Seeking ETs on PCs With Screen Savers to the Stars
Tantalized by the notion of extraterrestrial intelligence, even if you’re not yet persuaded that intelligent life exists on Earth?
Then the people leading that search want you . . . to employ a screen-saver program in your desktop personal computer that, along with thousands of others, can analyze billions and billions of raw bits of space data collected from a 1,000-foot-diameter radio dish operated in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, by SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence folks.
More than 100,000 people have already signed up with UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory for the day in April that the bugs are worked out and SETI@home can be downloaded from the Web to a PC near you.
SERENDIP IV, which hunts for radio emission evidence of intelligent populations from the Arecibo data, can analyze only the most likely and obvious signals for evidence of smart species. The rest of the radio data can go unanalyzed--which is where the screen saver comes in.
With the screen saver, each idling PC worries away at a different undigested chunk of Arecibo radio data as the screen shows a graph of the signal analysis. Then the user can sign onto the Web, ship off the data the PC has processed and load up on a new batch to analyze. The SETI@home Web site forwards it to Berkeley for collation.
Like a Neighborhood Watch for the universe, the screen saver can hunt for telling patterns in the data. As with sorting through tailings at diamond mines, chances are slim that you’ll turn up the Hope Diamond of extraterrestrial smarts, but it could happen, Wookie willing.
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Sutter’s nil: Davis, the environmentally conscientious urb, is fast supplanting Berkeley as the City That Does the Sensitive Thing.
Already it is embracing an ordinance to make stargazing easier--and save on electric bills--by requiring light shields on new outdoor fixtures, much as cities near observatories now do.
And now, on the threshold of the 150th anniversary of the Gold Rush and California’s subsequent statehood, the Davis City Council has tentatively voted to strip the man who started it all of his honors within the city limits, changing a street name from Sutter Place to Shasta Way.
It was at John Sutter’s sawmill in January 1848 that Sutter’s partner discovered the gold that began the California stampede. Until then, Sutter, who became a Mexican citizen, owned an enormous rancho that he ran like an agricultural fiefdom, with Indian labor. An impassioned UC Davis professor emeritus, Jack Forbes, told the council that Sutter was “an immoral man, a sexual predator, a rapist and an enslaver of native Californians.”
The final vote comes next year. Of the interim decision, council member Sheryl Freeman said, “Change can be painful but still good and necessary. . . . We know that we have made mistakes as a people in the past and we’ve grown from that.”
Sensitive to PC finger-pointing, Forbes said he realizes that “there are other counties that have things named after him, but we’re in Davis, and we just have to take care of what we have right here in Davis.”
If it’s any consolation, the Gold Rush that made fortunes for others ruined Sutter, who died in poverty in Pennsylvania in 1880.
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A Toast to a Grape Year
California’s annual grape harvest accounts for 90% of the nation’s wine production. So, as you ring in the new year Thursday night, here are the top 10 of the more than 140 grape varieties grown here, ranked by tons crushed in 1997.
Thompson seedless: 766,295
Chardonnay: 491,406
French Colombard: 475,082
Zinfandel: 421,594
Cabernet Sauvignon: 226,317
Merlot: 201,707
Chenin Blanc: 170,710
Grenache: 120,813
Barbera: 120,267
Rubired: 95,330
All other varieties: 801,882
Source: California Agricultural Statistics, Sacramento; The Wine Institute, San Francisco.
Researched by TRACY THOMAS / Los Angeles Times
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One-offs: The coffee cart in the state Capitol basement advertises its joe in three sizes: conservative (small), liberal (medium) and extremist (large). . . . A police officer who once challenged the driving skills of an elderly Lodi man was killed when his police motorcycle collided with a car driven by the same man, who is now accused of causing the officer’s death. . . . Dorothy Kohlars, a 103-year-old Barstow woman, today is awarded the French Legion of Honor for her work as a nurse during the Meuse-Argonne offensive of World War I. . . . Two bits will buy you a seat in one of San Jose’s high-tech, computer-controlled pay public toilets, 10 tons of green-and-gold computer whizzery. . . . For the first time since last January’s skiing accident that killed Palm Springs Republican Rep. Sonny Bono, his widow and successor, Mary, went skiing with the couple’s two children, as well as her new beau.
EXIT LINE
“Maybe it gives you so much gas it forces the baby out.”
--Kris Gerald, finance manager of the town of Clayton, and a lover of Skipolino’s garlic/salami/sausage/pepperoni/linguica/olives/mushroom/peppers pizza, which some locals believe can induce labor in overdue pregnant women. Quoted in the Contra Costa Times. (A half-dozen years ago, similar results were reported from a romaine and watercress salad served in a Laurel Canyon restaurant.)
California Dateline appears every other Tuesday.
