#YesAllWomen: My Take

In what will undoubtedly come off as a thinly-veiled ploy to drive traffic to my blog, I thought I'd weigh in on something that's popping up in my social media feeds today. Given the timing, I should really talk about veterans' issues and the somewhat-lost significance of Memorial Day, but I may not be the best person to voice an opinion on that anyway, since I'm not a veteran. For that matter, I'm not a woman either. Oh well. Let's get on with this anyway.

That Disgusting Kiss from the NFL Draft

I'm sure most of you are aware that the openly gay football player Michael Sam recently became the first of his kind to be drafted into the NFL. You're probably also aware that upon receiving the news, he passionately kissed his boyfriend in celebration. I have no doubt this will be an unpopular opinion, but I don't think that kind of thing should be broadcast on television, or anywhere else for that matter, and I'll tell you why.

World Community Grid - Fighting Cancer with Science

I'm not sure what prompted me to start this again, but I've resumed participation in World Community Grid projects, and since it's for a good cause and all, I figured I should share this on the off chance anybody else might be interested.

Some of you may have never heard of this and are wondering what joining the grid even does. Well, for example, I just got an email today saying the Computing for Clean Water project has completed, and the word is the team got some great data and are getting ready to publish their findings soon. That data came from computers on the grid using their combined processing power to tackle the computational aspects of the research.

Unfortunately, I just have my one laptop, and an old one at that. I don't have any extra computers sitting idle for long periods of time, but plenty of people do. When I went to Marist, they'd set up whole computer labs with WCG clients so they'd be churning out results whenever students weren't using them. It's a pretty great idea.

So yeah, if you care about science and helping out good causes like finding new treatment options for AIDS and cancer, and you like the idea of not having to actually do anything to make a difference, installing a grid client on a machine you own and letting it run in the background or as a screensaver is a great idea.