Bob is tired of Folding alone. Bob's next Distributed/Cooperative Computing Team: The Dutch Power Cows!!!

click, maybe Good happens

When my college student pal Phrost extincts Folding@Home PhrostByte Team 53337 -- he is desperately folding proteins to win a folding competition so he can win free hours on a computer game service, exactly like Vleeptron gives away free Pizza -- I shall need to find another Folding team to join. I am tired of Folding Proteins alone, by myself, in the dark, no one to talk about Folding Proteins with. I want to be on a Team.

This one:

The Dutch Power Cows

These suckers mostly geekspeak in Dutch, but if you speak Geekish to begin with, it's pretty easy to grok.

The Power Cows are a Very Big and a Very Ambitious team of Distributed Computing freakazoids. They do Folding@Home , of course, and they do SETI@Home, but they also do some really strange brute-force computing projects, like Seventeen or Bust, and deciphering coded messages ($$$ prizes!) like RC5-72 and OGR-25 from RSA, the company founded by 3 Number Theory geniuses who invented modern computer cryptography -- the way you buy crap on the Web with your credit card safely, most of the time.

The Dutch Power Cows are into so many different (and I think interesting) Distributed/Cooperative Computing tasks that you can just pick one or two you like for pure aesthetics -- which one tickles or fascinates or stimulates or obsesses you the most. I started on G.I.M.P.S., the very first Distributed Programming project, and then Folding@Home caught my eye and my brain and my passions and my imagination.

There is the promise, the possibility, the tease that if Folding@Home blossoms into its promise, my goofy efforts, just to click the mouse a few times a year, and look at Real Pretty Wiggling Pictures whenever I like, may help find the cures for some ghastly diseases.

The Vleeptron High Non-Junk-Science Council certifies that this is an Authentically Scientific Promise. Beyond that, as Doris Day liked to sing:

Que sera, sera!
Whatever will be, will be!
The Future's not ours to see
Que sera, sera!

My diabetes doctor has forbidden me from ever again listening to Doris Day sing or watch a Doris Day movie. One more Doris Day 1960s Clean Sex comedy, he tells me, could kill me. If she sings in the movie, it will be Sugar Overdose City.

Perhaps you are thinking: Hey, I don't know shit about Molecular Biology, and I don't give a shit about Molecular Biology. I got a D in biology and I think it sucks. Why should I get messed up with this weird Folding@Home shit?

1. Phrost's reason: It's all about the Free Computer Game Hours. (Chat up Phrost on Undernet #narcotics for details.)

2. Your humble PC could accidentally stumble across the cure for AIDS or some ghastly variety of cancer or Alzheimer's Disease, and they would definitely send an e-mail to your Mom to tell her that you cured AIDS.

3. Once you install the Folding@Home software on your PC (2 minutes or less), you never have to think about it or do anything again. It does all the computing -- the protein folding modeling -- silently, and when it gets an answer, it automatically sends the answer via the Internet to Folding@Home world headquarters, which is at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California USA. HQ sends back a new protein for your PC to fold automatically. You won't even know you're doing it. You might even forget you're Folding.

4. You can end up with weird new pals like The Dutch Power Cows. First you can chat with them safely from far away about Nerd Stuff, and later maybe they'll let you crash on their sofa in Utrecht for 4 or 5 days.

I suspect most of the DPC don't give a flying fuck about molecular biology either. These are overclocker freakazoids. (Overclocking means to push your CPU chip at a faster rate than the manufacturer designed the chip to operate at. Overclockers think their PCs, the way they come out of the box, are Too Fucking Slow, and spend all their money to make Hot Rods and Drag Racers and fighter jets out of their PCs.)

Some people want to drive the fastest motorcycle on Earth. Some people want to fly the fastest airplane or rocket on Earth. Some people want to shoot the most powerful gun on Earth. Some people want to ingest the most powerful drugs on Earth.

The Dutch Power Cows want to use 500 percent of the potential of their souped-up PCs to solve problems which, 10 years ago, were declared Mathematically Hopeless, because no supercomputer was super enough to do the massive volume of computing the problem demands. (At least not in our lifetime, but you can solve some of these problems if you leave your PC powered up and running for a century or two after you die.) One humble PC has no chance to get anywhere with a Hard Problem.

But 3000 or 10,000 or 100,000 ordinary (or souped-up) PCs, all over the world, all Thinking Merrily Away, all jabbering among themselves over the Internet:

The Dutch Power Cows are finding lots of Big Answers.

One of their sub-teams is Los Alcoholicos. Other members or sub-teams are

* Clan Delft
* CyberCow
* Fatal Error Group
* Forza Mucca
* Bubbles

Even though my Dutch sux (no one in NL will speak Dutch to me, they say: "What is the point?"), I get Huge Radiation Hits that these are Very Interesting Human Beings who are all fucked up on being a part of the most powerful computing projects this planet was ever ambitious enough to try to assault or solve.

I suspect you can get good conversations with a lot of these Power Cows.

On my next trip to Yerp I want to see Dwingeloo, where Jan Oort first began to gaze, in radio frequencies, at the universe at the edge of and beyond our Melkweg. (Read Mulisch's "The Discovery of Heaven," it's Dutch but it's been translated into lots of Indo-European and Finno-Ugrik lingos by now, maybe Semitics and Sinos too.)

And now to that agenda I add that I am going to stalk me some Dutch Power Cows and see what goes on in their heads.

Will the Dutch Power Cows let me, a non-Dutch person, join?

Of course. All Things Are Possible, if you beg and whine and debase yourself ceaselessly. (Also they got Belgian Power Cows, so why not an American Power Cow?)

Some of you dorks have left Comments that you think this stuff is Not Important.

Well -- now you know that you can win free computer game hours by doing this shit! Leave A Comment to say you're sorry about the earlier Comment.