As you may or may not know, SETI stands for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Life. And the project involves a few million people donating the use of their computer when they’re not using it, to the analysis of data taken from radio telescopes. This is something that used to be handled by supercomputers, and usually on the US Government’s nickel, that is until funding was cut in the mid-1990s. Those radio telescopes are basically listening for any hint of radio signals from somewhere else in the universe — that is evidence of intelligent life.

It’s one of those big questions that people ponder from time-to-time: Are we alone in the universe? I first began to think about it seriously when I was eight or nine. I read “The Star Wars Question And Answer Book About Space” cover-to-cover several times. It contained a section on radio astronomy that was rather sophisticated for a kid’s book. Among other things it covered a basic explanation — but notably no illustration — of the Arecibo Message sent to the star cluster M13 located 25,000 light-years away. It also included sections on the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft, and the golden record placed on the Voyager probes, but for obvious reasons, no pictures of the message engraved on the Pioneer plaques.

By the time I was 12 or 13 I had a subscription to Discover Magazine, had seen the film ET, and had also watched much of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos on public television. The March 1983 issue of Discover had Sagan on its cover, trumpeting the launch of a new effort to search seriously for life in space. (Summary of the issue here.) Within its pages I first learned about Frank Drake who predicted that we would find intelligent life by 2000, and was first exposed to the concept of a von Neumann space probe. It arrived in the mail on a day when I was home sick from school, and I devoured it, learning more from it than I probably did in any science class I would take.

In his TV series, Sagan made an argument (which I now know was borrowed in part from Drake) that fascinated me. When you consider the number of stars in the galaxy, which is about 400 billion, the chance that there’s life out there, and that it’s intelligent isn’t unspeakably far-fetched, but by a reasonable stretch of argument, plausible. (Though Sagan’s own math is off on one point: In the clip below he says our solar system has 10 planets, when the accepted orthodoxy at the time was nine. It’s now eight. In the early 80s, when Cosmos was made, Pluto was still considered a planet, rather than a Kuiper Belt Object. Thank you, International Astronomical Union.)

In any event, the thought that I could help out in even a small way with the effort of finding a signal from somewhere out there, however remote the chance of success, has kept me mildly entertained these 10 years. As of today my computers have contributed 229,235 work units, comprised of 198.06 quadrillion floating point operations to the effort. (That’s 198,060,000,000,000,000 or an average of 54.2 trillion operations per day.) Plus I’ve earned credit for another 3,053 work units under the original “classic” SETI@Home program, which works out to 33,319 hours of computing time.

By SETI@Home standards, my numbers aren’t impressive. I rank somewhere at about 38,000th place among its base of users. A team I’m involved with, SETI.USA, has a few members who have reported more than 10 million work units, and many more who have stats north of the 1 million and half-million mark. I’ve never been quite as disciplined about keeping my machines running the program as I might have been. But when I learned that the 10-year anniversary of my participation was coming up, I had hoped to push my machines to the point of having finished 250,000 units, and have paid close attention to my progress in recent weeks. I have four computers running SETI@Home: Three at home, including my newly purchased MacBook Pro, and one at the office which runs it only when I’m not there. Obviously I didn’t hit the goal I had hoped for, but will probably see that number before the end of the summer.

I was interested to see the video below of a talk by SETI’s chief scientist Dan Werthimer, and for once to see a face on the other end of the SETI@home process. It’s been fun to have been a small part of the biggest supercomputer on the planet and the largest computation that’s ever been done. Still, no signals yet.

