According to SpaceRef, all those CPU cycles donated by me and 4,000,000 other space geeks have produced at least 150 spots in the sky worth taking another look at.

I’ve been running the SETI@home screensaver on 3 computers for nearly 4 years now, and I still find it fascinating to pop up the application once in a while and watch it “chirping data”, computing “fast Fourier transforms” and “searching for pulses/triplets”. Whatever all that means…

What’s even more exciting about my participation in the project, is the way SETI@home has enabled scientists and researchers to consider projects which they never before would have had the computing resources to undertake. Projects like distributed.net‘s RC5 effort, Stanford’s Folding@home project, Evolutionary-Research‘s evolution@home and dozens of others are able to tap into the unused computing power of the world’s millions of personal computers.

Whether or not SETI@home’s re-analysis of the 150 or so hotspots turns up a real ET this time, it’s certain that this is just the beginning of truly cooperative research.

In my previous entry on the Estrada nomination and filibuster, I noted that the problem with Estrada was that there is a limited paper trail and that Mr. Estrada was not very forthcoming during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I think that this should become less of a problem in the future as more and more lawyers are writing on the internet — and especially publishing blogs. When Eugene Volokh or Howard Bashman or Lawrence Lessig or Denise Howell or Ernest Svenson are nominated for judgeships, there will be no doubts as to their ideas, opinions, writing styles and reasoning abilities. While my politics may be very different from any of these people, I would have no problem supporting them for judgeships based on their thoughtfulness, seriousness and abilities to look at all sides of an issue. For this alone, I see blogs as a fundamental good in the judicial system.

The Democratic filibuster of the nomination vote for Miguel Estrada to the lifetime appointment as a Justice of the DC Circuit Court, has been going on for weeks. I have supported this filibuster because I felt that Mr. Estrada had not provided enough information to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his appearance before the committee last fall.

The pro bono work Mr. Estrada has performed and the limited number of his writings indicate that Mr. Estrada is strongly opposed to many of the progressive social causes and issues which the Federal Courts have decided in the past four decades. This anecdotal record, along with his reticence before the Judiciary Committee, gives the Senate little to go on in its role of advisor to the President in these matters. Therefore, any Senate vote on Mr. Estrada right now will be a purely political vote, providing no advice and failing in that body’s Constitutional obligation.

But now, it’s time for the filibusterers to put their money where their mouths are. As Howard Bashman reports in his (always fascinating) blog,

Estrada’s responses are reasoned, well thought-out, and although his answers refer more to process than substance, maintaining that he is not responding is becoming disingenuous. I urge more Senators — and I will be writing to my Senators Sarbanes and Mikulski today — to submit questions to Estrada, which I am certain Howard, in his role as a true Model Citizen, will continue to post.

I welcome these questions, even though I might not like the answers. I hope that more Senators submit questions, or that Chairman Hatch of the Judiciary Committee will agree to schedule another round of hearings. Suspicions about Mr. Estrada’s motives and intentions can be allayed by exposure to Justice Brandeis’s “sunlight“.