{"id":26105,"date":"2019-09-22T14:19:58","date_gmt":"2019-09-22T19:19:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=26105"},"modified":"2019-09-22T14:19:58","modified_gmt":"2019-09-22T19:19:58","slug":"the-devils-playthings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2019\/09\/22\/the-devils-playthings\/","title":{"rendered":"The Devil’s Playthings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Long, long ago a friend told me that idle computer cycles are the Devil’s playthings. This was in connection with a program of inductive logic that he had written and fed with a bunch of facts and claimed that, at some point, it asked him if a platypus was a mammal or a bird.<\/p>\n

So I was a little embarrassed to get home from the store and realize that I had shut off SETI@Home and Einstein@Home this morning, while trying to figure out why my computer isn’t as responsive as usual, and forgotten to reactivate the manager for them. Here’s the resource manager:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’m sure you can see when I reactivated SETI & Einstein. The other cycle-hog? I recently joined another public computing project, the GIMPS<\/strong><\/em><\/a> (Great Internet<\/em> Mersenne Prime<\/a>[1]<\/sup><\/a> Search<\/strong>) project. It’s been running since 1996, and yet I hadn’t heard of it until a month or two ago. The GIMPS software is delightfully retro for someone of my age and experience; I can’t imagine computer users who don’t understand, or at least like, a command line, would up with it put[2]<\/sup><\/a>. Here’s a sample from this Linux box:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Maybe their Windows version has a visual interface, I dunno. I didn’t see anything for this X-Windows box.<\/p>\n

Twenty minutes later:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yep, the Devil will walk away disappointed from this computer.<\/p>\n

\n

<\/a>1<\/sup> A Mersenne Prime<\/em> is any prime number which satisfies 2n<\/sup> – 1, where n<\/em> is a whole number. From all I’ve read so far, they lack practical significance.<\/p>\n

<\/a>2<\/sup> I once read that Romans liked to put their verbs at the end of sentences as a way to heighten the anticipation of the listener.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long, long ago a friend told me that idle computer cycles are the Devil’s playthings. This was in connection with a program of inductive logic that he had written and fed with a bunch of facts and claimed that, at some point, it asked him if a platypus was a \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26105","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26105"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26105\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26112,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26105\/revisions\/26112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}