During the intervening years, Prine has battled throat cancer, the treatment of which has changed his voice, released four albums, and won a trophy case full of awards, including a Lifetime Achievement award from the BBC, and been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

I came upon Prine by happenstance in 1992. He appeared on the duet track “If You Were The Woman, And I Were The Man” opposite Margo Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies on that group’s album “Black Eyed Man.” They toured toured together that year, and among their stops was one at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts in Eugene, Oregon where I was at the time attending college. I got tickets, and attended with a friend, and was prepared to leave after the Cowboy Junkies had finished, but was convinced to stay.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Prine’s show, and quickly realized that most of the people in the audience were there not to see the Cowboy Junkies, but to see him. It was my first exposure to the Prine standards like “Big Ol’ Goofy World” and “Dear Abby.” What I didn’t yet know was that I was seeing a performance by an honest-to-goodness national treasure of the American folk songbook.

A few years after seeing that show, at the suggestion of yet another friend, I started exploring more of Prine’s work and became a devoted fan. I learned that if you peel back the outer skin of the often catchy, funny, self-effacing, working-class songs, you find work of uncommon emotional complexity expressed in an unambiguous manner. In “Blue Umbrella” he comtemplates the state of being emotionally overwhelmed by a relationship gone wrong beyond repair. He tackles false patriotism in “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” a song which can’t help but evoke memories of Country Joe McDonald.

While it’s easy to dismiss Prine’s early work, in particular his 1971 self-titled debut, as intended to be cheap knock-off of Bob Dylan. Casual contemporary observers remember him as “the guy who was supposed to be the next Dylan.” His trajectory from Army vet to postal worker, to open-mic night regular in a Chicago nightclub is well known, as is his discovery by Kris Kristofferson,  made him seem a good candidate for the adjective “Dylanesque.”

Songs like “Sam Stone” sound today as though a record executive told Prine to “do it like Dylan.” Despite its whiny, Dylan-as-hayseed delivery, the subject of the song was cutting edge for 1971. The Vietnam War was entering its closing phase, and a song about a heroin-addicted veteran having difficulty returning to civilian life was something not widely addressed. With “Sam Stone” Prine raised an issue that would not be on the national legislative agenda for another three years, nor firmly established within the popular culture for another seven. The song went on to be covered by no less an American icon as Johnny Cash.

But over time, Prine’s voice of occasional political protest gave way to songs about the emotional indignities of life, expressed in ways that anyone can understand, but which aren’t always easy to put into words. Take the bittersweet “Souvenirs,” a meditation on growing older, or the loving recollection of his grandfather in “Grandpa Was A Carpenter.” Love and relationships, with their relevant pains and joys, as in “Gold Inside Of You” and the peculiarities of intra-couple humor as in “In Spite Of Ourselves,” are constant themes of his work. “Paradise” sounds like it came from the pen of Woody Guthrie.

The performance was excellent, and I was especially happy that Maggie came along as she has endured hearing me talk about Prine for several years. Given her sophisticated and multi-faceted taste for music  — she was the one who first introduced me to the work of Tom Waits — I had really wanted her to come away appreciating Prine.

Like me, she had discovered some of his work by accident. At the DEMO Conference in 2005, we attended the Jam Session party at the close of the first day and slow-danced to a rendition of “Angel From Montgomery.” She became a fan of the song, and was surprised to learn it had been written by the man about whom I had over the years been an occasional nudnik . At Friday’s show she especially liked the spare charm of “Six O’Clock News” and Prine’s standard concert-closing number “Lake Marie,” where he lets loose with the electric guitar, and nods more toward his love of rock, while telling a wide-ranging historical and personal narrative. I have to say I agree with her on that note. On the subdued John Prine scale, “Lake Marie” is a musical epic, and in this performance it lasted 12 minutes.

Prine was backed only by two other musicians variously adding electric guitar, mandolin, and bass fiddle. At times, he appeared solo with only his acoustic guitar. Yet he proved that his simple approach can be suitable for so grand a venue as The Beacon Theater without the assistance of any elaborate performance tricks. His achingly direct delivery, propelled by the power of a heart filled with genuine emotion, to me, was enough to fill the room.

