Pure Digital Thought

IBM’s World Community Grid has teamed up with scientists at UTMB in Galveston, Texas to help search for drugs that can cure a family of diseases such as dengue fever, West Nile encephalitis, hepatitis C, and yellow fever. The project is called “Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together”. The fact that this project is targeting the West Nile virus has hit home with those of us living in the south where West Nile has been flaring up over the past few years. Researchers say it will take about 50,000 years of computing time to help run all of the drug molecules against the various virus variants but by using distributed computing formed by volunteers who join the World Community Project and process workunits for the project, the project should take about a year. This should give scientists a fair number of drug candidates that can affect the virus and eventually lead to actual vaccines. I’ve started moving many of my machines to help crunch workunits on this project since I think this is an important project and the faster it runs the faster the scientists can get on with the task of testing the drug molecules that are found through this process. So, join up today and help find candidate drugs for West Nile and other viruses in its family. As a side note, make sure you download the BOINC client instead of the United Devices (UD) client from World Community Grid as the “Discovering Dengue Drugs - Together” project only runs on the BOINC client.

A lot more information can be found directly on the UTMB DDD-T website where they will post project status updates and other information as the project progresses.

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[as seen in a slashdot comment]

I got this email from the Video Game Voters Network and I wanted to pass the info on to help increase awareness. This is copied verbatim from the note.
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Inform Capitol Hill and Help Share the FTC Report Findings

In a recent report on entertainment media, the Federal Trade Commission commended video game self-regulation, recognizing the ESRB ratings as a “useful and important tool” for parents, and that retailers have made “substantial improvement” in limiting sales of Mature-rated games to children. Help us spread this information on Capitol Hill so we can further educate policymakers and hopefully put an end to harmful video game legislation. We at the Network believe that self-regulation is a better solution than government legislation, but to convince legislators, we have to make sure they know self-regulation works.

Write A Letter & Make Capitol Hill Aware of the FTC’s report!

Some of the FTC’s positive findings about Video Games:

1. High Parental Awareness: 9 out 10 parents are aware of ESRB ratings.
2. Clear Ratings: 94% percent of parents said the ESRB ratings are easy to understand–up from 77% in 2000–and 87% are either very or somewhat satisfied with the ESRB system, up from 76% in 2000.
3. Parents Taking More Active Role: The number of parents who restrict the games their children play is up to 85% from 69% in 2000.

Write your Senators and Representative to educate them on the FTC’s findings before another video game bill comes to a vote.

This report is further evidence for the argument against video game regulation, but public officials must hear about it from video game-playing citizens like you!

Please take two minutes to send a letter, and help defend your favorite form of entertainment!

Thank you,

The Video Game Voters Network
http://videogamevoters.org

The World Community Grid is a life sciences distributed computing project sponsored by IBM. The project works by having people volunteer unused CPU time to find cures for human diseases. Currently, they are searching for drugs to treat AIDS, testing models for automating the early detection of Cancer cells, working on protein folding predictions to help understand the causes of diseases like Alzheimer’s, Cancer, Cystic Fibrosis, etc, and also working on a protein matching process to help future disease research.
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So I’ve heard so much babble on 1080p and XBox360 with much coming from people who have no experience with it and are simply repeating rumors of what they have heard. Today when I went to pick up my HD-DVD drive for the XBox360, I picked up the VGA cable and a KVM switch. I have my main gaming machine hooked to my Samsung HDTV which is why I needed the KVM so I could switch between my PC and my XBox360.
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Yeah, I’m alive.  I’ve just gotten away from my blog and abandoned it for some reason.  I’m been doing homebrew beer as Warren hinted in one of the comments.  We use a nice little piece of software called Brew Blogger to record the brews we make.  I’ve finally gotten around to linking to it on the header of my site.  I suppose I should make more of an effort to use my blog.

My review for Splinter Cell Chaos Theory was posted on GamersInfo.net yesterday.  I actually did this one before my Frogger review but it was scheduled for posting later.  The happy thing about this review was that it was my second free game.  As I’ve mentioned before, GI.n is a volunteer game review site.  So, reviewers don’t get paid except with thanks, the joy in being published, and occasionally getting a free game to play.