Welcome fellow BOINCers! This is the home site for the Hosers With Towels volunteer computing (VC) team.
For the uninitiated who are wondering what BOINC and VC is all about, it all centers on volunteering the use of your computer's unused processing cycles to work on mostly scientific projects. The menu on the left will take you to web sites that more thoroughly explain what it is and how one gets involved.
As you can see there is not much here (yet). That will change as I expand the content (and the team actually attracts other volunteer to join).
The following are the projects which have a Hosers With Towels team.
SETI@Home
- The mostly widely known project.
Searching for extra-terrestrial life
by analyzing radio signals from space.
What Guide fan would not want this to be their
primary volunteer project?
Einstein@Home - Searching for spinning neutron stars by analyzing gravitational wave detector data. Very 24th century and totally hoopy!
Spinhenge@Home
- Researching molecular magnetism.
Rosetta@Home
- Determining the 3-dimensional shapes of proteins in the
research that may lead to finding cures for some
major human diseases.
LHC@Home - Particle simulation for the Large Hedron Collider. Research into the line between energy and matter.
For those coming here pondering what the team name is all about, I will elaborate. The team name is a humourous combination of 2 factors, being Canadian (hosers) and being a fan of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (towels). Now, if you fall into those categories, chances are you got it. For those not belonging to those subsets of people, you are still welcome to become a team member.
The word "hoser" is a humourous pseudonym for a Canadian. For those old enough to know, it was popularized by the old SCTV television series. In the frequent segment titled "The Great White North" with Bob and Doug Mackenzie, Bob and Doug often called each other a hoser.
The towel reference comes from the book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. All savvy hitchhikers used towels to flag down passing space ships.