richlayers

I've done this before, but my excuse is that it's been a long time.

001. Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
002. I will respond by asking you ANY five questions of a very intimate and creepily personal nature. Or not so creepy/personal.
003. You WILL update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
004. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
005. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

From kyrie1618

1) Did the secret admirer ever make it up to you? The long silences bit, I mean.

You know, I still do not know who that was. I say "was," and not "is," because I haven't heard anything from TSA or his compatriot in... going on six months (ish?) now. How's THAT for a long silences bit? However, I am still enjoying Doctor Who series 1, so I guess I have no room to complain....

2) What would it take to finish a marathon? What's stopped you so far?

40 kilometers, I would say would do the trick. Errr. What's stopped me is... lack of time, and lack of warm weather, and laziness. Oh, and that broken toe was a setback, but mostly... laziness. I think it would help to have someone to train with, and also to just be more determined than I currently am. But I WILL do it. Maybe even this year? (When it gets WARM again!?)

3) Want to start using strong crypto? Shall our next ten LJ posts be signed by us in a way that cannot be faked?

I don't know. I mean, I read Little Brother, I appreciate a healthy dose of paranoia as much as the next geek, but... on the other hand, I just have trouble considering myself significant enough for anyone to bother messing with. Not that that's necessarily the deciding factor.

I would sign my posts in a way that could not be faked if I had an idea of how to do that. I sort of understand the theory, but in a vague, non-applicable way.

4) Tell me more about Folding@Home?

Folding is awesome! Basically your computer makes these... computations... and figures out how proteins fold... Like when you eat food, right? And that food is turned into your body, you know? But how does it know what kind of body to turn into? How does it "fold" into the right shape for eyeball or muscle or... whatever? Errr, that's my basic understanding of it. Here is a fairly dense wikipedia article about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_folding

(Unfortunately they don't have an article about it at simple.wikipedia.org or I would have been so there.)

Anyway, the folding@home concept is that, since figuring out all the ways that folding can happen is a monumental task, many computers can work on small bits of data, which are then put together at Stanford to form a bigger picture of the process. Err, I'm pretty sure you can read more about this, and in more depth/detail/accuracy, if you go to their main page:

http://folding.stanford.edu/

Which you should do. And join my team: 159490

5) If you get a chance to upload, but you'd lose your body doing it, would you? Why?

Man, I'd really have to think about this one. On the one hand, when reading the latest Sawyer book on the concept, it makes complete sense to me and I'm all in favor of it. On the other hand, my hardcore scifi geek beliefs aside, I'm not ready to dismiss a spiritual aspect of our human existence, and how does that fit into an upload? Does my soul travel with my most current data? Or is the soul released when the original body dies, no matter what? Or is the soul just a comforting way to consider death? I don't think I could answer this without the process being a possibility in front of me, but...

I'm inclined to say yes... Sort of as a default. Like... get uploaded but have the upload inactive until the moment of my ... first death? I don't know, is that a cop-out? That sort of suggests I want the most of both options.... Tricky question.

So Chris got me started on Folding at home, which I think is really awesome. Basically it's one of those distributed computing programs that runs in the background... Michael used to run something like SETI at home I think. This one is about protein folding, and the research could help with curing/understanding diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and others.

For a way more coherent and full explanation, check it out here:

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Main

A kind of neat aspect of this project is that you can team up with friends, and semi-compete with other people running the program. Here is my team:

http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=159490

Although I haven't actually submitted any work yet, so my name isn't on there. But IT WILL BE. OH IT WILL. And... I think you can join it, too? I'll have to look into that though.