believed that we were doing a good thing because the spirit of Petre was haunting us all and was very close to killing some of us. He came back from the dead and was after us."

Marinescu explained to police when he was arrested that Toma, who he said had been a respected and well-liked teacher in the village for years, had been buried on Christmas Day in 2003. But soon afterwards he had begun to appear to members of Marinescu's family in dreams as a vampire. Although he did not see the man himself, he saw his family become sick and they told him that Toma was not just a dream but a vampire whose spirit had come back from the dead.

He, like the rest of his family, had been told how to recognise vampires and how to deal with them by his parents who had been taught that knowledge from their own parents and they from theirs. He said he had had to act quickly to save his family.

Paula Diaconu, who has lived in Marotinul de Sus for decades, praised the ritual carried out by Marinescu and his relatives. "It was all a good thing to take his heart out because people were in danger. Villagers in Romania know about rituals for driving away the evil spirits of the dead," he said.

Another man from the village, Dumitru Moineasa, once drank a solution containing the ashes of his uncle's heart. "An uncle of mine died in 1992 and a few days after we buried him I started to feel very sick," he said. "The doctor had no idea what was wrong with me. One day, an aunt brought me a glass of water. I drank it all. I got well almost immediately. I only found out later that it was my dead uncle's ashes."

His friend, Domnica Brancusi, said that hearts had been taken out of dead men's chests many times before. "There have been dozens of dead men who turned into vampires and were haunting us," he said. "But usually the family of the dead man who was haunting people made a pact with those people and agreed not to say anything about the rituals. Until this case, no fuss was ever made about it."

Local police laid charges against the six men after Toma's daughter, Floarea Cotoran, who has since left Marotinul de Sus, complained about what happened to her father's body. They admitted that they were aware of similar rituals having been performed in the region. A policeman in nearby Celaru, which has jurisdiction over Marotinul de Sus, and who asked not to be named, said: "We've known about it for years. There's never been anything we could do about it as no one ever complained."

Marotinul de Sus, in the south-west, is far from the only village in Romania to take the threat of vampires seriously. In many rural communities like it across the country, belief in vampires is pervasive and superstition often governs people's lives. "Fear and great challenges in life are sometimes met by people with rituals and superstitions, a set of rules built over generations which has been verified over time," said Sabina Ispas, an ethnologist at the Institute for Ethnology and Folklore in Bucharest. "Rural Romania has conserved excellently this system of rituals and beliefs."

Deep superstition and belief in the paranormal and pagan permeates all levels of society in urban Romania as well. Maria Tedescu, a 21-year-old law student in Bucharest, said: "We all have our little superstitions, like taking three steps back if a black cat crosses your path to stop something bad happening. But vampires are different. It's not something to be taken lightly. I know it may sound silly and I can't totally explain it, but I think they exist. I always wear a crucifix… just in case."

Source - The Daily Telegraph.

I rather like this, it shows what some of the debates are like when people discuss their favourite linux distribution. The reality is that they all have their strengths and weakneses, and what suits one person may not suit another. And as the field of distributions is so big, then look around for another one which suits you better ... after all, you're learning all the time.

The source for this comic strip is here. And the current weeks cartoon can be displayed by clicking on the first panel of the cartoon on the left, right down at the bottom.