This Might Eventually Help End Our Barley Shortages

[billvelek]

Semi-on-topic

As homebrewers, we've watched with some dismay as barley prices have jumped dramatically, along with most food prices. Part of that has been attributed to acreage being diverted to corn for ethanol production, and is probably true in large measure. Other factors include the increasing affluence and standard of living of people in China, India, and other nations with expanding economic clout, which enables them to compete for more meat in their diets ... which requires more grain as feed; they are reportedly also drinking more beer. There are other factors, too, but the main point to be made here is that barley prices are affected by the prices of other grains, regardless of what they are used for. So, ... when I came upon this New York Times article -- http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/j...-for-super-rice -- my immediate thought was that by improving rice crops, and eventually using the same technology to improve crops of corn, wheat, oats, and even barley, we should all have more barley to brew with in the future.

Along those lines, if anyone here would like to help with that research, we just happen to have our own 'Homebrewers' team already working for the World Community Grid (the very organization which is working on the 'super-rice' project). Until now, the 'WCG' has been working strictly on non-profit medical research to help find cures for diseases such as cancer, but this is an important humanitarian project now that we are seeing a growing food shortage. Any member can designate the particular projects that his/her computer to work on, so if you want ALL of your computer's spare power to be used for 'super-rice' research, you can certainly do that. The main thing is to quit wasting your computer's power running a stupid screen saver when you're not even looking at it most of the time, and start using it for humanitarian research. Our 'Homebrewers' team currently has only 88 members, but we have donated the equivalent of more than 133 YEARS of computer time for this non-profit research to benefit all of humanity.

Read about our team here - http://home.alltel.net/billvelek/team.html - and then click on the Home-Page link to see how safe and secure this is.

Thanks for your time.

Bill Velek

 

[redbeard]

Hi Bill,

Its always good and interesting the different areas of research and information that people relate back to brewing. Your hops mailing list is a big plus. I havent investigated this super rice project in detail but will this super rice dna / recipe be freely available or sold exclusively by a large company like Monsanto ?

cheers

 

[billvelek]

Hi Bill,

Its always good and interesting the different areas of research and information that people relate back to brewing. Your hops mailing list is a big plus. I havent investigated this super rice project in detail but will this super rice dna / recipe be freely available or sold exclusively by a large company like Monsanto ?

cheers

This page on the World Community Grid website -- http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewAboutUs.do -- says: "As part of our commitment to advancing human welfare, all results will be in the public domain and made public to the global research community." And that has always been my understanding from everything that I have ever read which is associated with the WCG or any of its projects. And one reason I believe it is because of the representation on the WCG's advisory board, which is multinational and includes members primarily from academia rather than businesses, and from such esteemed organizations as the Mayo Clinic, National Geographic Society, and the World Health Organization. In fact, the only business, per se, is IBM, which is the sponsor of the World Community Grid, and I don't think IBM has plans to control the world's food supply or health care. See this page for the current 'advisary board': http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us...dvisoryBoard.do

I hope that helps.

Bill Velek

 

[goatherder]

Seems like a worthy cause - just remember using your "spare" computer cycles for something like this will not cost you nothing. Increasing the processing load on your computer means the computer uses more power, sometimes a lot more.

 

[PostModern]

Seems like a worthy cause - just remember using your "spare" computer cycles for something like this will not cost you nothing. Increasing the processing load on your computer means the computer uses more power, sometimes a lot more.

Here's a graph showing how much power Intel CPUs use:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imageower_c...ption_graph.PNG

Fast multicore cpus will consume up to 98W under full load. I don't know what kind of load World Community Grid puts on a CPU, but most of the distributed computing projects I ran in the past used 100% of available capacity. I'm not saying people shouldn't join Bill's team, but just be aware of the "hidden" cost of doing so. However, most of that power is given out as heat, so if you're going to heat your house this winter anyway, you may as well let some of the energy come from your CPU doing good work.

 

[Stuster]

Of course, with electricity being about 10c/kWh, that means that even if it's full power it costs about 1c per hour. Not enough to break the bank, but as you say, something to be aware of I guess.

 

[PostModern]

Of course, with electricity being about 10c/kWh, that means that even if it's full power it costs about 1c per hour. Not enough to break the bank, but as you say, something to be aware of I guess.

Why does anyone ever turn off their 100W porch light? Because it costs $87.60 per year to run, counting nothing but the CPU's consumption. Add in the fans, HDD, memory, mobo, etc and it'll be another 20% of that. There's a two goats for a struggling third world family you could gift at Christmas instead. Don't discount the shortened life of your PC by running the CPU flat out 24x7. Yes, yes, you're more likely to upgrade it before it dies, but still...