Private Thoughts Made Public

Space, according to the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.
This thought brings two subjects to mind. The first (and perhaps more important of the two) is that there is a new series of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy starting on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow evening. Or, if you’re reading this tomorrow, then it’s this evening. And if you’re reading this after 7pm tomorrow then you’ve missed it. Except you haven’t, coz it’s repeated on Thursday and will be available to listen to on the Radio 4 web site for a whole week. So there’s absolutely no excuse for you to miss it. Unless, of course, you’re reading this some time next year in the archives because you’ve discovered this incredibly witty and insightful blog and thought you’d go through all the old posts to find out how crap it used to be. That’ll teach you. You should have been with me from the very start, so you don’t miss little gems like this.
I mentioned earlier there were two subjects. Time to move on to the second one, I think, before you all die of boredom. I’ve joined seti@home, the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence … er, @ home. I’m sure everyone has heard of this by now, and when I went to check out the site a few weeks ago I expected it to be in the last throes of a dying fad. But no, far from it. Once I’d downloaded the software and watched it draw pretty 3-d shapes on my screen for a few hours, I went to check my statistics. There are over 5 million registered users, all using their PC’s to analyse radio data gathered sometime last year or the year before in the search for little green men. You can see on your stats page how you move up the “top 5 million” chart of busy little bees (I’m currently 1,260,827th), and you can see how you compare to the other people who joined on the same day you did. I was absolutely staggered to find that on my day of joining, September 3rd, 6,780 other people also joined in the search for life out there….. and this is hardly a new project, it’s been running for years.
Anyway, download the seti software. It runs in the background, on a very low priority, which means it only does stuff when your computer isn’t doing anything else. And listen to the new Hitch Hikers series.
One of these two activities will give me more satisfaction than the other one. I’ll leave it as an exercise for you, dear reader, to decide which one that is.