This is one of the few even remotely serious aspects of the Clan MacDude. It's a little known fact that a large proportion of the Clan are involved in technical fields and the sciences. That being the case, it's kind of right up our alley to loan some spare clock cycles to the effort to sort through gobs of data collected by the SETI program

What is the SETI@Home project, you ask? Well, it's an effort to crunch through the huge volumes of data the SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project has managed to gather from the big dish at Arecibo, Puerto Rico.

If you're a *NIX user (UNIX, Linux, BSD, OS/X, etc.) this little program runs in the background taking up unused clock cycles. I've run it continuously on my system here at the Stately MacDude Manor, alongside a web server, an IRC server, and all my day to day applications, and never noticed a performance hit. If you use a Macintosh, or one of those commercial PC operating systems from Redmond, you get a cool screensaver that gives you a graphical display of what it's doing.

The Graphical versions are slower, but they're pretty cool to watch and there are a lot of people running them. Hit the SETI@Home website, then look for "Clan MacDude" under Groups. You can find us there. Why not join up and add some processor power to the CLan's effort to make some real history?