I must admit that in recent years lost some of my interest in Prine. I didn’t think much of his 1999 release of duets “In Spite Of Ourselves,” — it was a little too conventionally country-fied for me — and had concluded that Prine’s best work was behind him. In 2000 he followed with “Souvenirs” in which, post-cancer, he re-records his earlier and best-known work. When he bowed “Fair and Square” in 2005, I presumed there couldn’t possibly be anything on it to write home about, and skipped it without much thought.

How wrong I was. Prine is still writing quality songs. As evidence I submit the gentle “She Is My Everything,” the sunny “Glory Of True Love,” and the rollicking “Bear Creek Blues.” He even nods to political and social commentary in “Some Humans Ain’t Human.” In 2006 “Fair And Square” won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. I’m even enjoying “Standard Songs For Average People.” Clearly, Prine isn’t done with us yet.

I’d say the world needs more John Prines in it, but given the the volume of his output over the years, one has so far proven to be enough.

Below are two samples taken from the performance. The first is his Prine’s well-known “Angel from Montgomery”; the second is “That’s The Way That The World Goes Round.”

Times Square, Night Before New Year’s Eve from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

This weekend I built two pages comprised of old stuff. The first will be interesting really only to those who care about the long slow demise of the newspaper industry and its various early flirtations with the Web. During 1997 and 1998, my first job out of grad school was at New Century Networks, a joint venture of nine newspaper companies to combine forces and content on the Web. The company briefly produced a site called NewsWorks that is barely remembered except for its unspectacular shuttering in the cold March of 98. On my last day in the office I salvaged the files of a few packages I had worked on to a Zip disk and have since preserved them in their original format. You can see the results, along with my own reflections on the experience here.

The second page I produced is basically a republishing of my old 1990 Bungee Jumping story written in my last term as a community college student. The realization that I wrote it 18 years ago gave me a bit of a shiver.

I did go on to Bungee jump a few more times. There was one more trip to Blue River Dam in the fall of 1991, and another to a privately owned bridge in 1992, where myself and a friend had organized a film crew to shoot some footage of the group of University of Oregon students we took with us. One of my great regrets in life is that I lost my copy of that tape. If you were on that trip and have a copy, please contact me, because I am desperate to transfer it to DVD and from there to the Web. I jumped one more time in Las Vegas in 2002. It wasn’t quite as fun as jumping in the great outdoors. I had a tape made of that jump but lost it as well.

The day of my visit happened to coincide with a public lecture by Brian Greene, a professor of mathematics and physics at Columbia University. He’s the author of “The Elegant Universe” which was adapted into a PBS TV series of the same name. I was invited to attend the lecture and since I had nothing else to do other than return to my hotel room, I accepted. I was warned however to arrive early as seats would fill up soon.

The lecture was given not at the Perimeter Institute itself, but rather at a local high school auditorium. I arrived, was surprised at the turnout. It seemed the entire town had turned up on a beautiful late summer evening to sit in a stuffy un-air conditioned auditorium to hear a physics lecture. I wondered how often this sort of thing happens in the U.S. It was indeed, standing room only.

I hadn’t thought much about the lecture since then. It was certainly fascinating. Greene spoke about, and focused mostly on the finer points of black holes. He relied for some of the lecture on material from his latest book, “Icarus At The Edge Of Time” to illustrate complicated points. I had mostly forgotten about it, until I read the news that Stephen Hawking is The Perimeter Institute’s new distinguished research chair, which means he’ll be visiting Waterloo a few times a year beginning in the summer of 2009, and hopefully giving some public lectures, for which, I’m sure the entire city of Waterloo will turn out.

What I had also forgotten since that night was the fact that I had recorded the lecture. Today I ran across the file by chance, and thought I’d share the audio here. It’s about 68 minutes long (I didn’t edit out the introductions) but you can now hear Brian Greene’s lecture on black holes too. It is, I think, worth the time, even if you have absolutely no interest in theoretical physics.

This John Lee Hooker tune seemed appropriate for the day after the election. And the Carlos Santana guitar work is pretty sweet too.