Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

Merchandising and distributed computing!
Admin CavemanJoe – 2011-05-05 19:08:43 [Permalink]
Hello, folks! I've got two awesome bits of news for you!

Awesome piece of news the first:
You've been asking us for ages to MAKE A BLOODY T-SHIRT OR SOMETHING ALREADY CAVEMAN JOE, I KNOW YOU THINK IT'S TOO MUCH HASSLE BUT DAMN IT SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY - so I'm going to shut up and take your money! Esteemed Island moderator Zolotisty has been hard at work on creating some merchandising for us, sorting out a decent supplier, and getting everything lined up - and now we're all ready to take some pre-orders! We have a T-shirt, a mug, a really cool poster, and a fantastic nickel/enamel keychain for you to buy!

Let me stress that this stuff isn't your usual crappy print-on-demand CafePress tat that'll fall apart after two washes and make kittens cry. Zolotisty chose our supplier very carefully, and they guarantee no kitten tears! The mug in particular is a very awesome mug. It's all tapered and happymaking.

Because we have a decent supplier, and we're not doing print-on-demand tat, we have to get some pre-orders going so that we can put in a big order from the factory to get us going. Our shop is at http://merch.improbableisland.com. You know what you must do.

Awesome piece of news the second:
Our World Community Grid team is about to pass four hundred years of distributed computing! Now's a fantastic time to join our team, because you get free Supporter Points for donating your spare CPU cycles to humanitarian research! In case you don't know what that means, it means that we've made a computer game that cures cancer. That would have gotten us some excellent publicity, but in the same week that we started the project, there was a video of a kitten asleep on top of another kitten. I can't compete with that. If you're curious and perhaps if you're an awesome person who wants to help the world out a little bit, click the link at the bottom of the right-hand stats bar that says "Help us cure cancer, get free Supporter Points!"

The latest really cool thing that World Community Grid is doing involves new methods of water filtration. Guys, one in six people can't drink the water around them, and about one in three of us don't have any sort of sanitation, which means that - here's your depressing statistic for the day - on average, one kid dies every twenty-two seconds from a disease brought on by not having clean water. It's usually diarrhea that does them in.

Now, we've got technology for filtering dirty water, but it's too expensive to deploy in the sort of numbers we'd need to stop people dying by drinking shitty water. We've got some ideas concerning carbon nanotubes, which we can make as cheap as chips - but the pores are so small that you need massive amounts of pressure to force the water through, meaning that the equipment needed is, again, too expensive to do much good. However, back in 2005 we had an unexpected surprise - certain arrangements of carbon nanotubes allowed water to flow much faster than expected, while still allowing the same high level of filtration. Now, World Community Grid wants to use your computer's idle time to simulate a whole bunch of different arrangements at a molecular level, to see which one is the best.

So, join our project and maybe the world can move on, and have things to worry about that aren't "Will drinking this water kill me faster than not drinking at all." And I'll give you some Supporter Points too!

Have fun!

-CMJ

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